Page:Episodes-before-thirty.djvu/21

Rh good for him when he took his conducted tours of Canadian Methodists to Switzerland; but I did not rise to this, and persuaded him to wait till I could get a more select class to meet, perhaps, at his own house, where a girl could more suitably attend. For, to tell the truth, some of my pupils had a habit of coming slightly drunk--or, as they called it, "with a jag on." He, however, would not wait, so I lost two good pupils!... Dr. Withrow, patient little man of kindly disposition! His faded black frock-coat, his spectacles high on his puckered forehead, his carpet slippers, his tobacco-stained white beard, his sincere beliefs and his striped trousers of a pattern I have always since labelled mentally as "Methodist trousers"--it is a gentle little memory tucked away among unkinder ones, and I still hear him giving me my first and only lesson how to write. His paraphrase of "fatal facility" stays with me: "Fluency means dullness, unless the mind is packed with thought." It stays with me because the conversation led to my asking if I might write an article for the monthly on the subject of Buddhism. Behind it lay an ever keener desire to write something on Hegel, whose philosophy I felt certain was based on some personal experience of genuine mystical kind.

"From what point of view?" he asked, his forehead puckering with amazement.

"That of belief," I said, my mind bursting with an eager desire to impart information, if not also to convert.

He passed his hand across his forehead, knocking the spectacles off. Then, catching them with a fumbling motion which betrayed his perturbation, he inquired: "But, of course, Mr. Blackwood, not your own?"

The voice, the eyes, the whole attitude of the body made me realize he was prepared to be shocked, if not already shocked.

"Yes," I replied truthfully, "my own. I've been a Buddhist for a long time."

He stared for some time at me without a word, then smiled a kindly, indulgent, rather sceptical smile. "It would be hardly suitable," he mentioned, as I felt his Rh