Semanticate

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 			<p>I may as well here inform the reader that I was born at the end of September 1871, and was christened John, after my grandfather. From what I have said above he will readily believe that my earliest experiences were somewhat squalid. Memories of childhood rush vividly upon me when I pass through a low London alley, and catch the faint sickly smell that pervades it⁠—half paraffin, half black-currants, but wholly something very different. I have a fancy that we lived in Blackmoor Street, off Drury Lane. My father, when first I knew of his doing anything at all, supported my mother and myself by drawing pictures with coloured chalks upon the pavement; I used sometimes to watch him, and marvel at the skill with which he represented fogs, floods, and fires. These three “f’s,” he would say, were his three best friends, for they were easy to do and brought in halfpence freely. The return of the dove to the ark was his favourite subject. Such a little ark, on such a hazy morning, and such a little pigeon⁠—the rest of the picture being cheap sky, and still cheaper sea; nothing, I have often heard him say, was more popular than this with his clients. He held it to be his masterpiece, but would add with some naivete that he considered himself a public benefactor for carrying it out in such perishable fashion. “At any rate,” he would say, “no one can bequeath one of my many replicas to the nation.”</p>
 			<p>I never learned how much my father earned by his profession, but it must have been something considerable, for we always had enough to eat and drink; I imagine that he did better than many a struggling artist with more ambitious aims. He was strictly temperate during all the time that I knew anything about him, but he was not a teetotaler; I never saw any of the fits of nervous excitement which in his earlier years had done so much to wreck him. In the evenings, and on days when the state of the pavement did not permit him to work, he took great pains with my education, which he could very well do, for as a boy he had been in the sixth form of one of our foremost public schools. I found him a patient, kindly instructor, while to my mother he was a model husband. Whatever others may have said about him, I can never think of him without very affectionate respect.</p>
 			<p>Things went on quietly enough, as above indicated, till I was about fourteen, when by a freak of fortune my father became suddenly affluent. A brother of his father’s had emigrated to Australia in 1851, and had amassed great wealth. We knew of his existence, but there had been no intercourse between him and my father, and we did not even know that he was rich and unmarried. He died intestate towards the end of 1885, and my father was the only relative he had, except, of course, myself, for both my father’s sisters had died young, and without leaving children.</p>
-			<p>The solicitor through whom the news reached us was, happily, a man of the highest integrity, and also very sensible and kind. He was a <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Alfred Emery Cathie, of 15 Clifford’s Inn, <abbr epub:type="z3998:place">EC</abbr>, and my father placed himself unreservedly in his hands. I was at once sent to a first-rate school, and such pains had my father taken with me that I was placed in a higher form than might have been expected considering my age. The way in which he had taught me had prevented my feeling any dislike for study; I therefore stuck fairly well to my books, while not neglecting the games which are so important a part of healthy education. Everything went well with me, both as regards masters and schoolfellows; nevertheless, I was declared to be of a highly nervous and imaginative temperament, and the school doctor more than once urged our headmaster not to push me forward too rapidly⁠—for which I have ever since held myself his debtor.</p>
+			<p>The solicitor through whom the news reached us was, happily, a man of the highest integrity, and also very sensible and kind. He was a <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Alfred Emery Cathie, of 15 Clifford’s Inn, <abbr epub:type="z3998:place">EC</abbr>, and my father placed himself unreservedly in his hands. I was at once sent to a first-rate school, and such pains had my father taken with me that I was placed in a higher form than might have been expected considering my age. The way in which he had taught me had prevented my feeling any dislike for study; I therefore stuck fairly well to my books, while not neglecting the games which are so important a part of healthy education. Everything went well with me, both as regards masters and schoolfellows; nevertheless, I was declared to be of a highly nervous and imaginative temperament, and the school doctor more than once urged our headmaster not to push me forward too rapidly⁠—for which I have ever since held myself his debtor.</p>
 			<p>Early in 1890, I being then home from Oxford (where I had been entered in the preceding year), my mother died; not so much from active illness, as from what was in reality a kind of <i xml:lang="fr">maladie du pays</i>. All along she had felt herself an exile, and though she had borne up wonderfully during my father’s long struggle with adversity, she began to break as soon as prosperity had removed the necessity for exertion on her own part.</p>
 			<p>My father could never divest himself of the feeling that he had wrecked her life by inducing her to share her lot with his own; to say that he was stricken with remorse on losing her is not enough; he had been so stricken almost from the first year of his marriage; on her death he was haunted by the wrong he accused himself⁠—as it seems to me very unjustly⁠—of having done her, for it was neither his fault nor hers⁠—it was Atè.</p>
