ooth-limbed Roman boys, kidnapped from some
sunny Italian villa, and carried to that gloomy place--held them
pitilessly on the altar among the other fork-bearded Druids, with
their white robes and glaring eyes--and smote the cruel blow, in
spite of the trembling touch of the young fingers and the piteous
entreaties, as they looked tearfully from side to side in the damp
sunless Golgotha, among the glens of that sinister isle.

"That is the picture that somehow or other, even in my most material
mood, is evoked by the thought of the place. The rationalist
explanation of the coming fever is far more satisfactory and
scientific; but the other keeps recurring--a curious experience
anyhow.

"If you have nothing to do you might write me a line to Stockholm,
Poste Restante. I am going north to have a look at the ice.
Altogether, what with the East still open before me, I do not expect
to come home for two or three years.

"You are one of the few friends I can rely upon, so I carry about
with me a letter addressed to you; in case of my death you will be
the first to be notified of the fact.

"Ever yours,
"Arthur Hamilton."

I have given this letter in full, because it affords a good example
of Arthur's descriptive style, which always struck me as being vivid
and graphic, and also because this little incident, not by the proof
it itself afforded, but by the turn it gave his thoughts--then rather
rapidly drifting into materialism--was the first step in a kind of
conversion from the purely physical views of life he had been apt to
take. The episode itself, too, is a curious one, and may deserve to
be recorded.

CHAPTER VI

Nothing is more hopelessly wearisome than descriptions of travel;
even George Eliot could not make in her diaries Florence anything but
dull. I shall confine myself to sketching his route, to telling one
incident among the few he told me, and describing his return.

I had no more letters from him; but he has told me that he got to
Spitzbergen, and in a whaler to the edge of the great arctic
ice-field. He sailed to America and crossed it. From San Francisco he
visited Peru and the Amazon, on which river he spent a month. Then he
went to Africa, to what part I do not know, except that he came down
the Nile; and then he wandered through Asia Minor, Persia, and India;
he penetrated a little way into Thibet, and saw China and Japan; he
went up to the mouth of the Siberian rivers, travelling