get along very decently--very decently indeed.'

The desire for little successes amidst conditions securely fixed! So it
struck upon Holsten's mind. He added in his diary, 'I had a sense of all
this globe as that....'

By that phrase he meant a kind of clairvoyant vision of this populated
world as a whole, of all its cities and towns and villages, its high
roads and the inns beside them, its gardens and farms and upland
pastures, its boatmen and sailors, its ships coming along the great
circles of the ocean, its time-tables and appointments and payments and
dues as it were one unified and progressive spectacle. Sometimes such
visions came to him; his mind, accustomed to great generalisations and
yet acutely sensitive to detail, saw things far more comprehensively
than the minds of most of his contemporaries. Usually the teeming sphere
moved on to its predestined ends and circled with a stately swiftness
on its path about the sun. Usually it was all a living progress that
altered under his regard. But now fatigue a little deadened him to that
incessancy of life, it seemed now just an eternal circling. He lapsed
to the commoner persuasion of the great fixities and recurrencies of the
human routine. The remoter past of wandering savagery, the inevitable
changes of to-morrow were veiled, and he saw only day and night,
seed-time and harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks
in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient
sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on for
ever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was raised to
overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit spinning-top of
man's existence....

For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions, famine