t to my room and sat a while over a volume of Kant, which I always
travel with--a sort of philosopher's stone on which to whet the mind's
tools when they are dulled with boring into the geological strata of
other people's ideas. I was too much occupied with the personality of
the man I had been talking with to read long, and so I abandoned myself
to a reverie, passing in review the events of the long day.

* * * * *

CHAPTER VII.

The Sabbatarian tendency of the English mind at home and abroad is
proverbial, and if they are well-behaved on Sunday in London they are
models of virtue in Simla on the same day. Whether they labour and are
well-fed and gouty in their island home, or suffer themselves to be
boiled for gain in the tropical kettles of Ceylon and Singapore; whether
they risk their lives in hunting for the north pole or the northwest
passage, or endanger their safety in the pursuit of tigers in the Terai,
they will have their Sunday, come rain, come shine. On the deck of the
steamer in the Red Sea, in the cabin of the inbound Arctic explorer, in
the crowded Swiss hotel, or the straggling Indian hill station, there is
always a parson of some description, in a surplice of no description at
all, who produces a Bible and a couple of well-thumbed sermons from the
recesses of his trunk or his lunch basket, or his gun-case, and goes at
the work of weekly redemption with a will. And, what is more, he is
listened to, and for the time being--though on week days he is styled a
bore by the old and a prig by the young--he becomes temporarily invested
with a dignity not his own, with an authority he could not claim on any
other day. It is the dignity of a people who with all their faults have
the courage of their opinions, and it is the authority that they have
been taught from their childhood to reverence, whenever their traditions
give it the right to assert itself. Not otherwise. It is a fine trait of
national character, though it is one which has brought upon the English
much unmerited ridicule. One may differ from them in faith and in one's
estimate of the real value of these services, which are often only saved
from being irreverent in their performance by the perfect sincerity of
parson and congregation. But no one who dispassionately judges them can
deny that the custom inspires respect for English consistency and
admiration for their supreme contempt of surroundings.

I presum