But the deskmen command a temporary majority:  for the short while they shall hold the cards they have the right to call the game.  And so —­ since we must bow to the storm —­ let the one thing be labelled Sin, and the other Salvation —­ for a season:  ourselves forgetting never that it is all a matter of nomenclature.  What we have now first to note is that this original Waft from the Garden asserts itself most vigorously in the Child.  This it is that thrusts the small boy out under the naked heavens, to enact a sorry and shivering Crusoe on an islet in the duck-pond.  This it is that sends the little girl footing it after the gipsy’s van, oblivious of lessons, puddings, the embrace maternal, the paternal smack; hearing naught save the faint, far bugle-summons to the pre-historic little savage that thrills and answers in the tingling blood of her; seeing only a troop of dusky, dull-eyed guides along that shining highway to the dim land east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon:  where freedom is, and you can wander and breathe, and at night tame street lamps there are none —­ only the hunter’s fires, and the eyes of lions, and the mysterious stars.  In later years it is stifled and gagged —­ buried deep, a green turf at the head of it, and on its heart a stone; but it lives, it breathes, it lurks, it will up and out when ’tis looked for least.  That stockbroker, some brief summers gone, who was missed from his wonted place one settling-day! a goodly portly man, i’ faith:  and had a villa and a steam launch at Surbiton:  and was versed in the esoteric humours of the House.  Who could have thought that the Hunter lay hid in him?  Yet, after many weeks, they found him in a wild nook of Hampshire.  Ragged, sun-burnt, the nocturnal haystack calling aloud from his frayed and weather-stained duds, his trousers tucked, he was tickling trout with godless native urchins; and when they would have won him to himself with honied whispers of American Rails, he answered but with babble of green fields.  He is back in his wonted corner now:  quite cured, apparently, and tractable.  And yet —­ let the sun shine too wantonly in Throgmorton Street, let an errant zephyr, quick with the warm South, fan but his cheek too wooingly on his way to the station; and will he not once more snap his chain and away?  Ay, truly:  and next time he will not be caught.

Deans have danced to the same wild piping, though their chapters have hushed the matter up.  Even Duchesses (they say) have ``come tripping doon the stair,’’ rapt by the climbing passion from their strawberry-leaved surroundings into starlit spaces.  Nay, ourselves, too —­ the douce, respectable mediocrities that we are —­ which of us but might recall some fearful outbreak whose details are mercifully unknown to the household that calls us breadwinner and chief?  What marvel that up yonder the Hunter smiles?  When he knows that every one in his ken, the tinker with the statesman, has caught his bugle blast and gone forth on its irresistible appeal!