“I read a good deal,” he said simply.  Then he added in a reflective tone, “I rather think I have a philosophical mind.  The old man who taught me theology in Istamboul when I was a boy used to talk philosophy to me by the hour, though I do not believe he knew much about it.  He was a plodder, and went up ladders in search of information, like the man you describe.  But he was very patient and good to me; the peace of Allah be with him.”

It was late, and soon afterwards we parted for the night.  The next day was Sunday, and I had a heap of unanswered letters to attend to, so we agreed to meet after tiffin and ride together before dining with Mr. Ghyrkins and the Westonhaughs.

I went to my room and sat a while over a volume of Kant, which I always travel with—­a sort of philosopher’s stone on which to whet the mind’s tools when they are dulled with boring into the geological strata of other people’s ideas.  I was too much occupied with the personality of the man I had been talking with to read long, and so I abandoned myself to a reverie, passing in review the events of the long day.

* * * * *

CHAPTER VII.

The Sabbatarian tendency of the English mind at home and abroad is proverbial, and if they are well-behaved on Sunday in London they are models of virtue in Simla on the same day.  Whether they labour and are well-fed and gouty in their island home, or suffer themselves to be boiled for gain in the tropical kettles of Ceylon and Singapore; whether they risk their lives in hunting for the north pole or the northwest passage, or endanger their safety in the pursuit of tigers in the Terai, they will have their Sunday, come rain, come shine.  On the deck of the steamer in the Red Sea, in the cabin of the inbound Arctic explorer, in the crowded Swiss hotel, or the straggling Indian hill station, there is always a parson of some description, in a surplice of no description at all, who produces a Bible and a couple of well-thumbed sermons from the recesses of his trunk or his lunch basket, or his gun-case, and goes at the work of weekly redemption with a will.  And, what is more, he is listened to, and for the time being—­though on week days he is styled a bore by the old and a prig by the young—­he becomes temporarily invested with a dignity not his own, with an authority he could not claim on any other day.  It is the dignity of a people who with all their faults have the courage of their opinions, and it is the authority that they have been taught from their childhood to reverence, whenever their traditions give it the right to assert itself.  Not otherwise.  It is a fine trait of national character, though it is one which has brought upon the English much unmerited ridicule.  One may differ from them in faith and in one’s estimate of the real value of these services, which are often only saved from being irreverent in their performance by the perfect sincerity of parson and congregation.  But no one who dispassionately judges them can deny that the custom inspires respect for English consistency and admiration for their supreme contempt of surroundings.