The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE MAN-COVER little error they treat me gently and worship me so much that they seem very much concerned every time I venture myself out of their sight. The sailor, my lieutenant, calls them “Nurse,” but then he is such a simple fellow! Remembering the Laws of Manu, and how it is there said that there are seven kinds of wife, z.e., a wife like a thief, like an enemy, like a master, like a friend, like a sister, like a mother, like a slave, and that the last four are good and the last of all the best, I cannot quite agree with the ancient. My wives are of the best, and I am afraid they are like a master to me, though their authority is always tempered with sisterly manners. And what fine cooks they both are! They will help me to civilise our negroes. This task seems to me the most important. All the civi- lised world may disappear; and we must have cultured beings to put in its place. Have you never thought of the dreadful doom perhaps reserved to our race; of the very slight dis- turbance that might reduce to nothing all our proud civilisa- tion, leaving only the puniest and less fitted amongst human beings? All to be begun anew! As perhaps it has begun again more than once in one or another planet—even in our own little one—along the past centuries. Nothing, nothing will be left, perhaps ; not a book, even the Bible; not a statue, even “ Demeter” or “La Vénus”; not a piece of art of any kind, save, mayhap, the skull of a monkey floating upon a new and fathomless Ocean. Worse even!|—things may be preserved that would lead to serious blunders for our successors. Think of their extremity if the students of our times should find as the only documents a complete edition of the works of Miss Corelli or some of the numerous Utopias that are poured on us at the 383