The old barkey is lightening famously:  who shall be next to go?  The Sportsman of intolerable yarns:  who slays twice over —­ first, his game, and then the miserable being he button-holes for the tedious recital.  Shall we suffer him longer?  Who else?  Who is that cowering under the bulwarks yonder?  The man who thinks he can imitate the Scottish accent!  Splash!  And the next one?  What a crowd is here!  How they block the hatchways, lumber the deck, and get between you and the purser’s room —­ these fadmongers, teetotallers, missionaries of divers isms!  Overboard with them, and hey for the Fortunate Isles!  Then for tobacco in a hammock ’twixt the palms!  Then for wine cooled in a brooklet losing itself in silver sands!  Then for —­ but O these bilboes on our ankles, how mercilessly they grip!  The vertical sun blisters the bare back:  faint echoes of Olympian laughter seem to flicker like Northern Lights across the stark and pitiless sky.  One earnest effort would do it, my brothers!  A little modesty, a short sinking of private differences; and then we should all be free and equal gentlemen of fortune, and I would be your Captain! ``Who? you? you would make a pretty Captain!’’ Better than you, you scurvy, skulking, little galley-slave! ``Galley-slave yourself, and be —–­ Pull together, boys, and lie low!  Here’s the Master coming with his whip!’’

The Lost Centaur

It is somewhere set down (or does the legend only exist in the great volume of ought-to-be-writ?) that the young Achilles, nurtured from babyhood by the wise and kindly Cheiron, accustomed to reverence an ideal of human skill and wisdom blent with all that was best and noblest of animal instinct, strength and swiftness, found poor humanity sadly to miss, when at last the was sent forth among his pottering little two-legged peers.  Himself alone he had hitherto fancied to be the maimed one, the incomplete; he looked to find the lords of earth even such as these Centaurs; wise and magnanimous atop:  below, shod with the lightning, winged with the wind, terrible in the potentiality of the armed heel.  Instead of which —­ !  How fallen was his first fair hope of the world!  And even when reconciled at last to the dynasty of the forked radish, after he had seen its quality tested round the clangorous walls of Troy —­ some touch of an imperial disdain ever lingered in his mind for these feeble folk who could contentedly hail him —­ him, who had known Cheiron! —­ as hero and lord!

Achilles has passed, with the Centaurs and Troy; but the feeling lingers.

Of strange and divers strands is twisted the mysterious cord that, reaching back ``through spaces out of space and timeless time,’’ somewhere joins us to the Brute; a twine of mingled yarn, not utterly base.  As we grow from our animal infancy, and the threads snap one by one at each gallant wing-stroke of a soul poising for flight into Empyrean, we are yet conscious of a loss for every gain, we have some