was like a veil to hide the soul, a defence against inquiry, itself the
unceasing question, a sort of battery thrown forward, a kind of field-
casemate for a lonely besieged spirit.

It was full of suggestion. It might have been the glass behind which
showed some mediaeval relic, the body of some ancient Egyptian king whose
life had been spent in doing wonders and making signs--the primitive,
anthropomorphic being. He might have been a stone man, for any motion
that he made. Yet looking at him closely you would have seen discontent
in the eye, a kind of glaze of the sardonic over the whole face.

What is the good! the face asked. What is there worth doing? it said.
What a limitless futility! it urged, fain to be contradicted too, as the
grim melancholy of the figure suggested.

"To be an animal and soak in the world," he thought to himself--" that is
natural; and the unnatural is civilisation, and the cheap adventure of
the mind into fields of baffling speculation, lighted by the flickering
intelligences of dead speculators, whose seats we have bought in the
stock-exchange of mortality, and exhaust our lives in paying for. To
eat, to drink, to lie fallow, indifferent to what comes after, to roam
like the deer, and to fight like the tiger--"

He came to a dead stop in his thinking. "To fight like the tiger!" He
turned his head quickly now to where upon a raft some river-drivers were
singing:

"And when a man in the fight goes down,
Why, we will carry him home!"