The Lost Centaur

It is somewhere set down (or does the legend only exist in the great
volume of ought-to-be-writ?) that the young Achilles, nurtured from
babyhood by the wise and kindly Cheiron, accustomed to reverence an
ideal of human skill and wisdom blent with all that was best and
noblest of animal instinct, strength and swiftness, found poor
humanity sadly to miss, when at last the was sent forth among his
pottering little two-legged peers. Himself alone he had hitherto
fancied to be the maimed one, the incomplete; he looked to find the
lords of earth even such as these Centaurs; wise and magnanimous atop:
below, shod with the lightning, winged with the wind, terrible in the
potentiality of the armed heel. Instead of which -- ! How fallen was
his first fair hope of the world! And even when reconciled at last to
the dynasty of the forked radish, after he had seen its quality tested
round the clangorous walls of 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 stiff, tame
creatures claiming to be of closer kin. And yet these playmates, while
cheerfully admitting him of their fellowship, make him feel his
inferiority at every point. Vainly, his snub nose projected
earthwards, he essays to sniff it with the terrier who (as becomes the
nobler animal) is leading in the chase; and he is ready to weep as he
realises his loss. And the rest of the Free Company, -- the pony, the
cows, the great cart-horses, -- are ever shaming him by their
unboastful exercise of some enviable and unattainable attribute. Even
the friendly pig, who (did but parents permit) should eat of his bread
and drink of