ound it, the roots
of the withered grass forming a crust many feet above, and, inside the
cist, the rude urn, reversed over a heap of charred ashes; it was not
the curiosity of the sight that moved me, but the thought of the old
dark life revealed, the dim and savage world, that was yet shot through
and pierced, even as now, with sorrow for death, and care for the
beloved ashes of a friend and chieftain. Such a sight sets a viewless
network of emotion, which seems to interlace far back into the ages,
all pulsating and stirring. One sees in a flash that humanity lived,
carelessly and brutally perhaps, as we too live, and were confronted, as
we are confronted, with the horror of the gap, the intolerable
mystery of life lapsing into the dark. Ah, the relentless record, the
impenetrable mystery! I care very little, I fear, for the historical
development of funereal rites, and hardly more for the light that such
things throw on the evolution of society. I leave that gratefully enough
to the philosophers. What I care for is the touch of nature that shows
me my ancient brethren of the dim past--who would have mocked and
ridiculed me, I doubt not, if I had fallen into their hands, and killed
me as carelessly as one throws aside the rind of a squeezed fruit--yet
I am one of them, and perhaps even something of their blood flows in my
veins yet.

As I grow older, I tend to travel less and less, and I do not care if
I never cross the Channel again. Is there a right and a wrong in the
matter, an advisability or an inadvisability, an expediency or an
inexpediency? I do not think so. Travelling is a pleasure, if it is
anything, and a pleasure pursued from a sense of duty is a very fatuous
thing. I have no good reason to give, only an accumulation of small
reasons. Dr. Johnson once said that any number of insufficient reasons
did not make a sufficient one, just as a number of rabbits did not make
a horse. A lively but misleading illustration: he might as well have
said that any number of sovereigns did not make a cheque for a hundred
pounds. I suppose that I do not like the trouble, to start with; and
then I do not like being adrift from my own beloved country. Then
I cannot converse in any foreign language, and half the pleasure of
travelling comes from being able to lay oneself alongside of a new point
of view. Then, too, I realise, as I grow older, how little I have really
seen of my own incomparably beautiful and delightful land, s