that enabled him to cut the meat, and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles to move to cut the meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun shining in his brain.  He was entranced by illumination, and did not hear the “Bughouse,” whispered by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his sister’s face, nor notice the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbotham’s finger, whereby he imparted the suggestion of wheels revolving in his brother-in-law’s head.

What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the correlation of knowledge—­of all knowledge.  He had been curious to know things, and whatever he acquired he had filed away in separate memory compartments in his brain.  Thus, on the subject of sailing he had an immense store.  On the subject of woman he had a fairly large store.  But these two subjects had been unrelated.  Between the two memory compartments there had been no connection.  That, in the fabric of knowledge, there should be any connection whatever between a woman with hysterics and a schooner carrying a weather-helm or heaving to in a gale, would have struck him as ridiculous and impossible.  But Herbert Spencer had shown him not only that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for there to be no connection.  All things were related to all other things from the farthermost star in the wastes of space to the myriads of atoms in the grain of sand under one’s foot.  This new concept was a perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found himself engaged continually in tracing the relationship between all things under the sun and on the other side of the sun.  He drew up lists of the most incongruous things and was unhappy until he succeeded in establishing kinship between them all—­kinship between love, poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes, rainbows, precious gems, monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions, illuminating gas, cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and tobacco.  Thus, he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it, or wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a terrified traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown goal, but observing and charting and becoming familiar with all there was to know.  And the more he knew, the more passionately he admired the universe, and life, and his own life in the midst of it all.

“You fool!” he cried at his image in the looking-glass.  “You wanted to write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you to write about.  What did you have in you?—­some childish notions, a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.  And you wanted to write!  Why, you’re just on the edge of beginning to get something in you to write about.  You wanted to create beauty, but how could you when you knew nothing about the nature of beauty?  You wanted to write about life