“I am not inclined for the Church, I have a positive distaste for the ministry, and yet Lord Lamerton is bent on my being a parson. If I do not become one, what am I to be? I cannot go back to the life whence I have been taken; I cannot endure to be with those who hold their knives by the middle when eating, and drink their tea out of their saucers, and take their meals in their shirt sleeves. Remember I have been translated from the society to which by birth I belong, to another as different from it as is that of Brahmins from Esquimaux; I cannot accommodate myself again to what was once my native element. Baron Munchausen, in one of his voyages, landed on an island made of cream cheese, and only discovered it by the fainting of a sailor who had a natural antipathy to cream cheese. I have come ashore on an island the substance of which is altogether different from the soil where I was born. I cannot say I have an ineradicable distaste for it, but that at first I found a difficulty in walking on it. The specific gravity of cream cheese is other than that of clay. Now that I have acquired the light and trippant tread that suits, if I return to my native land, my paces will be criticised, and regarded as affected, and myself as supercilious, for not at once plodding from my shoulders like a ploughboy in marl. How was it with poor Persephone who spent half her time in the realm of darkness and half in that of light? She carried to the world of light her groping tentative walk, and was laughed at, and when in Hades, she trod boldly as if in day and got bruises and bloody noses. Even now I am in a state of oscillation between the two spheres, and am at home in neither, miserable in both. When I am in the cream-cheese island I never feel that I can walk with the buoyancy of one born on cream-cheese. I can never quite overcome the sense of inhaling an atmosphere of cheese, never quite find the buttermilk squeezed out of it taste like aniseed water.” Arminell could not refrain from a laugh. “Really, Mr. Saltren, you are not complimentary to our island.” “Call it the Isle of Rahat la Koum, Turkish Delight, or Guava Jelly—anything luscious. One who has eaten salt pork and supped vinegar cannot at once tutor his palate to everything saccharine to a syrup.” “But what really troubles you in the Isle of Guava?”