When shall we men leave off fighting, cease to prove the Darwinian theory, and the legends of Kilkenny (by leaving only our tails behind us, a legacy for new lawsuits); and in the latter days ask God the reason we were made for? When our savage life is done with, and we are no longer cannibals—and at present cannibals are perhaps of more practical mind than we, for they have an object in homicide, and the spit justifies the battle–field—when we do at last begin not to hate one another; not to think the evil first, because in nature prior; not to brand as maniacs, and marks for paltry satire, every man who dares to think that he was not born a weasel, and that ferocity is cowardice—then a man of self–respect may begin to be a patriot. At present, as our nations are, all abusing one another, none inquiring, none allowing, all preferring wrong to weakness, if it hit the breed and strain; each proclaiming that it is the favoured child of God, the only one He looks upon (merging His all–seeing eye in its squint ambition)—at present even we must feel that “patriotism” is little more than selfishness in a balloon. Poor Cradock, wasted so and altered (when he left black London) that nothing short of womanʼs true love could run him home without check, began to feel the change of sky, and drink new health from the balmy air, and relish the wholesome mind–bread, leavened with the yeast of novelty. A man who can stay in the same old place, and work the blessed old and new year at the same old work, dwell on and deal with the same old faces, receive and be bound to reciprocate the self–same old ideas, without crying out, “Oh bother you!” without yearning for the sea–view, or pining for the mountain—that man has either a very great mind, or else he has none at all. For a very great mind can create its own food, fresh as the manna, daily, or dress in unceasing variety the fruit of other intellects, and live thereon amid the grand and ever–shifting scenery of a free imagination. On the other hand, a man of no mind gets on quite contentedly, having never tasted thought–food; only wind him up with the golden key every Saturday night, and oil him with respectability at the Sunday service. Now the under–supercargo of the _Taprobane_ was beginning to eat his meals like a man, to be pleased with the smell of new tar, and the head–over–heel of the porpoises, and to make acquaintance with sailors of large morality. In a word, he was coming back, by spell and spate, to Cradock Nowell, but as yet so merely skew–nailed to the pillar of himself, that any change of weather caused a gape, a gap, a chasm. Give him bright sun and clear sky, with a gentle breeze over the water spreading wayward laughter, with an amaranth haze just lightly veiling the union of heaven and ocean, and a few flying–fish, or an albatross, for incident in the foreground—and the young man would walk to and fro as briskly, and talk as clearly and pleasantly, as any one in the ship could.