52 CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 



beggar that came along, though sure of never finding a 

 native-born countryman among them. In a small way, I 

 was resolved to emulate Hatem Tai s tent, with its three 

 hundred and sixty-five entrances, one for every day in the 

 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 fiesh-pots of Egypt) when I at last advised him some 

 what 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 i But moralists, 

 sociologists, political economists, and taxes have slowly 



