London School
Board, upon which the cumulative vote and the support of the "advanced"
people had placed him. He had, like myself, a small independent income
that relieved him of any necessity to earn a living, and he had a
kindred craving for social theorising and some form of social service.
He had sought my acquaintance after reading a paper of mine (begotten
by the visit of Chris Robinson) on the limits of pure democracy. It had
marched with some thoughts of his own.

We went by train to Spiez on the Lake of Thun, then up the Gemmi,
and thence with one or two halts and digressions and a little modest
climbing we crossed over by the Antrona pass (on which we were
benighted) into Italy, and by way of Domo D'ossola and the Santa Maria
Maggiore valley to Cannobio, and thence up the lake to Locarno (where,
as I shall tell, we stayed some eventful days) and so up the Val Maggia
and over to Airolo and home.

As I write of that long tramp of ours, something of its freshness and
enlargement returns to me. I feel again the faint pleasant excitement of
the boat train, the trampling procession of people with hand baggage and
laden porters along the platform of the Folkestone pier, the scarcely
perceptible swaying of the moored boat beneath our feet. Then, very
obvious and simple, the little emotion of standing out from the homeland
and seeing the long white Kentish cliffs recede. One walked about the
boat doing one's best not to feel absurdly adventurous, and presently a
movement of people directed one's attention to a white lighthouse on a
cliff to the east of us, coming up suddenly; and then one turned to scan
the little different French coast villages, and then, sliding by in a
pale sunshine came a long wooden pier with oddly dressed children upon
it, and the clustering town of Boulogne.

One took it all with the outward calm that became a young man of nearly
three and twenty, but one was alive to one's finger-tips with pleasing
little stimulations. The custom house examination excited one, the
strangeness of a babble in a foreign tongue; one found the French of
City Merchants' and Cambridge a shy and viscous flow, and then one was
standing in the train as it went slowly through the rail-laid street to
Boulogne Ville, and one looked out at the world in French, porters in
blouses, workmen in enormous purple trousers, police officers in peaked
caps instead of helmets and romantically cloaked, big carts, all on
two wheels in