Page:Romance & Reality 2.pdf/336

334 southern side a sunny-looking bunch, which would not have disgraced Aladdin's garden of rubies. Hospitality is the virtue of an uncivilised state, because it is then a useful one. It is a wise moral dispensation, that those virtues are most prevalent which are most wanted. A man asks another to dine with him in London, and spends on the said dinner just twice as much as he can afford; while the odds are, that his visitor will be discontented with his reception, envious of his host, and console himself next day by abusing entertainer and entertainment. A man wanders through a desert—is half starved—falls in with an Arab tent, whose owner gives him some goat's milk and dates—he comes home, and raves about the hospitality of the desert. The difference is this: in the one case the dinner was needed, and in the other it was not. We must want a thing before we can value it. Hospitality is, therefore, the virtue of uncivilised, as benevolence should be that of civilised life.

The crowd which had surrounded the traveller gradually dispersed, and Lorraine was left almost alone with a very fine-looking old man, whose free gait bespoke a life of active