n have been only left a few thousands, a few
hundreds of haggard and trembling specimens, unique trustees of the last
ruins of what had once been civilisation.

III

THE STRUGGLE

In this extremity a man arose who did not despair of humanity. His name
has been preserved for us. By a singular coincidence he was called
Miltiades, like another saviour of Hellenism. He was not, however, of
Hellenic race. A cross between a Slave and a Breton he had only half
sympathised with the prosperity of the Neo-Graecian world with its
levelling and enervating tendencies, and amid this wholesale
obliteration of previous civilisation, and universal triumph of a kind
of Byzantine renaissance brought up to date, he belonged to those who
reverently guarded in the depths of their heart the germs of recusancy.
But, like the barbarian stilicho, the last defender of the foundering
Roman world against the barbaric hordes, it was precisely this
disbeliever in civilisation who alone undertook to arrest it on the
brink of its vast downfall. Eloquent and handsome, but nearly always
taciturn, he was not without certain resemblances in pose and features,
so it was said, to Chateaubriand and Napoleon (two celebrities, as one
knows, who in their time were famous throughout an entire continent).
Worshipped by the women of whom he was the hope, and by the men who
stood greatly in awe of him, he had early kept the crowd at arm's
length, and a singular accident had doubled his natural shyness. Finding
the sea less monotonously dull at any rate than terra firma, and in any
case more unconfined, he had passed his youth on board the last
iron-clad of State of which he was captain, in patrolling the coasts of
continents, in dreaming of impossible adventures, and of conquests when
all was conquered, of discoveries of America when all was discovered,
and in cursing all former travellers, discoverers and conquerors,
fortunate reapers in all the fields of glory in which there was nothing
more left to glean. One day, however, he believed he had discovered a
new island--it was a mistake--and he had the joy of engaging in a fight,
the last of which ancient history makes mention, with an apparently
highly primitive tribe of savages, who spoke English and read the Bible.
In this fight he displayed such valour that he was unanimously
pronounced to be mad by his crew, and was in great danger of losing his
rank after a specialist in insanity, who had been called