There are no circumstances, however, under which friendship comes so often to a violent and sudden death as under the pressure of travel.  It is like the fate which the Scientific ascribe to a box sunk in the sea; after a certain depth, which varies according to the strength of the box, the weight of the superincumbent water bursts it up.  It is merely a question of how deep or how strong.  Our travelling companion remains our friend for a day, for a week, for even a month; but at the month’s end he is our friend no longer.  Our relations have probably become what the diplomatists term ‘strained’ long before that date, but a day comes when the tension becomes intolerable; the cable parts and we lose him.  Unfortunately, not always, however; there are circumstances—­such as being on board ship, for example—­when we thus part without parting company.  A long voyage is the most terrible trial to which friendship can be subjected.  It is like the old sentence of pressing to death, ’as much as he can bear, and more.’  It is doubtful, for example, whether friendship has ever survived a voyage to Australia.  I have sometimes asked a man whether he knew So-and-So, who hails, like himself, from Melbourne, and he has replied, ’We came over in the same ship’—­’Only that, and nothing more,’ as the poet puts it; but his tone has an unmistakable significance, and one perceives at once that the topic had better not be pursued.

A very dear friend of mine once proposed that we should go round the world together; he offered to pay all my expenses, and painted the expedition in rose-colour.  But I had the good sense to decline the proposal.  I felt I should lose my friend.  Even yachting is a very dangerous pastime in this respect, especially when the vessel is becalmed.  In that case, like the sea itself, one’s friend soon becomes a pond.  Conceive, then, what it must be to go round the world with him!  Is it possible, both being human, that we can still love one another when we have got to Japan, for instance?  And then we have to come back together!  How frightful must be that moment when he tells us the same story he told at starting, and we feel that he has come to the end of his tether, and is going to tell all his stories over again!  This is why it so often happens that only one of two friends returns from any long voyage they have undertaken together.  What has become of the other?  A question that one should never put to the survivor.  It is certain that great travellers, and especially those who travel by sea, have a very different code of morals from that which they conform to at home.  Human life is not so sacred to them.  Perhaps it is in this respect that travel is said to enlarge the mind.  That it does not sharpen it, however, whatever it may do for the temper, is tolerably certain.  In their habits travellers are singularly conventional.  They are compelled, of course, to suffer certain inconveniences, but they endure others, and most serious ones, quite