“To all of these I am quite content to say ‘Yes.’  The sight does not trouble me, or, indeed, anything but interest me.  I am not superstitious; I am not nervous in the least.  Only I can not help feeling as if, catching, in my weakened state, the hideous leprosy of the place, I had received into my mind, then less able than usual to resist, the stamp and impress of some other mind forced to linger near that spot, and unable to avoid brooding over some haunting remorseful thought or image of a deed, ever dismally recalling how he stood in grim silence watching the tears and prayers of the two soft-faced smooth-limbed Roman boys, kidnapped from some sunny Italian villa, and carried to that gloomy place—­held them pitilessly on the altar among the other fork-bearded Druids, with their white robes and glaring eyes—­and smote the cruel blow, in spite of the trembling touch of the young fingers and the piteous entreaties, as they looked tearfully from side to side in the damp sunless Golgotha, among the glens of that sinister isle.

“That is the picture that somehow or other, even in my most material mood, is evoked by the thought of the place.  The rationalist explanation of the coming fever is far more satisfactory and scientific; but the other keeps recurring—­a curious experience anyhow.

“If you have nothing to do you might write me a line to Stockholm, Poste Restante.  I am going north to have a look at the ice.  Altogether, what with the East still open before me, I do not expect to come home for two or three years.

“You are one of the few friends I can rely upon, so I carry about with me a letter addressed to you; in case of my death you will be the first to be notified of the fact.

  “Ever yours,
     “Arthur Hamilton.”

I have given this letter in full, because it affords a good example of Arthur’s descriptive style, which always struck me as being vivid and graphic, and also because this little incident, not by the proof it itself afforded, but by the turn it gave his thoughts—­then rather rapidly drifting into materialism—­was the first step in a kind of conversion from the purely physical views of life he had been apt to take.  The episode itself, too, is a curious one, and may deserve to be recorded.

CHAPTER VI

Nothing is more hopelessly wearisome than descriptions of travel; even George Eliot could not make in her diaries Florence anything but dull.  I shall confine myself to sketching his route, to telling one incident among the few he told me, and describing his return.