Add 47429 from ibiblio

author: nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> 2025-02-28 05:29:45 -0800
committer: nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org> 2025-02-28 05:29:45 -0800
commit: c1f44b4243ba2473225d7bbe29ecd324bd9de99d (patch)
tree: bd7d7469abc843c9a5ad5527f0c909c9ada4e72f
parent: 268e5f9024a1c2dd7daa85b801f31252258e1713 (diff)
389 files changed, 14451 insertions, 53894 deletions
diff --git a/47429/47429-0.txt b/47429-0.txt
index 71357e8..b750284 100644
--- a/47429/47429-0.txt
+++ b/47429-0.txt
@@ -1,6707 +1,6323 @@
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Windfalls
-
-Author: (AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-Illustrator: Clive Gardiner
-
-Release Date: November 22, 2014 [EBook #47429]
-Last Updated: March 15, 2018
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-WINDFALLS
-
-By Alfred George Gardiner
-
-(Alpha of the Plough)
-
-Illustrations by Clive Gardiner
-
-J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
-
-1920
-
-
-[Illustration: 0002]
-
-[Illustration: 0008]
-
-[Illustration: 0009]
-
-
-TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS
-
-I think this book belongs to you because, if it can be said to be about
-anything in particular--which it cannot--it is, in spite of its delusive
-title, about bees, and as I cannot dedicate it to them, I offer it to
-those who love them most.
-
-[Illustration: 0013]
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-|In offering a third basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is
-hoped that the fruit will not be found to have deteriorated. If that is
-the case, I shall hold myself free to take another look under the
-trees at my leisure. But I fancy the three baskets will complete the
-garnering. The old orchard from which the fruit has been so largely
-gathered is passing from me, and the new orchard to which I go has not
-yet matured. Perhaps in the course of years it will furnish material for
-a collection of autumn leaves.
-
-[Illustration: 0015]
-
-[Illustration: 0021]
-
-
-
-
-JEMIMA
-
-|I took a garden fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes.
-When Jemima saw me crossing the orchard with a fork he called a
-committee meeting, or rather a general assembly, and after some joyous
-discussion it was decided _nem. con_. that the thing was worth looking
-into. Forthwith, the whole family of Indian runners lined up in single
-file, and led by Jemima followed faithfully in my track towards the
-artichoke bed, with a gabble of merry noises. Jemima was first into the
-breach. He always is...
-
-But before I proceed it is necessary to explain. You will have observed
-that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless,
-you said, “How careless of the printer. Once might be forgiven; but
-twice----” Dear madam' (or sir), the printer is on this occasion
-blameless. It seems incredible, but it's so. The truth is that Jemima
-was the victim of an accident at the christening ceremony. He was one of
-a brood who, as they came like little balls of yellow fluff out of the
-shell, received names of appropriate ambiguity--all except Jemima. There
-were Lob and Lop, Two Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?, Greedy
-and Baby, and so on. Every name as safe as the bank, equal to all
-contingencies--except Jemima. What reckless impulse led us to call him
-Jemima I forget. But regardless of his name, he grew up into a handsome
-drake--a proud and gaudy fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you call
-him so long as you call him to the Diet of Worms.
-
-And here he is, surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble,
-gobble, and crowd in on me so that I have to scare them off in order to
-drive in the fork. Jemima keeps his eye on the fork as a good batsman
-keeps his eye on the ball. The flash of a fork appeals to him like the
-sound of a trumpet to the warhorse. He will lead his battalion through
-fire and water in pursuit of it. He knows that a fork has some mystical
-connection with worms, and doubtless regards it as a beneficent deity.
-The others are content to grub in the new-turned soil, but he, with his
-larger reasoning power, knows that the fork produces the worms and that
-the way to get the fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the way
-he watches it I rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the fork.
-Look at him now. He cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating fork,
-expecting to see large, squirming worms dropping from it, and Greedy
-nips in under his nose and gobbles a waggling beauty. My excellent
-friend, I say, addressing Jemima, you know both too much and too little.
-If you had known a little more you would have had that worm; if you had
-known a little less you would have had that worm. Let me commend to you
-the words of the poet:
-
-               A little learning is a dangerous thing:
-
-               Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
-
-I've known many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too
-much but don't know enough. Now Greedy----
-
-But clear off all of you. What ho! there.... The scales!... Here is a
-bumper root.... Jemima realises that something unusual has happened,
-assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with great animation. It
-is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners such agreeable
-companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian runners
-about. Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the orchard
-without an idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in a
-perpetual gossip. The world is full of such a number of things that they
-hardly ever leave off talking, and though they all talk together they
-are so amiable about it that it makes you feel cheerful to hear them....
-But here are the scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do you
-say to that, Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.
-
-The idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am
-enveloped once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful
-risks in his attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be
-ungracious to complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it,
-I said, but you are feasting to-day in order that others may feast
-tomorrow. You devour the worm, and a larger and more cunning animal will
-devour you. He cocks up his head and fixes me with that beady eye that
-gleams with such artless yet searching intelligence.... You are right,
-Jemima. That, as you observe, is only half the tale. You eat the worm,
-and the large, cunning animal eats you, but--yes, Jemima, the crude
-fact has to be faced that the worm takes up the tale again where Man the
-Mighty leaves off:
-
-                        His heart is builded
-
-               For pride, for potency, infinity,
-
-               All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
-
-               Arrased with purple like the house of kings,
-
-               _To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm_
-
-               _Statelily lodge..._
-
-I accept your reminder, Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like
-you, am only a link in the chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries,
-who creates to devour and devours to create. I thank you, Jemima. And
-driving in the fork and turning up the soil I seized a large fat worm. I
-present you with this, Jemima, I said, as a mark of my esteem...
-
-[Illustration: 0024]
-
-[Illustration: 0025]
-
-
-
-
-ON BEING IDLE
-
-|I have long laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person.
-It is an entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in
-conversation, I do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am
-idle, in fact, to prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art
-of defence is attack. I defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a
-verdict of not guilty by the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm
-you by laying down my arms. “Ah, ah,” I expect you to say. “Ah, ah, you
-an idle person. Well, that is good.” And if you do not say it I at least
-give myself the pleasure of believing that you think it.
-
-This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things
-about ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about
-us. We say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way
-some people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their
-early decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as
-remote as it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating
-the sorrow it will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be
-missed. We all like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember
-a nice old gentleman whose favourite topic was “When I am gone.” One day
-he was telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee,
-what would happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up
-cheerfully and said, “When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at
-the funeral?” It was a devastating question, and it was observed that
-afterwards the old gentleman never discussed his latter end with his
-formidable grandchild. He made it too painfully literal.
-
-And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were
-to express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad
-as the old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and
-I daresay I should take care not to lay myself open again to such
-_gaucherie_. But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling
-self-deception. I can speak the plain truth about “Alpha of the Plough”
- without asking for any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how
-he suffers. And I say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was
-never more satisfied of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has
-been engaged in the agreeable task of dodging his duty to _The Star_.
-
-It began quite early this morning--for you cannot help being about
-quite early now that the clock has been put forward--or is it back?--for
-summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and
-there at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved
-to write an article _en plein air_, as Corot used to paint his
-pictures--an article that would simply carry the intoxication of
-this May morning into Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare
-carolling with larks, and make it green with the green and dappled
-wonder of the beech woods. But first of all he had to saturate himself
-with the sunshine. You cannot give out sunshine until you have taken it
-in. That, said he, is plain to the meanest understanding. So he took it
-in. He just lay on his back and looked at the clouds sailing serenely in
-the blue. They were well worth looking at--large, fat, lazy, clouds
-that drifted along silently and dreamily, like vast bales of wool being
-wafted from one star to another. He looked at them “long and long” as
-Walt Whitman used to say. How that loafer of genius, he said, would have
-loved to lie and look at those woolly clouds.
-
-And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
-another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not
-have a picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began
-enumerating the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the
-wings of the west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could
-hear if one gave one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin
-whisper of the breeze in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of
-the woodland behind, the dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech
-near by, the boom of a bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of
-the meadow pipit rising from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo
-sailing up the valley, the clatter of magpies on the hillside, the
-“spink-spink” of the chaffinch, the whirr of a tractor in a distant
-field, the crowing of a far-off cock, the bark of a sheep dog, the ring
-of a hammer reverberating from a remote clearing in the beech woods,
-the voices of children who were gathering violets and bluebells in the
-wooded hollow on the other side of the hill. All these and many other
-things he heard, still lying on his back and looking at the heavenly
-bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him; their billowy softness
-invited to slumber....
-
-When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
-Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and
-the best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the
-blossoms falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you
-preaching the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He
-would catch something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did
-not lie about on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds.
-To them, life was real, life was earnest. They were always “up and
-doing.” It was true that there were the drones, impostors who make ten
-times the buzz of the workers, and would have you believe they do all
-the work because they make most of the noise. But the example of these
-lazy fellows he would ignore. Under the cherry tree he would labour like
-the honey bee.
-
-But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came
-out to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives
-alone, but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put
-on a veil and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time
-flies when you are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do
-and see. You always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure
-that she is there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took
-more time than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one
-of the hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other
-hives, and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was
-visible. The frames were turned over industriously without reward. At
-last, on the floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found.
-This deepened the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason,
-rejected her sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne
-appeared and given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last
-the new queen was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of
-her subjects. She had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped
-notice when the brood frames were put in and, according to the merciless
-law of the hive, had slain her senior. All this took time, and before
-he had finished, the cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard
-announced another interruption of his task.
-
-And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
-of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article
-about how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one
-virtue. It exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.
-
-[Illustration: 0030]
-
-[Illustration: 0031]
-
-
-
-
-ON HABITS
-
-|I sat down to write an article this morning, but found I could make
-no progress. There was grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels
-refused to revolve. I was writing with a pen--a new fountain pen
-that someone had been good enough to send me, in commemoration of an
-anniversary, my interest in which is now very slight, but of which one
-or two well-meaning friends are still in the habit of reminding me. It
-was an excellent pen, broad and free in its paces, and capable of a most
-satisfying flourish. It was a pen, you would have said, that could have
-written an article about anything. You had only to fill it with ink and
-give it its head, and it would gallop away to its journey's end without
-a pause. That is how I felt about it when I sat down. But instead of
-galloping, the thing was as obstinate as a mule. I could get no more
-speed out of it than Stevenson could get out of his donkey in the
-Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried the bastinado, equally without
-effect on my Modestine.
-
-Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
-practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without
-my using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
-there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
-thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
-extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
-bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a
-whole forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to
-me what his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke
-of Cambridge, or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to
-Jackson or--in short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my
-hand, seat me before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as
-they say of the children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an
-eight-day clock. I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten.
-But the magic wand must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen
-in my hand, and the whole complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an
-atmosphere of strangeness. The pen kept intruding between me and my
-thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the touch. It seemed to write a foreign
-language in which nothing pleased me.
-
-This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
-better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
-of his school days. “There was,” he said, “a boy in my class at school
-who stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant
-him. Day came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would;
-till at length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always
-fumbled with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
-waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in
-an evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know
-the success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was
-again questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not
-to be found. In his distress he looked down for it--it was to be seen no
-more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
-place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was
-the author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him
-smote me as I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some
-reparation; but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed
-my acquaintance with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior
-office in one of the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe
-he is dead, he took early to drinking.”
-
-It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
-regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
-and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come.
-to grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits,
-so long as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little
-more than bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take
-away our habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about.
-We could not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life.
