"Of course, we enjoy it," they say, almost apologising for saving us; "we so seldom get a chance."
The Royal Navy is the salt of the sea and the salt of the earth also.
THE LAST CHAPTER
BY
VERNON BLACKBURN.
I will give no number to the last chapter of George Steevens's story of the war. There is no reckoning between the work from his and the work from this pen. It is the chapter which covers a grave; it does not make a completion. A while back, you have read that surrendering wail from the beleaguered city—a wail in what contrast to the humour, the vitality, the quickness, the impulse, the eagerness of expectation with which his toil in South Africa began!—wherein he wrote: "Beyond is the world—war and love. Clery marching on Colenso, and all that a man holds dear in a little island under the north star.... To your world and to yourself you are every bit as good as dead—except that dead men have no time to fill in." And now he is dead. And I have undertaken the most difficult task, at the command—for in such a case the timorous suggestion, hooped round by poignant apologies, is no less than a command—of that human creature whom, in the little island under the north star, he held most dear of all—his wife, to set a copingstone, a mere nothing in the air, upon the last work that came from his pen. I will prefer to begin with my own summary, my own intimate view of George Steevens, as he wandered in and out, visible and invisible, of the paths of my life.
"Weep for the dead, for his light hath failed; weep but a little for the dead, for he is at rest." Ecclesiasticus came to my mind when the news of his death came to my knowledge. Who would not weep over the extinction of a career set in a promise so golden, in an accomplishment so rare and splendid? Sad enough thought it is that he is at rest; still—he rests. "Under the wide and starry sky," words which, as I have heard him say, in his casual, unambitious manner of speech, he was wont to repeat to himself in the open deserts of the Soudan—"Under the wide and starry sky" the grave has been dug, and "let me lie."
"Glad did I live, and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will."