y larger than the other, that sixth carried its man, and he
stood for the flats of the Wash or for the clear hills of Cumberland, or
for Devon, which is all one great and lonely hill.

"This man," said I, "in some very mystic way is _Ourselves_--he is our
past and our great national memory. By his vote he decides what shall be
done; but he is controlled."

"By what is he controlled?" said my companions eagerly. Evidently they
had a sneaking love of seeing representatives controlled.

"By a committee of the rich," said I promptly.

At this they shrugged their shoulders and said: "It is a bad system!"

"And by what are yours?" said I.

At this the gravest and oldest of them, looking as it were far away with
his eyes, answered: "By the name of our country and a wholesome terror
of the people."

"Your system," said I, shrugging my shoulders in turn, but a little
awkwardly, "is different from ours."

After this, we were silent all three. We remembered, all three of us,
the times when no such things were done in Europe, and yet men hung
well together, and a nation was vaguer and yet more instinctive and
ready. We remembered also--for it was in our common faith--the gross,
permanent, and irremediable imperfection of human affairs. There arose
perhaps in their minds a sight of the man they had sent to be the spirit
and spokesman, or rather the very self, of that golden plateau which the
train was crawling through, and certainly in my mind there rose the
picture of a man--small, false, and vile--who was, by some fiction, the
voice of a certain valley in my own land.

Then I said to them as I left the train at the town I spoke of: "Days,
knights!"--for so one addresses strangers in that country. And they
answered: "Your grace, we commend you to God."

ARLES

The use and the pleasure of travel are closely mingled, because the use
of it is fulfilment, and in fulfilling oneself a great pleasure is
enjoyed. Every man bears within him not only his own direct experience,
but all the past of his blood: the things his own race has done are part
of himself, and in him also is what his race will do when he is dead.
This is why men will always read _records_, and why, even when letters
are at their lowest, _records_ still remain. Thus, if a diary be known
to be true, then it seems vivid and becomes famous where if it were
fiction no one would find any merit in it. History, therefore, once a
man has begun to know it, bec