58 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 



have seen or heard. I was also aware, from considerable 

 experience, that every foreigner is persuaded that, by 

 doing this country the favor of coming to it, he has laid 

 every native thereof under an obligation, pecuniary or 

 other, as the case may be, whose discharge he is entitled- 

 to on demand duly made in person or by letter. Too 

 much learning (of this kind) had made me mad in the 

 provincial sense of the word. I had begun life with the 

 theory of giving something to every beggar that came 

 along, though sure of never finding a native-born coun- 

 tryman 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 over- 

 worked, 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 temp- 

 tation 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 



