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Thorn waved his arms frantically. He had nothing with which to signal save his body. He flung his arms wide, and up, and wide again, in an improvised adaption of the telegraphic alphabet to gesticulation. He sent the watch call over and over again.... A little cloud of riding-lights swept toward the dome from an infinite distance away.

The costumes of the different regiments made a break in the drab monotony. The Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force was composed of varied components. Steel helmets could be worn only in winter. In many of the native regiments the British officers wore tasselled pugrees, and long tunics that were really shirts, and an adaption of the native custom of wearing the shirt-tails outside the trousers.

What the stimulus of his achievements, of his renown, meant for these men we have no means of computing; yet we may feel sure that it was vastly more important and significant than any actual traces of imitation or plagiarism from his works, which can with difficulty and for the more part very doubtfully be brought home to them; vastly more important and significant too we may be sure than his effect upon his pupils and other more or less obscure painters, engravers, and block designers, in whose work actual imitation or adaption of his creations is more certain and more abundant.

Perhaps, indeed, we are placing the effect before the cause to some extent; for, after all, the animal system possesses marvellous powers of adaption, and there is perhaps hardly any poisonous vegetable which man might not have learned to eat without deleterious effect, provided the experiment were made gradually.

Moreover, it can stand even as a hypothesis only if it meets the test of observation and experiment. It it can demonstrate its adaption to explain all the facts, it may, until another and better theory is propounded, be accepted as a theory. When it does not explain the facts, it must be modified or abandoned.

And that particular toughening process which had been working on him for years now aided in his speedy adaption to a new set of facts, formidable ones. He was alone on a strange and perhaps hostile world. Water, food, safe shelter, those were important now.

And, as they were to understand later that night, there was a very good reason for that precaution. "Hope all our adaption shots work," Ali murmured, eyeing with no pleasure at all the succession of platters now being borne through the inner opening of the table.

Villette, as being a member of the Convention, obtained redress; but had he been only a journalist, the liberty of the press would not have rescued him. The patriots of Belfast were not more fortunate in the adaption of their civilities they addressed the Convention, in a strain of great piety, to congratulate them on the success of their arms in the "cause of civil and religious liberty."*

That element is rarely absent from great Roman work, which is wanting in the nice adaption of the means to the end. The means are always exaggerated; the end is so much more than attained. The Roman rigidity was apt to overshoot the mark, and I suppose a race which could do nothing small is as defective as a race that can do nothing great.

It may be shown by an analysis of Wycherley's Plain Dealer, a coarse prose adaption of the Misanthrope, stuffed with lumps of realism in a vulgarized theme to hit the mark of English appetite, that we have in it the keynote of the Comedy of our stage. It is Moliere travestied, with the hoof to his foot and hair on the pointed tip of his ear.