rk that day, nor
the next, nor the next.

In his random reading he had never chanced upon the Rubaiyat, and it was
to him like a great find of treasure. Much I remembered, possibly
two-thirds of the quatrains, and I managed to piece out the remainder
without difficulty. We talked for hours over single stanzas, and I found
him reading into them a wail of regret and a rebellion which, for the
life of me, I could not discover myself. Possibly I recited with a
certain joyous lilt which was my own, for--his memory was good, and at a
second rendering, very often the first, he made a quatrain his own--he
recited the same lines and invested them with an unrest and passionate
revolt that was well-nigh convincing.

I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was not
surprised when he hit upon the one born of an instant's irritability, and
quite at variance with the Persian's complacent philosophy and genial
code of life:

"What, without asking, hither hurried _Whence_?
And, without asking, _Whither_ hurried hence!
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence!"

"Great!" Wolf Larsen cried. "Great! That's the keynote. Insolence! He
could not have used a better word."

In vain I objected and denied. He deluged me, overwhelmed me with
argument.

"It's not the nature of life to be otherwise. Life, when it knows that
it must cease living, will always rebel. It cannot help itself. The
Preacher found life and the works of life all a vanity and vexation, an
evil thing; but death, the ceasing to be able to be vain and vexed, he
found an eviler thing. Through chapter after chapter he is worried by
the one event that cometh to all alike. So Omar, so I, so you, even you,
for you rebelled against dying when Cooky sharpened a knife for you. You
were afraid to die; the life that was in you, that composes you, that is
greater than you, did not want to die. You have talked of the instinct
of immortality. I talk of the instinct of life, which is to live, and
which, when death looms near and large, masters the instinct, so called,
of immortality. It mastered it in you (you cannot deny it), because a
crazy Cockney cook sharpened a knife.

"You are afraid of him now. You are afraid of me. You cannot deny it.
If I should catch you by the throat, thus,"--his hand was about my throat
and my breath was shut off,--"and began to press the life out of you
thus, and