in works. He is as
Lucifer would be, were that proud spirit banished to a society of
soulless, Tomlinsonian ghosts.

This loneliness is bad enough in itself, but, to make it worse, he is
oppressed by the primal melancholy of the race. Knowing him, I review
the old Scandinavian myths with clearer understanding. The
white-skinned, fair-haired savages who created that terrible pantheon
were of the same fibre as he. The frivolity of the laughter-loving
Latins is no part of him. When he laughs it is from a humour that is
nothing else than ferocious. But he laughs rarely; he is too often sad.
And it is a sadness as deep-reaching as the roots of the race. It is the
race heritage, the sadness which has made the race sober-minded,
clean-lived and fanatically moral, and which, in this latter connection,
has culminated among the English in the Reformed Church and Mrs. Grundy.

In point of fact, the chief vent to this primal melancholy has been
religion in its more agonizing forms. But the compensations of such
religion are denied Wolf Larsen. His brutal materialism will not permit
it. So, when his blue moods come on, nothing remains for him, but to be
devilish. Were he not so terrible a man, I could sometimes feel sorry
for him, as instance three mornings ago, when I went into his stateroom
to fill his water-bottle and came unexpectedly upon him. He did not see
me. His head was buried in his hands, and his shoulders were heaving
convulsively as with sobs. He seemed torn by some mighty grief. As I
softly withdrew I could hear him groaning, "God! God! God!" Not that
he was calling upon God; it was a mere expletive, but it came from his
soul.

At dinner he asked the hunters for a remedy for headache, and by evening,
strong man that he was, he was half-blind and reeling about the cabin.

"I've never been sick in my life, Hump," he said, as I guided him to his
room. "Nor did I ever have a headache except the time my head was
healing after having been laid open for six inches by a capstan-bar."

For three days this blinding headache lasted, and he suffered as wild
animals suffer, as it seemed the way on ship to suffer, without plaint,
without sympathy, utterly alone.

This morning, however, on entering his state-room to make the bed and put
things in order, I found him well and hard at work. Table and bunk were
littered with designs and calculations. On a large transparent sheet,
compass and square in hand, h