I suppose none of us recognise the great part that is played in life by eating and drinking.  The appetite is so imperious that we can stomach the least interesting viands, and pass off a dinner-hour thankfully enough on bread and water; just as there are men who must read something, if it were only Bradshaw’s Guide.  But there is a romance about the matter after all.  Probably the table has more devotees than love; and I am sure that food is much more generally entertaining than scenery.  Do you give in, as Walt Whitman would say, that you are any the less immortal for that?  The true materialism is to be ashamed of what we are.  To detect the flavour of an olive is no less a piece of human perfection than to find beauty in the colours of the sunset.

Canoeing was easy work.  To dip the paddle at the proper inclination, now right, now left; to keep the head down stream; to empty the little pool that gathered in the lap of the apron; to screw up the eyes against the glittering sparkles of sun upon the water; or now and again to pass below the whistling tow-rope of the Deo Gratias of Conde, or the Four Sons of Aymon—­there was not much art in that; certain silly muscles managed it between sleep and waking; and meanwhile the brain had a whole holiday, and went to sleep.  We took in, at a glance, the larger features of the scene; and beheld, with half an eye, bloused fishers and dabbling washerwomen on the bank.  Now and again we might be half-wakened by some church spire, by a leaping fish, or by a trail of river grass that clung about the paddle and had to be plucked off and thrown away.  But these luminous intervals were only partially luminous.  A little more of us was called into action, but never the whole.  The central bureau of nerves, what in some moods we call Ourselves, enjoyed its holiday without disturbance, like a Government Office.  The great wheels of intelligence turned idly in the head, like fly-wheels, grinding no grist.  I have gone on for half an hour at a time, counting my strokes and forgetting the hundreds.  I flatter myself the beasts that perish could not underbid that, as a low form of consciousness.  And what a pleasure it was!  What a hearty, tolerant temper did it bring about!  There is nothing captious about a man who has attained to this, the one possible apotheosis in life, the Apotheosis of Stupidity; and he begins to feel dignified and longaevous like a tree.

There was one odd piece of practical metaphysics which accompanied what I may call the depth, if I must not call it the intensity, of my abstraction.  What philosophers call me and not-me, Ego and non Ego, preoccupied me whether I would or no.  There was less me and more not-me than I was accustomed to expect.  I looked on upon somebody else, who managed the paddling; I was aware of somebody else’s feet against the stretcher; my own body seemed to have no more intimate relation