ork; but if I were to be
left to-morrow on Juan Fernandez, Hoppus's is not the book that I
should choose for my companion volume.

I tried to fight the point with Mackay. I made him own that he had taken
pleasure in reading books otherwise, to his view, insignificant; but he
was too wary to advance a step beyond the admission. It was in vain for
me to argue that here was pleasure ready-made and running from the
spring, whereas his ploughs and butter-churns were but means and
mechanisms to give men the necessary food and leisure before they start
upon the search for pleasure; he jibbed and ran away from such
conclusions. The thing was different, he declared, and nothing was
serviceable but what had to do with food. "Eat, eat, eat!" he cried;
"that's the bottom and the top." By an odd irony of circumstance, he
grew so much interested in this discussion that he let the hour slip by
unnoticed and had to go without his tea. He had enough sense and humour,
indeed he had no lack of either, to have chuckled over this himself in
private; and even to me he referred to it with the shadow of a smile.

Mackay was a hot bigot. He would not hear of religion. I have seen him
waste hours of time in argument with all sorts of poor human creatures
who understood neither him nor themselves, and he had had the boyishness
to dissect and criticise even so small a matter as the riddler's
definition of mind. He snorted aloud with zealotry and the lust for
intellectual battle. Anything, whatever it was, that seemed to him
likely to discourage the continued passionate production of corn and
steam-engines he resented like a conspiracy against the people. Thus,
when I put in the plea for literature, that it was only in good books,
or in the society of the good, that a man could get help in his conduct,
he declared I was in a different world from him. "Damn my conduct!" said
he. "I have given it up for a bad job. My question is, 'Can I drive a
nail?'" And he plainly looked upon me as one who was insidiously
seeking to reduce the people's annual bellyful of corn and
steam-engines.

It may be argued that these opinions spring from the defect of culture;
that a narrow and pinching way of life not only exaggerates to a man the
importance of material conditions, but indirectly, by denying him the
necessary books and leisure, keeps his mind ignorant of larger thoughts;
and that hence springs this overwhelming concern about diet, and hence
the bald view