Yarde started to crawl down to the hatch-cover. He trailed through the sand in his torn, white linen like a silent lizard. Using rollers of driftwood, he managed to launch the hatch-cover. He pushed it out to deep water, his pulses throbbing wildly. He climbed on it, and poled out with a bit of wood. Then he lay down as he had lain before, and waited.

The tide was going out; a strong eddy sucked toward the reefs beyond the island. The cover entered the

eddy, swung, circled, and drifted out. The island receded. Yarde lay at length, looking back toward the island. His face was drawn into grotesque lines of fear, of suspense. Beneath him, in the warm blue sea, a school of little fish gathered in the shadow of the cover, their disks of eyes glinting like silver.

The beach of the island was almost hidden in the heat-haze when a long shudder ran over Yarde; for out of the glitter a cry came to him, tremendous,

of all the hidden terror of the sea. Yarde leaped to his feet; he screamed crazily. He shouted:

"I won't go back! I won't!" He saw a shadow in the bright water. The sailor was swimming after the cover, cleaving the sea with great strokes. His pursuit seemed monstrous to Yarde, out of nature, as though iron swam after him. He jumped and screamed: "You sha'n't catch me! I won't go back!"

Heaving half clear of the water, the sailor called again. His arms flashed as regularly as parts of a machine. Yarde sank down and hid his face. Presently he felt a soft jar, and the cover tilted. He looked. A black hand grasped the edge of the wood.

Yarde stood up. It seemed to him that all he feared centered in that hand. He caught the bit of wood he had poled out with, and struck it. He struck and struck, trying to beat off the hand. It yielded no more than iron. In a minute Yarde stopped. He crouched, gasping, staring into the black mask of a face behind the hand. He saw something so incredible that he had no more power to move.

Slow, immense wrinkles strained the face. The fierce eyes gazed at Yarde, and from them tears ran; not sea-water, but tears. That was the incredible thing. The black sailor was crying.

Yarde began to tremble; his mouth opened. Then the sailor spoke. A Cleep appeal was in his voice, a burden of trouble as heavy as the old sea's. He lifted his arm and pointed.

In the dazzle Yarde saw a black speck and a flash. A boat was putting in to the island. Presently, behind it in the haze, he made out a ship.

He sat still, staring at these things.

cover, pushing it toward the boat.

A great confusion held Yarde, he had lost the measure of distance and of time. He did not know how long it was before the boat came up to them, and he was lifted on board. He saw the black sailor heave himself dripping over the rail. Men talked to him, gave him a blue coat, a sandwich,that somehow seemed very funny, and a drink. They told Yarde that they had been sent out on purpose to search the islands for him, but Yarde could n't think of these things now. One urgent necessity was his, to get into communication with the black sailor. The first thing he asked when he stood on the schooner's deck was:

"Is there any one here who can speak to him? Is there any one here who can tell me what he means? Is there any one who can find out what he saved me for?"

A man in a queer yellow shirt, with brass rings in his ears, came forward. He spoke to the black. The black answered him as resonantly as the tide on a beach. They talked for minutes. Yarde could wait no longer.

"For Heaven's sake, tell me what he says!"

The man with the brass rings glanced round, grinning a little.

"He says he's tired, oh, dam' tired. He says he thinks you 're crazy, always tryin' to get away and give him so much trouble. He says you got left behind when the ship ran on the reef. All the boats went off without you. He was in the last boat. He saw you down below in the water. He jumped in and brought you up, but there was only room in that boat for It was very full. They wanted him in it, not you, because he's a good

one.

man in a boat. He would n't quit you. He put you on the first thing that came by, he says, and the boat towed it. But the rope parted in the dark, and he lost the boat. Then, he says, he swam with you to an island he knew was near, where there was good water and plenty fish. And there, he says, you been acting like crazy; so he was scared to take his eyes off you for fear you'd drown yourself. Everything he do, he says, seemed to make you crazier. He says you cry and talk and laugh, just as if you was alone there, and without him looking after you. And he says he never left you alone by yourself not for one minute, any more than if you was a baby, he says."

The man with the ear-rings looked at Yarde, curiously. In the faces of all the men who stood in a little halfcircle and listened was something curious, latently hostile, the look of human kind for what is alien to it.

Yarde was accustomed to this look. This was what his mind sullenly pondered over when he was drunk. Now the confusion of the last days changed to a sudden, burning, premonitory clearness. He seemed to see with his whole being, to see the men's faces, their clothes, their shadows on the deck. One man was quietly sucking an orange; another was splicing a rope, his browned fingers working like a skilled knitter's, without the aid of his eyes, which were fixed critically on Yarde. Yarde knew he would never forget one detail of that picture, with the blue sea behind it. But he did not know that it was the last picture he would see with the lonely eyes of his marred boyhood. He stammered:

"Ask him why he saved me."

"He says one man 'd always do that much for another at sea."

Yarde drew in a long breath. He had been lonely, he had been desperately afraid; and all the time, close beside him, were honor and pure benevolence, saving him, serving him with a mighty hand, and he had not recognized. Shaken with knowledge come suddenly as a vision, he looked at the black sailor.

