Believe me or not, he was paid an excellent wage by the municipality to
prevent people like me, who sit up at night, from doing mischief in the
harbour. When I had come to an end of his politico-economic scheme--the
main lines of which were so clear and simple that a child could
understand them--we fell to talking of the tides, and I told him that in
my country the sea went up and down. He was no rustic, and would have no
such commonplace truths. He was well acquainted with the Phenomenon of
the Tides; it was due to the combined attraction of the sun and of the
moon. But when I told him I knew places where the tides fell thirty or
forty feet, we would have had a violent quarrel had I not prudently
admitted that that was romantic exaggeration, and that five or six was
the most that one ever saw it move. I avoided the quarrel, but the
little incident broke up our friendship, and he shuffled away. He did
not like having his leg pulled.

There are many others I remember. Those I have written about elsewhere I
am ashamed to recall, as the man at Jedburgh, who first expounded to me
how one knew all about the fate of the individual soul, and then
objected to personal questions about his own; the German officer man at
Aix-la-Chapelle, who had hair the colour of tow, and gave me minute
details of the method by which England was to be destroyed; a man I met
upon the Appian Way, who told the most abominable lies; and another man
who met me outside Oxford station during the Vac. and offered to show me
the sights of the town for a consideration, which he did, but I would
not pay him because he was inaccurate, as I easily proved by a few
searching questions upon the exact site of Bocardo (of which he had
never heard), and the negative evidence against a Roman origin for the
site of the city. Moreover, he said that Trinity was St. John's, which
was rubbish.