s faces, and all that presence of something that is
dead and yet sleepless? It is the presence of the sin that is sealed
with pride and impenitence; the story of how the Sultan got his
throne. But it is not the story he is listening to just now, but
another story which has been invented to cover it--the story called
"Eugenius: or the Adventures of One Not Born," a most varied and
entrancing tale, which never fails to send him to sleep.

CHAPTER II

TRUE HISTORY OF A TRAMP

He awoke in the Dark Ages and smelt dawn in the dark, and knew he was
not wholly a slave. It was as if, in some tale of Hans Andersen, a
stick or a stool had been left in the garden all night and had grown
alive and struck root like a tree. For this is the truth behind the
old legal fiction of the servile countries, that the slave is a
"chattel," that is a piece of furniture like a stick or a stool. In
the spiritual sense, I am certain it was never so unwholesome a fancy
as the spawn of Nietzsche suppose to-day. No human being, pagan or
Christian, I am certain, ever thought of another human being as a
chair or a table. The mind cannot base itself on the idea that a comet
is a cabbage; nor can it on the idea that a man is a stool. No man was
ever unconscious of another's presence--or even indifferent to
another's opinion. The lady who is said to have boasted her
indifference to being naked before male slaves was showing off--or she
meant something different. The lord who fed fishes by killing a slave
was indulging in what most cannibals indulge in--a satanist
affectation. The lady was consciously shameless and the lord was
consciously cruel. But it simply is not in the human reason to carve
men like wood or examine women like ivory, just as it is not in the
human reason to think that two and two make five.

But there was this truth in the legal simile of furniture: that the
slave, though certainly a man, was in one sense a dead man; in the
sense that he was _moveable_. His locomotion was not his own: his
master moved his arms and legs for him as if he were a marionette. Now
it is important in the first degree to realise here what would be
involved in such a fable as I have imagined, of a stool rooting itself
like a shrub. For the general modern notion certainly is that life and
liberty are in some way to be associated with novelty and not standing
still. But it is just because the stool is lifeless that it moves
about. It is just because t