She takes possession of his heart like some fair capricious mistress.  Before the boy awakes to the beauty of cousin Mary, he is crazed by the fascinations of ocean.  With her voices of ebb and flow she weaves her siren song round the Englishman’s coasts day and night.  Nothing that dwells on land can keep from her embrace the boy who has gazed upon her dangerous beauty, and who has heard her singing songs of foreign shores at the foot of the summer crag.  It is well that in the modern gentleman the fierce heart of the Berserker lives yet.  The English are eminently a nation of vagabonds.  The sun paints English faces with all the colours of his climes.  The Englishman is ubiquitous.  He shakes with fever and ague in the swampy valley of the Mississippi; he is drowned in the sand pillars as they waltz across the desert on the purple breath of the simoom; he stands on the icy scalp of Mont Blanc; his fly falls in the sullen Norwegian fiords; he invades the solitude of the Cape lion; he rides on his donkey through the uncausewayed Cairo streets.  That wealthy people, under a despotism, should be travellers seems a natural thing enough.  It is a way of escape from the rigours of their condition.  But that England—­where activity rages so keenly and engrosses every class; where the prizes of Parliament, literature, commerce, the bar, the church, are hungered and thirsted after; where the stress and intensity of life ages a man before his time; where so many of the noblest break down in harness hardly halfway to the goal—­should, year after year, send off swarms of men to roam the world, and to seek out danger for the mere thrill and enjoyment of it, is significant of the indomitable pluck and spirit of the race.  There is scant danger that the rust of sloth will eat into the virtue of English steel.  The English do the hard work and the travelling of the world.  The least revolutionary nation of Europe, the one with the greatest temptations to stay at home, with the greatest faculty for work, with perhaps the sincerest regard for wealth, is also the most nomadic.  How is this?  It is because they are a nation of vagabonds; they have the “hungry heart” that one of their poets speaks about.

There is an amiability about the genuine vagabond which takes captive the heart.  We do not love a man for his respectability, his prudence and foresight in business, his capacity of living within his income, or his balance at his banker’s.  We all admit that prudence is an admirable virtue, and occasionally lament, about Christmas, when bills fall in, that we do not inherit it in a greater degree.  But we speak about it in quite a cool way.  It does not touch us with enthusiasm.  If a calculating-machine had a hand to wring, it would find few to wring it warmly.  The things that really move liking in human beings are the gnarled nodosities of character, vagrant humours, freaks of generosity, some little unextinguishable spark of the aboriginal savage, some