cline the
proposal. I felt I should lose my friend. Even yachting is a very
dangerous pastime in this respect, especially when the vessel is
becalmed. In that case, like the sea itself, one's friend soon becomes
a pond. Conceive, then, what it must be to go round the world with him!
Is it possible, both being human, that we can still love one another
when we have got to Japan, for instance? And then we have to come back
together! How frightful must be that moment when he tells us the same
story he told at starting, and we feel that he has come to the end of
his tether, and is going to tell _all_ his stories over again! This is
why it so often happens that only one of two friends returns from any
long voyage they have undertaken together. What has become of the
other? A question that one should never put to the survivor. It is
certain that great travellers, and especially those who travel by sea,
have a very different code of morals from that which they conform to at
home. Human life is not so sacred to them. Perhaps it is in this
respect that travel is said to enlarge the mind. That it does not
sharpen it, however, whatever it may do for the temper, is tolerably
certain. In their habits travellers are singularly conventional. They
are compelled, of course, to suffer certain inconveniences, but they
endure others, and most serious ones, quite unnecessarily, merely
because it is the custom so to do. In crossing the Atlantic, for
example, a man of means will submit to be shut up in a close cupboard
for ten days with an utter stranger, though by paying double fare he
can get a cabin to himself. This arises from no desire for economy, but
simply because he does not think for himself; other travellers do the
like, and he follows their example. Yet what money could recompense him
for occupying for the same time _on land_ a double-bedded room--not to
say a mere china closet--with a man of whom he knows nothing except
that he is subject to chronic sickness? A pleasant sort of travelling
companion indeed, yet, strange to say, the commonest of all. Where
there is a slender purse this terrible state of things (supposing
travel under such circumstances to be compatible with pleasure at all,
which, for my part, I cannot imagine) is not a matter of choice; but
where it can be avoided why is it undergone?

There is nothing that convinces me of the folly of mankind so much as
those advertisements we see in the summer months with respect