the remainder without difficulty. We talked for hours over single
stanzas, and I found him reading into them a wail of regret and a
rebellion which, for the life of me, I could not discover myself.
Possibly I recited with a certain joyous lilt which was my own,
for--his memory was good, and at a second rendering, very often the
first, he made a quatrain his own--he recited the same lines and
invested them with an unrest and passionate revolt that was well-
nigh convincing.

I was interested as to which quatrain he would like best, and was
not surprised when he hit upon the one born of an instant's
irritability, and quite at variance with the Persian's complacent
philosophy and genial code of life:


"What, without asking, hither hurried Whence?
And, without asking, Whither hurried hence!
Oh, many a Cup of this forbidden Wine
Must drown the memory of that insolence!"


"Great!" Wolf Larsen cried. "Great! That's the keynote.
Insolence! He could not have used a better word."

In vain I objected and denied. He deluged me, overwhelmed me with
argument.

"It's not the nature of life to be otherwise. Life, when it knows
that it must cease living, will always rebel. It cannot help
itself. The Preacher found life and the works of life all a vanity