ncient cathedral; or the
delicate pillars of the Parthenon, yellow in the clear Athenian air; or
Stamboul, where the East and West join hands; or Egypt and the desert,
and the Nile and the pyramids; or the Holy Land and the walls of
Jerusalem--ah! it is all very wonderful, and then I open my eyes and
blink at my dying fire, and look at my slippered feet, and remember that
I am a stout old gentleman who has never left his native land, and I
yawn and take my candle and go to my bed.'

There was something so curiously pathetic and yet comic about the white
gentleman's case, about his odd blend of bookish knowledge and personal
inexperience, that the Dictator could scarcely forbear smiling. But he
did forbear, and he spoke with all gravity.

'I am not sure that you haven't the better part after all,' he said. 'I
find that the chief pleasure of travel lies in recollection. _You_ seem
to get the recollection without the trouble.'

'Perhaps so,' said Mr. Sarrasin; 'perhaps so. But I think I would rather
have had the trouble as well. Believe me, my dear sir, believe a
dreamer, that action is better than dreams. Ah! how much better it is
for you, sir, to sit here, a disappointed man for the moment it may be,
but a man with a glowing past behind him, than, like me, to have nothing
to look back upon! My adventures are but compounded out of the essences
of many books. I have never really lived a day; you have lived every day
of your life. Believe me, you are much to be envied.'

There was genuine conviction in the white gentleman's voice as he spoke
these words, and the note of genuine conviction troubled the Dictator in
his uncertainty whether to laugh or cry. He chose a medium course and
smiled slightly.

'I should think, Mr. Sarrasin, that you are the only one in London
to-day who looks upon me as a man much to be envied. London, if it
thinks of me at all, thinks of me only as a disastrous failure, as an
unsuccessful exile--a man of no account, in a word.'

Mr. Sarrasin shook his head vehemently. 'It is not so,' he protested,
'not so at all. Nobody really thinks like that, but if everybody else
did, my brother Oisin Stewart Sarrasin certainly does not think like
that, and his opinion is better worth having than that of most other
men. You have no warmer admirer in the world than my brother, Mr.
Ericson.'

The Dictator expressed much satisfaction at having earned the good
opinion of Mr. Sarrasin's brother.

'You would l