ss of answer staggers me--"O no, grandpapa doesn't allow
it--why should he?" I feel caught: I stand abashed at the reproof; I
must not expose my childishness again to this youthful disciplinarian,
and so I ask him very stately what he is going to be--a good serious
practical question, out of delicacy for his parts. He answers that he is
going to be a missionary to China, and tells me how a missionary once
took him on his knee and told him about missionary work, and asked him
if he, too, would not like to become one, to which the child had simply
answered in the affirmative. The child is altogether so different from
what I have been, is so absolutely complementary to what I now am, that
I turn away not a little abashed from the conversation, for there is
always something painful in sudden contact with the good qualities that
we do not possess. Just then the grandfather returns; and I go with him
to the summer-house, where I used to learn my Catechism, to the wall on
which M----and I thought it no small exploit to walk upon, and all the
other places that I remembered.

In fine, the matter being ended, I turn and go my way home to the hotel,
where, in the cold afternoon, I write these notes with the table and
chair drawn as near the fire as the rug and the French polish will
permit.

One other thing I may as well make a note of, and that is how there
arises that strange contradiction of the hills being higher than I had
expected and everything near at hand being so ridiculously smaller. This
is a question I think easily answered: the very terms of the problem
suggest the solution. To everything near at hand I applied my own
stature, as a sort of natural unit of measurement, so that I had no
actual image of their dimensions but their ratio to myself; so, of
course, as one term of the proportion changed, the other changed
likewise, and as my own height increased my notion of things near at
hand became equally expanded. But the hills, mark you, were out of my
reach: I could not apply myself to them: I had an actual, instead of a
proportional eidolon of their magnitude; so that, of course (my eye
being larger and flatter nowadays, and so the image presented to me then
being in sober earnest smaller than the image presented to me now), I
found the hills nearly as much too great as I had found the other things
too small.

* * * * *

[_Added the next morning_.]--He who indulges habitually in the