Sometimes I think Wolf Larsen mad, or half-mad at least, what of
his strange moods and vagaries. At other times I take him for a
great man, a genius who has never arrived. And, finally, I am
convinced that he is the perfect type of the primitive man, born a
thousand years or generations too late and an anachronism in this
culminating century of civilization. He is certainly an
individualist of the most pronounced type. Not only that, but he
is very lonely. There is no congeniality between him and the rest
of the men aboard ship. His tremendous virility and mental
strength wall him apart. They are more like children to him, even
the hunters, and as children he treats them, descending perforce to
their level and playing with them as a man plays with puppies. Or
else he probes them with the cruel hand of a vivisectionist,
groping about in their mental processes and examining their souls
as though to see of what soul-stuff is made.

I have seen him a score of times, at table, insulting this hunter
or that, with cool and level eyes and, withal, a certain air of
interest, pondering their actions or replies or petty rages with a
curiosity almost laughable to me who stood onlooker and who
understood. Concerning his own rages, I am convinced that they are
not real, that they are sometimes experiments, but that in the main
they are the habits of a pose or attitude he has seen fit to take
toward his fellow-men. I know, with the possible exception of the
incident of the dead mate, that I have not seen him really angry;
nor do I wish ever to see him in a genuine rage, when all the force
of him is called into play.

While on the question of vagaries, I shall tell what befell Thomas
Mugridge in the cabin, and at the same time complete an incident