-They enable us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we
-had to give fresh and original thought to them each time, would make
-existence an impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our
-commonplace activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more
-leisure we command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but
-not so large as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up
-your own hat and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long
-time it was my practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant
-hook and to take no note of the place. When I sought them I found it
-absurdly difficult to find them in the midst of so many similar hats and
-coats. Memory did not help me, for memory refused to burden itself with
-such trumpery things, and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering
-forlornly and vacuously between the rows and rows of clothes in search
-of my own garments murmuring, “Where _did_ I put my hat?” Then one day a
-brilliant inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on
-a certain peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to
-it. It needed a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked
-like a charm. I can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding
-them. I go to them as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to
-its mark. It is one of the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
-
-But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
-ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally
-break them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ
-them, without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once
-saw Mr Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial
-breach of habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of
-Trinity House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House.
-It is his custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the
-most comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms
-about in a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief
-and the body in repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no
-lapels, and when the hands went up in search of them they wandered about
-pathetically like a couple of children who had lost their parents on
-Blackpool sands. They fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung
-to each other in a visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed
-the search for the lost lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with
-the glasses on the table, sought again for the lapels, did everything
-but take refuge in the pockets of the trousers. It was a characteristic
-omission. Mr Balfour is too practised a speaker to come to disaster as
-the boy in Scott's story did; but his discomfiture was apparent. He
-struggled manfully through his speech, but all the time it was obvious
-that he was at a loss what to do with his hands, having no lapels on
-which to hang them.
-
-I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out
-a pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit,
-ticked away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I
-hope) pardonable result.
-
-[Illustration: 0036]
-
-
-
-
-IN DEFENCE OF WASPS
-
-|It is time, I think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He
-is no saint, but he is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been
-unusually prolific this summer, and agitated correspondents have been
-busy writing to the newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how
-by holding your breath you may miraculously prevent him stinging you.
-Now the point about the wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He
-is, in spite of his military uniform and his formidable weapon, not a
-bad fellow, and if you leave him alone he will leave you alone. He is
-a nuisance of course. He likes jam and honey; but then I am bound
-to confess that I like jam and honey too, and I daresay those
-correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam and honey. We
-shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like jam and honey.
-But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the plate, and he
-is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no doubt. He is
-an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously helpless condition
-from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness for beer. In the
-language of America, he is a “wet.” He cannot resist beer, and having
-rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully tight and
-staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that he
-won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
-Belloc--not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so waspishly
-about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about beer.
-
-This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty
-beer bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets
-out. He is indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings.
-He is excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody
-and nothing, and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of
-things; but a wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin
-that he is, and will never have the sense to walk out the way he went
-in. And on your plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You
-can descend on him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight
-for anything above him, and no sense of looking upward.
-
-His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
-fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
-glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
-familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
-the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.
-
-If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he
-cuts a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
-poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its
-time in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night
-during its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and
-for future generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow
-stripes just lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank
-you. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow----. He
-runs through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time
-in August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving
-only the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of
-20,000 or so next summer.
-
-But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
-you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
-it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet
-he could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than
-the bee, for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel
-competent to speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for
-I've been living in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the
-orchard, with an estimated population of a quarter of a million bees
-and tens of thousands of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never
-deliberately attacked by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around
-me I flee for shelter. There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp,
-the bee's hatred is personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some
-obscure reason, and is always ready to die for the satisfaction of
-its anger. And it dies very profusely. The expert, who has been taking
-sections from the hives, showed me her hat just now. It had nineteen
-stings in it, planted in as neatly as thorns in a bicycle tyre.
-
-It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
-him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
-nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
-devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked,
-and I like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little
-joint, usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real
-virtue, and this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean
-fellow, and is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of
-that supreme abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is
-very cunning. I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He
-got the blow fly down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed
-off one of the creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape,
-and then with a huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away.
-And I confess he carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a
-whole generation of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
-
-And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
-help a fellow in distress.
-
-Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to
-one that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was
-continued for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to
-stroke gently the injured wings.
-
-There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
-who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
-carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp
-as an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
-sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to
-kill her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
-preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we
-wish ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for
-their enemy.
-
-[Illustration: 0040]
-
-[Illustration: 0041]
-
-
-
-
-ON PILLAR ROCK
-
-|Those, we are told, who have heard the East a-calling “never heed
-naught else.” Perhaps it is so; but they can never have heard the call
-of Lakeland at New Year. They can never have scrambled up the screes of
-the Great Gable on winter days to try a fall with the Arrow Head and the
-Needle, the Chimney and Kern Knotts Crack; never have seen the mighty
-Pillar Rock beckoning them from the top of Black Sail Pass, nor the inn
-lights far down in the valley calling them back from the mountains when
-night has fallen; never have sat round the inn fire and talked of the
-jolly perils of the day, or played chess with the landlord--and been
-beaten--or gone to bed with the refrain of the climbers' chorus still
-challenging the roar of the wind outside--
-
-               Come, let us tie the rope, the rope, the rope,
-
-                   Come, let us link it round, round, round.
-
-               And he that will not climb to-day
-
-                   Why--leave him on the ground, the ground, the ground.
-
-If you have done these things you will not make much of the call of the
-temple bells and the palm trees and the spicy garlic smells--least of
-all at New Year. You will hear instead the call of the Pillar Rock and
-the chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your oldest clothes and
-wind the rope around you--singing meanwhile “the rope, the rope,”--and
-take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will step out
-at that gateway of the enchanted land--Keswick. Keswick! Wastdale!...
-Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to whom they
-open the magic casements at a breath.
-
-And at Keswick you call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go
-to Keswick without calling on George Abraham. You might as well go to
-Wastdale Head without calling on the Pillar Rock. And George tells you
-that of course he will be over at Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will
-climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle with you on New Year's Day.
-
-The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave adieus, and are soon
-jolting down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where every object is
-an old friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the Bowder
-Stone and there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow of
-Cat Bells. (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and picking
-wimberries and waking the echoes of Grisedale.)
-
-And there before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the
-billowy summits of Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky
-sentinels of the valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name.
-Perhaps you jump down at Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to
-Rosthwaite and lunch.
-
-And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street is
-a myth and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of the
-sanctuary and the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling your
-rucksack on your back and your rope over your shoulder and set out on
-the three hours' tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.
-
-It is dark when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and
-these December days are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by
-the landlord and landlady--heirs of Auld Will Ritson--and in the flagged
-entrance you see coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of
-climbers' boots--boots that make the heart sing to look upon, boots that
-have struck music out of many a rocky breast, boots whose missing nails
-has each a story of its own. You put your own among them, don your
-slippers, and plunge among your old companions of the rocks with jolly
-greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it is--a master from a
-school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a young clergyman, a
-barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham, and so on.
-But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and the eternal
-boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.
-
-Who shall tell of the days and nights that follow?--of the songs that
-are sung, and the “traverses” that are made round the billiard room and
-the barn, of the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous
-climb, of the letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and
-the departures for the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich
-with new memories, you all foregather again--save only, perhaps, the
-jolly lawyer and his fellows who have lost their way back from Scafell,
-and for whom you are about to send out a search party when they turn up
-out of the darkness with new material for fireside tales.
-
-Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's Day--clear and
-bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost in the
-air. In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up ropes,
-putting on putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for boots
-(the boots are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing nails).
-We separate at the threshold--this group for the Great Gable, that for
-Scafell, ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock. It
-is a two and a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and as
-daylight is short there is no time to waste. We follow the water course
-up the valley, splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice, cross
-the stream where the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount the
-steep ascent of Black Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down lonely
-Ennerdale, where, springing from the flank of the Pillar mountain,
-is the great Rock we have come to challenge. It stands like a tower,
-gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600 feet from its northern base to its
-summit, split on the south side by Jordan Gap that divides the High Man
-or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser rock.
-
-We have been overtaken by another party of three from the inn--one in
-a white jersey which, for reasons that will appear, I shall always
-remember. Together we follow the High Level Traverse, the track that
-leads round the flank of the mountain to the top of Walker's Gully, the
-grim descent to the valley, loved by the climber for the perils to which
-it invites him. Here wre lunch and here we separate. We, unambitious
-(having three passengers in our party of five), are climbing the East
-face by the Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending by the New
-West route, one of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here; theirs
-is from the other side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I wish
-to speak, but of theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will find
-the Slab and Notch route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it is
-held in little esteem.
-
-With five on the rope, however, our progress is slow, and it is two
-o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring and triumphant, and
-stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar Rock, where the
-wind blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over half the
-peaks of Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in the
-book that lies under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on the
-West face for signs of our late companions. The sound of their voices
-comes up from below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a glimpse
-of their forms. “They're going to be late,” says George Abraham--the
-discoverer of the New West--and then he indicates the closing stages of
-the climb and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the most
-thrilling escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock--two men
-falling, and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of those
-three, two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the next
-year on the Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and turn
-cheerfully to descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route which
-ends on the slope of the mountain near to the starting point of the New
-West route.
-
-The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in the East sheds
-no light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are quite
-distinct, coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the directions
-and distinguish the speakers. “Can't understand why those lads are
-cutting it so fine,” says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace down
-cracks and grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and safety.
-And now we look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one thing
-is visible--a figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at full
-stretch. There it hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the rocks.
-
-[Illustration: 0047]
-
-The party, then, are only just making the traverse from the chimney to
-the right, the most difficult manoeuvre of the climb--a manoeuvre in
-which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain stationary while his
-fellows pass him. “This is bad,” says George Abraham and he prepares
-for a possible emergency. “Are you in difficulties? Shall we wait?” he
-cries. “Yes, wait.” The words rebound from the cliff in the still air
-like stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white jersey,
-still moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every word
-they speak echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board. You
-hear the iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds on
-the ringing wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if both
-feet are dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a hold.
-I fancy one or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look at
-each other in silent comment. And all the time the figure in white, now
-growing dim, is impaled on the face of the darkness, and the voices
-come down to us in brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon is
-sailing into the clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.
-
-At last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery “All
-right” drops down from above. The difficult operation is over, the
-scattered rocks are reached and nothing remains but the final slabs,
-which in the absence of ice offer no great difficulty. Their descent by
-the easy Jordan route will be quick. We turn to go with the comment that
-it is perhaps more sensational to watch a climb than to do one.
-
-And then we plunge over the debris behind Pisgah, climb up the Great
-Doup, where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we reach the friendly
-fence that has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down to the top of
-Black Sail Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours later we
-have rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.
-
-In a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one
-to his office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem
-prosaic and ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say
-only the word “Wastdale” to them and you shall awake its echoes; then
-you shall see their faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable
-things. They are no longer men of the world; they are spirits of the
-mountains.
-
-[Illustration: 0049]
-
-[Illustration: 0050]
-
-
-
-
-TWO VOICES
-
-|Yes,” said the man with the big voice, “I've seen it coming for years.
-Years.”
-
-“Have you?” said the man with the timid voice. He had taken his seat
-on the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of the tube
-strike that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of London.
-
-“Yes, years,” said big voice, crowding as much modesty into the
-admission as possible. “I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long way
-off. Suppose I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit psychic.”
-
-“Ah,” said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning of the
-word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it meant.
-
-“Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George--that's the man that
- up to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and
-property and things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.'
-Why, his speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's
-it's come back. I always said it would. I said we should pay for it.”
-
-“Did you, though?” observed timid voice--not questioningly, but as an
-assurance that he was listening attentively.
-
-“Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for years--years, I did.
-And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in no time. In the
-first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000 aeroplanes and
-train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what I said.
-But was it done?”
-
-“Of course not,” said timid voice.
-
-“I saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why,
-but there it is. I'm not much at the platform business--tub-thumping,
-I call it--but for seeing things far off--well, I'm a bit psychic, you
-know.”
-
-“Ah,” said timid voice, mournfully, “it's a pity some of those talking
-fellows are not psychic, too.” He'd got the word firmly now.
