THE LION WHO HAS EATEN A MAN. 189 



and the common man, utterly remote from all such 

 experience, walled out from it by blank negation, in- 

 capable of even conceiving the heights and depths of 

 such a passion. Visions of those ecstatic hours for ever 

 accompany the happy man. He may return to his 

 home, and resume the labours of his profession, which 

 secures him pudding, and, it may be, praise : he con- 

 tinues the daily round, but not as before. He is a 

 chano;ed man. The direction of his thoughts is con- 

 stantly seawards. Murmurs of old ocean linger in his 

 soul, as they murmur in a shell long since taken from 

 the deep, and now condemned to ornament the man- 

 tel-jDiece of some lodging-house, the daily witness of 

 prosaisms and peculations. To the casual eye he may 

 not seem changed ; but read his soul, and you will find 

 he is another man. 



At least it was thus with me. I had suj^ped with the 

 gods, and grew fastidious over my shilling ordinary. 

 If work imperiously claimed my attention, if I was 

 forced to trouble myself with "proofs," commentators, 

 old writers, dreary philosophies, and multiform affairs, 

 the glass vases on my table, ^perpetually reminding me 

 of Ilfracombe and Tenby, aggravated the oppression. 

 The iodine of the sea-breezes had entered me. I felt 

 that I had " suffered a sea change '' into sometliing 

 zoological and strange. Men began to aj^pear like 

 molluscs ; and their ways the ways of creatures in a 

 larger rock-pool. When forced to endure the conversa- 

 tion of some "friend of the family," with well-waxed 



