n of the white gentleman. The Dictator
assented. It was very curious.

'Yet I am fond of travel, too, in my way,' Mr. Sarrasin went on,
delighted to have found an appreciative audience. 'I read about it
largely. I read all the old books of travel, and all the new ones, too,
for the matter of that. I have quite a little library of voyages,
travels, and explorations in my little home. I should like you to see it
some time if you should so far honour me.'

The Dictator declared that he should be delighted. Mr. Sarrasin, much
encouraged, went on again.

'There is nothing I like better than to sit by my fire of a winter's
evening, or in my garden of a summer afternoon, and read of the
adventures of great travellers. It makes me feel as if I had travelled
myself.'

'And Mr. Sarrasin tells me what he has read, and makes me, too, feel
travelled,' said Miss Ericson.

'Perhaps you get all the pleasure in that way with none of the fatigue,'
the Dictator suggested.

Mr. Sarrasin nodded. 'Very likely we do. I think it was a Kempis who
protested against the vanity of wandering. But I fear it was not a
Kempis's reasons that deterred me; but an invincible laziness and
unconquerable desire to be doing nothing.'

'Travelling is generally uncomfortable,' the Dictator admitted. He was
beginning to feel an interest in his curious, whimsical interlocutor.

'Yes,' Mr. Sarrasin went on dreamily. 'But there are times when I regret
the absence of experience. I have tramped in fancy through tropical
forests with Stanley or Cameron, dwelt in the desert with Burton,
battled in Nicaragua with Walker, but all only as it were in dreams.'

'We are such stuff as dreams are made of,' the Dictator observed
sententiously.

'And our little lives are rounded by a sleep,' Miss Ericson said softly,
completing the quotation.

'Yes, yes,' said Mr. Sarrasin; 'but mine are dreams within a dream.' He
was beginning to grow quite communicative as he sat there with his big
stick between his knees, and his amorphous felt hat pushed back from his
broad white forehead.

'Sometimes my travels seem very real to me. If I have been reading Ford
or Kinglake, or Warburton or Lane, I have but to lay the volume down and
close my eyes, and all that I have been reading about seems to take
shape and sound, and colour and life. I hear the tinkling of the
mule-bells and the guttural cries of the muleteers, and I see the
Spanish market-place, with its arcades and its a