g parts of me
are asleep again, while the third wakes up to mount guard over them,
and keeps me deliciously aware of the rhythmic dream they are dreaming
about the hot bath and the clean linen, and the lovely breakfast that I
am to have at Aberdeen; and of the Scotch air, crisp and keen, that is
to escort me, later along the Deeside.

Little journeys, as along the Deeside, have a charm of their own.
Little journeys from London to places up the river, or to places on the
coast of Kent--journeys so brief that you lunch at one end and have tea
at the other--I love them all, and loved the labels that recalled them
to me. But the labels of long journeys, of course, took precedence in
my heart. Here and there on my hat-box were labels that recalled to me
long journeys in which frontiers were crossed at dead of night--dim
memories of small, crazy stations where I shivered half-awake, and was
sleepily conscious of a strange tongue and strange uniforms, of my
jingling bunch of keys, of ruthless arms diving into the nethermost
recesses of my trunks, of suspicious grunts and glances, and of
grudging hieroglyphics chalked on the slammed lids. These were things
more or less painful and resented in the moment of experience, yet even
then fraught with a delicious glamour. I suffered, but gladly. In the
night, when all things are mysteriously magnified, I have never crossed
a frontier without feeling some of the pride of conquest. And, indeed,
were these conquests mere illusions? Was I not actually extending the
frontiers of my mind, adding new territories to it? Every crossed
frontier, every crossed sea, meant for me a definite success--an
expansion and enrichment of my soul. When, after seven days and nights
of sea traversed, I caught my first glimpse of Sandy Hook, was there no
comparison between Columbus and myself? To see what one has not seen
before, is not that almost as good as to see what no one has ever seen?

Romance, exhilaration, self-importance these are what my labels
symbolised and recalled to me. That lost collection was a running
record of all my happiest hours; a focus, a monument, a diary. It was
my humble Odyssey, wrought in coloured paper on pig-skin, and the one
work I never, never was weary of. If the distinguished Ithacan had
travelled with a hat-box, how finely and minutely Homer would have
described it--its depth and girth, its cunningly fashioned lock and
fair lining withal! And in how interminable a torren