than we did, as he is paid to teach us," said Oman.
"See here, you only know where the shoals lie, but I know where the stromling are, which is a straw nearer."
"So," rallied Oman. "If we dip into the sea we shall get fish!—well one is never too old to learn."
The wife came out of the cottage and began a lively talk with her husband, so that the commissioner found it unprofitable to confer longer with the hostile fisherman, and started toward the harbor.
Some pilots were sitting on the pier who zealously increased their conversation and seemed inclined not to notice him.
He would not turn back but continued toward the strand, leaving the habitations behind. The naked rock lay waste, without a tree, without a bush, for everything that fire could burn was destroyed. He walked along the water's edge, sometimes in fine soft sand, sometimes on stones. When he had continued an hour, always turning to the right, he found himself in the same place from which he had started, with a feeling of being in captivity. The hillock of the little island crushed him, and the sea's horizontal circle oppressed him, the old feeling of not having room enough came over him, and he climbed to the highest plateau of the hillock, which was about fifty feet above the sea level. There he lay down on his back and looked up into space. Now when his eyes could behold nothing, neither land nor sea, and he saw only the blue cupola over him, he felt free, isolated, as a cosmic particle floating in the ether only obeying the law of gravitation. He fancied he was perfectly alone upon the globe, the earth was only a vehicle in which he rode on its orbit, and he heard in the wind's faint rustle only the air draft that the planet in its speed would awake in the ether, and in the din of the waves he perceived the splashing which the liquid must make as the big reservoir rolled round its axle. All reminiscences of fellow creatures, community, law, customs, had blown away, now that he did not see a single fragment of the earth to which he was bound. He let his thoughts run like calves let loose, dashing over all obstacles, all considerations, and therewith intoxicated himself to stupefaction, as the India navel reverencers, who forgot both heaven and earth in contemplating an inferior external part of themselves.
Commissioner Borg was not a nature worshiper any more than were those navel worshipers of India. On the contrary he was a self-conscious being, standing highest in the terrestrial chain of creation and entertained certain contempt for the lower forms of existence, understanding very well that what the self-conscious spirit produces is partly more subtle than that of the unconscious nature, and above all else has more advantages to man, who creates his creations with regard to the usefulness and beauty they may afford to their creator. Out of nature he brought forth raw material for his work, and although both light and air could be produced by machine, he preferred the sun's unexcellable ether vibrations, and the atmosphere's inexhaustible well of oxygen. He loved nature as an assistant, as an inferior who could serve him, and it pleased him that he was able to fool this powerful adversary to place its resources at his disposal.
After having lain an uncertain time and felt the great rest of absolute solitude, freedom from influences, from pressure, he arose and went down to seek his room.
When he entered his empty chamber it reëchoed his footsteps and he felt himself entrapped. The white quadrant and rectangles that enclosed the room where he must dwell, reminded him of human hands, but of a low order, mastering only the simple forms of inorganic nature. He was enclosed in a crystal, a hexaëdron or the like, and the straight lines and the congruent surfaces, shaped his thoughts into squares, and ruled his soul in lines, simplifying it from the organic life's liberty of forms, and reduced his brain's rich tropical vegetation of changing perceptions to nature's first childish attempt at classifying.
After he had called to the girl and let her bring in his chests, he began at once the transformation of the room.
His first care was to regulate the entrance of light by a pair of heavy garnet Persian curtains, that instantly gave the room a softer tone. He opened the two leaves of the big dining table and the emptiness of the big white floor was filled at once, but the white surface of the table was still disturbing, so he concealed it under an oilcloth of a solid warm moss-green color which harmonized with the curtains and was restful. Then he placed his book shelves against the poorest wall. This certainly was not an improvement as they only striped it in columns like a time-table, and the white plastering contrasted more against the black walnut colored wood, but he would first outline the whole before he went into details.
From a nail in the ceiling he hung his bed curtains, this made as it were, a room within the room, and the dormitory was separated from the sitting room, as though under a tent.
The long white floor planks with their black: parallel cracks, where dirt from shoes, dust from furniture and clothes, tobacco ashes, scrubbing water and broom splinters, formed hot beds for fungi and hiding places for wood worms, he covered here and there with rugs of different colors and patterns, which lay like verdant blooming islets on the big white flat.
Now that there was color and warmth added to the space he began to give the finishing touches. He had first to create a forge, an altar to labor which would be the center round which everything would be grouped and radiating from it. Therefore he placed his big lamp on the writing table, it was two feet high and rose like a lighthouse upon the green cloth, its painted china stand with arabesques, flowers and animals, which bore no resemblance to ordinary ones, but gave a cheerful coloring and reminded with their ornaments, of the human spirit's power to outrage nature's unchangeable shapes. Here had the painter transformed a stiff spear thistle to a clinging vine, and forced a rabbit to stretch himself out like a crocodile, and with a gun between his fore paws with their tiger claw nails, to aim at a hunter with a fox's head.
Round the lamp he placed a microscope, diopter, scales, plumb bobs, and a sounding rod, whose varnished brasses diffused a warm sunlight yellow.
The inkstand, a big cube of glass cut in facets, which gave it the faint blue light of water or ice, the penholders of porcupine quills which suggested animal life with their indefinite oily coloring, sticks of sealing wax in loud cinnabar, pen boxes with variegated labels, scissors with cold steel glance, cigar dishes in lac and gold, paper knife of bronze, all that mass of small trifles of use and beauty soon filled the big table abundantly with points on which the eye could rest a moment getting an impression, a memory, an impulse, keeping it always active and never fatiguing.
Now for filling the spaces in the book shelves, and blow the breath of life into the vacuum between the dark boards. There soon stood row upon row a variegated collection of reference and handbooks, from which the owner could get enlightenment on all that had happened in the past and present time. Encyclopedias, which like an air telegraph answered with a pressure on the right letter. Text-books in history, philosophy, archeology, and natural sciences, journeys in all lands with maps, all of Baedeker's handbooks so that the owner could sit at home and plan the shortest and cheapest route to this or that place, and decide which hotel, and know how much to give in drink money. But as all of these works have an inevitable seed of decay, he had manned a special shelf with an observation corps of scientific journals from which he could immediately obtain reports concerning even the smallest advancements of knowledge, even the slightest discoveries. And at last a whole collection of skeleton keys to all present knowledge, in bibliographical notices, publishers' catalogues, book-sellers' newspapers, so that he, shut up in his room, could see precisely how high or low the barometer stood with all the science that concerned him.
When he regarded the wall with the book shelf, it seemed to him as though the room was now for the first time inhabited by living beings. These books gave the impression of individuals for there were not two works of the same exterior. One was a Baedeker in scarlet and gold, like one who on a Monday morning leaves all behind him and travels away from sorrow.
Others solemn, dressed in black, a whole procession, like the Encyclopedia Britannica,
