stion, I took up my staff and my sack and
regained the road.

I should very much like to know what those who have an answer to
everything can say about the food requisite to breakfast? Those great
men Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser before him, drank
beer at rising, and tamed it with a little bread. In the regiment we
used to drink black coffee without sugar, and cut off a great hunk of
stale crust, and eat nothing more till the halt: for the matter of
that, the great victories of '93 were fought upon such unsubstantial
meals; for the Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being in
this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors I know eat nothing for
some hours--I mean those who turn out at four in the morning; I could
give the name of the watch, but that I forget it and will not be
plagued to look up technicalities. Dogs eat the first thing they come
across, cats take a little milk, and gentlemen are accustomed to get
up at nine and eat eggs, bacon, kidneys, ham, cold pheasant, toast,
coffee, tea, scones, and honey, after which they will boast that their
race is the hardiest in the world and ready to bear every fatigue in
the pursuit of Empire. But what rule governs all this? Why is
breakfast different from all other things, so that the Greeks called
it the best thing in the world, and so that each of us in a vague way
knows that he would eat at breakfast nothing but one special kind of
food, and that he could not imagine breakfast at any other hour in the
day?

The provocation to this inquiry (which I have here no time to pursue)
lies in the extraordinary distaste that I conceived that morning for
Brule wine. My ham and bread and chocolate I had consumed overnight.
I thought, in my folly, that I could break my fast on a swig of what
had seemed to me, only the night before, the best revivifier and
sustenance possible. In the harsh dawn it turned out to be nothing but
a bitter and intolerable vinegar. I make no attempt to explain this,
nor to say why the very same wine that had seemed so good in the
forest (and was to seem so good again later on by the canal) should
now repel me. I can only tell you that this heavy disappointment
convinced me of a great truth that a Politician once let slip in my
hearing, and that I have never since forgotten. _'Man,'_ said the
Director of the State, _'man is but the creature of circumstance.'_

As it was, I lit a pipe of tobacco and hobbled blindly along for miles