The light of his shaded reading lamp slept like a sheltered pool, his footfalls made no sound on the carpet, his wandering days were over. No more horizons as boundless as hope, no more twilights within the forests as solemn as temples, in the hot quest of the Ever-undiscovered Country over the hill, across the stream, beyond the wave. The hour was striking! Nor more! No more!

The boat fairly flew; we sweltered side by side in the stagnant superheated air; the smell of mud, of marsh, the primeval smell of fecund earth seemed to sting our faces; till suddenly at a bend it was as if a great hand far away had lifted a heavy curtain, had flung open an immense portal. The light itself seemed to stir, the sky above our heads widened, a far off murmur reached our ears, a freshness enveloped us, filled our lungs, quickened our thoughts, our blood, our regrets — and, straight ahead, the forests sank down against the dark blue ridge of the sea. I breathed deeply, I reveled in the vastness of the opened horizon, in the different atmosphere that seemed to vibrate with a toil of life, with the energy of an impeccable world. The sky and the sea were open to me. The girl was right — there was a sign, a call in them — something to which I responded with every fiber of my being. I let my eyes roam through space, like a man released from bonds who stretches his cramped limbs, runs, leaps, responds to the inspiring elation of freedom. “This is glorious!” I cried, and then I looked at the sinner by my side. He sat with his head sunk on his breast and said, “Yes,” without raising his eyes, as if afraid to see writ large on the clear sky of the offing the reproach of his romantic conscience.

The sun, whose concentrated glare dwarfs the earth into a restless mote of dust, had sunk behind the forest, and the diffused light from an opal sky seemed to cast upon a world without shadows and without brilliance the illusion of a calm and pensive greatness.

It is respectable to have no illusions — and safe — and profitable — and dull. Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamor created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone — and as short-lived, alas!

Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life.

There were married couples looking domesticated and bored with each other in the midst of their travels; there were small parties and large parties, and lone individuals dining solemnly or feasting boisterously, but all thinking, conversing, joking or scowling as was their wont at home; and just as intelligently receptive to new impressions as their trunk upstairs. Henceforth they would be labeled as having passed through this and that place and so would be their luggage. They would cherish this distinction of their persons, and preserve the gummed tickets on their portmanteaux as documentary evidence, as the only permanent trace of their improving enterprise.

They talked everlastingly of turns of luck; how So-and-so got charge of a boat on the coast of China — a soft thing; how this one had an easy billet in Japan somewhere, and that one was doing well in the Siamese navy; and in all they said — in their actions, in their looks, in their persons — could be detected a soft sport, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely through existence.

. . . there is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.