Little journeys, as along the Deeside, have a charm of their own.
Little journeys from London to places up the river, or to places on
the coast of Kent--journeys so brief that you lunch at one end and
have tea at the other--I love them all, and loved the labels that
recalled them to me. But the labels of long journeys, of course, took
precedence in my heart. Here and there on my hat-box were labels that
recalled to me long journeys in which frontiers were crossed at dead
of night--dim memories of small, crazy stations where I shivered half-
awake, and was sleepily conscious of a strange tongue and strange
uniforms, of my jingling bunch of keys, of ruthless arms diving into
the nethermost recesses of my trunks, of suspicious grunts and
glances, and of grudging hieroglyphics chalked on the slammed lids.
These were things more or less painful and resented in the moment of
experience, yet even then fraught with a delicious glamour. I
suffered, but gladly. In the night, when all things are mysteriously
magnified, I have never crossed a frontier without feeling some of the
pride of conquest. And, indeed, were these conquests mere illusions?
Was I not actually extending the frontiers of my mind, adding new
territories to it? Every crossed frontier, every crossed sea, meant
for me a definite success--an expansion and enrichment of my soul.
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