sailed up the Nile as if it were the Mississippi; although a
well-enough-informed man, he practically ignored the importance of any
city anterior to the Plymouth Settlement, or at least to London, which
had the honor of sending colonists to New England; and he would have
discussed American politics in the heart of Africa, had not my
ignorance upon the topic generally excluded it from our conversation.
He had what is most wrongly termed an exceedingly practical mind,--that
is, not one that appreciates the practical existence and value of
thought as such, considering that a _praxis_, but a mind that denied
the existence of a thought until it had become realized in visible
action.

"'The end of a man is an action, and not a thought, though it be the
noblest,' as Carlyle has well written," he triumphantly quoted to me,
as, leaning over the little railing of the yacht, watching, at least I
was, the smooth, green water gliding under the clean-cutting keel, we
had been talking earnestly for some time. "A thought has value only as
it is a potential action; if the action be abortive, the thought is as
useless as a crank that fails to move an engine-wheel."

"Then, if action is the wheel, and thought only the crank, what does
the body of your engine represent? For what purpose are your wheels
turning? For the sake of merely moving?"

"No," said he, "moving to promote another action, and _that_
another,--and----so on _ad infinitum_."

"Then you leave out of your scheme a real engine, with a journey to
accomplish, and an end to arrive at; for so wheels would only move
wheels, and there would be an endless chain of machinery, with no plan,