waiting for sleep! I turned over with
another sigh, and recalled that William James has advised us that a
deleterious thought may be exorcised by willing another that is sunny. I
tried to command a more enjoyable picture for eyes that were closed but
intent. Yet you never know where the most promising image will transport
you through some inconsequential association. I recalled a pleasing day
in the Eastern Mediterranean, and that brought _Eothen_ into my mind, by
chance. And instantly, instead of seeing Sfax in Tunis, I was looking
down from a window on a black-edged day of rain, watching an unending
procession of moribund figures jolting over the _pave_ of a street in
Flanders, in every kind of conveyance, from the Yser. There I was, back
at the War, at two in the morning, and all because I had read _Eothen_
desperately in odd moments while waiting for the signs which would warn
me that the enemy was about to enter that village.

No escape yet! I could hear the old clock slowly making its way towards
another day. I heard a belated wayfarer going home, his feet muffled in
snow. Anyhow, I never had much of an opinion of _Eothen_, a book over
which the cymbals have been banged too loudly. Compare it, as a travel
book, for substance and style, with _A Week on the Concord_; though that
is a silly thing to ask, if no sillier than literary criticism usually
is. But though all the lists the critics make of our best travel books
invariably give Kinglake's a principal place, I have not once seen
Thoreau's narrative included.

What is the test for such a book? I should ask it to be a trustworthy
confidence of a kingdom where the marches may be foreign to our cheap and
usual experience, though familiar enough to our dreams. It may not offer,
but it must promise that Golden City which drew Raleigh to the Orinoco,
Thoreau to Walden Pond, Doughty to Arabia, Livingstone to Tanganyika, and
Hudson to the Arctic. The fountain of life is there. We hope to come to
our own.

We never notice whether that country has good corn-land, or whether it is
rich enough in minerals to arouse an interest in its future. But its
prospects are lovely and of good report. It is always a surprise to find
the earth can look so good, and behave so handsomely, on the quiet, to a
vagabond traveller like Thoreau, who has no valid excuse for not being at
honest work, as though it reserved its finest mornings to show to
favoured children when really good people