-
-“Them psychic!” said big voice, with scorn. “We know what they are.
-You see that Miss Asquith is marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word,
-he'll turn out to be a German, that's what he'll turn out to be. It's
-German money all round. Same with these strikes. There's German money
-behind them.”
-
-“Shouldn't wonder at all,” said timid voice.
-
-“I know,” said big voice. “I've a way of seeing things. The same in the
-Boer War. I saw that coming for years.”
-
-“Did you, indeed?” said timid voice.
-
-“Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to some of my friends. There it
-was in black and white. They said it was wonderful how it all turned
-out--two years, I said, 250 millions of money, and 20,000 casualties.
-That's what I said, and that's what it was. I said the Boers would win,
-and I claim they did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave them all
-they asked for.”
-
-“You were about right,” assented timid voice.
-
-“And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round his
-finger--that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his finger.
-Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building a
-fleet as big as ours.”
-
-“Never did like that man,” said timid voice.
-
-“It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the armistice
-means. They've escaped--and just when we'd got them down.”
-
-“It's a shame,” said timid voice.
-
-“This war ought to have gone on longer,” continued big voice. “My
-opinion is that the world wanted thinning out. People are too crowded.
-That's what they are--they're too crowded.”
-
-“I agree there,” said timid voice. “We wanted thinning.”
-
-“I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It ought to
-have gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should like to
-know his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says _John Bull_, and
-that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a case
-down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building society--regular
-chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building society
-went smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot.”
-
-“I don't like those goody-goody people,” said timid voice.
-
-“No,” said big voice. “William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what
-that man knew. 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women
-players,' he said. Strordinary how he knew things.”
-
-“Wonderful,” said timid voice.
-
-“There's never been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare
-knew--not one-half.”
-
-“No doubt about it,” said timid voice.
-
-“I consider that William Shakespeare was the most psychic man that ever
-lived. I don't suppose there was ever such a long-sighted man before
-_or_ since. He could see through anything. He'd have seen through Wilson
-and he'd have seen this war didn't stop before the job was done. It's a
-pity we haven't a William Shakespeare now. Lloyd George and Asquith
-are not in it with him. They're simply duds beside William Shakespeare.
-Couldn't hold a candle to him.”
-
-“Seems to me,” said timid voice, “that there's nobody, as you might say,
-worth anything to-day.”
-
-“Nobody,” said big voice. “We've gone right off. There used to be men.
-Old Dizzy, he was a man. So was Joseph Chamberlain. He was right about
-Tariff Reform. I saw it years before he did. Free Trade I said was all
-right years ago, when we were manufacturing for the world. But it's out
-of date. I saw it was out of date long before Joseph Chamberlain. It's
-the result of being long-sighted. I said to my father, 'If we stick to
-Free Trade this country is done.' That's what I said, and it's true. We
-_are_ done. Look at these strikes. We stick to things too long. I
-believe in looking ahead. When I was in America before the war they
-wouldn't believe I came from England. Wouldn't believe it. 'But the
-English are so slow,' they said, 'and you--why you want to be getting on
-in front of us.' That's my way. I look ahead and don't stand still.”
-
-“It's the best way too,” said timid voice. “We want more of it. We're
-too slow.”
-
-And so on. When I came to the end of my journey I rose so that the
-light of a lamp shone on the speakers as I passed. They were both
-well-dressed, ordinary-looking men. If I had passed them in the street
-I should have said they were intelligent men of the well-to-do business
-class. I have set down their conversation, which I could not help
-overhearing, and which was carried on by the big voice in a tone meant
-for publication, as exactly as I can recall it. There was a good deal
-more of it, all of the same character. You will laugh at it, or weep
-over it, according to your humour.
-
-[Illustration: 0055]
-
-
-
-
-ON BEING TIDY
-
-|Any careful observer of my habits would know that I am on the eve of
-an adventure--a holiday, or a bankruptcy, or a fire, or a voluntary
-liquidation (whatever that may be), or an elopement, or a duel, or a
-conspiracy, or--in short, of something out of the normal, something
-romantic or dangerous, pleasurable or painful, interrupting the calm
-current of my affairs. Being the end of July, he would probably say:
-That fellow is on the brink of the holiday fever. He has all the
-symptoms of the epidemic. Observe his negligent, abstracted manner.
-Notice his slackness about business--how he just comes and looks in and
-goes out as though he were a visitor paying a call, or a person who had
-been left a fortune and didn't care twopence what happened. Observe his
-clothes, how they are burgeoning into unaccustomed gaiety, even levity.
-Is not his hat set on at just a shade of a sporting angle? Does not
-his stick twirl with a hint of irresponsible emotions? Is there not the
-glint of far horizons in his eye? Did you not hear him humming as he
-came up the stairs? Yes, assuredly the fellow is going for a holiday.
-
-Your suspicions would be confirmed when you found me ransacking my
-private room and clearing up my desk. The news that I am clearing up my
-desk has been an annual sensation for years. I remember a colleague of
-mine once coming in and finding me engaged in that spectacular feat.
-His face fell with apprehension. His voice faltered. “I hope you are not
-leaving us,” he said. He, poor fellow, could not think of anything else
-that could account for so unusual an operation.
-
-For I am one of those people who treat their desks with respect. We do
-not believe in worrying them about their contents. We do not bully them
-into disclosing their secrets. We stuff the drawers full of papers and
-documents, and leave them to mellow and ripen. And when the drawers are
-full we pile up other papers and documents on either side of us; and the
-higher the pile gets the more comfortable and cosy we feel. We would not
-disturb them for worlds. Why should we set our sleeping dogs barking at
-us when they are willing to go on sleeping if we leave them alone? And
-consider the show they make. No one coming to see us can fail to be
-impressed by such piles of documents. They realise how busy we are. They
-understand that we have no time for idle talk. They see that we have
-all these papers to dispose of--otherwise, why are they there? They get
-their business done and go away quickly, and spread the news of what
-tremendous fellows we are for work.
-
-I am told by one who worked with him, that old Lord Strathcona knew the
-trick quite well, and used it unblushingly. When a visitor was announced
-he tumbled his papers about in imposing confusion and was discovered
-breasting the mighty ocean of his labours, his chin resolutely out
-of the water. But he was a supreme artist in this form of amiable
-imposture. On one occasion he was entertained at a great public dinner
-in a provincial city. In the midst of the proceedings a portly flunkey
-was observed carrying a huge envelope, with seals and trappings, on a
-salver. For whom was this momentous document intended? Ah, he has paused
-behind the grand old man with the wonderful snowy head. It is for him.
-The company looks on in respectful silence. Even here this astonishing
-old man cannot escape the cares of office. As he takes the envelope his
-neighbour at the table looks at the address. It was in Strathcona's own
-hand-writing!
-
-But we of the rank and file are not dishevelled by artifice, like this
-great man. It is a natural gift. And do not suppose that our disorder
-makes us unhappy. We like it. We follow our vocation, as Falstaff says.
-Some people are born tidy and some are born untidy. We were bom untidy,
-and if good people, taking pity on us, try to make us tidy we get lost.
-It was so with George Crabbe. He lived in magnificent disorder, papers
-and books and letters all over the floor, piled on every chair, surging
-up to the ceiling. Once, in his absence, his niece tidied up for him.
-When he came back he found himself like a stranger in a strange land.
-He did not know his way about in this desolation of tidiness, and he
-promptly restored the familiar disorder, so that he could find things.
-It sounds absurd, of course, but we people with a genius for untidiness
-must always seem absurd to the tidy people. They cannot understand that
-there is a method in our muddle, an order in our disorder, secret paths
-through the wilderness known only to our feet, that, in short, we are
-rather like cats whose perceptions become more acute the darker it gets.
-It is not true that we never find things. We often find things.
-
-And consider the joy of finding things you don't hope to find. You, sir,
-sitting at your spotless desk, with your ordered and labelled shelves
-about you, and your files and your letter-racks, and your card indexes
-and your cross references, and your this, that, and the other--what do
-you know of the delights of which I speak? You do not come suddenly
-and ecstatically upon the thing you seek. You do not know the shock of
-delighted discovery. You do not shout “Eureka,” and summon your family
-around you to rejoice in the miracle that has happened. No star swims
-into your ken out of the void. You cannot be said to find things at
-all, for you never lose them, and things must be lost before they can
-be truly found. The father of the Prodigal had to lose his son before
-he could experience the joy that has become an immortal legend of the
-world. It is we who lose things, not you, sir, who never find them, who
-know the Feast of the Fatted Calf.
-
-This is not a plea for untidiness. I am no hot gospeller of disorder.
-I only seek to make the best, of a bad job, and to show that we untidy
-fellows are not without a case, have our romantic compensations, moments
-of giddy exaltation unknown to those who are endowed with the pedestrian
-and profitable virtue of tidiness. That is all. I would have the
-pedestrian virtue if I could. In other days, before I had given up hope
-of reforming myself, and when I used to make good resolutions as piously
-as my neighbours, I had many a spasm of tidiness. I looked with envy on
-my friend Higginson, who was a miracle of order, could put his hand on
-anything he wanted in the dark, kept his documents and his files and
-records like regiments of soldiers obedient to call, knew what he had
-written on 4th March 1894, and what he had said on 10th January 1901,
-and had a desk that simply perspired with tidiness. And in a spirit
-of emulation I bought a roll-top desk. I believed that tidiness was a
-purchasable commodity. You went to a furniture dealer and bought a large
-roll-top desk, and when it came home the genius of order came home with
-it. The bigger the desk, the more intricate its devices, the larger
-was the measure of order bestowed on you. My desk was of the first
-magnitude. It had an inconceivable wealth of drawers and pigeon-holes.
-It was a desk of many mansions. And I labelled them all, and gave them
-all separate jobs to perform.
-
-And then I sat back and looked the future boldly in the face. Now, said
-I, the victory is won. Chaos and old night are banished. Order reigns
-in Warsaw. I have but to open a drawer and every secret I seek will
-leap magically to light. My articles will write themselves, for every
-reference will come to my call, obedient as Ariel to the bidding of
-Prospero.
-
-                   “Approach, my Ariel; come,”
-
-I shall say, and from some remote fastness the obedient spirit will
-appear with--
-
-               “All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come
-
-               To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,
-
-               To swim, to dive into the sea, to ride
-
-               On the curl'd clouds.”
-
-I shall know where Aunt Jane's letters are, and where my bills are,
-and my cuttings about this, that, and the other, and my diaries and
-notebooks, and the time-table and the street guide. I shall never be
-short of a match or a spare pair of spectacles, or a pencil, or--in
-short, life will henceforth be an easy amble to old age. For a week it
-worked like a charm. Then the demon of disorder took possession of the
-beast. It devoured everything and yielded up nothing. Into its soundless
-deeps my merchandise sank to oblivion. And I seemed to sink with it.
-It was not a desk, but a tomb. One day I got a man to take it away to a
-second-hand shop.
-
-Since then I have given up being tidy. I have realised that the quality
-of order is not purchasable at furniture shops, is not a quality of
-external things, but an indwelling spirit, a frame of mind, a habit that
-perhaps may be acquired but cannot be bought.
-
-I have a smaller desk with fewer drawers, all of them nicely choked up
-with the litter of the past. Once a year I have a gaol delivery of the
-incarcerated. The ghosts come out into the daylight, and I face them
-unflinching and unafraid. They file past, pointing minatory fingers at
-me as they go into the waste-paper basket. They file past now. But I
-do not care a dump; for to-morrow I shall seek fresh woods and pastures
-new. To-morrow the ghosts of that old untidy desk will have no terrors
-for my emancipated spirit.
-
-[Illustration: 0061]
-
-[Illustration: 0062]
-
-
-
-
-AN EPISODE
-
-|We were talking of the distinction between madness and sanity when one
-of the company said that we were all potential madmen, just as every
-gambler was a potential suicide, or just as every hero was a potential
-coward.
