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about a race which, according to their philosophy, began in a gas and ΛΥΪΙΙ soon end in a glacier, who spell the People with a capital P, and think that we one day shall have a better religion than the Catholic —I would ask them to run over all the things that they are proudest of in the modern world ; and I will venture to say that a part of our pleasure in the past is due to the fact that in the past every one of these things was wanting. In other words, to make a long matter short, the true traveller is mentally the émigré of contemporary Eevolution ; and he exiles himself from his country in order that he may escape at intervals, if not from himself, as all events from his generation. In one way, however, he differs from those other émigrés, his prototypes. He is a far more practical man ; and for all practical purposes no one is better able to recognise and accept the inevitable. His many enemies will of course call him a sentimentalist ; but his sentiment is generally kept sweet by the brine of some cynical humour ; and though it renders him contemptuous of modern life in general, it leaves him none the less equal to dealing with, and making the best of, it. The optimists will probably ask him, why, if that best is bad, he does not give his fine sentiment to the future instead of to the past, and so throw himself hopefully into the ranks of progressive Humanity. The pessimists will ask him, Why give any sentiment to either ? The past died yesterday ; the future will be dead to-morrow. But such re- 10 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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