perhaps, as we too live, and were confronted, as we are confronted, with the horror of the gap, the intolerable mystery of life lapsing into the dark.  Ah, the relentless record, the impenetrable mystery!  I care very little, I fear, for the historical development of funereal rites, and hardly more for the light that such things throw on the evolution of society.  I leave that gratefully enough to the philosophers.  What I care for is the touch of nature that shows me my ancient brethren of the dim past—­who would have mocked and ridiculed me, I doubt not, if I had fallen into their hands, and killed me as carelessly as one throws aside the rind of a squeezed fruit—­yet I am one of them, and perhaps even something of their blood flows in my veins yet.

As I grow older, I tend to travel less and less, and I do not care if I never cross the Channel again.  Is there a right and a wrong in the matter, an advisability or an inadvisability, an expediency or an inexpediency?  I do not think so.  Travelling is a pleasure, if it is anything, and a pleasure pursued from a sense of duty is a very fatuous thing.  I have no good reason to give, only an accumulation of small reasons.  Dr. Johnson once said that any number of insufficient reasons did not make a sufficient one, just as a number of rabbits did not make a horse.  A lively but misleading illustration:  he might as well have said that any number of sovereigns did not make a cheque for a hundred pounds.  I suppose that I do not like the trouble, to start with; and then I do not like being adrift from my own beloved country.  Then I cannot converse in any foreign language, and half the pleasure of travelling comes from being able to lay oneself alongside of a new point of view.  Then, too, I realise, as I grow older, how little I have really seen of my own incomparably beautiful and delightful land, so that, like the hero of Newman’s hymn,

                 “I do not ask to see
     The distant scene; one step enough for me.”

And, lastly, I have a reason which will perhaps seem a far-fetched one.  Travel is essentially a distraction, and I do not want to be distracted any more.  One of the mistakes that people make, in these Western latitudes, is to be possessed by an inordinate desire to drown thought.  The aim of many men whom I know seems to me to be occupied in some absolutely definite way, so that they may be as far as possible unaware of their own existence.  Anything to avoid reflection!  A normal Englishman does not care very much what the work and value of his occupation is, as long as he is occupied; and I am not at all sure that we came into the world to be occupied.  Christ, in the Gospel story, rebuked the busy Martha for her bustling anxieties, her elaborate attentions to her guests, and praised the leisurely Mary for desiring to sit and hear Him talk.  Socrates spent his life in conversation.  I do not say that contemplation is a duty, but I cannot help thinking that we are not