d round my head through most of my journey;
that Christendom is like a gigantic bronze come out of the furnace
of the Near East; that in Asia is only the fire and in Europe
the form. The nearest to what I mean was suggested in that
very striking book _Form and Colour_, by Mr. March Philips.
When I spoke of the idols of Asia, many moderns may well have murmured
against such a description of the ideals of Buddha or Mrs. Besant.
To which I can only reply that I do know a little about the ideals,
and I think I prefer the idols. I have far more sympathy with
the enthusiasm for a nice green or yellow idol, with nine arms
and three heads, than with the philosophy ultimately represented
by the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argument
in a circle by which everything begins and ends in the mind.
I would far rather be a fetish worshipper and have a little fun,
than be an oriental pessimist expected always to smile like an optimist.
Now it seems to me that the fighting Christian creed is the one
thing that has been in that mystical circle and broken out of it,
and become something real as well. It has gone westward by a sort
of centrifugal force, like a stone from a sling; and so made
the revolving Eastern mind, as the Franciscan said in Jerusalem,
do something at last.

Anyhow, although I carried none of the trappings of a pilgrim I felt
strongly disposed to take the privileges of one. I wanted to be
entertained at the firesides of total strangers, in the medieval manner,
and to tell them interminable tales of my travels. I wanted to linger
in Dover, and try it on the citizens of that town. I nearly got
out of the train at several wayside stations, where I saw secluded
cottages which might be brightened by a little news from the Holy Land.
For it seemed to me that all my fellow-countrymen must be my friends;
all these English places had come much closer together after travels
that seemed in comparison as vast as the spaces between the stars.
The hop-fields of Kent seemed to me like outlying parts of my own
kitchen garden; and London itself to be really situated at London End.
London was perhaps the largest of the suburbs of Beaconsfield.
By the time I came to Beaconsfield itself, dusk was dropping
over the beechwoods and the white cross-roads. The distance seemed
to grow deeper and richer with darkness as I went up the long
lanes towards my home; and in that distance, as I drew nearer,
I heard the barking of