Did he not find it in that eagerness of spirit which had sent him, in obedience to Salvation Yeo’s pointing finger, away from the dour and narrow father and the first taste of the Tyneside works, penniless, over the wild North Sea to Archangel, town of fairy wonders, and thence, so as not to be caught on the ship again and taken back to Newcastle, to wanderings he scarce knew whither? Did he not find it in the strange lure of Russia which impelled him, when, after a few voyages, he landed in the port of London, to procure a passport which would make him free for the land of his fascination? Did he not find it in the resourcefulness of brain which, the mariner’s life forsaken, first secured him employment in the English racing establishment of a Russian Prince, and then interested recognition by the Princess herself, so that, after a strenuous while he found himself no longer as an inconsiderable stable hand, but as a human being who counted in the world? Did he not find it in his fond ambitions, when the Princess at his request transferred him from stables to garage, from garage to motor-works for higher training; when he set himself to learn Russian as no Englishman should ever have learned it; when afterwards he steeped his mind in Russian poetry and folk-lore, sleeping four or five hours a night, compelled by dreams of greatness in which there figured as his bride of the golden future the little Princess Tania, whose governess-taught English was as pure as the church bells on a frosty night? Did he not find it in those qualities of practical command of circumstance and of poetic vision which had raised him in a few years from the ragged, semi-ignorant, sea-faring English lout alone in Russia to the trusted chief of a Prince’s fleet of a dozen cars, to the courier-chauffeur, with all the roads and ways and customs and languages of Russia, from Riga to Tobolsk, and from Tobolsk to Tiflis, and from Tiflis to St. Petersburg, at his finger tips; to the Master of Russian Literature, already something of a published poet, admitted into intellectual companionship by the Prince and thereby given undreamed of leisure for further intellectual development? What were those qualities but the qualities of genius differentiating him from the ordinary run of men and absolving him from such judgments as might be passed upon the errant of them? Without this absolving genius could he have marched in and taken his place in the modern world of English letters?