None the less I don’t envy the traveller. “East, west, home’s best”; and yet perhaps home should rightly be where oneself is; perhaps we are too prone to surround ourselves with comforts in one spot and disregard the big world. But after lying here so long it seems as if there would be no joy in any travel to equal one brief walk round the garden.—Thank you again.
Serena.
CXIV
Horace Mun-Brown to Verena Raby
My Dear Aunt,—You will begin to think of me as a business man and nothing else, even although so many of my schemes have come to nothing. But I assure you I am quite human too and often think of your illness with sincere regret. If I have had bad luck with my schemes, it is due to the fact, which is no disgrace, that they are before their time. I have been, in a way, too far-sighted. I have seen the public needs too soon, before even the public is conscious of them; which commercially is a mistake. One cannot, however, change one’s nature. My great distress is that I have as yet failed to convince you of my general acuteness, at any rate to the point of support. Without a little capital a young experimentalist can do nothing, and I have only my brains.
The project which I am now about to lay before you is, however, so different from the others, and so romantic and picturesque, that I feel sure you will be interested. It also offers chances of rich returns.
There is somewhere in Mexico a lake with which is associated a very remarkable religious ceremony. On a certain day in the year the priest of the community, accompanied by thousands of worshippers, proceeds to the shore of this lake, where, after some impressive rites, he enters the water. The others remain outside. The priest wades steadily out into the lake, the bottom of which slopes very gradually, until his head alone is visible.
(All this may sound very odd to you, but you must remember, dear Aunt, that the Mexicans are a strange race and that foreign religions can often appear grotesque to us. My informant, a very cultivated man, assures me that, in this lake business, the comic element is lacking, such is the fervour of the multitude.)