xplaining
that it was caused by the breaking up of a stranded orange-boat, so that
the waves for many hundred yards threw up on the beach a wrack of fruit;
yet the same wilful and perverse mind will stand impenetrably dumb and
blind before the noblest and sweetest prospect, and decline to receive
any impression at all. What is perhaps the oddest characteristic of the
tricksy spirit is that it often chooses moments of intense discomfort
and fatigue to master some scene, and take its indelible picture. I
suppose that the reason of this is that the mind makes, at such moments,
a vigorous effort to protest against the tyranny of the vile body, and
to distract itself from instant cares.

But another man may travel for archaeological or even statistical
reasons. He may wish, like Ulysses, to study "manners, councils,
customs, governments." He may be preoccupied with questions of
architectural style or periods of sculpture. I have a friend who takes
up at intervals the study of the pictures of a particular master, and
will take endless trouble and undergo incredible discomfort, in order
to see the vilest daubs, if only he can make his list complete, and say
that he has seen all the reputed works of the master. This instinct
is, I believe, nothing but the survival of the childish instinct for
collecting, and though I can reluctantly admire any man who spares no
trouble to gain an end, the motive is dark and unintelligible to me.

There are some travellers, like Dean Stanley, who drift from the
appreciation of natural scenery into the pursuit of historical
associations. The story of Stanley as a boy, when he had his first sight
of the snowy Alps on the horizon, always delights me. He danced about
saying, "Oh, what shall I do, what shall I do?" But, in later days,
Stanley would not go a mile to see a view, while he would travel all
night to see a few stones of a ruin, jutting out of a farmyard wall, if
only there was some human and historical tradition connected with the
place. I do not myself understand that. I should not wish to see Etna
merely because Empedocles is supposed to have jumped down the crater,
nor the site of Jericho because the walls fell down at the trumpets
of the host. The only interest to me in an historical scene is that
it should be in such a condition as that one can to a certain extent
reconstruct the original drama, and be sure that one's eyes rest upon
very much the same scene as the actors saw. The rea