Something of his old indifference lingered about him; it was
seldom that he was in earnest; he drifted with the tide, and, except to
maintain a clear integrity before God and men and his own soul, exerted
scarcely an effort. It was not an easy thing for him to break up any
manner of life; and when it became necessary for one of the firm to
visit America, and he as the most suitable was selected, he assented to
the proposition with not a heart-beat. America was as flat a wilderness
to him as the Desert of Sahara. On landing in India, he had felt like a
semi-conscious sleeper in his dream, the country seemed one of
phantasms: the Lascars swarming in the port,--the merchants wrapped in
snowy muslins, who moved like white-robed bronzes faintly animate,--the
strange faces, modes, and manners,--the stranger beasts, immense, and
alien to his remembrance; all objects that crossed his vision had seemed
like a series of fantastic shows; he could have imagined them to be the
creations of a heated fancy or the weird deceits of some subtle draught
of magic. But now they had become more his life than the scenes which he
had left; this land with its heats and its languors had slowly and
passively endeared itself to him; these perpetual summers, the balms and
blisses of the South, had unconsciously become a need of his nature.
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