“We part, Sir Charleroy, to-morrow?” said the Hospitaler.
“If thou dost elect to stay in sad Jerusalem, surely.
“Yes; I’d go mad here from doing nothing but wrestling with my thoughts. In fact, I guess I’d go mad anywhere, if long there. I think, sometimes, that my mind’s in a whirlpool, moving not like others; yet, round and round in some consistency, carrying its befooling creeds, hopes, dreams, visions, phantasmagoria in a pretty fair march. I’m sure, more than sure, that if I once stopped moving, my brain would rest like a house after a land-slide, tilted over, while all the things in the whirlpool would drift about in hopeless confusion.”
“Thou dost talk like a physician, gone mad with philosophy!”
“No doubt of it; that’s all because I’ve been idling here a month; a week longer and God knows who could set me going again, rightly.”
Then the knight laughed merrily; very merrily, in fact, for a man who had trained himself to morbidness. The Hospitaler replied:
“I see nothing for me beyond the Holy City and its historic surrounds. I’m training myself to proclaim God’s kingdom and must begin at that pre-eminent, world over-looking point, Jerusalem.”
“But there are no schools to fit one there?”
“The most informing and man-expanding on earth; the deathless examples of the worthies; best studied where they lived their mightful living. I go now to Golgotha.”