-
-“I mean,” he said, “that the difference between the sane and the
-insane is not that the sane man never has mad thoughts. He has, but he
-recognises them as mad, and keeps his hand on the rein of action. He
-thinks them, and dismisses them. It is so with the saint and the sinner.
-The saint is not exempt from evil thoughts, but he knows they are evil,
-is master of himself, and puts them away.
-
-“I speak with experience,” he went on, “for the potential madman in me
-once nearly got the upper hand. I won, but it was a near thing, and if
-I had gone down in that struggle I should have been branded for all
-time as a criminal lunatic, and very properly put away in some place of
-safety. Yet I suppose no one ever suspected me of lunacy.”
-
-“Tell us about it,” we said in chorus.
-
-“It was one evening in New York,” he said. “I had had a very exhausting
-time, and was no doubt mentally tired. I had taken tea with two friends
-at the Belmont Hotel, and as we found we were all disengaged that
-evening we agreed to spend it together at the Hippodrome, where a revue,
-winding up with a great spectacle that had thrilled New York, was being
-presented. When we went to the box office we found that we could not get
-three seats together, so we separated, my friends going to the floor of
-the house and I to the dress circle.
-
-“If you are familiar with the place you will know its enormous
-dimensions and the vastness of the stage. When I took my seat next but
-one to one of the gangways the house was crowded and the performance had
-begun. It was trivial and ordinary enough, but it kept me amused, and
-between the acts I went out to see the New Yorkers taking 'soft' drinks
-in the promenades. I did not join them in that mild indulgence, nor did
-I speak to anyone.
-
-“After the interval before the concluding spectacle I did not return to
-my seat until the curtain was up. The transformation hit me like a
-blow. The huge stage had been converted into a lake, and behind the lake
-through filmy draperies there was the suggestion of a world in flames.
-I passed to my seat and sat down. I turned from the blinding glow of the
-conflagration in front and cast my eye over the sea of faces that filled
-the great theatre from floor to ceiling. 'Heavens! if there were a fire
-in this place,' I thought. At that thought the word 'Fire' blazed in my
-brain like a furnace. 'What if some madman cried Fire?' flashed through
-my mind, and then '_What if I cried Fire?_'
-
-“At that hideous suggestion, the demon word that suffused my brain leapt
-like a shrieking maniac within me and screamed and fought for utterance.
-I felt it boiling in my throat, I felt it on my tongue. I felt myself to
-be two persons engaged in a deadly grapple--a sane person struggling to
-keep his feet against the mad rush of an insane monster. I clenched my
-teeth. So long as I kept my teeth tight--tight--tight the raging
-madman would fling himself at the bars in vain. But could I keep up the
-struggle till he fell exhausted? I gripped the arms of my seat. I felt
-beads of perspiration breaking out on my right brow. How singular that
-in moments of strain the moisture always broke out at that spot. I could
-notice these things with a curious sense of detachment as if there were
-a third person within me watching the frenzied conflict. And still
-that titanic impulse lay on my tongue and hammered madly at my clenched
-teeth. Should I go out? That would look odd, and be an ignominious
-surrender. I must fight this folly down honestly and not run away from
-it. If I had a book I would try to read. If I had a friend beside me I
-would talk. But both these expedients were denied me. Should I turn to
-my unknown neighbour and break the spell with an inconsequent remark or
-a request for his programme? I looked at him out of the tail of my eye.
-He was a youngish man, in evening dress, and sitting alone as I was. But
-his eyes were fixed intently on the stage. He was obviously gripped by
-the spectacle. Had I spoken to him earlier in the evening the course
-would have been simple; but to break the ice in the midst of this tense
-silence was impossible. Moreover, I had a programme on my knees and what
-was there to say?...
-
-“I turned my eyes from the stage. What was going on there I could not
-tell. It was a blinding blur of Fire that seemed to infuriate the
-monster within me. I looked round at the house. I looked up at the
-ceiling and marked its gilded ornaments. I turned and gazed intensely at
-the occupants of the boxes, trying to turn the current of my mind into
-speculations about their dress, their faces, their characters. But the
-tyrant was too strong to be overthrown by such conscious effort. I
-looked up at the gallery; I looked down at the pit; I tried to busy my
-thoughts with calculations about the numbers present, the amount of
-money in the house, the cost of running the establishment--anything. In
-vain. I leaned back in my seat, my teeth still clenched, my hands still
-gripping the arms of the chair. How still the house was! How enthralled
-it seemed!... I was conscious that people about me were noticing my
-restless inattention. If they knew the truth.... If they could see the
-raging torment that was battering at my teeth.... Would it never go? How
-long would this wild impulse burn on my tongue? Was there no distraction
-that would
-
-               Cleanse the stuffed bosom of this perilous stuff
-
-               That feeds upon the brain.
-
-“I recalled the reply--
-
-               Therein the patient must minister to himself.
-
-“How fantastic it seemed. Here was that cool observer within me quoting
-poetry over my own delirium without being able to allay it. What a
-mystery was the brain that could become the theatre of such wild
-drama. I turned my glance to the orchestra. Ah, what was that they were
-playing?... Yes, it was a passage from Dvorak's American Symphony. How
-familiar it was! My mind incontinently leapt to a remote scene, I saw
-a well-lit room and children round the hearth and a figure at the
-piano....
-
-“It was as though the madman within me had fallen stone dead. I looked
-at the stage coolly, and observed that someone was diving into the lake
-from a trapeze that seemed a hundred feet high. The glare was still
-behind, but I knew it for a sham glare. What a fool I had been.... But
-what a hideous time I had had.... And what a close shave.... I took out
-my handkerchief and drew it across my forehead.”
-
-[Illustration: 0066]
-
-[Illustration: 0067]
-
-
-
-ON SUPERSTITIONS
-
-|It was inevitable that the fact that a murder has taken place at a
-house with the number 13 in a street, the letters of whose name number
-13, would not pass unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that
-have been committed, I suppose we should find that as many have taken
-place at No. 6 or No. 7, or any other number you choose, as at No.
-13--that the law of averages is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But
-this consideration does not prevent the world remarking on the fact when
-No. 13 has its turn. Not that the world believes there is anything
-in the superstition. It is quite sure it is a mere childish folly, of
-course. Few of us would refuse to take a house because its number was
-13, or decline an invitation to dinner because there were to be 13 at
-table. But most of us would be just a shade happier if that desirable
-residence were numbered 11, and not any the less pleased with the dinner
-if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept him away. We would
-not confess this little weakness to each other. We might even refuse to
-admit it to ourselves, but it is there.
-
-That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are
-numerous streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which
-there is no house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a
-bed in a hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though
-it has worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations
-of a discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house,
-and into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of
-a bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession
-to the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery
-is a matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow
-on the mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat
-recovery. Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers
-in the sick bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of
-a certain state of mind in the patient. There are few more curious
-revelations in that moving record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences
-during the war, than the case of the man who died of a pimple on his
-nose. He had been hideously mutilated in battle and was brought into
-hospital a sheer wreck; but he was slowly patched up and seemed to have
-been saved when a pimple appeared on his nose. It was nothing in itself,
-but it was enough to produce a mental state that checked the flickering
-return of life. It assumed a fantastic importance in the mind of the
-patient who, having survived the heavy blows of fate, died of something
-less than a pin prick. It is not difficult to understand that so fragile
-a hold of life might yield to the sudden discovery that you were lying
-in No. 13 bed.
-
-I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
-wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of
-all the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that
-I constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have
-associated the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had
-anything but the most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved
-a bus, and as free from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I
-would not change its number if I had the power to do so. But there are
-other circumstances of which I should find it less easy to clear myself
-of suspicion under cross examination. I never see a ladder against a
-house side without feeling that it is advisable to walk round it rather
-than under it. I say to myself that this is not homage to a foolish
-superstition, but a duty to my family. One must think of one's family.
-The fellow at the top of the ladder may drop anything. He may even
-drop himself. He may have had too much to drink. He may be a victim of
-epileptic fits, and epileptic fits, as everyone knows, come on at the
-most unseasonable times and places. It is a mere measure of ordinary
-safety to walk round the ladder. No man is justified in inviting danger
-in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle fancy. Moreover, probably
-that fancy has its roots in the common-sense fact that a man on a ladder
-does occasionally drop things. No doubt many of our superstitions have
-these commonplace and sensible origins. I imagine, for example, that the
-Jewish objection to pork as unclean on religious grounds is only due to
-the fact that in Eastern climates it is unclean on physical grounds.
-
-All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather
-glad that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing
-so. Even if--conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to
-myself--I walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not
-done so as a kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have
-challenged it rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way
-of dodging the absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the
-ladder. This is not easy. In the same way I am sensible of a certain
-satisfaction when I see the new moon in the open rather than through
-glass, and over my right shoulder rather than my left. I would not for
-any consideration arrange these things consciously; but if they happen
-so I fancy I am better pleased than if they do not. And on these
-occasions I have even caught my hand--which chanced to be in my pocket
-at the time--turning over money, a little surreptitiously I thought,
-but still undeniably turning it. Hands have habits of their own and one
-can't always be watching them.
-
-But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover
-in ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a
-creed outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the
-laws of the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
-superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and
-man seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
-neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of
-their hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
-inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
-misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon
-of life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of
-battles being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more
-relation to the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When
-Pompey was afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as prætor he shouted
-to the Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election
-postponed, for the Romans would never transact business after it had
-thundered. Alexander surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took
-counsel with them as a modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers.
-Even so great a man as Cæsar and so modern and enlightened a man as
-Cicero left their fate to augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were
-right and sometimes they were wrong, but whether right or wrong they
-were equally meaningless. Cicero lost his life by trusting to the wisdom
-of crows. When he was in flight from Antony and Cæsar Augustus he put to
-sea and might have escaped. But some crows chanced to circle round his
-vessel, and he took the circumstance to be unfavourable to his action,
-returned to shore and was murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece
-consulted the omens and the oracles where the farmer to-day is only
-careful of his manures.
-
-I should have liked to have seen Cæsar and I should have liked to have
-heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later
-day and who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the
-better end of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad.
-We do not know much more of the Power that
-
-                   Turns the handle of this idle show
-
-than our forefathers did, but at least we have escaped the grotesque
-shadows that enveloped them. We do not look for divine guidance in the
-entrails of animals or the flight of crows, and the House of Commons
-does not adjourn at a clap of thunder.
-
-[Illustration: 0072]
-
-[Illustration: 0073]
-
-
-
-
-ON POSSESSION
-
-|I met a lady the other day who had travelled much and seen much, and
-who talked with great vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one
-peculiarity about her. If I happened to say that I too had been, let us
-say, to Tangier, her interest in Tangier immediately faded away and
-she switched the conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not
-been, and where therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about
-the Honble. Ulick de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had
-the honour of meeting that eminent personage. And so with books and
-curiosities, places and things--she was only interested in them so long
-as they were her exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and
-when she ceased to possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have
-Tangier all to herself she did not want it at all.
-
-And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
-people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
-not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
-exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
-countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else
-in the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching
-that appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he
-was getting something that no one else had got, and when he found that
-someone else had got it its value ceased to exist.
-
-The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything
-in the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
-material thing. I do not own--to take an example--that wonderful picture
-by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his grandchild. I
-have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own room I could
-not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for years. It
-is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries of the
-mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have read, and
-beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it whenever I
-like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the painter saw in
-the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the bottle nose as he
-stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long centuries ago. The
-pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may share this spiritual
-ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine, or the shade of
-a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or the song of the
-lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is common to
-all.
-
-From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
-woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of
-solitude which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient
-Britons hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense
-a certain noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether
-he has seen these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the
-little hamlet know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them
-for a perpetual playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but
-we could not have a richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on
-every tree. For the pleasure of things is not in their possession but in
-their use.
