it, and in relation to travellers, is wont to quote the famous parallel of the copper wire, ’which grows the narrower by going further.’  A confirmed stay-at-home, he has mingled much in society of all sorts, and exercised a keen but quite unsympathetic observation.  His very reserve in company (though, when he catches you alone, he is a button-holder of great tenacity) encourages free speech in others; they have no more reticence in his presence than if he were the butler.  He has belonged to no cliques, and thereby escaped the greatest peril which can beset the student of human nature.  A man of genius, indeed, in these days is almost certain, sooner or later, to become the centre of a mutual admiration society; but the person I have in my mind is no genius, nor anything like one, and he thanks Heaven for it.  To an opinion of his own he does not pretend, but his views upon the opinions of other people he believes to be infallible.  I have called him dogmatic, but that does not at all express the absolute certainty with which he delivers judgment.  ‘I know no more,’ he says, ’about the problems of human life than you do’ (taking me as an illustration of the lowest prevailing ignorance), ‘but I know what everybody is thinking about them.’  He is didactic, and therefore often dull, and will eventually, no doubt, become one of the greatest bores in Great Britain.  At present, however, he is worth knowing; and I propose to myself to be his Boswell, and to introduce him—­or, at least, his views—­to other people.  I have entitled them the Midway Inn, partly from my own inveterate habit of story-telling, but chiefly from an image of his own, by which he once described to me, in his fine egotistic rolling style, the position he seemed to himself to occupy in the world.

When I was a boy, he said (which I don’t believe he ever was), I had a long journey to take between home and school.  Exactly midway there was a hill with an Inn upon it, at which we changed horses.  It was a point to which I looked forward with very different feelings when going and returning.  In the one case—­for I hated school—­it seemed to frown darkly on me, and from that spot the remainder of the way was dull and gloomy; in the other case, the sun seemed always glinting on it, and the rest of the road was as a fair avenue that leads to Paradise.  The innkeeper received us with equal hospitality on both occasions, and it was quite evident did not care one farthing in which direction we were tending.  He would stand in front of his house, jingling his money—­our money—­in his pockets, and watch us depart with the greatest serenity, whether we went east or west.  I thought him at one time the most genial of Bonifaces (for it was his profession to wear a smile), and at another a mere mocker of human woe.  When I grew up, I perceived that he was a philosopher.

And now I keep the Midway Inn myself, and watch from the hill-top the passengers come