"Inconsequent foolishness is lunacy, I suppose?" said the Hermit.

"I suppose it is very like it," answered Mr. Traveller.

"Do I converse like a lunatic?"

"One of us two must have a strong presumption against him of being one,
whether or no. Either the clean and decorously clad man, or the dirty
and indecorously clad man. I don't say which."

"Why, you self-sufficient bear," said the Hermit, "not a day passes but I
am justified in my purpose by the conversations I hold here; not a day
passes but I am shown, by everything I hear and see here, how right and
strong I am in holding my purpose."

Mr. Traveller, lounging easily on his billet of wood, took out a pocket
pipe and began to fill it. "Now, that a man," he said, appealing to the
summer sky as he did so, "that a man--even behind bars, in a blanket and
skewer--should tell me that he can see, from day to day, any orders or
conditions of men, women, or children, who can by any possibility teach
him that it is anything but the miserablest drivelling for a human
creature to quarrel with his social nature--not to go so far as to say,
to renounce his common human decency, for that is an extreme case; or who
can teach him that he can in any wise separate himself from his kind and
the habits of his kind, without becoming a deteriorated spectacle
calculated to give the Devil (and perhaps the monkeys) pleasure,--is
something wonderful! I repeat," said Mr. Traveller, beginning to smoke,
"the unreasoning hardihood of it is something wonderful--even in a man
with the dirt upon him an inch or two thick--behind bars--in a blanket
and skewer!"