But Luke, who, as has been said before, was an odd boy, took it very hard and said that he didn’t want to be brought back to life.  Not even when she told him that his name was now Sir Nigel Guido Cadross Tintagel, Bart.  He became very cross and said that he was going out and drown himself all over again, just to show her that she shouldn’t have gone meddling with his spirit life.  He was too refined to say so, but when you consider that he was just thirty, and his wife, owing to the difference in time between the spirit world and this, had gone on growing old until she was now pushing sixty, he had a certain amount of justice on his side.  But of course she was Lady Tintagel, and all the lovers of Florence Barclay will understand that that is something.

So, after reciting Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,” at her request (credit is given in the front of the book for the use of this poem, and only rightly too, for without it the story could never have been written), he goes out into the ocean.  But there—­we mustn’t give too much of the plot away.  All that one need know is that Luke or Sir Nigel, as you wish (and what reader of Florence Barclay wouldn’t prefer Sir Nigel?), was so cultured that he said, “Nobody in the whole world knows it, save you and I,” and referred to “flotsam and jetson” as he was swimming out into the path of the rising sun.  “Jetsam” is such an ugly word.

It is only fitting that on his tombstone Lady Tintagel should have had inscribed an impressive and high-sounding misquotation from the Bible.

LXI

“MEASURE YOUR MIND”

“Measure Your Mind” by M.R.  Traube and Frank Parker Stockbridge, is apt to be a very discouraging book if you have any doubt at all about your own mental capacity.  From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.  If they ever adopt the “menti-meter tests” on this journal I shall last just about forty-five minutes.

And the trouble is that each test starts off so easily.  You begin to think that you are so good that no one has ever appreciated you.  There is for instance, a series of twenty-four pictures (very badly drawn too, Mr. Frank Parker Stockbridge.  You think you are so smart, picking flaws with people’s intelligence.  If I couldn’t draw a better head than the one on page 131 I would throw up the whole business).  At any rate, in each one of these pictures there is something wrong (wholly apart from the drawing).  You are supposed to pick out the incongruous feature, and you have 180 seconds in which to tear the twenty-four pictures to pieces.

* * * * *

The first one is easy.  The rabbit has one human ear.  In the second one the woman’s eye is in her hair.  Pretty soft, you say to yourself.  In the third the bird has three legs.  It looks like a cinch.  Following in quick succession come a man with his mouth in his forehead, a horse with cow’s horns, a mouse with rabbit’s ears, etc.  You will have time for a handspring before your 180 seconds are up.