Page:MacGrath--The luck of the Irish.djvu/192

 turbans; their thrilling kettledrums and reeds, their donkeys, their trains of pack-camels, their indescribably bewildering bazaars—his interest in these pictures was ecstatic.

He was one of the many millions who accept life as a series of pictures, impressionable most to those which do not conform with every-day routine. I repeat, what he knew of life had been hammered into him cruelly and unforgetably. To digress for a moment, Burke was Burns's favorite author. Over the office desk was a printed card. William could not remember it literally, but he had the basic truth of it. To quote William in preference to Burke: "Learning is a painful job; a whole lot of pains rammed into your coco whether you wanted 'em or not; and the more pains you could stand up under without throwing up the sponge, the bigger the know; and you could enjoy learning only when you'd digested these pains. I guess my brain, like my stomach, is built on the corned-beef-and-cabbage plan."

Therefore, his mental attitude was inclined toward such pictures as he saw in Cairo. When he read a book he took the story and stored it away; the useful or practical information made a negligible impression and was rarely serviceable. When he was somewhere around fifty his education would be complete—that is, he would possess an unlimited number of pictures, some of them badly done, some of them in outrageous perspective, and some of them so indistinct that he would remember them only as old masters.