gracious enough to consider that a third-class carriage
and my company were to be preferred to a first class with solitude. You
know that he came into his uncle's money a little time ago, and after a
first delirious outbreak, he has now relapsed into that dead heavy state
of despair which is caused by having everything which one can wish for.
How absurd are the ambitions of life when I think that I, who am fairly
happy and as keen as a razor edge, should be struggling for that which
I can see has brought neither profit nor happiness to him! And yet, if I
can read my own nature, it is not the accumulation of money which is my
real aim, but only that I may acquire so much as will relieve my mind
of sordid cares and enable me to develop any gifts which I may have,
undisturbed. My tastes are so simple that I cannot imagine any advantage
which wealth can give--save indeed the exquisite pleasure of helping a
good man or a good cause. Why should people ever take credit for charity
when they must know that they cannot gain as much pleasure out of their
guineas in any other fashion? I gave my watch to a broken schoolmaster
the other day (having no change in my pocket), and the mater could not
quite determine whether it was a trait of madness or of nobility. I
could have told her with absolute confidence that it was neither the one
nor the other, but a sort of epicurean selfishness with perhaps a little
dash of swagger away down at the bottom of it. What had I ever had from
my chronometer like the quiet thrill of satisfaction when the fellow
brought me the pawn ticket and told me that the thirty shillings had
been useful?

Leslie Duncan got out at Carstairs, and I was left alone with a hale,
white-haired, old Roman Catholic priest, who had sat quietly reading his
office in the corner. We fell into the most intimate talk, which lasted
all the way to Avonmouth--indeed, so interested was I that I very nearly
passed through the place without knowing it. Father Logan (for that was
his name) seemed to me to be a beautiful type of what a priest should
be--self-sacrificing and pure-minded, with a kind of simple cunning
about him, and a deal of innocent fun. He had the defects as well as the
virtues of his class, for he was absolutely reactionary in his views.
We discussed religion with fervour, and his theology was somewhere
about the Early Pliocene. He might have chattered the matter over with
a priest of Charlemagne's Court, and they w