of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibres of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade-routes, building boats, and founding navigation—­ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.

I was that man in all his births and endeavours.  I am that man to-day, waiting my due death by the law that I helped to devise many a thousand years ago, and by which I have died many times before this, many times.  And as I contemplate this vast past history of me, I find several great and splendid influences, and, chiefest of these, the love of woman, man’s love for the woman of his kind.  I see myself, the one man, the lover, always the lover.  Yes, also was I the great fighter, but somehow it seems to me as I sit here and evenly balance it all, that I was, more than aught else, the great lover.  It was because I loved greatly that I was the great fighter.

Sometimes I think that the story of man is the story of the love of woman.  This memory of all my past that I write now is the memory of my love of woman.  Ever, in the ten thousand lives and guises, I loved her.  I love her now.  My sleep is fraught with her; my waking fancies, no matter whence they start, lead me always to her.  There is no escaping her, that eternal, splendid, ever-resplendent figure of woman.

Oh, make no mistake.  I am no callow, ardent youth.  I am an elderly man, broken in health and body, and soon to die.  I am a scientist and a philosopher.  I, as all the generations of philosophers before me, know woman for what she is—­her weaknesses, and meannesses, and immodesties, and ignobilities, her earth-bound feet, and her eyes that have never seen the stars.  But—­and the everlasting, irrefragable fact remains:  Her feet are beautiful, her eyes are beautiful, her arms and breasts are paradise, her charm is potent beyond all charm that has ever dazzled men; and, as the pole willy-nilly draws the needle, just so, willy-nilly, does she draw men.

Woman has made me laugh at death and distance, scorn fatigue and sleep.  I have slain men, many men, for love of woman, or in warm blood have baptized our nuptials or washed away the stain of her favour to another.  I have gone down to death and dishonour, my betrayal of my comrades and of the stars black upon me, for woman’s sake—­for my sake, rather, I desired her so.  And I have lain in the barley, sick with yearning for her, just to see her pass and glut my eyes with the swaying wonder of her and of her hair, black with the night, or brown or flaxen, or all golden-dusty with the sun.