until death overtook him.

There followed almost immediately a feeling of content, for, where
before his future at best seemed but a void, now it was filled
with possibilities the contemplation of which brought him, if not
happiness, at least a surcease of absolute grief, for before him
lay a great work that would occupy his time.

Stripped not only of all the outward symbols of civilization, Tarzan
had also reverted morally and mentally to the status of the savage
beast he had been reared. Never had his civilization been more than
a veneer put on for the sake of her he loved because he thought it
made her happier to see him thus. In reality he had always held the
outward evidences of so-called culture in deep contempt. Civilization
meant to Tarzan of the Apes a curtailment of freedom in all its
aspects--freedom of action, freedom of thought, freedom of love,
freedom of hate. Clothes he abhorred--uncomfortable, hideous,
confining things that reminded him somehow of bonds securing him to
the life he had seen the poor creatures of London and Paris living.
Clothes were the emblems of that hypocrisy for which civilization
stood--a pretense that the wearers were ashamed of what the clothes
covered, of the human form made in the semblance of God. Tarzan
knew how silly and pathetic the lower orders of animals appeared in
the clothing of civilization, for he had seen several poor creatures
thus appareled in various traveling shows in Europe, and he knew,
too, how silly and pathetic man appears in them since the only men
he had seen in the first twenty years of his life had been, like
himself, naked savages. The ape-man had a keen admiration for a
well-muscled, well-proportioned body, whether lion, or antelope,
or man, and it had ever been beyond him to understand how clothes