At this there was a gentle sound of laughter.
"Luxuries—the luxuries of the White Dove!" says her hostess, mindful of tinned meats.
"Yes, indeed," says our young Doctor, though he is laughing too. "There is far too much luxury—the luxury of idleness—on board this yacht to be wholesome for one like me."
"Perhaps you object to the effeminacy of the downy couches and the feather pillows," says his hostess, who is always grumbling about the hardness of the beds.
But it appears that she has made an exceedingly bad shot. The man at the wheel—one can just make out his dark figure against the clear starlit heavens, though occasionally he gets before the yellow light of the binnacle—proceeds to assure her that, of all the luxuries of civilisation, he appreciates most a horse-hair pillow; and that he attributes his sound sleeping on board the yacht to the hardness of the beds. He would rather lay his head on a brick, he says, for a night's rest than sink it in the softest feathers.
"Do you wonder," he says, "that Jacob dreamed of angels when he had a stone for his pillow? I don't. If I wanted to have a pleasant sleep and fine dreams that is the sort of pillow I should have."
Some phrase of this catches the ear of our look-out forward; he instantly comes aft.
"Yes, it is a singular piece of testimony," he says. "There is no doubt of it; I have myself seen the very place."
We were not startled; we knew that the Laird, under the guidance of a well-known Free Church minister, had made a run through Palestine.
"Ay," said he, "the further I went away from my own country the more I saw nothing but decadence and meesery. The poor craytures!—living among ruins, and tombs, and decay, without a trace of public spirit or private energy. The disregard of sanitary laws was something terrible to look at—as bad as their universal beggary. That is what comes of centralisation, of suppressing local government. Would ye believe that there are a lot of silly bodies actually working to get our Burgh of Strathgovan annexed to Glasgow—swallowed up in Glasgow!"