It is not only in the hour of danger that we feel this itching for altitude. It consoled the sailors who had to climb the masts. At least, they sometimes said so, singing with gusto,
“We jolly sailor-boys are sitting up aloft,
And the land-lubbers lying down below.”
To this day it makes yachtsmen happy—at least, some of them say so, and it is otherwise not easy to understand their preference for cloths stretched on poles to more efficient modern machinery. Be that as it may, it is certainly the itching for altitude that is the inherent part of the pleasure of climbing knotted ropes and poles and slippery mountain-sides, of drifting in balloons like clouds, or whirring madly about like monstrous mechanical partridges with motors in their bellies. For myriads of ages, our noble ancestors looked down upon things in general from the trees, and the taste revives in us readily, and soon feels as natural as winking.
So, if old fashions of decoration last, and a “coat [220] ]of arms” is needed for some successful sailor in the sky, he could choose no more appropriate emblem than a noble little gibbon. The mighty muscles of an orang-outang or gorilla might put a man to shame, whereas the gibbon is much smaller than ourselves. He is also the nimblest of all us creatures with legs and arms, and in various ways more like us than any of the others. So let the emblem be a gibbon and a man clasping hands, and the legend these plain words of simple truth—
“TWO CHILDREN OF THE AIR.”
2. “CHARLIE DARWIN”
It was “antipathy to Darwin,” they told me, which made a reverend missionary, in the last century, exhort some neighbours of ours, some Christian Karens in Burma, to “shoot at sight” the monkeys and little apes that occasionally took a few plantains from their gardens. The loss of fruit could be minimised in other, gentler ways, as their Burman neighbours showed them. The “heathens” were so “benighted” that they spoke of the trifling losses caused by the apes exactly as the poet Burns spoke of the depredations [221] ]of the little mouse, whose nest his plough destroyed—
“I doubtna, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live! ...