ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 45 



year I know not whether he was astronomer enough to add 

 another for leap-years. The beggars were a kind of German 

 silver aristocracy ; not real plate, to be sure, but better than 

 nothing. Where everybody was overworked, they supplied 

 the comfortable equipoise of absolute leisure, so aesthetically 

 needful. Besides, I was but too conscious of a vagrant 

 fibre in myself, which too often thrilled me in my solitary 

 walks with the temptation to wander on into infinite space, 

 and by a single spasm of resolution to emancipate myself 

 from the drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectability and 

 the regular course of things. This prompting has been at 

 times my familiar demon, and I could not but feel a kind of 

 respectful sympathy for men who had dared what I had only 

 sketched out to myself as a splendid possibility. For seven 

 years I helped maintain one heroic man on an imaginary 

 journey to Portland as fine an example as I have ever 

 known of hopeless loyalty to an ideal. I assisted another so 

 long in a fruitless attempt to reach Mecklenburg-Schwerin, 

 that at last we grinned in each other s faces when we met, 

 like a couple of augurs. He was possessed by this harmless 

 mania as some are by the North Pole, and I shall never 

 forget his look of regretful compassion (as for one who was 

 sacrificing his higher life to the fleshpots of Egypt) when I 



at last advised him somewhat strenuously to go to the D , 



whither the road was so much travelled that he could not 

 miss it. General Banks, in his noble zeal for the honour of 

 his country, would confer on the Secretary of State the 

 power of imprisoning, in case of war, all these seekers of 

 the unattainable, thus by a stroke of the pen annihilating 

 the single poetic element in our humdrum life. Alas ! not 

 everybody has the genius to be a Bobbin-Boy, or doubtless 

 all these also would have chosen that more prosperous line 

 of life ! But moralists, sociologists, political economists, and 

 taxes have slowly convinced me that my beggarly sympathies 

 were a sin against society. Especially was the Buckle doctrine 

 of averages (so flattering to our free-will) persuasive with 

 me ; for as there must be in every year a certain number 

 who would bestow an alms on these abridged editions of the 

 Wandering Jew, the withdrawal of my quota could make no 

 possible difference, since some destined proxy must always 

 step forward to fill my gap. Just so many misdirected letters 

 every year, and no more. Would it were as easy to reckon 



