to cut himself wholly adrift from these his poor relations.  The mute and stunted human embryo that gazes appealingly from out the depths of their eyes must ever remind him of a kinship once (possibly) closer.  Nay, at times, it must even seem to whelm him in reproach.  As thus:  ``Was it really necessary, after all, that we two should part company so early?  May you not have taken a wrong turning somewhere, in your long race after your so-called progress, after the perfection of this be-lauded species of yours?  A turning whose due avoidance might perhaps have resulted in no such lamentable cleavage as is here, but in some perfect embodiment of the dual nature:  as who should say a being with the nobilities of both of us, the basenesses of neither?  So might you, more fortunately guided, have been led at last up the green sides of Pelion, to the ancestral, the primeval, Centaur still waiting majestic on the summit!’’ It is even so.  Perhaps this thing might once have been, O cousin outcast and estranged!  But the opportunity was long since lost.  Henceforth, two ways for us for ever!

Orion

The moonless night has a touch of frost, and is steely-clear.  High and dominant amidst the Populations of the Sky, the restless and the steadfast alike, hangs the great Plough, lit with a hard radiance as of the polished and shining share.  And yonder, low on the horizon, but half resurgent as yet, crouches the magnificent hunter:  watchful, seemingly, and expectant:  with some hint of menace in his port.

Yet should his game be up, you would think by now.  Many a century has passed since the plough first sped a conqueror east and west, clearing forest and draining fen; policing the valleys with barbed-wires and Sunday schools, with the chains that are forged of peace, the irking fetters of plenty:  driving also the whole lot of us, these to sweat at its tail, those to plod with the patient team, but all to march in a great chain-gang, the convicts of peace and order and law:  while the happy nomad, with his woodlands, his wild cattle, his pleasing nuptialities, has long since disappeared, dropping only in his flight some store of flint-heads, a legacy of confusion.  Truly, we Children of the Plough, but for yon tremendous Monitor in the sky, were in right case to forget that the Hunter is still a quantity to reckon withal.  Where, then, does he hide, the Shaker of the Spear?  Why, here, my brother, and here; deep in the breasts of each and all of us!  And for this drop of primal quicksilver in the blood what poppy or mandragora shall purge it hence away?

Of pulpiteers and parents it is called Original Sin:  a term wherewith they brand whatever frisks and butts with rude goatish horns against accepted maxims and trim theories of education.  In the abstract, of course, this fitful stirring of the old yeast is no more sin than a natural craving for a seat on a high stool, for the inscription —­ now horizontal, and now vertical —­ of figures, is sin.