Or the engineer, again, on the Mississippi, who, when the steamer caught fire, held, as he had sworn he would, her bow against the bank till every soul save he got safe on shore,—­

   “Through the hot black breath of the burning boat
      Jim Bludso’s voice was heard;
   And they all had trust in his cussedness,
      And knew he would keep his word. 
   And sure’s you’re born, they all got off
      Afore the smokestacks fell,—­
   And Bludso’s ghost went up alone
      In the smoke of the ‘Prairie Belle.’

   “He weren’t no saint—­but at judgment
      I’d run my chance with Jim
   ’Longside of some pious gentlemen
      That wouldn’t shake hands with him. 
   He’d seen his duty—­a dead sure thing—­
      And went for it there and then;
   And Christ is not going to be too hard
      On a man that died for men.”

To which gallant poem of Colonel John Hay’s—­and he has written many gallant and beautiful poems—­I have but one demurrer:  Jim Bludso did not merely do his duty, but more than his duty.  He did a voluntary deed, to which he was bound by no code or contract, civil or moral; just as he who introduced me to that poem won his Victoria Cross—­as many a cross, Victoria and other, has been won—­by volunteering for a deed to which he, too, was bound by no code or contract, military or moral.  And it is of the essence of self-sacrifice, and, therefore, of heroism, that it should be voluntary; a work of supererogation, at least towards society and man:  an act to which the hero or heroine is not bound by duty, but which is above though not against duty.

Nay, on the strength of that same element of self-sacrifice, I will not grudge the epithet heroic, which my revered friend Mr. Darwin justly applies to the poor little monkey, who once in his life did that which was above his duty; who lived in continual terror of the great baboon, and yet, when the brute had sprung upon his friend the keeper, and was tearing out his throat, conquered his fear by love, and, at the risk of instant death, sprang in turn upon his dreaded enemy, and bit and shrieked till help arrived.

Some would now-a-days use that story merely to prove that the monkey’s nature and the man’s nature are, after all, one and the same.  Well:  I, at least, have never denied that there is a monkey-nature in man as there is a peacock-nature, and a swine-nature, and a wolf-nature—­of all which four I see every day too much.  The sharp and stern distinction between men and animals, as far as their natures are concerned, is of a more modern origin than people fancy.  Of old the Assyrian took the eagle, the ox, and the lion—­and not unwisely—­as the three highest types of human capacity.  The horses of Homer might be immortal, and weep for their master’s death.  The animals and monsters of Greek myth—­like the Ananzi spider of Negro fable—­glide insensibly into speech and reason.  Birds—­the most wonderful