impressions and ideas, that somewhen, years ahead, I might
be able to put into her hands.

One does not carry out such an idea into reality; it is so much easier
to leave the letter imagined and unwritten if there lives but little
hope of its delivery; yet for many years I kept up an impalpable
correspondence in my thoughts, a stream of expression to which no answer
came--until at last the habits of public writing and the gathering
interests of a new role in life diverted it to other ends.

Sec. 8

One morning on the way from Brindisi to Egypt I came up on deck at dawn
because my mind was restless and I could not sleep. Another solitary
passenger was already up, so intently watching a pink-lit rocky
coast-line away to the north of us that for a time he did not observe
me.

"That's Crete," he said, when at last he became aware of me close at
hand.

"Crete!" said I.

"Yes," he said, "Crete."

He came nearer to me. "That, sir," he said with a challenging emphasis,
"is the most wonderful island I've ever yet set eyes on,--quite the most
wonderful."

"Five thousand years ago," he remarked after a pause that seemed to me
to be calculated, "they were building palaces there, better than the
best we can build to-day. And things--like modern things. They had
bathrooms there, beautifully fitted bathrooms--and admirable
sanitation--admirable. Practically--American. They had better artists to
serve them than your King Edward has, why! Minos would have laughed or
screamed at all that Windsor furniture. And the things they made of
gold, sir--you couldn't get them done anywhere to-day. Not for any
money. There was a Go about them.... They had a kind of writing,
too--before the Phoenicians. No man can read it now, and there it is.
Fifty centuries ago it was; and to-day--They grow oranges and lemons.
And they riot.... Everything else gone.... It's as if men struggled up
to a certain pitch and then--grew tired.... All this Mediterranean; it's
a tired sea...."

That was the beginning of a curious conversation. He was an American, a
year or so younger than myself, going, he said, "to look at Egypt."

"In our country," he explained, "we're apt to forget all these
worked-out regions. Too apt. We don't get our perspectives. We think the
whole blessed world is one everlasting boom. It hit me first down in
Yucatan that that wasn't so. Why! the world's littered with the remains
of booms and swaggering beginnings. Americanism!--th