A gentleman is a man who is engaged in expressing his best and noblest self in every fibre of his mind and every fibre of his body.  He makes the very force of gravity pulling on his clothes express him, and the movements of his feet and his hands.  He gathers up his rooms into his will and all the appointments of his life and crowds into them the full meaning of his soul.  He makes all these things say him.

The main attribute of a man who is not a gentleman is that he does not do these things, that he cannot inform his body with his spirit.

I go back to the Great Western Railway, ugly as it still is.  I go alone, and sadly if I must, and for a little time—­without the deep bells and without the stained-glass windows, without all that dear, familiar beauty I have loved in the old and quiet quadrangles—­I take my stand beside the Great Western Railway!  I claim the Great Western Railway for the spirit of man and for the will of God!

With its vast shuttle of steam and shining engines, its little, whispering telegraph office, the Great Western Railway is a part of my body.  I lay my will on the heart of London with it, or I sleep in the old house in Lynmouth with it.  I am the Great Western Railway, and the Great Western Railway is ME.  And from the heart of the roar of London to the slow, sleepy surge of the sea in my window at Lynmouth it is mine!  Though it be iron and wood, switches, whistles, and white steam, it is my body, and I inform it with my spirit, or I die.  With the will of God I endow it, with the glory of the world, with the desires of my heart, and with the prayers of the hurrying men and women.

I declare that that same glory I have known before, and that I will always know, and will never give up, in the old quiet quadrangles of Oxford and in the deep bells and in the still waters, as in some strange, new, and mighty Child, is in the Great Western Railway too.

When I am in the train it sings.  Strangely and hoarsely It sings!  I lie down to rest.  It whistles on ahead my ideals down the slope of the world.  It roars softly, while I sleep, my religion in my ears.

CHAPTER III

DEW AND ENGINES

When I was small, and wanted suddenly to play tag or duck-on-the-rock I had a little square half-mile of boys near by to play with.

My daughter plays tag or plays dolls, any minute she likes, with a whole city.  She is not surprised at the telephone; she takes it for granted like sunshine and milk.  It is a part of the gray matter in her brain—­a whole city, six or seven square miles of it.  A little mouthpiece on a desk, a number, and two hundred little girls are hers in a minute, to play dolls with.  She thinks in miles when she plays, where I thought in door-yards.  The whole city is a part of the daily, hourly furniture of her mind.  The little gray molecules in the structure of her brain are different from those in mine.