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limbs ; and further and further it quietly put away from me all the cares belonging to what is commonly called reality. Who does not know the delight of sleep that is conscious of itself ? There is the same sort of delight in strange surroundings, as they gradually become familiar, and yet leave us con-scious of their strangeness. There is the same sort of delight, and another delight added to it. Sleep is only an anodyne ; but these strange surroundings are at once an anodyne and a stimulant. Perhaps after a time one's own life, by being lived amongst them, would rub away the bloom of their freshness, and cover them gradually with some precipitate of its own weariness. But there is a long interval before this happens, during which familiarity with the strangeness only makes it stranger, and completes, cell by cell, a new environment for our life. Then, as we look round us, our ordinary lot is inverted. We have slipped, for the time being, from the husk of our past experiences ; and the world shows us our dreams and illusions reflected, instead of showing us our dreams and illusions destroyed. This, as I have said already, is the true end of travelling—this unnatural transmigration of the soul into a new body of circumstance ; this flight from the life to which birth happens to have married one, to the arms, the lips, the eyes, of a life and land with which legitimately one has nothing at all to do. The severe scientific moralist, armed with terrible phrases about the social organism, and Humanity, 102 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

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