They plucked him aloft and they held him high, Then, under the sea of gore, To his torment dire of eternal fire He vanished for evermore. * * * * * A northern wind, like the breath of God, Leapt forth from the sky to the sea; And the hideous stain off the rolling main Was lifted right speedily. A clear sweet night of diamond stars, And a crew on their bended knees, For the precious boon of a silver moon That shone upon silver seas. THE TRANSMIGRATIONS OF TARVER I I should never have thought it of a man not only called John Robinson, but who looked the name so completely. True, he had been born abroad in a land of mystery, but with that he had nothing to do. Owing to a series of circumstances over which Robinson exerted no control whatever, he first saw daylight on a Thibetan tableland, and, what is more, did not return to his mother-country until he was one-and-twenty years of age; but there was little to suggest these facts about him. He had the most purely British middle-class manners, instincts, appetites and mould of mind that ever I saw. For ten years I knew him intimately, and never guessed that anything in the least uncommon lurked beneath his fat exterior. I even respected him. He dwelt alone with an unmarried sister but little older than himself and he went to business in the City daily. After travelling upon the same omnibus with him every morning, winter and summer, for five years, the English reserve of the man thawed, and we grew acquainted. He was a giant in stature, I am undersized; he had an extraordinary amount of physical courage, I possess none; he, indeed, differed from me in a thousand ways, and that was doubtless the reason why we became such firm friends. Our political opinions, moreover, were tinged by the same morning journal, and when similar views on great questions of the day bind men together, it often happens that warm if not lasting friendships are the result. Of course, I never asked for the key of Robinson’s mystery; I did not so much as dream that he had a mystery. Once only might I have read some indication of a side to his character that I had not guessed at; but I never really grasped the significance of certain remarks uttered by him on his way to town one morning, though they surprised me at the time. Having read, with some interest, a leading article on occult theosophy--which approached that belief in a disrespectful spirit--Robinson spoke. “What fools men are!” he said. “How can this poor penny-a-liner possibly know what he is talking about? Just listen: ‘Mahatmas are a figment to bolster a cause which human wisdom has agreed to pronounce unsound.’ There’s bosh for you!” I recollected his early life in Thibet. “You, who dwelt in a Mahatma country, ought to know,” I said. “I do,” he answered. “Mahatmas may not be as common as rabbits, but they exist, and what’s more, they can do a great many remarkable things.”