-
-It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised
-long ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who
-scurried through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to
-say that they had done something that other people had not done. Even
-so great a man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive
-possession. De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at
-the mountains, he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene,
-whereupon Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone
-else to praise _his_ mountains. He was the high priest of nature,
-and had something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of
-revelation, and anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence,
-except through him, was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to
-nature.
-
-In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
-possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and
-Bernard Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy
-of the free human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of
-communism. On this point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's
-doctrine and pointed out that the State is not a mere individual, but
-a body composed of dissimilar parts whose unity is to be drawn “ex
-dissimilium hominum consensu.” I am as sensitive as anyone about my
-title to my personal possessions. I dislike having my umbrella stolen
-or my pocket picked, and if I found a burglar on my premises I am sure I
-shouldn't be able to imitate the romantic example of the good bishop in
-“Les Misérables.” When I found the other day that some young fruit trees
-I had left in my orchard for planting had been removed in the night I
-was sensible of a very commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean
-Valjean was I shouldn't have asked him to come and take some more trees.
-I should have invited him to return what he had removed or submit to
-consequences that follow in such circumstances.
-
-I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
-necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
-society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who
-ventured to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or
-two hence. Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control
-and the range of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If
-mankind finds that it can live more conveniently and more happily
-without private property it will do so. In spite of the Decalogue
-private property is only a human arrangement, and no reasonable observer
-of the operation of the arrangement will pretend that it executes
-justice unfailingly in the affairs of men. But because the idea of
-private property has been permitted to override with its selfishness the
-common good of humanity, it does not follow that there are not limits
-within which that idea can function for the general convenience and
-advantage. The remedy is not in abolishing it altogether, but in
-subordinating it to the idea of equal justice and community of purpose.
-It will, reasonably understood, deny me the right to call the coal
-measures, which were laid with the foundations of the earth, my private
-property or to lay waste a countryside for deer forests, but it will
-still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of ownership. And the
-more true the equation of private and public rights is, the more secure
-shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and common
-interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the grotesque
-and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of private
-property which to some minds make the idea of private property itself
-inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea of
-private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
-the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger
-of attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard
-without any apprehensions as to their safety.
-
-But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
-ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
-things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment.
-I do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
-experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
-mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. “I do
-not know how it is,” said a very rich man in my hearing, “but when I
-am in London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I
-want to be in London.” He was not wanting to escape from London or the
-country, but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions
-and was bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher “his hands were full
-but his soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world.” There
-was wisdom as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that “he who was
-born first has the greatest number of old clothes.” It is not a bad rule
-for the pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage
-to those who take a pride in its abundance.
-
-[Illustration: 0078]
-
-
-[Illustration: 0079]
-
-
-
-
-ON BORES
-
-|I was talking in the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat
-blunt manner when Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and
-began:
-
-“Well, I think America is bound to----” “Now, do you mind giving us two
-minutes?” broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom, unabashed
-and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group. Poor
-Blossom! I had almost said “Dear Blossom.” For he is really an excellent
-fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that he is a
-bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable company.
-You feel that you could love Blossom if he would only keep away. If
-you heard of his death you would be genuinely grieved and would send
-a wreath to his grave and a nice letter of condolence to his wife and
-numerous children.
-
-But it is only absence that makes the heart grow fond of Blossom. When
-he appears all your affection for him withers. You hope that he will not
-see you. You shrink to your smallest dimensions. You talk with an air of
-intense privacy. You keep your face averted. You wonder whether the back
-of your head is easily distinguishable among so many heads. All in vain.
-He approacheth with the remorselessness of fate. He putteth his hand
-upon your shoulder. He remarketh with the air of one that bringeth new
-new's and good news--“Well, I think that America is bound to----” And
-then he taketh a chair and thou lookest at the clock and wonderest how
-soon thou canst decently remember another engagement.
-
-Blossom is the bore courageous. He descends on the choicest company
-without fear or parley. Out, sword, and at 'em, is his motto. He
-advances with a firm voice and a confident air, as of one who knows he
-is welcome everywhere and has only to choose his company. He will have
-nothing but the best, and as he enters the room you may see his
-eye roving from table to table, not in search of the glad eye of
-recognition, but of the most select companionship, and having marked
-down his prey he goes forward boldly to the attack. Salutes the circle
-with easy familiarity, draw's up his chair with assured and masterful
-authority, and plunges into the stream of talk with the heavy impact
-of a walrus or hippopotamus taking a bath. The company around him melts
-away, but he is not dismayed. Left alone with a circle of empty chairs,
-he riseth like a giant refreshed, casteth his eye abroad, noteth another
-group that whetteth his appetite for good fellowship, moveth towards it
-with bold and resolute front. You may see him put to flight as many as
-three circles inside an hour, and retire at the end, not because he is
-beaten, but because there is nothing left worth crossing swords with. “A
-very good club to-night,” he says to Mrs B. as he puts on his slippers.
-
-Not so Trip. He is the bore circumspect. He proceeds by sap and mine
-where Blossom charges the battlements sword in hand. He enters timidly
-as one who hopes that he will be unobserved. He goes to the table and
-examines the newspapers, takes one and seats himself alone. But not so
-much alone that he is entirely out of the range of those fellows in the
-corner who keep up such a cut-and-thrust of wit. Perchance one of them
-may catch his eye and open the circle to him. He readeth his paper
-sedulously, but his glance passeth incontinently outside the margin or
-over the top of the page to the coveted group. No responsive eye meets
-his. He moveth just a thought nearer along the sofa by the wall. Now
-he is well within hearing. Now he is almost of the company itself.
-But still unseen--noticeably unseen. He puts down his paper, not
-ostentatiously but furtively. He listens openly to the conversation,
-as one who has been enmeshed in it unconsciously, accidentally,
-almost unwillingly, for was he not absorbed in his paper until this
-conversation disturbed him? And now it would be almost uncivil not to
-listen. He waits for a convenient opening and then gently insinuates
-a remark like one venturing on untried ice. And the ice breaks and the
-circle melts. For Trip, too, is a bore.
-
-I remember in those wonderful submarine pictures of the brothers
-Williamson, which we saw in London some time ago, a strange fish at
-whose approach all the other fish turned tail. It was not, I think, that
-they feared him, nor that he was less presentable in appearance than any
-other fish, but simply that there was something about him that made them
-remember things. I forget what his name was, or whether he even had a
-name. But his calling was obvious. He was the Club Bore. He was the fish
-who sent the other fish about their business. I thought of Blossom as
-I saw that lonely creature whisking through the water in search of some
-friendly ear into which he could remark--“Well, I think that America is
-bound to----” or words to that effect. I thought how superior an animal
-is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish did. He
-hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb. He
-looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth even
-to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his
-feelings.
-
-It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of
-sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists
-on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but
-this is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. And the humour must
-not be that counterfeit currency which consists in the retailing of
-borrowed stories. “Of all bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang,
-and Heaven in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate its species,”
- says De Quincey, “the most insufferable is the teller of good stories.”
- It is an over hard saying, subject to exceptions; but it contains the
-essential truth, for the humour of good company must be an authentic
-emanation of personality and not a borrowed tale. It is no discredit to
-be a bore. Very great men have been bores! I fancy that Macaulay,
-with all his transcendent gifts, was a bore. My head aches even at the
-thought of an evening spent in the midst of the terrific torrent of
-facts and certainties that poured from that brilliant and amiable man. I
-find myself in agreement for once with Melbourne who wished that he
-was “as cocksure of one thing as Macaulay was of everything.” There is
-pretty clear evidence that Wordsworth was a bore and that Coleridge was
-a bore, and I am sure Bob Southey must have been an intolerable
-bore. And Neckar's daughter was fortunate to escape Gibbon for he was
-assuredly a prince of bores. He took pains to leave posterity in
-no doubt on the point. He wrote his “Autobiography” which, as a wit
-observed, showed that “he did not know the difference between himself
-and the Roman Empire. He has related his 'progressions from London to
-Bariton and from Bariton to London' in the same monotonous, majestic
-periods that he recorded the fall of states and empires.” Yes, an
-indubitable bore. Yet these were all admirable men and even great men.
-Let not therefore the Blossoms and the Trips be discomfited. It may be
-that it is not they who are not fit company for us, but we who are not
-fit company for them.
-
-[Illustration: 0084]
-
-[Illustration: 0085]
-
-
-
-
-A LOST SWARM
-
-|We were busy with the impossible hen when the alarm came. The
-impossible hen is sitting on a dozen eggs in the shed, and, like the boy
-on the burning deck, obstinately refuses to leave the post of duty. A
-sense of duty is an excellent thing, but even a sense of duty can be
-carried to excess, and this hen's sense of duty is simply a disease. She
-is so fiercely attached to her task that she cannot think of eating, and
-resents any attempt to make her eat as a personal affront or a malignant
-plot against her impending family. Lest she should die at her post, a
-victim to a misguided hunger strike, we were engaged in the delicate
-process of substituting a more reasonable hen, and it was at this moment
-that a shout from the orchard announced that No. 5 was swarming.
-
-It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had
-been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells
-visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around
-the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the
-thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more
-exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You
-pass it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched
-within. The next, the whole colony roars out like a cataract, envelops
-the hive in a cloud of living dust until the queen has emerged and gives
-direction to the masses that slowly cohere around her as she settles
-on some branch. The excitement is contagious. It is a call to adventure
-with the unknown, an adventure sharpened by the threat of loss and tense
-with the instancy of action. They have the start. It is your wit against
-their impulse, your strategy against their momentum. The cloud thins
-and expands as it moves away from the hive and you are puzzled to
-know whither the main stream is moving in these ever widening folds of
-motion. The first indeterminate signs of direction to-day were towards
-the beech woods behind the cottage, but with the aid of a syringe we put
-up a barrage of water in that direction, and headed them off towards a
-row of chestnuts and limes at the end of the paddock beyond the orchard.
-A swift encircling move, armed with syringe and pail, brought them again
-under the improvised rainstorm. They concluded that it was not such a
-fine day as they had thought after all, and that they had better take
-shelter at once, and to our entire content the mass settled in a great
-blob on a conveniently low bough of a chestnut tree. Then, by the aid of
-a ladder and patient coaxing, the blob was safely transferred to a skep,
-and carried off triumphantly to the orchard.
-
-[Illustration: 0089]
-
-And now, but for the war, all would have been well. For, but for the
-war, there would have been a comfortable home in which the adventurers
-could have taken up their new quarters. But hives are as hard to come by
-in these days as petrol or matches, or butter or cheese, or most of the
-other common things of life. We had ransacked England for hives and the
-neighbourhood for wood with which to make hives; but neither could be
-had, though promises were plenty, and here was the beginning of the
-swarms of May, each of them worth a load of hay according to the adage,
-and never a hive to welcome them with. Perhaps to-morrow something would
-arrive, if not from Gloucester, then from Surrey. If only the creatures
-would make themselves at home in the skep for a day or two....
-
-But no. For two hours or so all seemed well. Then perhaps they found
-the skep too hot, perhaps they detected the odour of previous tenants,
-perhaps--but who can read the thoughts of these inscrutable creatures?
