After reading as well as I could by myself Plato's Sophista, which comes in natural order after the Theatetus, and paying a brief visit to London, I started sometime about the end of June to join a reading-party in Brittany.

A too easy temper, or ennui, or mere wantonness, often makes men take a step with the perfect consciousness that they are doing a very foolish thing. It is notorious matter of tradition and experience that not one in a hundred of those who go on reading-parties makes a profitable use of his time—nay, that scapegraces who wish to “do their governors” and delude them into the belief that they are “reading” while doing anything but read, adopt this very plan as the most efficient—nevertheless it happens every year that some hardworking and well-disposed youths wander off in these parties. Perhaps the unfortunate has stayed two whole Longs at Cambridge already, and finds the prospect of a third summer there too dreary, or he thinks a change of air may do him good before the struggle of the last term, or some nice Bachelor friend of his is making up a nice party and wants to bring him into it; so, though he knows that the majority of men who join in such excursions do very little reading, he hopes to be one of the minority who form the exceptions.