332 Notes on Sport and Travel m 



but clings to him from some strange animal senti- 

 ment of affection, half custom, half old pride), and 

 surrounded by a glowering ring of her savage white- 

 toothed brethren, who, he well knows, are ever 

 questioning their simple minds whether it would 

 pay them better to feed him or to spear him. Odd, 

 that the higher the original status, the baser the 

 beach-coomber. The Portuguese makes a really 

 decent one ; but if you want to get the perfect 

 renegade, and to hear your common country 

 thoroughly well maligned and cursed, let me recom- 

 mend you to the expatriated Scot, — the rule will do 

 as well for the latitude of New York as of New 

 Zealand. 



In fact, the case of those who associate too much 

 with inferior intelligences is somewhat like that of 

 the Mad Doctors, who, by long straining and striving 

 to unravel the tangled phantasies of their patients, 

 do not unseldom so twist and twirl their own brains 

 that they become more or less mad themselves. 

 They begin as I have said the true traveller should 

 do, letting part of their reason become irrational in 

 order to understand the half- reasoning of their 

 patients (as some having said a thing in drink, forget 

 it till they bedrunken themselves again), in order to 

 find out what course to follow, and gradually and 

 imperceptibly allow more and more of the rational 

 portion, which they had kept for observing purposes, 

 to be absorbed, till it becomes a question ev^en to 

 themselves on which side of the cell-door they ought 