Only Yarde had been alone, separate, castaway; the black sailor, divided from Yarde by ten thousand savage years, had been all the time in touch with the greatest things of life with patience, with courage, with sacrifice.

"He says he done his best for you; he 's sorry you was so scared. He says now he'll go and get a good sleep."

The sailor turned away, but Yarde shot from out that ring of critical eyes. Stammering, he held out his hand.

After a minute, the iron mask bent toward him wrinkled; the black sailor smiled, a slow, somber, smile like the stretching of a lion's lips. He laid his great hand in Yarde's.

At the grip something was completed in Yarde, a full connection was made. He turned back to the men of the schooner, and now their faces seemed no longer alien; they were

friendly, the world friendly, the world was friendly. Nothing could happen in life that a man of courage should fear. Men would always help men.

Yarde brushed his arm across his eyes. He said hoarsely:

"I know I'll never forget what he did for me."

The man who had been eating the orange threw the skin overboard. He came up to Yarde and slipped an arm through the boy's and said:

"You come on down with me an' get some eats into you, Sonny.'

UROPE, three years after the war,

is in these circumstances that the

on the face of the waters. The storm has passed, and the waters have subsided, but the ship is a wreck. Its timbers have parted, its machinery is scrapped, helm and compass and all the mechanism of control are lost. Worst of all, there is no captain.

When peace came, the cohesive motive that made for the solidarity of the mass during the war disappeared. The simple issue of the war was dispersed into a thousand conflicting and fragmentary issues, national, economic, political, personal. The leap of Niagara was broken and scattered in the tumult of the whirlpool. Prewar society had gone to pieces in a paroxysm of violence, and European civilization lay stunned and disintegrating, all its traditions gone, all its landmarks submerged. Faith in men had perished with faith in institutions, and the moral sanctions of society were repudiated as frankly as its political bonds. A fierce egotism, descending from the race to the nation, from the nation to the class, and from the class to the individual person, became the general note, and the spirit of Prussianism, crushed in Berlin, took possession of the heaving masses of European society. The old gospel, with all its social contracts, had gone in the whirlwind, and the law of the jungle became the law of Europe. It

resources has been manifest. An unprecedented challenge was issued to the statesmanship of Europe, and it was issued in vain. We are without leadership and without a leader, and no voice is heard above the ugly scramble of savage appetites in which nations are falling daily to even deeper levels of ruin. We look back to the past when Gladstone touched the whole life of Europe to finer issues, when the simple and sublime wisdom of Lincoln shone like a star for the guidance of men, and we ask whether humanity has lost this great strain or whether it is that events have swelled to such vast dimensions that the human mind is no longer able to grasp them.

under a staggering weight of debt, it is true, but there was a reasonable prospect of ultimate financial recovery. Above all she had no Continental interest to serve other than that of the restoration of its normal economic life, on which her own economic recovery depended. With all these moral and material advantages, her influence, thrown into the scale for appeasement, would have been irresistible. But Mr. Lloyd George, having no constructive policy of his own, and looking at the unparalleled situation not with the eye of a statesman, but with the eye of an astute politician playing a hand for personal power at home, yielded the leadership to France and, with an election conducted as an appeal to the lowest dregs of war fever, secured the return of a House of Commons that has insulted and degraded the public life of the nation beyond all precedent in modern annals.

The result is before us in a landscape more dark than in the darkest days of the war, a continent in dissolution, Ireland in rebellion, the industrial world seething with discontent, millions of unemployed in the streets, trade vanishing, taxation so oppressive as to have passed the limits of productiveness, an exchequer faced with the impossibility of meeting the gigantic expenditure left by the war. An ominous restlessness is the prevailing temper.

The habit of thrift has largely disappeared. It seems to have no relevance to a world in which values have no fixed meaning and from which security has gone. We live from hand to mouth and from day to day. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, for the moral sense, numbed by years of passion, seems dead, and family life has suffered an unprecedented blow. Re

tired judges, like Lord Mersey, are called in to deal with the unending stream of divorce suits. Public affairs have got into so incomprehensible a tangle that the public turns away from them to the trivialities of sport, and we seem to have no serious interest in life apart from cricket, golf, racing, and boxing. Christianity, put into cold storage during the war, is still frozen, and the churches have lost all influence upon public opinion. Labor, threatened with the collapse of wages from the high levels established during the war, is rebellious, and industry is crushed between the loss of world trade and the catastrophic conflicts, such as the one in the coal trade, which are paralyzing production.

The better mind of the nation, aghast at the drift of events, yet helpless to check it, waits with deepening alarm for the emergence of some leadership that will recall the country from its wild course before it is too late. It understands the disease very well. There is no responsible man of any party to-day who does not know that Lloyd George is the enemy and that until the malign power is destroyed it is idle to look for a turn in the tide of disaster. But how and by whom is it to be destroyed? In the art of political manipulation there has never been a phenomenon comparable with Mr. Lloyd George, and the chaos into which the convulsion of the last half dozen years has plunged society is the perfect medium for his sinister and astonishing gifts. Through his skill in using the press he has created a legend of himself that has made him supreme with the mob, which he excites and influences with breath-taking ingenuity. He plays with all parties and all interests, has reduced the organized