But, truth to say, on this July day I reflected but little on the condition of the civilised world.  Whatever sinister passions were heaving under its splendid and complex surface, I was too agitated by a simple and innocent desire of my own, to notice the signs or interpret them correctly.  The most innocent of passions will take the edge off one’s judgment.  The desire which possessed me was simply the desire to travel.  And that being so it would have taken something very plain in the way of symptoms to shake my simple trust in the stability of things on the Continent.  My sentiment and not my reason was engaged there.  My eyes were turned to the past, not to the future; the past that one cannot suspect and mistrust, the shadowy and unquestionable moral possession the darkest struggles of which wear a halo of glory and peace.

In the preceding month of May we had received an invitation to spend some weeks in Poland in a country house in the neighbourhood of Cracow, but within the Russian frontier.  The enterprise at first seemed to me considerable.  Since leaving the sea, to which I have been faithful for so many years, I have discovered that there is in my composition very little stuff from which travellers are made.  I confess that my first impulse about a projected journey is to leave it alone.  But the invitation received at first with a sort of dismay ended by rousing the dormant energy of my feelings.  Cracow is the town where I spent with my father the last eighteen months of his life.  It was in that old royal and academical city that I ceased to be a child, became a boy, had known the friendships, the admirations, the thoughts and the indignations of that age.  It was within those historical walls that I began to understand things, form affections, lay up a store of memories and a fund of sensations with which I was to break violently by throwing myself into an unrelated existence.  It was like the experience of another world.  The wings of time made a great dusk over all this, and I feared at first that if I ventured bodily in there I would discover that I who have had to do with a good many imaginary lives have been embracing mere shadows in my youth.  I feared.  But fear in itself may become a fascination.  Men have gone, alone and trembling, into graveyards at midnight—­just to see what would happen.  And this adventure was to be pursued in sunshine.  Neither would it be pursued alone.  The invitation was extended to us all.  This journey would have something of a migratory character, the invasion of a tribe.  My present, all that gave solidity and value to it, at any rate, would stand by me in this test of the reality of my past.  I was pleased with the idea of showing my companions what Polish country life was like; to visit the town where I was at school before the boys by my side should grow too old, and gaining an individual past of their own, should lose their unsophisticated interest in mine.  It is only