By the time that man has seen these things and a few others that go with a boom he may say that he has lived, and talk with his enemies in the gate.  He has heard the Arabian Nights retold and knows the inward kernel of that romance, which some? little folk say is vanished.  Here they lie in their false teeth, for Cortes is not dead, nor Drake, and Sir Philip Sidney dies every few months if you know where to look.  The adventurers and captains courageous of old have only changed their dress a little and altered their employment to suit the world in which they move.  Clive came down from Lobengula’s country a few months ago protesting that there was an empire there, and finding very few that believed.  Hastings studied a map of South Africa in a corrugated iron hut at Johannesburg ten years ago.  Since then he has altered the map considerably to the advantage of the Empire, but the heart of the Empire is set on ballot-boxes and small lies.  The illustrious Don Quixote to-day lives on the north coast of Australia where he has found the treasure of a sunken Spanish galleon.  Now and again he destroys black fellows who hide under his bed to spear him.  Young Hawkins, with a still younger Boscawen for his second, was till last year chasing slave-dhows round Tajurrah; they have sent him now to the Zanzibar coast to be grilled into an admiral; and the valorous Sandoval has been holding the ‘Republic’ of Mexico by the throat any time these fourteen years gone.  The others, big men all and not very much afraid of responsibility, are selling horses, breaking trails, drinking sangaree, running railways beyond the timberline, swimming rivers, blowing up tree-stumps, and making cities where no cities were, in all the five quarters of the world.  Only people will not believe this when you tell them.  They are too near things and a great deal too well fed.  So they say of the most cold-blooded realism:  ‘This is romance.  How interesting!’ And of over-handled, thumb-marked realism:  ‘This is indeed romance!’ It is the next century that, looking over its own, will see the heroes of our time clearly.

Meantime this earth of ours—­we hold a fair slice of it so far—­is full of wonders and miracles and mysteries and marvels, and, in default, it is good to go up and down seeing and hearing tell of them all.

ON ONE SIDE ONLY

NEW OXFORD, U.S.A., June-July 1892.

‘The truth is,’ said the man in the train, ’that we live in a tropical country for three months of the year, only we won’t recognise.  Look at this.’  He handed over a long list of deaths from heat that enlivened the newspapers.  All the cities where men live at breaking-strain were sending in their butcher-bills, and the papers of the cities, themselves apostles of the Gospel of Rush, were beseeching their readers to keep cool and not to overwork themselves while the hot wave was upon them.  The rivers were patched and barred with