Chapter 3 - Page 2

mead in the halls of Valhalla, and beating time with their cans to
the hymns of the Scalds. Ah! how the old Sagas run through me!

Yet Jarl, the descendant of heroes and kings, was a lone, friendless
mariner on the main, only true to his origin in the sea-life that he
led. But so it has been, and forever will be. What yeoman shall swear
that he is not descended from Alfred? what dunce, that he is not
sprung of old Homer? King Noah, God bless him! fathered us all. Then
hold up your heads, oh ye Helots, blood potential flows through your
veins. All of us have monarchs and sages for kinsmen; nay, angels and
archangels for cousins; since in antediluvian days, the sons of God
did verily wed with our mothers, the irresistible daughters of Eve.
Thus all generations are blended: and heaven and earth of one
kin: the hierarchies of seraphs in the uttermost skies; the thrones
and principalities in the zodiac; the shades that roam throughout
space; the nations and families, flocks and folds of the earth; one
and all, brothers in essence--oh, be we then brothers indeed! All
things form but one whole; the universe a Judea, and God Jehovah its
head. Then no more let us start with affright. In a theocracy, what
is to fear? Let us compose ourselves to death as fagged horsemen
sleep in the saddle. Let us welcome even ghosts when they rise. Away
with our stares and grimaces. The New Zealander's tattooing is not a
prodigy; nor the Chinaman's ways an enigma. No custom is strange; no
creed is absurd; no foe, but who will in the end prove a friend. In
heaven, at last, our good, old, white-haired father Adam will greet
all alike, and sociality forever prevail. Christian shall join hands
between Gentile and Jew; grim Dante forget his Infernos, and shake
sides with fat Rabelais; and monk Luther, over a flagon of old
nectar, talk over old times with Pope Leo. Then, shall we sit by the
sages, who of yore gave laws to the Medes and Persians in the sun; by
the cavalry captains in Perseus, who cried, "To horse!" when waked by
their Last Trump sounding to the charge; by the old hunters, who
eternities ago, hunted the moose in Orion; by the minstrels, who sang
in the Milky Way when Jesus our Saviour was born. Then shall we list
to no shallow gossip of Magellans and Drakes; but give ear to the
voyagers who have circumnavigated the Ecliptic; who rounded the Polar
Star as Cape Horn. Then shall the Stagirite and Kant be forgotten,
and another folio than theirs be turned over for wisdom; even the
folio now spread with horoscopes as yet undeciphered, the heaven of
heavens on high.

Now, in old Jarl's lingo there was never an idiom. Your aboriginal
tar is too much of a cosmopolitan for that. Long companionship with