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WINGS

blanched skull of his enemy; the days when Rome, jeering and rude, stole an alien civilization without understanding it, and when Gaul was the home of inarticulate barbarians.

Professor Barker Harrison was sane, academic and Anglo-Saxon. For he did not believe in mesmerism, table-moving, and other forms of occult acrobatics; he judged—and dismissed—poetry with a Spencerian smile of amused sympathy; and his family had lived in the same small Vermont town for more than three hundred years, after having thrived for the preceding seven centuries in the English Midlands.

Yet in his study, when his primitive Self disentangled itself from the pack-threads of his everyday life and surroundings, when his mind returned to the youth of his race and the beginnings of his Ego, he seemed to see himself a short, bow-legged, yellow man, with a square chin, heavy snub nose, angular jaws nearly piercing the hairless, cracked skin, slanting eyes, and pointed, wolfish teeth. He seemed to see himself a man on horseback, whose horizon was bounded by the endless plains of Central Asia, whose only reason for life was eating and drinking and rapine, whose highest aim in life