erment had risen, as I say, to a pitch of
positive fever; and as to the _Boreal_ in particular, the daily progress
of her preparations was minutely discussed in the newspapers, everyone
was an authority on her fitting, and she was in every mouth a bet, a
hope, a jest, or a sneer: for now, at last, it was felt that success was
probable. So this Mackay had an acutely interested audience, if a
somewhat startled, and a somewhat cynical, one.

A truly lion-hearted man this must have been, after all, to dare
proclaim a point-of-view so at variance with the spirit of his age! One
against four hundred millions, they bent one way, he the opposite,
saying that they were wrong, all wrong! People used to call him 'John
the Baptist Redivivus': and without doubt he did suggest something of
that sort. I suppose that at the time when he had the face to denounce
the _Boreal_ there was not a sovereign on any throne in Europe who, but
for shame, would have been glad of a subordinate post on board.

On the third Sunday night of his denunciation I was there in that
Kensington chapel, and I heard him. And the wild talk he talked! He
seemed like a man delirious with inspiration.

The people sat quite spell-bound, while Mackay's prophesying voice
ranged up and down through all the modulations of thunder, from the
hurrying mutter to the reverberant shock and climax: and those who came
to scoff remained to wonder.

Put simply, what he said was this: That there was undoubtedly some sort
of Fate, or Doom, connected with the Poles of the earth in reference to
the human race: that man's continued failure, in spite of continual
efforts, to reach them, abundantly and super-abundantly proved this; and
that this failure constituted a lesson--_and a warning_--which the race
disregarded at its peril.

The North Pole, he said, was not so very far away, and the difficulties
in the way of reaching it were not, on the face of them, so very great:
human ingenuity had achieved a thousand things a thousand times more
difficult; yet in spite of over half-a-dozen well-planned efforts in
the nineteenth century, and thirty-one in the twentieth, man had never
reached: always he had been baulked, baulked, by some seeming
chance--some restraining Hand: and herein lay the lesson--_herein the
warning_. Wonderfully--really _wonderfully_--like the Tree of
Knowledge in Eden, he said, was that Pole: all the rest of earth lying
open and offered to man--but _That_ persist