He used, however, to complain much at this time of feeling himself incapable of any very strong emotion, even that of sorrow.

No doubt there is more stimulation to the brain than to the heart in the highly critical atmosphere of all phases of the intellectual life at Oxford; also Donald had hardly yet got over the shocks of his youth and the loneliness of his life abroad.  He was, too, essentially and curiously the son of his father—­even to his minor tastes, such as his connoisseur’s palate for a good wine and his judgment in “smokes”—­and this feeling of a certain detachment from the larger emotions of life was always his father’s pose—­the philosopher’s.  In his father’s case it was perhaps engendered, if not necessitated, by his poor health and wretched nerves.

But can we not trace his dissatisfaction at this time in what he felt to be his cold philosophical attitude towards life to the same cause as much of the misery he suffered as a boy!  In the paper he calls “School,” which follows with that entitled “Home,” he tells us how he would have liked to have chastised a school-fellow “had he dared,” and his failure to dare was evidently what reduced him to the state of impotent rage described on page 9 of this sketch.  Again at Woolwich, what made him unhappy was not so much the evils which he saw but his impotence to deal with them.  So now again at Oxford he feels “impotent,” impotent this time to feel and sympathize as he would have wished with suffering humanity.  But within him was the light, “the light which is, of course, not physical,” which betrayed itself through his wonderful smile—­the same now as in babyhood; and from his mother, and perhaps also from the young country that gave her birth, he had inherited, as well as her great heart and broad human sympathies, the vigour that was to carry him through the experiences by means of which, in the fullness of time, that light, no longer dormant, was to break into a flame of infinite possibilities.

Donald’s one complaint against Oxford was that the ideas that are born and generated there so often evaporate in talk and smoke.  He left with the determination to “do,” but before going on to a Clergy School he decided to accept a friend’s invitation to visit him in savage Africa so that he might think things over, and put to the test, far away from the artificialities of Modern Life, the ideas he had assimilated in the highly sophisticated atmosphere of Oxford.  As he quaintly put it:  “Since Paul went into Arabia for three years, I don’t see why I should not go to British East Africa for six months!” He did not, however, stay the whole time there, but re-visited his beloved Mauritius, and also stayed in Madagascar.