but even so, I lose the pleasure of the fight and the glory of
winning. Your fate is infinitely to be preferred to mine."

"Ah, now you talk with the voluminous voice of the centuries,"
bantered Davis. "You are but echoing the breath of your Nelsons, your
Cabots, your Drakes and your Franklins. Why, can't you see, you
sentimental idiot, that it's all different and has to be different
with us? The Anglo-Saxon race has been producing that fine frenzy in
you for seven centuries and more. You come, with the blood of
merchants, pioneers and heroes in your veins, to a normal battle. But
for me, my forebears were savages two hundred years ago. My people
learn to know civilization by the lowest and most degrading contact
with it, and thus equipped or unequipped I tempt, an abnormal contest.
Can't you see the disproportion?"

"If I do, I can also see the advantage of it."

"For the sake of common sense, Halliday," said Davis, turning to his
companion, "don't sit there like a clam; open up and say something to
convince this Don Quixote who, because he himself, sees only
windmills, cannot be persuaded that we have real dragons to fight."

"Do you fellows know Henley?" asked Halliday, with apparent
irrelevance.

"I know him as a critic," said McLean.

"I know him as a name," echoed the worldly Davis, "but--"

"I mean his poems," resumed Halliday, "he is the most virile of the