g that fine frenzy in
you for seven centuries and more. You come, with the blood of
merchants, pioneers and heroes in your veins, to a normal battle. But
for me, my forebears were savages two hundred years ago. My people
learn to know civilization by the lowest and most degrading contact
with it, and thus equipped or unequipped I tempt, an abnormal contest.
Can't you see the disproportion?"

"If I do, I can also see the advantage of it."

"For the sake of common sense, Halliday," said Davis, turning to his
companion, "don't sit there like a clam; open up and say something to
convince this Don Quixote who, because he himself, sees only
windmills, cannot be persuaded that we have real dragons to fight."

"Do you fellows know Henley?" asked Halliday, with apparent
irrelevance.

"I know him as a critic," said McLean.

"I know him as a name," echoed the worldly Davis, "but--"

"I mean his poems," resumed Halliday, "he is the most virile of the
present-day poets. Kipling is virile, but he gives you the man in hot
blood with the brute in him to the fore; but the strong masculinity of
Henley is essentially intellectual. It is the mind that is conquering
always."

"Well, now that you have settled the relative place in English letters
of Kipling and Henley, might I be allowed humbly to ask what in the
name of all that is good has that to do with the question before the
house?"

"I don't know your man's poetry," said McLean, "but I do believe that
I can see what you are driving at."

"Wonderful perspicacity, oh, youth!"

"If Webb will agree not to run, I'll spring on you the poem that seems
to me to strike the keynote of the matter in hand."

"Oh, well, curiosity will keep me. I want to get your position, and I
want to see McLean annihilated."

In a low, even tone, but without attempt at dramatic effect, Halliday
began to recite:

"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods there be
For my unconquerable soul!

"In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance,
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

"Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me unafraid.

"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the