When the thermometer drops, man ceases—­with all his lusts and wrestlings and achievements; with all his race-adventures and race-tragedies; and with all his red killings, billions upon billions of human lives multiplied by as many billions more.  This is the last word of Science, unless there be some further, unguessed word which Science will some day find and utter.  In the meantime it sees no farther than the starry void, where the “fleeting systems lapse like foam.”  Of what ledger-account is the tiny life of man in a vastness where stars snuff out like candles and great suns blaze for a time-tick of eternity and are gone?

And for us who live, no worse can happen than has happened to the earliest drifts of man, marked to-day by ruined cities of forgotten civilisation—­ruined cities, which, on excavation, are found to rest on ruins of earlier cities, city upon city, and fourteen cities, down to a stratum where, still earlier, wandering herdsmen drove their flocks, and where, even preceding them, wild hunters chased their prey long after the cave-man and the man of the squatting-place cracked the knuckle-bones of wild animals and vanished from the earth.  There is nothing terrible about it.  With Richard Hovey, when he faced his death, we can say:  “Behold!  I have lived!” And with another and greater one, we can lay ourselves down with a will.  The one drop of living, the one taste of being, has been good; and perhaps our greatest achievement will be that we dreamed immortality, even though we failed to realise it.

SMALL-BOAT SAILING

A sailor is born, not made.  And by “sailor” is meant, not the average efficient and hopeless creature who is found to-day in the forecastle of deepwater ships, but the man who will take a fabric compounded of wood and iron and rope and canvas and compel it to obey his will on the surface of the sea.  Barring captains and mates of big ships, the small-boat sailor is the real sailor.  He knows—­he must know—­how to make the wind carry his craft from one given point to another given point.  He must know about tides and rips and eddies, bar and channel markings, and day and night signals; he must be wise in weather-lore; and he must be sympathetically familiar with the peculiar qualities of his boat which differentiate it from every other boat that was ever built and rigged.  He must know how to gentle her about, as one instance of a myriad, and to fill her on the other tack without deadening her way or allowing her to fall off too far.

The deepwater sailor of to-day needs know none of these things.  And he doesn’t.  He pulls and hauls as he is ordered, swabs decks, washes paint, and chips iron-rust.  He knows nothing, and cares less.  Put him in a small boat and he is helpless.  He will cut an even better figure on the hurricane deck of a horse.