“As you please,” he replied. “Here I am at the end of my cigar. So good-night, my dear boy. Well, you have had my to-whit to your to-whoo.” And so a strange day ended. I sat thinking some time over our conversation. Kenneth’s observations opened quite a new train of thought. It had never occurred to me before that life was a great battle-field, and that all men were, as it were, ranged under two standards, under the folds of which they were compelled to fight. Everything had come to me in its place. A man might have his private opinions on men and things, as he collects a private museum for his own amusement; but in the main one lived and died, acted and thought, passed through and out of life, in much the same manner as his neighbor, not inquiring and not being inquired into too closely. Life was made for us, and we lived it much in the same way as we learned our alphabet, we never knew well how, or took our medicine, in the regulation doses. Sometimes we were a little rebellious, and suffered accordingly; that was all. Excess on any side was a bore to everybody else. It was very easy, and on the whole not unpleasant. We nursed our special crotchets, we read our newspapers, we watched our children at their gambols, we chatted carelessly away out on the bosom of the broad stream along which we were being borne so surely and swiftly into the universal goal. Why should we scan the sky and search beneath the silent waters, trembling at storms to come and treacherous whirlpools, hidden sand-banks, and cruel rocks on which many a brave bark had gone down? Chart and compass were for others; a pleasant sail only for us. There was a Captain up aloft somewhere; it was his duty and not ours to see that all was right and taut--ours to glide along in slumbrous ease, between eternal banks of regions unexplored; to feast our eyes on fair scenes, and lap our senses in musical repose. That was the true life. Sunken rocks, passing storms, mutinies among the crew, bursting of engines--what were such things to us? Had we not paid our fares and made our provision for the voyage, and was not the Captain bound to land us safely at our journey’s end, if he valued his position and reputation?