"How pleasant to sit here for ever!" said Claude, one afternoon, in the inn garden at Beddgelert, "and say, not with Descartes, 'I think, therefore I exist;' but simply, 'I enjoy, therefore I exist.' I almost think those Emersonians are right at times, when they crave the 'life of plants, and stones, and rain.' Stangrave said to me once, that his ideal of perfect bliss was that of an oyster in the Indian seas, drinking the warm salt water motionless, and troubling himself about nothing, while nothing troubled itself about him." "Till a diver came and tore him up for the sake of his pearls?" said Valencia. "He did not intend to contain any pearls. A pearl, you know, is a disease of the oyster, the product of some irritation. He wished to be the oyster pure and simple, a part of nature." "And to be of no use?" asked Frank. "Of none whatsoever. Nature had made him what he was, and all beside was her business, and not his. I don't deny that I laughed at him, and made him wroth by telling him that his doctrine was 'the apotheosis of loafing.' But my heart went with him, and the jolly oyster too. It is very beautiful after all, that careless nymph and shepherd life of the old Greeks, and that Marquesas romance of Herman Melville's--to enjoy the simple fact of living, like a Neapolitan lazzaroni, or a fly upon a wall." "But the old Greek heroes fought and laboured to till the land, and rid it of giants and monsters," said Frank. "And as for the Marquesas, Mr. Melville found out, did he not--as you did once--that they were only petting and fattening him for the purpose of eating him? There is a dark side to that pretty picture, Mr. Mellot."