AH, No! Not brigands! Not pirates! They belong to the good days of youth, the “Boys’ Own Annual,” Stevenson, Henty, Kingston, when there were words of pure magic that wrought spells. Is there a boy with soul so dead who never to himself hath said “Sallee Rovers,” “High Barbary,” “Masked Men on Maidenhead Thicket,” “A Toby Man on a Black Horse,” for the sheer pleasure of evoking the little shiver that goes with Romance? Has the deep villainy of Long John Silver anything in common with Tirpitz? Long John would never have allowed the right of Tirpitz to fly the Jolly Roger. Would Claude Duval have taken the Kaiser’s hand? Never!

The skull and crossbones have fallen on evil days, the black flag has had its sable purity rent and torn; no boy is going to stick his nose into a book about the Kaiser and Willie in future days, in order to snuff up sensuously the very smell of such a jolly good tale. Ah, these others were a merry company, and they swung very rightly on creaking gallows, or walked the plank into glittering foreign seas, for crimes which would show saintly white upon the Potsdam flag. They were bad men, but witless, too; they did such petty sins, imagined such small crimes. If they bullied a little boy, we thought them already damnable rascals! One little boy! Anybody could count him on their fingers; but we need the higher mathematics to compute the wrong of Potsdam. It is like weighing Saturn, or measuring Lucifer; we must go outside our world to do either.

Better the lonely gibbet on the heath than the stalled ox of Potsdam; let us walk the plank like the honest murderers we are, and go to the perdition that suits with our knaveries and cruelties and black crimes; but let us from creaking chain and blanched sea-sand enter a protest against having the Berlin brood fathered on us; nay, sirs, must even the good fat swine in his filth be compared with such as these?

H. PEARL ADAM.