-Suddenly the skep was enveloped in a cyclone of bees, and again the
-orchard sang with the exciting song of the wings. For a moment the cloud
-seemed to hover over an apple tree near by, and once more the syringe
-was at work insisting, in spite of the sunshine, that it was a
-dreadfully wet day on which to be about, and that a dry skep,
-even though pervaded by the smell of other bees, had points worth
-considering. In vain. This time they had made up their minds. It may
-be that news had come to them, from one of the couriers sent out to
-prospect for fresh quarters, of a suitable home elsewhere, perhaps a
-deserted hive, perhaps a snug hollow in some porch or in the bole of an
-ancient tree. Whatever the goal, the decision was final. One moment the
-cloud was about us; the air was filled with the high-pitched roar of
-thirty thousand pair of wings. The next moment the cloud had gone--gone
-sailing high over the trees in the paddock and out across the valley. We
-burst through the paddock fence into the cornfield beyond; but we might
-as well have chased the wind. Our first load of hay had taken wings
-and gone beyond recovery. For an hour or two there circled round the
-deserted skep a few hundred odd bees who had apparently been out when
-the second decision to migrate was taken, and found themselves homeless
-and queenless. I saw some of them try to enter other hives, but they
-were promptly ejected as foreigners by the sentries who keep the porch
-and admit none who do not carry the authentic odour of the hive. Perhaps
-the forlorn creatures got back to No. 5, and the young colony left in
-possession of that tenement.
-
-We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full of
-hope, for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's bench
-under the pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and plane,
-and before nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And it
-never rains but it pours--here is a telegram telling us of three hives
-on the way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We will
-harvest our loads of hay before they take wing.
-
-[Illustration: 0090]
-
-[Illustration: 0091]
-
-
-
-
-YOUNG AMERICA
-
-|If you want to understand America,” said my host, “come and see
-her young barbarians at play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at
-Princeton. It will be a great game. Come and see it.”
-
-He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured
-victory in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but
-consider the record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was
-as much ahead of Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of
-Cambridge on the river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It
-was like a Derby Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the
-great hall of that magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated
-men and women, wearing the favours of the rival colleges--yellow for
-Princeton and red for Harvard--passed through the gateways to the
-platform, filling train after train, that dipped under the Hudson and,
-coming out into the sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered
-away with its jolly load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country,
-through historic Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off
-towers of Princeton.
-
-And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges,
-such a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
-“how-d'ye-do's” and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
-times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
-haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured
-in the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some
-terrific memorial of antiquity--seen from without a mighty circular wall
-of masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval,
-or rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the
-level of the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand
-spectators--on this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side,
-with the sunlight full upon them, the yellows.
-
-Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
-playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings---for this American
-game is much more complicated than English Rugger--its goal-posts and
-its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
-minute record of the game.
-
-The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
-there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
-music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
-like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
-horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
-opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
-
-Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
-Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
-greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.
-
-The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war.
-Three flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They
-shout through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line,
-they wave their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with
-that leap there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of
-cheers roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
-demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of
-a tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey--the growl rising
-to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
-
-The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell,
-roar for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of
-us, and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their
-limbs we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I
-cannot hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off
-with the battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand
-lusty pairs of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid,
-we rise like one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our
-cheer-leaders, gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad
-dervishes, we shout back the song of “Har-vard! Har-vard!”
-
-And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into
-the field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson,
-that in the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and
-helmeted so that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic
-muscular development and horrific visage. At their entrance the
-megaphones opposite are heard again, and the enemy host rises and
-repeats its wonderful cheer and tiger growl. We rise and heave the
-challenge back. And now the teams are in position, the front lines, with
-the ball between, crouching on the ground for the spring. In the silence
-that has suddenly fallen on the scene, one hears short, sharp cries of
-numbers. “Five!” “Eleven!” “Three!” “Six!” “Ten!” like the rattle of
-musketry. Then--crash! The front lines have leapt on each other. There
-is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs and bodies. The swirl clears and
-men are seen lying about all over the line as though a shell had burst
-in their midst, while away to the right a man with the ball is brought
-down with a crash to the ground by another, who leaps at him like a
-projectile that completes its trajectory at his ankles.
-
-I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
-thrilling minutes--which, with intervals and stoppages for the
-attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours--how the battle
-surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the tension
-of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how Harvard
-scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm of
-victory, how Princeton drew level--a cyclone from the other side!--and
-forged ahead--another cyclone--how man after man went down like an ox,
-was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how another
-brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last hardly a
-man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every convenient
-interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we jumped up
-and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how the match
-ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of victory that
-is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters--all this is recorded
-in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives in my mind as
-a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous “rag” in which young and old, gravity
-and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly confounded.
-
-“And what did you think of it?” asked my host as we rattled back to New
-York in the darkness that night. “I think it has helped me to understand
-America,” I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
-explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.
-
-[Illustration: 0095]
-
-[Illustration: 0096]
-
-
-
-
-ON GREAT REPLIES
-
-|At a dinner table the other night, the talk turned upon a certain
-politician whose cynical traffic in principles and loyalties has
-eclipsed even the record of Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one
-defender, an amiable and rather portentous gentleman who did not so much
-talk as lecture, and whose habit of looking up abstractedly and fixedly
-at some invisible altitude gave him the impression of communing with the
-Almighty. He was profuse in his admissions and apologies, but he wound
-up triumphantly with the remark:
-
-“But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.”
-
-“So was Madame de Pompadour,” said a voice from the other side of the
-table.
-
-It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
-replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician
-with a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of
-democracy who, like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things
-for ambition and power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through
-the dull, solemn man on the other side of the table like a rapier. There
-was no reply. There was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash
-of lightning. It revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift,
-searching intelligence, equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that
-went with deadly certainty to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed
-on the whole landscape of discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that
-gave it larger significance and range.
-
-It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour
-and finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
-absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and
-personality. There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning
-phrase that has leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental
-things. I do not know much about the military genius or the deeds of
-Augureau, but I know the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon
-about the celebration at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial
-ambitions of the First Consul. Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought
-of the ceremony. “Oh, it was very fine,” replied the general; “there was
-nothing wanting, _except the million of men who have perished in pulling
-down what you are setting up_.”
-
-And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
-the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
-make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
-bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
-him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud
-Italian, a poor peasant's son--a miserable friar of a country town--was
-prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
-Christendom.
-
-“What!” said the Cardinal at last to him, “do you think the Pope cares
-for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
-than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
-_you--you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you
-be then--where will you be then?”
-
-“Then, as now,” replied Luther. “Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
-God.”
-
-<b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
-venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
-century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man--one of the
-profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
-country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
-brilliant author of the papers on “The Crisis,” that kept the flame of
-the rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of
-the United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the
-Bastille for presentation to Washington. The true character of this
-great Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had
-discoursed “On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.” And
-Paine answered, “God did not make rich and poor. God made male and
-female and gave the earth for their inheritance.”</b>
-
-It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
-this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
-to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
-Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
-boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
-remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. “Indeed,”
- said the President. “Then whose boots do they black?” There was the same
-mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
-inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. “I do not know,
-madam,” he said, “but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.”
-
-And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
-when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
-dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
-disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
-using his department to further his ambitions. “Raymond,” he said, “you
-were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
-is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving
-the horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he
-rushed across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely
-keep pace with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an
-enormous chin fly fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother
-asked me what I did that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse
-bitten in that way. 'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him
-go!' Now, if Mr Chase has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm
-not going to knock it off, if it will only make his department _go!_” If
-one were asked to name the most famous answer in history, one might, not
-unreasonably, give the palm to a woman--a poor woman, too, who has been
-dust for three thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke
-six words that gave her immortality. They have been recalled on
-thousands of occasions and in all lands, but never more memorably than
-by John Bright when he was speaking of the hesitation with which he
-accepted cabinet office: “I should have preferred much,” he said, “to
-have remained in the common rank of citizenship in which heretofore I
-have lived. There is a passage in the Old Testament that has often
-struck me as being one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect that
-the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very hospitably entertained
-by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make her some amends, and
-he called her to him and asked her what there was he should do for her.
-'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to the captain of the
-host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the Shunamite woman
-returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the prophet's offer,
-'I dwell among mine own people.'”
-
-It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
-point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
-babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if
-by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the
-spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty
-replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp
-tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit or
-cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he never
-made one. His repartees are perfect of their kind, but they belong to
-the debating club and the law court. They raise a laugh and score a
-point, but they are summer lightnings. The great reply does not come
-from witty minds, but from rare and profound souls. The brilliant
-adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that reply of Augereau
-than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it because with
-all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a great part on
-the world's stage.
-
-[Illustration: 0101]
-
-[Illustration: 0102]
-
-
-
-
-ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES
-
-|I went recently to an industrial town in the North on some business,
-and while there had occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and
-engines and machinery of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers
-and engines and machinery of all sorts, and I did my best to appear
-interested and understanding. But I was neither one nor the other. I was
-only bored. Boilers and engines, I know, are important things. Compared
-with a boiler, the finest lyric that was ever written is only a perfume
-on the gale. There is a practical downrightness about a boiler that
-makes “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” or “O mistress mine, where are
-you roaming?” or even “Twelfth Night” itself, a mere idle frivolity.
-All you can say in favour of “Twelfth Night,” from the strictly business
-point of view, is that it doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank
-heaven for that.
-
-But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
-never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought
-to be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How,
-for example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of
-a boiler? How--and this was still more important--how could I hope
-to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
-gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
-great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it
-as much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
-discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no
-bowels of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the
-symbol of brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional
-values. In Dante's “Inferno” each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted
-to give him the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room
-for me, and there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever
-among wheels and pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying
-amidst the thud and din of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily
-“waste” to catch those perfumes on the gale, those frivolous rhythms
-to which I had devoted so much of that life' which should be “real and
-earnest” and occupied with serious things like boilers. And so it came
-about that as my friend talked I spiritually wilted away.
-
-I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
-learned and articulate boiler.
-
-Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
-boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
-inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a “b” in
-boilers and a “b” in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect
-was miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit.
-The light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if
-I were a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved
-brother. Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come,
-I must see his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could
-whisk us to his house in the suburbs, and there in a great room,
-surrounded with hundreds of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from
-the ends of the earth, butterflies from the forests of Brazil and
-butterflies from the plains of India, and butterflies from the veldt of
-South Africa and butterflies from the bush of Australia, all arranged
-in the foliage natural to their habitat to show how their scheme of
-coloration conformed to their setting. Some of them had their wings
-folded back and were indistinguishable from the leaves among which they
-lay. And as my friend, with growing excitement, revealed his treasure,
-he talked of his adventures in the pursuit of them, and of the law of
-natural selection and all its bearing upon the mystery of life, its
-survivals and its failures. This hobby of his was, in short, the key
-of his world. The boiler house was the prison where he did time. At the
-magic word “butterflies” the prison door opened, and out he sailed on
-the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the mind.
-
-There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
-something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a
-ship without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair
-that most of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the
-end of the journey without ever having found a path and a sense of
-direction. But a hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial
-a thing, but it supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm
-outside the mere routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it
-will lead. You may begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in
-continents. You may collect coins, and find that the history of man is
-written on them. You may begin with bees, and end with the science of
-life. Ruskin began with pictures and found they led to economics and
-everything else. For as every road was said to lead to Rome, so every
-hobby leads out into the universe, and supplies us with a compass
-for the adventure. It saves us from the humiliation of being merely
-smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in general, for the world
-is too full of things to permit us to be anything else, but one field
-of intensive culture will give even our smattering a respectable
-foundation.
-
-It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who
-knows even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might
-be when he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not
-know them and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of
-measurement which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters.
-He will have, above all, an attachment to life which will make him at
-home in the world. Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged
-into this bewildering whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of
-circumstance. We have in us the genius of speculation, but the further
-our speculations penetrate the profounder becomes the mystery that
-baffles us. We are caught in the toils of affections that crumble to
-dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither like grass, beaten about by
-storms that shatter our stoutest battlements like spray blown upon the
-wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little more than dreams within
-a dream--or as Carlyle puts it, “exhalations that are and then are not.”
- And we share the poet's sense of exile--
-
-               In this house with starry dome,
-
-                   Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
-
-               Shall I never be at home?
