THE MAN-COVER
little error they treat me gently and worship me so much that
they seem very much concerned every time I venture myself
out of their sight. The sailor, my lieutenant, calls them
“Nurse,” but then he is such a simple fellow!
Remembering the Laws of Manu, and how it is there said
that there are seven kinds of wife, z.e., a wife like a thief, like an
enemy, like a master, like a friend, like a sister, like a mother,
like a slave, and that the last four are good and the last of all
the best, I cannot quite agree with the ancient. My wives are
of the best, and I am afraid they are like a master to me, though
their authority is always tempered with sisterly manners.
And what fine cooks they both are! They will help me to
civilise our negroes.
This task seems to me the most important. All the civi-
lised world may disappear; and we must have cultured beings
to put in its place. Have you never thought of the dreadful
doom perhaps reserved to our race; of the very slight dis-
turbance that might reduce to nothing all our proud civilisa-
tion, leaving only the puniest and less fitted amongst human
beings? All to be begun anew! As perhaps it has begun again
more than once in one or another planet—even in our own little
one—along the past centuries. Nothing, nothing will be left,
perhaps ; not a book, even the Bible; not a statue, even
“ Demeter” or “La Vénus”; not a piece of art of any kind,
save, mayhap, the skull of a monkey floating upon a new and
fathomless Ocean. Worse even!|—things may be preserved that
would lead to serious blunders for our successors. Think of
their extremity if the students of our times should find as the
only documents a complete edition of the works of Miss Corelli
or some of the numerous Utopias that are poured on us at the
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