-			<p>His unrest soon assumed the form of a burning desire to revisit the country in which he and my mother had been happier together than perhaps they ever again were. I had often heard him betray a hankering after a return to Erewhon, disguised so that no one should recognise him; but as long as my mother lived he would not leave her. When death had taken her from him, he so evidently stood in need of a complete change of scene, that even those friends who had most strongly dissuaded him from what they deemed a madcap enterprise, thought it better to leave him to himself. It would have mattered little how much they tried to dissuade him, for before long his passionate longing for the journey became so overmastering that nothing short of restraint in prison or a madhouse could have stayed his going; but we were not easy about him. “He had better go,” said <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cathie to me, when I was at home for the Easter vacation, “and get it over. He is not well, but he is still in the prime of life; doubtless he will come back with renewed health and will settle down to a quiet home life again.”</p>
-			<p>This, however, was not said till it had become plain that in a few days my father would be on his way. He had made a new will, and left an ample power of attorney with <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cathie⁠—or, as we always called him, Alfred⁠—who was to supply me with whatever money I wanted; he had put all other matters in order in case anything should happen to prevent his ever returning, and he set out on October 1, 1890, more composed and cheerful than I had seen him for some time past.</p>
+			<p>His unrest soon assumed the form of a burning desire to revisit the country in which he and my mother had been happier together than perhaps they ever again were. I had often heard him betray a hankering after a return to Erewhon, disguised so that no one should recognise him; but as long as my mother lived he would not leave her. When death had taken her from him, he so evidently stood in need of a complete change of scene, that even those friends who had most strongly dissuaded him from what they deemed a madcap enterprise, thought it better to leave him to himself. It would have mattered little how much they tried to dissuade him, for before long his passionate longing for the journey became so overmastering that nothing short of restraint in prison or a madhouse could have stayed his going; but we were not easy about him. “He had better go,” said <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Cathie to me, when I was at home for the Easter vacation, “and get it over. He is not well, but he is still in the prime of life; doubtless he will come back with renewed health and will settle down to a quiet home life again.”</p>
+			<p>This, however, was not said till it had become plain that in a few days my father would be on his way. He had made a new will, and left an ample power of attorney with <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Cathie⁠—or, as we always called him, Alfred⁠—who was to supply me with whatever money I wanted; he had put all other matters in order in case anything should happen to prevent his ever returning, and he set out on October 1, 1890, more composed and cheerful than I had seen him for some time past.</p>
 			<p>I had not realised how serious the danger to my father would be if he were recognised while he was in Erewhon, for I am ashamed to say that I had not yet read his book. I had heard over and over again of his flight with my mother in the balloon, and had long since read his few opening chapters, but I had found, as a boy naturally would, that the succeeding pages were a little dull, and soon put the book aside. My father, indeed, repeatedly urged me not to read it, for he said there was much in it⁠—more especially in the earlier chapters, which I had alone found interesting⁠—that he would gladly cancel if he could. “But there!” he had said with a laugh, “what does it matter?”</p>
 			<p>He had hardly left, before I read his book from end to end, and, on having done so, not only appreciated the risks that he would have to run, but was struck with the wide difference between his character as he had himself portrayed it, and the estimate I had formed of it from personal knowledge. When, on his return, he detailed to me his adventures, the account he gave of what he had said and done corresponded with my own ideas concerning him; but I doubt not the reader will see that the twenty years between his first and second visit had modified him even more than so long an interval might be expected to do.</p>
-			<p>I heard from him repeatedly during the first two months of his absence, and was surprised to find that he had stayed for a week or ten days at more than one place of call on his outward journey. On November 26 he wrote from the port whence he was to start for Erewhon, seemingly in good health and spirits; and on December 27, 1891, he telegraphed for a hundred pounds to be wired out to him at this same port. This puzzled both <abbr>Mr.</abbr> Cathie and myself, for the interval between November 26 and December 27 seemed too short to admit of his having paid his visit to Erewhon and returned; as, moreover, he had added the words, “Coming home,” we rather hoped that he had abandoned his intention of going there.</p>
+			<p>I heard from him repeatedly during the first two months of his absence, and was surprised to find that he had stayed for a week or ten days at more than one place of call on his outward journey. On November 26 he wrote from the port whence he was to start for Erewhon, seemingly in good health and spirits; and on December 27, 1891, he telegraphed for a hundred pounds to be wired out to him at this same port. This puzzled both <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Mr.</abbr> Cathie and myself, for the interval between November 26 and December 27 seemed too short to admit of his having paid his visit to Erewhon and returned; as, moreover, he had added the words, “Coming home,” we rather hoped that he had abandoned his intention of going there.</p>
 			<p>We were also surprised at his wanting so much money, for he had taken a hundred pounds in gold, which from some fancy, he had stowed in a small silver jewel-box that he had given my mother not long before she died. He had also taken a hundred pounds worth of gold nuggets, which he had intended to sell in Erewhon so as to provide himself with money when he got there.</p>