-
-                   Never wholly at my ease?
-
-From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
-stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
-hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
-that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
-without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
-find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come
-and go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always
-renewed. Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with
-Horace or Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the
-sense of the mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden
-of the mind, self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of
-intractible circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the
-spirit and endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman
-in “Romany Rye,” you will remember, found his deliverance in studying
-Chinese. His bereavement had left him without God and without hope in
-the world, without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the
-things that reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly
-before him, when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and
-he thought he heard a voice say, “The marks! the marks! cling to the
-marks! or-----” And from this beginning--but the story is too fruity,
-too rich with the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book
-down, turn to the episode, and thank me for sending you again into the
-enchanted Borrovian realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in
-books. It is enough for the purpose here to recall this perfect example
-of the healing power of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little
-world of our own where we can be at ease, and from whose warmth and
-friendliness we can look out on the vast conundrum without expecting an
-answer or being much troubled because we do not get one. It was a hobby
-that poor Pascal needed to allay that horror of the universe which he
-expressed in the desolating phrase, “Le silence étemel de ces espaces
-infinis m'effraie.” For on the wings of the butterfly one can not only
-outrange the boiler, but can adventure into the infinite in the spirit
-of happy and confident adventure.
-
-[Illustration: 0108]
-
-[Illustration: 0109]
-
-
-
-
-ON HEREFORD BEACON
-
-|Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she
-died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble
-range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester beacon
-to Gloucester beacon.
-
-It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way
-up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its
-descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire
-country.
-
-Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
-range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the
-deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as
-this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman
-legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural
-ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the
-work to----. But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell
-his own story.
-
-He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
-conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
-the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
-slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of
-the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up
-the steep road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the
-Cotswolds, Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and
-the other features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the
-road, Hereford beacon came in view.
-
-“That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.”
-
-He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
-
-“Killed?” said I, a little stunned.
-
-“Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
-from about here you know, sir.”
-
-“But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he
-wasn't killed at all. He died in his bed.”
-
-The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
-
-“Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
-captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
-sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard
-tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.”
-
-He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but
-the capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
-Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must
-be fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
-
-“He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,” he went on. “He blowed
-away Little Malvern Church down yonder.”
-
-He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
-visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
-ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of
-Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
-
-“Left the tower standing he did, sir,” pursued the historian. “Now, why
-should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?”
-
-And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought
-us to Wynd's Point.
-
-The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an
-old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the
-little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out
-on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently
-declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred
-to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and
-singer.
-
-It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of
-a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
-roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
-chalet, “the golden cage,” of the singer fronting the drawing-room
-bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter
-pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls--all speak with mute
-eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres,
-whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet
-simplicity of her name.
-
-“Why did you leave the stage?” asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
-like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
-surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for
-the sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for
-charity.
-
-Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
-
-“Because,” she said, touching the Bible, “it left me so little time for
-this, and” (looking at the sunset) “none for that.”
-
-There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
-cuckoo--his voice failing slightly in these hot June days--wakes you in
-the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows
-lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
-against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
-deepening gloom of the vast plain.
-
-Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
-unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the
-road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the
-broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come
-out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the
-green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of
-Worcester beacon.
-
-Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon
-to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these
-ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled
-at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of
-exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It
-is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of
-the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and
-look out over half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills,
-Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where
-southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the
-imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you
-may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill, and
-plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs are
-grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of that
-ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of
-smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of
-the Roses, of “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the
-field at Tewkesbury,” and of Ancient Pistol, whose “wits were thick as
-Tewkesbury mustard.” There is the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and
-far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of that
-great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at Worcester,
-where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land and
-where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.
-
-The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to
-cast its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the
-wide plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing
-here through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to
-Oxford and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are
-coming up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom.
-Now is the moment to turn westward, where
-
-                   Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
-
-                   Bleeds upon the road to Wales.
-
-All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun,
-and in the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the
-far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of
-alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that clothe these western
-slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the startled noise and
-flurry of its flight.
-
-The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
-the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
-suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
-
-Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and
-a late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through
-the twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great
-sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads
-of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an
-unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all
-save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its
-graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come
-those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that close
-the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is unbroken.
-
-          And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
-
-          In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
-
-Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
-
-[Illustration: 0115]
-
-[Illustration: 0116]
-
-
-
-
-CHUM
-
-|When I turned the key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a
-familiar sound. It was the “thump, thump, thump,” of a tail on the floor
-at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place
-was vacant. Chum had gone, and he would not return. I knew that the
-veterinary must have called, pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him
-away, and that I should hear no more his “welcome home!” at midnight. No
-matter what the labours of the day had been or how profound his sleep,
-he never failed to give me a cheer with the stump of his tail and to
-blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him “Good dog” and a pat on the head.
-Then with a huge sigh of content he would lapse back into slumber,
-satisfied that the last duty of the day was done, and that all was well
-with the world for the night. Now he has lapsed into sleep altogether.
-
-I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will
-pay my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and
-in any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that
-I enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he
-enjoyed my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom
-he went, and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to
-go with, unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person.
-It was not that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned
-after a longish absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would
-leap round and round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent
-her to the floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's
-schoolmaster who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and
-explained that “he didn't know his own strength.”
-
-But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and
-I was the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the
-woodlands, and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his
-reddish-brown coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan,
-and his head down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there
-was more than a hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was
-precisely no one ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up.
-His fine liquid brown eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but
-he had a nobler head than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain
-of the Irish terrier in him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat
-was all his own. And all his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and
-his genius for friendship.
-
-There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he
-was reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had
-been sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
-grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin,
-and he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
-schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
-eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
-something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
-when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
-abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
-ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
-You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about
-his affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to
-the forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled
-to any good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and
-watchful, his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury
-and pity for the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the
-qualities of a rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into
-an unspeakable abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your
-voice and all the world was young and full of singing birds again.
-
-He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
-that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
-For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or
-his colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more
-than a little of the spirit of the flunkey. “A man's a man, for a'
-that,” was not his creed. He discriminated between the people who came
-to the front door and the people who came to the side door. To the
-former he was systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly
-hostile. “The poor in a loomp is bad,” was his fixed principle, and any
-one carrying a basket, wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was _ipso
-facto_ suspect. He held, in short, to the servile philosophy of
-clothes as firmly as any waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair.
-Familiarity never altered his convictions. No amount of correction
-affected his stubborn dislike of postmen. They offended him in many
-ways. They wore uniforms; they came, nevertheless, to the front door;
-they knocked with a challenging violence that revolted his sense of
-propriety. In the end, the burden of their insults was too much for
-him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of trousers. Perhaps that
-incident was not unconnected with his passing.
-
-One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
-Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in
-leaping a stile--he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow--or
-had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
-latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
-for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted.
-But whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all
-the veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to
-the revels in his native woods--for he had come to us as a pup from a
-cottage in the heart of the woodland country--no longer made him tense
-as a drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and
-left his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the
-hill to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into
-the house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to
-be forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a
-place he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream
-of the happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there
-waiting to scour the woods with me as of old.
-
-[Illustration: 0120]
-
-[Illustration: 0121]
-
-
-
-
-ON MATCHES AND THINGS
-
-|I had an agreeable assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I
-went-into a tea-shop and sat down. There were several young waitresses
-by the counter engaged in animated conversation. They eyed me with that
-cold aloofness which is the ritual of the order, and which, I take
-it, is intended to convey to you the fact that they are princesses in
-disguise who only serve in shops for a pastime. When I had taken out
-my watch twice with an appearance of ostentatious urgency, one of the
-princesses came towards me, took my order (looking meanwhile out of
-the window to remind me that she was not really aware of me, but only
-happened to be there by chance), and moved languorously away. When she
-returned she brought tea--and sugar. In that moment her disdain was
-transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel who under the disguise of
-indifference went about scattering benedictions among her customers and
-assuring them that the spring had come back to the earth.
-
-It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future
-became suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine)
-had passed magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be
-sweetened thrice a day by honest sugar.
-
-Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised
-how I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my
-friends through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump
-person, but in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the
-spoon and stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer
-did the spoon seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere
-survival of an antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the
-back of your coat. It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the
-tea-table. To stir your tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It
-keeps tune with your thoughts if you are alone, and it keeps time with
-your tongue if you are talking. It helps out the argument, fills up
-the gaps, provides the animated commentary on your discourse. There are
-people I shall always remember in the attitude of standing, cup in hand,
-and stirring, stirring, stirring as the current of talk flowed on. Such
-a one was that fine old tea-drinker, Prince Kropotkin--rest his gentle
-soul if he indeed be among the slain.... With what universal benevolence
-his patriarchal face used to gleam as he stood stirring and talking,
-talking and stirring, with the hurry of his teeming thoughts.
-
-It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
-for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
-little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
-of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
-solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
-with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon
-the grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all
-the pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious
-than you had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days
-knitting up your severed friendships with things. You slip into the
-National Gallery just to see what old favourites have come up from the
-darkness of the cellars. You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in
-the great moon that shines again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that
-chimes gives you a pleasant emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds
-like the salutation of an old friend who had been given up as lost. And
-matches.... There was a time when I thought nothing of a match. I would
-strike a match as thoughtlessly as I would breathe. And for the same
-reason, that matches were as plentiful as air. I would strike a match
-and let the wind puff it out; another and let it burn out before using
-it, simply because I was too busy talking or listening or thinking
-or doing nothing. I would try to light a pipe in a gale of wind on a
-mountain top, crouching behind a boulder, getting inside my hat, lying
-on the ground under my coat, and wasting matches by the dozen. I would
-get rid of a box of matches a day, and not care a dump. The world was
-simply choked with matches, and it was almost a duty to go on striking
-them to make room for the rest. You could get a dozen boxes for a penny
-or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see great bags of matches with
-boxes bursting out at the top, and simply asking to be taken. If by some
-accident you found yourself without a box in your pocket you asked the
-stranger for a light as confidently as you would ask him for the time
-o' day. You were asking for something that cost him nothing except a
-commonplace civility.
-
-And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
-Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
-away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, “No; we haven't any.” They
-simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
-smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the
-habit and just go on in their sleep. “Oh, you funny people,” they seem
-to say, dreamily. “Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach
-you that there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years
-and years; never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let
-the other fools follow on.” And you go away, feeling much as though you
-had been caught trying to pass a bad half-crown.
-
-No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, “Can you oblige me
-with a light, sir?” You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or
-a pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
-wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
-fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting
-to pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket,
-preparing to have “After you, sir,” on your lips at the exact moment
-when he has lit his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out
-the precious flame. Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps
-the fellow is only waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting
-for what the other hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless
-world.
-
-I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which
-I can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips
-I know that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that
-excellent fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine,
-and I have had more lights from him in these days than from any other
-man on earth. I never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it
-quite boldly, fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me--but not so
-often, not nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If--having
-borrowed a little too recklessly from him of late--I go into his room
-and begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the
-Peace Conference, or things like that--is he deceived? Not at all. He
-knows that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has
-one left it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his
-pipe because he knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man
-Higginson is. I cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
-
-But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
-tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
-authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
-before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
-welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
-Lords and the Oval.
-
-And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning,
-Your young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is
-sailing home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds
-instead of khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters
-who are strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on
-historic battlefields and now ask you whether you will have “thick or
-clear,” with the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your
-galley proof is brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you
-look at with a shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he
-is that pale, thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago,
-and who in the interval has been fighting in many lands near and far,
-in France and Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing
-the burnished livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a
-stoutish fellow who turns out to be the old professional released from
-Germany after long months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one
-“of the lucky ones; nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and
-lived with the farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir,
-nothing to complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.”
