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at least Joe. At fifteen I refused to answer to anything shorter than Joseph. At eighteen I discovered that the name Joseph was supposed to indicate an unmanly prudery because of some old story about a Joseph who rejected the advances of his employer’s wife: very properly in my opinion. I then became Popham to my family and intimate friends, and Mister Barlow to the rest of the world. My mother slipped back into Iddy when her faculties began to fail her, poor woman; but I could not resent that, at her age. Zoo Do you mean to say that your mother bothered about you after you were ten? The Elderly Gentleman Naturally, madam. She was my mother. What would you have had her do? Zoo Go on to the next, of course. After eight or nine children become quite uninteresting, except to themselves. I shouldn’t know my two eldest if I met them. The Elderly Gentleman Again drooping. I am dying. Let me die. I wish to die. Zoo Going to him quickly and supporting him. Hold up. Sit up straight. What’s the matter? The Elderly Gentleman Faintly. My spine, I think. Shock. Concussion. Zoo Maternally. Pow wow wow! What is there to shock you? Shaking him playfully. There! Sit up; and be good. The Elderly Gentleman Still feebly. Thank you. I am better now. Zoo Resuming her seat on the sacks. But what was all the rest of that long name for? There was a lot more of it. Blops Booby or something. The Elderly Gentleman Impressively. Bolge Bluebin, madam: a historical name. Let me inform you that I can trace my family back for more than a thousand years, from the Eastern Empire to its ancient seat in these islands, to a time when two of my ancestors, Joyce Bolge and Hengist Horsa Bluebin, wrestled with one another for the prime ministership of the British Empire, and occupied that position successively with a glory of which we can in these degenerate days form but a faint conception. When I think of these mighty men, lions in war, sages in peace, not babblers and charlatans like the pygmies who now occupy their places in Baghdad, but strong silent men, ruling an empire on which the sun never set, my eyes fill with tears: my heart bursts with emotion: I feel that to have lived but to the dawn of manhood in their day, and then died for them, would have been a nobler and happier lot than the ignominious ease of my present longevity. Zoo Longevity! She laughs. The Elderly Gentleman Yes, madam, relative longevity. As it is, I have to be content and proud to know that I am descended from both those heroes. Zoo You must be descended from every Briton who was alive in their time. Don’t you know that? The Elderly Gentleman Do not quibble, madam. I bear their names, Bolge and Bluebin; and I hope I have inherited something of their majestic spirit. Well, they were born in these islands. I repeat, these islands were then, incredible as it now seems, the centre of the British Empire. When that centre shifted to Baghdad, and the Englishman at last returned to the true cradle of his race in Mesopotamia, the western islands were cast off, as they had been before by the Roman Empire. But it was to the British race, and in these islands, that the greatest miracle in history occurred. Zoo Miracle? The Elderly Gentleman Yes: the first man to live three hundred years was an Englishman. The first, that is, since the contemporaries of Methuselah. Zoo Oh, that! The Elderly Gentleman Yes, that, as you call it so flippantly. Are you aware, madam, that at that immortal moment the English race had lost intellectual credit to such an extent that they habitually spoke of one another as fatheads? Yet England is now a sacred grove to which statesmen from all over the earth come to consult English sages who speak with the experience of two and a half centuries of life. The land that once exported cotton shirts and hardware now exports nothing but wisdom. You see before you, madam, a man utterly weary of the weekend riverside hotels of the Euphrates, the minstrels and pierrots on the sands of the Persian Gulf, the toboggans and funiculars of the Hindu Kush. Can you wonder that I turn, with a hungry heart, to the mystery and beauty of these haunted islands, thronged with spectres from a magic past, made holy by the footsteps of the wise men of the West. Consider this island on which we stand, the last foothold of man on this side of the Atlantic: this Ireland, described by the earliest bards as an emerald gem set in a silver sea! Can I, a scion of the illustrious British race, ever forget that when the Empire transferred its seat to the East, and said to the turbulent Irish race which it had oppressed but never conquered, “At last we leave you to yourselves; and much good may it do you,” the Irish as one man uttered the historic shout “No: we’ll be damned if you do,” and emigrated to the countries where there was still a Nationalist question, to India, Persia, and Korea, to Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli. In these countries they were ever foremost in the struggle for national independence; and the world rang continually with the story of their sufferings and wrongs. And what poem can do justice to the end, when it came at last? Hardly two hundred years had elapsed when the claims of nationality were so universally conceded that there was no longer a single country on the face of the earth with a national grievance or a national movement. Think of the position of the Irish, who had lost all their political faculties by disuse except that of nationalist agitation, and who owed their position as the most interesting race on earth solely to their sufferings! The very countries they had helped