 			<p>I should explain that these nuggets would be worth in Erewhon fully ten times as much as they would in Europe, owing to the great scarcity of gold in that country. The Erewhonian coinage is entirely silver⁠—which is abundant, and worth much what it is in England⁠—or copper, which is also plentiful; but what we should call five pounds’ worth of silver money would not buy more than one of our half-sovereigns in gold.</p>
 			<p>He had put his nuggets into ten brown holland bags, and he had had secret pockets made for the old Erewhonian dress which he had worn when he escaped, so that he need never have more than one bag of nuggets accessible at a time. He was not likely, therefore, to have been robbed. His passage to the port above referred to had been paid before he started, and it seemed impossible that a man of his very inexpensive habits should have spent two hundred pounds in a single month⁠—for the nuggets would be immediately convertible in an English colony. There was nothing, however, to be done but to cable out the money and wait my father’s arrival.</p>

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 			<p>Tityus, as an effort after the conception of an eternity of torture, is not successful. What could an eagle matter on the liver of a man whose body covered nine acres? Before long he would find it an agreeable stimulant. If, then, the greatest minds of antiquity could invent nothing that should carry better conviction of eternal torture, is it likely that the conviction can be carried at all?</p>
 			<p>Methought I saw Jove sitting on the topmost ridges of Olympus and confessing failure to Minerva. “I see, my dear,” he said, “that there is no use in trying to make people very happy or very miserable for long together. Pain, if it does not soon kill, consists not so much in present suffering as in the still recent memory of a time when there was less, and in the fear that there will soon be more; and so happiness lies less in immediate pleasure than in lively recollection of a worse time and lively hope of better.”</p>
 			<p>As for the young gentleman above referred to, my father met him with the assurance that there had been several cases in which living people had been caught up into heaven or carried down into hell, and been allowed to return to earth and report what they had seen; while to others visions had been vouchsafed so clearly that thousands of authentic pictures had been painted of both states. All incentive to good conduct, he had then alleged, was found to be at once removed from those who doubted the fidelity of these pictures.</p>
-			<p>This at least was what he had then said, but I hardly think he would have said it at the time of which I am now writing. As he continued to sit in the Musical Bank, he took from his valise the pamphlet on “<span epub:type="se:name.publication.pamphlet">The Physics of Vicarious Existence</span>,” by <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Gurgoyle, which he had bought on the preceding evening, doubtless being led to choose this particular work by the tenor of the old lady’s epitaph.</p>
+			<p>This at least was what he had then said, but I hardly think he would have said it at the time of which I am now writing. As he continued to sit in the Musical Bank, he took from his valise the pamphlet on “<span epub:type="se:name.publication.pamphlet">The Physics of Vicarious Existence</span>,” by <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Dr.</abbr> Gurgoyle, which he had bought on the preceding evening, doubtless being led to choose this particular work by the tenor of the old lady’s epitaph.</p>
 			<p>The second title he found to run, “<span epub:type="se:name.publication.pamphlet">Being Strictures on Certain Heresies Concerning a Future State That Have Been Engrafted on the Sunchild’s Teaching</span>.”</p>
 			<p>My father shuddered as he read this title. “How long,” he said to himself, “will it be before they are at one another’s throats?”</p>
 			<p>On reading the pamphlet, he found it added little to what the epitaph had already conveyed; but it interested him, as showing that, however cataclysmic a change of national opinions may appear to be, people will find means of bringing the new into more or less conformity with the old.</p>
-			<p>Here it is a mere truism to say that many continue to live a vicarious life long after they have ceased to be aware of living. This view is as old as the non omnis moriar of Horace, and we may be sure some thousands of years older. It is only, therefore, with much diffidence that I have decided to give a résumé of opinions many of which those whom I alone wish to please will have laid to heart from their youth upwards. In brief, <abbr>Dr.</abbr> Gurgoyle’s contention comes to little more than saying that the quick are more dead, and the dead more quick, than we commonly think. To be alive, according to him, is only to be unable to understand how dead one is, and to be dead is only to be invincibly ignorant concerning our own livingness⁠—for the dead would be as living as the living if we could only get them to believe it.</p>
+			<p>Here it is a mere truism to say that many continue to live a vicarious life long after they have ceased to be aware of living. This view is as old as the non omnis moriar of Horace, and we may be sure some thousands of years older. It is only, therefore, with much diffidence that I have decided to give a résumé of opinions many of which those whom I alone wish to please will have laid to heart from their youth upwards. In brief, <abbr epub:type="z3998:name-title">Dr.</abbr> Gurgoyle’s contention comes to little more than saying that the quick are more dead, and the dead more quick, than we commonly think. To be alive, according to him, is only to be unable to understand how dead one is, and to be dead is only to be invincibly ignorant concerning our own livingness⁠—for the dead would be as living as the living if we could only get them to believe it.</p>
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