in this world paintable other and beyond those that lie between the North Cape, say, and Algiers.  For the sake of the pictures, putting aside the dear delight of the gamble, it might be worth while to venture out a little beyond the regular circle of subjects and—­see what happens.  If a man can draw one thing, it has been said, he can draw anything.  At the most he can but fail, and there are several matters in the world worse than failure.  Betting on a certainty, for instance, or playing with nicked cards is immoral, and secures expulsion from clubs.  Keeping deliberately to one set line of work because you know you can do it and are certain to get money by so doing is, on the other hand, counted a virtue, and secures admission to clubs.  There must be a middle way somewhere, as there must be somewhere an unmarried man with no position, reputation, or other vanity to lose, who most keenly wants to find out what his palette is set for in this life.  He will pack his steamer-trunk and get into the open to wrestle with effects that he can never reproduce.  All the same his will be a superb failure.

‘CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS’

From Yokohama to Montreal is a long day’s journey, and the forepart is uninviting.  In three voyages out of five, the North Pacific, too big to lie altogether idle, too idle to get hands about the business of a storm, sulks and smokes like a chimney; the passengers fresh from Japan heat wither in the chill, and a clammy dew distils from the rigging.  That gray monotony of sea is not at all homelike, being as yet new and not used to the procession of keels.  It holds a very few pictures and the best of its stories—­those relating to seal-poaching among the Kuriles and the Russian rookeries—­are not exactly fit for publication.  There is a man in Yokohama who in a previous life burned galleons with Drake.  He is a gentleman adventurer of the largest and most resourceful—­by instinct a carver of kingdoms, a ruler of men on the high seas, and an inveterate gambler against Death.  Because he supplies nothing more than sealskins to the wholesale dealers at home, the fame of his deeds, his brilliant fights, his more brilliant escapes, and his most brilliant strategy will be lost among sixty-ton schooners, or told only in the mouths of drunken seamen whom none believe.  Now there sits a great spirit under the palm trees of the Navigator Group, a thousand leagues to the south, and he, crowned with roses and laurels, strings together the pearls of those parts.  When he has done with this down there perhaps he will turn to the Smoky Seas and the Wonderful Adventures of Captain—.  Then there will be a tale to listen to.