Troy—some touch of an imperial disdain ever lingered in his mind for these feeble folk who could contentedly hail him—him, who had known Cheiron!—as hero and lord!
Achilles has passed, with the Centaurs and Troy; but the feeling lingers.
Of strange and divers strands is twisted the mysterious cord that, reaching back 'through spaces out of space and timeless time,' somewhere joins us to the Brute; a twine of mingled yarn, not utterly base. As we grow from our animal infancy, and the threads snap one by one at each gallant wing-stroke of a soul poising for flight into Empyrean, we are yet conscious of a loss for every gain, we have some forlorn sense of a vanished heritage. Willing enough are we to 'let the ape and tiger die;' but the pleasant cousins dissembled in hide and fur and feather are not all tigers and apes: which last vile folk, indeed, exist for us only in picture-books, and chiefly offend by always carrying the Sunday School ensign of a Moral at their tails. Others—happily of less didactic dispositions—there be; and it is to these unaffected, careless companions that the sensible child is wont to devote himself; leaving severely alone the
