Orion

The moonless night has a touch of frost, and is steely-clear. High and
dominant amidst the Populations of the Sky, the restless and the
steadfast alike, hangs the great Plough, lit with a hard radiance as
of the polished and shining share. And yonder, low on the horizon, but
half resurgent as yet, crouches the magnificent hunter: watchful,
seemingly, and expectant: with some hint of menace in his port.

Yet should his game be up, you would think by now. Many a century has
passed since the plough first sped a conqueror east and west, clearing
forest and draining fen; policing the valleys with barbed-wires and
Sunday schools, with the chains that are forged of peace, the irking
fetters of plenty: driving also the whole lot of us, these to sweat at
its tail, those to plod with the patient team, but all to march in a
great chain-gang, the convicts of peace and order and law: while the
happy nomad, with his woodlands, his wild cattle, his pleasing
nuptialities, has long since disappeared, dropping only in his flight
some store of flint-heads, a legacy of confusion. Truly, we Children
of the Plough, but for yon tremendous Monitor in the sky, were in
right case to forget that the Hunter is still a quantity to reckon
withal. Where, then, does he hide, the Shaker of the Spear? Why, here,
my brother, and here; deep in the breasts of each and all of us! And
for this drop of primal quicksilver in the blood what poppy or
mandragora shall purge it hence away?

Of pulpiteers and parents it is called Original Sin: a term wherewith
they brand whatever frisks and butts with rude goatish horns against
accepted maxims and trim theories of education. In the abstract, of
course, this fitful stirring of the old yeast is no more sin than a
natural craving for a seat on a high stool, for the inscription -- now
horizontal, and now vertical -- of figures, is sin. But the deskmen
command a temporary majority: for the short while they shall hold the
cards they have the right to call the game. And so -- since we must
bow to the storm -- let the one thing be labelled Sin, and the other
Salvation -- for a season: ourselves forgetting never that it is all a
matter of nomenclature. What we have now first to note is that this
original Waft from the Garden asserts itself most vigorously in the
Child. This it is that thrusts the small boy out under the naked
heavens, to enact a sorry and shivering Crusoe on an islet in the
duck-pond. This it is that sends the little girl footing it after the
gipsy's van, oblivious of lessons, puddings, the embrace maternal, the
paternal smack; hearing naught save the faint, far bugle-summons to
the pre-historic little savage that thrills and answers in the
tingling blood of her; seeing only a troop of