ter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes
are_"--there goes out from that ship all life, all motion. Even as
the mass of metal plunges downward and as the frenzied engineer
rushes through blinding steam and water to stop the engines in their
panic rush, the spirit of the vessel goes out of her in a great
sigh. With dampered ash-pits her fires blacken and go out, the idle
steering-engine clanks and rattles as the useless rudder tugs at her
chains, and the crew tell in whispers how it happened _just_ like that
on the _Gipsy Queen_, out of Sunderland, or the _Gerard Dow_, out of
Antwerp. All of which is not to be learned in the study at home. Let
us get back to the engine-room.

I am curious to know how all this would strike my friend at home.
Would it not, as Henley used to say, give him much to perpend? I hear
him mutter that phrase we talked out once, at the tea-table--"The Age
of Mechanism." But why not an Age of Heroism? Mind, I use this latter
word in its true sense as I use the word Hero. For some occult reason,
known only to Brixton and Peckham Rye, a hero is the person who jumps
into the Thames and pulls a woman out, or the interesting inanity of a
popular serial. There is nothing essentially heroic in life-saving.
Indeed, all the old heroes of Norseland, Rome, and Greece regarded
the saving of life with a contempt that was only natural when we
consider the utter lack of board schools and their frantic belief
in a hereafter. I imagine the Norse Sea-kings who pushed out to
Vine-land--aye, even down to Cape Cod--would have been puzzled to hear
an undersized clerk who had saved a man from a watery grave described
as a hero. _Their_ method was to pull the drowning wretch out with a
boat-hook, and curse him for being so clumsy as to fall in. Eric the
Red never worried about a sailor who had the bad judgment to be washed
overside during the night. Hercules would have felt outraged had the
Royal Humane Society of the period loaded him down with their medals.
Achilles would as soon have thought of committing the interminable
catalogue of the Grecian Ships to memory as of associating the saving
of life with the heroic. I am not suggesting that these heroes are
more worthy of emulation than a life-saver; I only want to explain
that there is, in our day, a race of beings, half-man, half-god, who
correspond, in all broad characteristics, to those rather indecent
heroes of early imaginative literature. They do with ease those