But, in the meantime, the Alpine Club man still condescends to show himself in Europe, though his condescension is not unmixed with a certain taint of pride. He does not carry himself quite as another man, and has his nose a little in the air, even when he is not climbing. He endeavours to abstain from showing that he despises the man who enjoys his mountains only from the valley; but the attempt is made with too visible an effort, and he is not quite able to bear himself, as though he, as a genuine Alpine Club man, were not, in some sort, a god upon the earth. To have had his feet where our feet have never rested, and can never rest, to have inhaled an air rarer than that which will ever inflate our lungs, to be one of a class permitted to face dangers which to us would be simply suicidal, does give him a conscious divinity of which he is, in his modesty, not quite able to divest himself. He abstains from mountain talk as a scholar abstains from his grammar, or a chemist from his crucibles; but we feel that he is abstaining because of our ignorance; and when, at our instigation, he does speak of mountains, we feel that he talks of them as though they were naught, out of pity to our incompetence. There are many pursuits among us which are of their own nature so engrossing that he who is wedded to them cannot divorce himself from their influences. Who does not feel that a policeman is always a policeman, enjoying the detection of an imaginary thief in every acquaintance with whom he may exchange a word, and conscious of the possibility of some delightfully-deep criminality in the bosom of each of his dearest friends? The very nature of the man has become impregnated with the aptitudes of his art. How nearly impossible it is for the actor not to be an actor, or for a cricketer who is great in cricket to forget his eleven, or for the billiard-player to cleanse his mind from hazards and canons. And with all such experts there grows up gradually an unconscious feeling that the art in which he is skilful is the one art worthy of a man's energy and of his intellect. To meet a foeman worthy of his steel he will willingly cross to the antipodes; and, as he goes, he pities his fellow-travellers who are cumbering themselves with the troubles of the journey for no purpose worthy of their labour. The genuine Alpine Club man,--he who aspires to any distinction among his colleagues,--is dipped as deeply in the waters of this mania as are the policeman, and the actor, and the cricketer. He climbs but for two months in each year of his life, but he lives his life in those two months. As the days of his thraldom to the ordinary duties of life come to an end,--the days in which he is merely a clergyman in his parish, or a lawyer among his clients, or a clerk at his desk,--his heart grows light and his nostrils almost expand with the expectation of the longed-for mountain air. Then, if you know nothing of mountain-climbing you are nothing to him,--simply