I am quite certain that it was not in my school-days. It may have
been in my teaching-days, but I'm not quite certain. I have often
wondered whether we teachers really believe all we try to teach. I
feel a pity for poor Sisyphus, poor fellow, rolling that stone to the
top of the hill, and then having to do the work all over when the
stone rolled to the bottom. But that is not much worse than trying
to teach Caribbean Sea and Mt. Vesuvius, if we can't really believe
in them. But here is Brown, metamorphosed into a psychologist who
begins with the known, yea, delightfully known grapefruit which I had
at breakfast, and takes me on a fascinating excursion till I arrive,
by alluring stages, at the related unknown, the Caribbean Sea. Too
bad that Brown isn't a teacher.

Brown has the gift of holding on to a thing till his craving for
knowledge is satisfied. Somewhere he had come upon some question
touching a campanile or, possibly, _the_ Campanile, as it seemed to
him. Nor would he rest content until I had extracted what the books
have to say on the subject. He had in mind the Campanile at Venice,
not knowing that the one beside the Duomo at Florence is higher than
the one at Venice, and that the Leaning Tower at Pisa is a campanile,
or bell-tower, also. When I told him that one of my friends saw the
Campanile at Venice crumble to a heap of ruins on that Sunday morning
back in 1907, and that another friend had been of the last party to
go to the top of it the evening before, he became quite excited, and
then I knew that I had succeeded in investing the subject with human
interest, and I felt quite the schoolmaster. Nothing of this did I
mention to Brown, for there is no need to exploit the mental
machinery if only you get results.

Many people who travel abroad buy postcards by the score, and seem to