“When we assembled at the dinner we were miserably tired and worn—­but we were posted.  Yes, it is fair to claim that.  In fact, erudition is a pale name for it.  New Zealand was the only subject; and it was just beautiful to hear us ripple it out.  And with such an air of unembarrassed ease, and unostentatious familiarity with detail, and trained and seasoned mastery of the subject-and oh, the grace and fluency of it!

“Well, finally somebody happened to notice that the guest was looking dazed, and wasn’t saying anything.  So they stirred him up, of course.  Then that man came out with a good, honest, eloquent compliment that made the Faculty blush.  He said he was not worthy to sit in the company of men like these; that he had been silent from admiration; that he had been silent from another cause also—­silent from shame—­silent from ignorance!  ‘For,’ said he, ’I, who have lived eighteen years in New Zealand and have served five in a professorship, and ought to know much about that country, perceive, now, that I know almost nothing about it.  I say it with shame, that I have learned fifty times, yes, a hundred times more about New Zealand in these two hours at this table than I ever knew before in all the eighteen years put together.  I was silent because I could not help myself.  What I knew about taxes, and policies, and laws, and revenue, and products, and history, and all that multitude of things, was but general, and ordinary, and vague-unscientific, in a word—­and it would have been insanity to expose it here to the searching glare of your amazingly accurate and all-comprehensive knowledge of those matters, gentlemen.  I beg you to let me sit silent—­as becomes me.  But do not change the subject; I can at least follow you, in this one; whereas if you change to one which shall call out the full strength of your mighty erudition, I shall be as one lost.  If you know all this about a remote little inconsequent patch like New Zealand, ah, what wouldn’t you know about any other Subject!’”

CHAPTER XXVIL

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes.  Or needs to. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what there is of it. 
—­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

From diary: 

November 1—­noon.  A fine day, a brilliant sun.  Warm in the sun, cold in the shade—­an icy breeze blowing out of the south.  A solemn long swell rolling up northward.  It comes from the South Pole, with nothing in the way to obstruct its march and tone its energy down.  I have read somewhere that an acute observer among the early explorers—­Cook? or Tasman?—­accepted this majestic swell as trustworthy circumstantial evidence that no important land lay to the southward, and so did not waste time on a useless quest in that direction, but changed his course and went searching elsewhere.