we left the station, and sought a vast red hotel that loomed through the drift on a steep hill, and in the side of this a door that had not been locked.  Happily one had been forgotten, and, entering at last, we roused a hibernating waiter, and he exhumed us some of his winter victual.  In this way we were presently to some degree comforted, and could play chess until a train had been sent for our relief.  And this did at last happen, and towards the hour of dinner we rejoined our anxious friends, and all the evening time we boasted of a pleasant day and urged them to go even as we had gone.

THE THEORY OF QUOTATION

The nobler method of quotation is not to quote at all.  For why should one repeat good things that are already written?  Are not the words in their fittest context in the original?  Clearly, then, your new setting cannot be quite so congruous, which is, forthwith, an admission of incongruity.  Your quotation is evidently a plug in a leak, an apology for a gap in your own words.  But your vulgar author will even go out of his way to make the clothing of his thoughts thus heterogeneous.  He counts every stolen scrap he can work in an improvement—­a literary caddis worm.  Yet would he consider it improvement to put a piece of even the richest of old tapestry or gold embroidery into his new pair of breeks?

The passion for quotation is peculiar to literature.  We do not glory to quote our costume, dress in cast-off court robes, or furnish our houses from the marine store.  Neither are we proud of alien initials on the domestic silver.  We like things new and primarily our own.  We have a wholesome instinct against infection, except, it seems, in the matter of ideas.  An authorling will deliberately inoculate his copy with the inverted comma bacillus, till the page swims unsteadily, counting the fever a glow of pure literary healthiness.  Yet this reproduction, rightly considered, is merely a proof that his appetite for books has run beyond his digestion.  Or his industry may be to seek.  You expect an omelette, and presently up come the unbroken eggs.  A tissue of quotation wisely looked at is indeed but a motley garment, eloquent either of a fool, or an idle knave in a fool’s disguise.

Nevertheless at times—­the truth must be told—­we must quote.  As for admitting that we have quoted, that is another matter altogether.  But the other man’s phrase will lie at times so close in one’s mind to the trend of one’s thoughts, that, all virtue notwithstanding, they must needs run into the groove of it.  There are phrases that lie about in the literary mind like orange peel on a pavement.  You are down on them before you know where you are.  But does this necessitate acknowledgment to the man, now in Hades, who sucked that orange and strewed the peel in your way?  Rather, is it not more becoming to be angry at his careless anticipation?