Long ago I knew an English Bohemian who had a small income that came to him very irregularly. He had begun life in a profession, but had quitted it that he might travel and see the world, which he did in the oddest, most original fashion, often enduring privation, but never ceasing to enjoy life deeply in his own way, and to accumulate a mass of observations which would have been quite invaluable to an author. In him the two activities, physical and mental, were alike so energetic that they might have led to great results had they been consistently directed to some private or public end; but unfortunately he remained satisfied with the existence of an observant wanderer who has no purpose beyond the healthy exercise of his faculties. In usefulness to others he was not to be compared with my good and admirable Philistine, but in the art of getting for himself what is best in the world he was by far the more accomplished of the two. He fully enjoyed both the physical and the intellectual life; he could live almost like a red Indian, and yet at the same time carry in his mind the most recent results of European thought and science. His distinguishing characteristic was a heroic contempt for comfort, in which he rather resembled a soldier in war-time than any self-indulgent civilian. He would sleep anywhere,--in his boat under a sail, in a hayloft, under a hedge if belated, and he would go for days together without any regular meal. He dressed roughly, and his clothes became old before he renewed them. He kept no servant, and lived in cheap lodgings in towns, or hired one or two empty rooms and adorned them with a little portable furniture. In the country he contrived to make very economical arrangements in farmhouses, by which he was fed and lodged quite as well as he ever cared to be. It would be difficult to excel him in simple manliness, in the quiet courage that accepts a disagreeable situation or faces a dangerous one; and he had the manliness of the mind as well as that of the body; he estimated the world for what it is worth, and cared nothing for its transient fashions either in appearances or opinion. I am sorry that he was a useless member of society,--if, indeed, such an eccentric is to be called a member of society at all,--but if uselessness is blamable he shares the blame, or ought in justice to share it, with a multitude of most respectable gentlemen and ladies who receive nothing but approbation from the world.