THE JOURNAL OF ISAACO[1]
I
The time approaches when all the wildness of this little world will be overrun and tamed into the trimness of a civilized parterre; when the last trail will have been trodden, the mystery of the last forest bared, and the last of the savage peoples penned into a League of Nations to die of unnatural peace. What will our children do then, I wonder, for their books of high romance? How satisfy their thirst of daring with nothing further to dare? Who will appease them, when
"The Rudyards cease from kipling
And the Haggards ride no more,"
when Eobinson Crusoe and the classics are once read, and in a hencoop world no saga-man arises in their stead? They say that by then we shall have enlarged our borders and gone in our chariots of petrol to visit the wheeling stars. But I misdoubt these Icarian flights. It seems to me more likely that the harassed parents and publishers of those days will be driven earthward to rummage into the lumber of the past and bring out as new the obscure things that a former more heroic age had buried. In those stricken times, I hope someone may have the fortune to light upon my manuscript Journal of Isaaco, a slim, alluring folio that now glitters in red-and-gold upon my study shelves. It would be a pity if Time, the All-Merciless, were allowed to throw the dust of oblivion over these pretty pages, for they possess in good measure that trait of "pleasant atrocity" which wins the attention of youth.
But who was Isaaco, and what was his Journal that it calls for the popularity of print? Those who have followed the harrowing tale of Mungo Park's Travels along the
- ↑ Extract from The Cream of Curiosity, by Reginald L. Hine, 1920, pp. 291-316.
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