-
-Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men
-and things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those
-who will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound
-of Big Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we
-enter the new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the
-stimulus of the princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the
-credit side of things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We
-have left the deathly solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the
-moraine is rough and toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we
-can hear the pleasant tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old
-pastures.
-
-[Illustration: 0127]
-
-[Illustration: 0128]
-
-
-
-
-ON BEING REMEMBERED
-
-|As I lay on the hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods
-watching the harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows
-chasing each other across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were
-looking down with me. For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an
-old school book is scored with the names of generations of scholars.
-Near by are the earthworks of the ancient Britons, and on the face of
-the hill is a great white horse carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those
-white marks, that look like sheep feeding on the green hill-side, are
-reminders of the great war. How long ago it seems since the recruits
-from the valley used to come up here to learn the art of trench-digging,
-leaving these memorials behind them before they marched away to whatever
-fate awaited them! All over the hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit
-by merry parties on happy holidays. One scorched and blackened area,
-more spacious than the rest, marks the spot where the beacon fire was
-lit to celebrate the signing of Peace. And on the boles of the beech
-trees are initials carved deep in the bark--some linked like those of
-lovers, some freshly cut, some old and covered with lichen.
-
-What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and
-school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is
-as ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school
-desks of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of
-the schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted
-them. There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood
-or scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled.
-And the joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found
-pleasure in whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice
-white ceiling above me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's
-hankering for a charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies.
-But at the back of it all, the explanation of those initials
-on the boles of the beeches is a desire for some sort of
-immortality--terrestrial if not celestial. Even the least of us would
-like to be remembered, and so we carve our names on tree trunks and
-tombstones to remind later generations that we too once passed this way.
-
-If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great.
-One of the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will
-trumpet its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries
-to take care that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's “Exegi
-monumentum ære perennius” is one of many confident assertions that he
-knew he would be among the immortals. “I have raised a monument,” he
-says, “more enduring than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings;
-a monument which shall not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by
-the rage of the north wind, nor by the countless years and the flight
-of ages.” The same magnificent confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud
-declaration--
-
-               Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
-
-               Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
-
-and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had
-written a song of a sparrow--
-
-               And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
-
-               Of which I sang one song that will not die.
-
-Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was “writ in water,” but
-behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for
-immortality.
-
-Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable
-confidence. “I'll be more respected,” he said, “a hundred years after
-I am dead than I am at present;” and even John Knox had his eye on
-an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus.
-“Theologians there will always be in abundance,” he said; “the like of
-me comes but once in centuries.”
-
-Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
-their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
-conceit on the subject. “What I write,” he said, “is not written on
-slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of
-years can efface it.” And again, “I shall dine late, but the dining-room
-will be well-lighted, the guests few and select.” A proud fellow, if
-ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le
-Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. “I do not die,” he
-said grandly; “_I quit the time_.” And beside this we may put Victor
-Hugo's rather truculent, “It is time my name ceased to fill the world.”
-
-But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
-that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. “Do you suppose,” he
-said, “to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
-should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
-service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
-Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
-toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has
-ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life,
-then at last it would begin to live.” The context, it is true,
-suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a
-terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.
-
-Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject
-is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in
-books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable
-terms. In the preface to his “Account of Corsica” he says:--
-
-_For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
-ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should
-imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able
-to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established
-himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any
-danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his
-weaknesses. (_Oh, you rogue!_) To preserve a uniform dignity among those
-who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us
-under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved
-book may allow his natural disposition an easy play (“_You were drunk
-last night, you dog_”), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius
-when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he
-never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and
-discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are
-at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may
-cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great
-object of the noblest minds in all ages._
-
-We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition.
-Most of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of
-Gray's depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the “dull
-cold ear of death.” In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy
-and immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of
-“Alpha of the Plough” an agreeable fancy something like this. In the
-year two thousand--or it may be three thousand--yes, let us do the thing
-handsomely and not stint the centuries--in the year three thousand and
-ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and the
-Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe for
-democracy--at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer who has
-been swished that morning from the British Isles across the Atlantic
-to the Patagonian capital--swished, I need hardly remark, being the
-expression used to describe the method of flight which consists in
-being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made
-to complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be
-desired--bursts in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered
-by him in the course of some daring investigations of the famous
-subterranean passages of the ancient British capital--those passages
-which have so long perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the
-Patagonian savants, some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers,
-and some that they were the roadways of a people who had become
-so afflicted with photophobia that they had to build their cities
-underground. The trophy is a book by one “Alpha of the Plough.” It
-creates an enormous sensation. It is put under a glass case in the
-Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is translated into every Patagonian
-dialect. It is read in schools. It is referred to in pulpits. It is
-discussed in learned societies. Its author, dimly descried across the
-ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
-
-[Illustration: 0134]
-
-An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
-celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
-assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
-marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha--a gentleman with a flowing
-beard and a dome-like brow--that overlooks the market-place, and places
-wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of bells
-and a salvo of artillery.
-
-There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you,
-my dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in
-the New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved
-for most, even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world
-to-day. And yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who
-writes has the best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox,
-who among the statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But
-Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb,
-even second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the
-temple of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military
-feats of Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza
-of the poem in which he poured out his creed--
-
-               He either fears his fate too much,
-
-                   Or his deserts are small.
-
-               That dares not put it to the touch
-
-                   To win or lose it all.
-
-Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship
-with Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he
-befriended a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the
-name of his benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of
-Ægina is full of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would
-like to be remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went
-to Pindar and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his
-praise. Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. “Why, for
-so much money,” said Pytheas, “I can erect a statue of bronze in the
-temple.”
-
-“Very likely.” On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And
-now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the
-statues of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples
-themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the
-ode of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer
-paths to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of
-the Earl of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of
-Shakespeare live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their
-dedication. But one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise
-you to go and give Mr -------- £200 and a commission to send your name
-echoing down the corridors of time.
-
-Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr -------- (you will fill in the
-blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them. It would be
-safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a rose, or an
-overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can confer a modest
-immortality. They have done so for many. A certain Maréchal Neil is
-wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which is as enviable
-a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr Mackintosh is
-talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of rain, and even
-Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his battles. It would
-not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone will be thought
-of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just as Archimedes
-is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.
-
-But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the
-healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps
-one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of
-forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike,
-and we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as
-if the world babbles about us for ever.
-
-[Illustration: 0137]
-
-[Illustration: 0138]
-
-
-
-
-ON DINING
-
-|There are people who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can
-hoard it not for the sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy,
-for the satisfaction of feeling that they have got something locked up
-that they could spend if they chose without being any the poorer and
-that other people would enjoy knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending
-what they can afford to spend. It is a pleasure akin to the economy of
-the Scotsman, which, according to a distinguished member of that race,
-finds its perfect expression in taking the tube when you can afford a
-cab. But the gift of secrecy is rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the
-sake of telling them. We spend our secrets as Lamb's spendthrift spent
-his money--while they are fresh. The joy of creating an emotion in other
-people is too much for us. We like to surprise them, or shock them, or
-please them as the case may be, and we give away the secret with which
-we have been entrusted with a liberal hand and a solemn request “to say
-nothing about it.” We relish the luxury of telling the secret, and leave
-the painful duty of keeping it to the other fellow. We let the horse out
-and then solemnly demand that the stable door shall be shut so that
-it shan't escape, I have done it myself--often. I have no doubt that
-I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret to reveal, but I
-shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely selfish reasons,
-which will appear later. You may conceive me going about choking with
-mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years have
-I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can
-dine wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the
-atmosphere restful, and the prices moderate--in short, the happy
-mean between the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the
-uncompromising cheapness of Lockhart's. In those extremes I find no
-satisfaction.
-
-It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its
-ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to
-a good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren't many
-families that enjoyed their “vittles” more than her's did, and I can
-claim the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that
-I count good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I
-could join very heartily in Peacock's chorus:
-
-                   “How can a man, in his life of a span,
-
-                   Do anything better than dine.”
-
-Give me a satisfactory' dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel
-themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads
-the landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who
-insisted that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life.
-That, I think, is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few
-things more revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by
-taking emetics. But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise
-for enjoying a good dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good
-dinners. I see no necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and
-a holy mind. There was a saintly man once in this city--a famous man,
-too--who was afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out
-to dinner, he had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to
-enable him to start even with the other guests. And it is on record
-that when the ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with
-Cardinal Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses
-that hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season
-of fasting, “I fear,” said one of them, “that there is a lobster salad
-side to the Cardinal.” I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side
-too. A hot day and a lobster salad--what happier conjunction can we look
-for in a plaguey world?
-
-But, in making this confession, I am neither _gourmand_ nor _gourmet_.
-Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic
-conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and
-the great language of the _menu_ does not stir my pulse. I do not ask
-for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt
-would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for
-talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was
-pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have
-for supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as
-the shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right
-spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes--eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
-smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke
-approvingly of Sancho's choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way
-with him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against
-his rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with
-conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the
-matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to
-follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart's desire at
-the Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel
-when I enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things.
-I stroke the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and
-rises, purring with dignity, under my caress. I say “Good evening” to
-the landlord who greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once
-cordial and restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of
-his hand. No frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a
-neat-handed Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress
-and white cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility
-and aloofness that establishes the perfect relationship--obliging,
-but not familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The
-napery makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a
-mirror, and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced
-dish of hors d'ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the
-modest four-course table d'hôte begins, and when at the end you light
-your cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only
-dined, but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement,
-touched with the subtle note of a personality.
-
-And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall
-not tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It
-may be in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's
-Inn, or it may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you
-because I sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it
-I shall shatter the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the
-Mermaid and find its old English note of kindly welcome and decorous
-moderation gone, and that in its place there will be a noisy, bustling,
-popular restaurant with a band, from which I shall flee. When it is
-“discovered” it will be lost, as the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so
-I shall keep its secret. I only purr it to the cat who arches her back
-and purrs understanding in response. It is the bond of freemasonry
-between us.
-
-[Illustration: 0142]
-
-[Illustration: 0143]
-
-
-
-
-IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA
-
-|I was leaning over the rails of the upper deck idly watching the
-Chinese whom, to the number of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre
-and were to disgorge at Halifax, when the bugle sounded for lunch. A
-mistake, I thought, looking at my watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon
-hour was one. Then I remembered. I had not corrected my watch that
-morning by the ship's clock. In our pursuit of yesterday across the
-Atlantic we had put on another three-quarters of an hour. Already on
-this journey we had outdistanced to-day by two and a half hours. By
-the time we reached Halifax we should have gained perhaps six hours. In
-thought I followed the Chinamen thundering across Canada to Vancouver,
-and thence onward across the Pacific on the last stage of their voyage.
-And I realised that by the time they reached home they would have caught
-yesterday up.
-
-But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
-this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
-years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
-thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always
-the same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of
-it than I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind
-as insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
-beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we
-were overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by
-sea and land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight
-across the plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it
-was neither yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a
-confusion of all three.
-
-In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
-absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom--a parochial illusion
-of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
-axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
-light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that
-they were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
-numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away
-on the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length
-of light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
-meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
-and dark--what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for ever
-and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark--not many days, but
-just one day and that always midday.
-
-At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
-itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck
-of dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A
-few hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of
-dark, I should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo
-sky--specks whose strip of daylight was many times the length of
-ours, and whose year would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the
-astronomers tell us that Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years?
-Think of it--our Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round
-a single solar year of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and
-live to a green old age according to our reckoning, and still never see
-the glory of midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our
-ideas of Time have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune--if,
-that is, there be any dwellers on Neptune.
-
-And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts
-of other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this
-regal orb above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and
-numbered their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons
-by the illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of
-other systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to
-have any fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the
-unthinkable void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time:
-there was only duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of
-fable.
-
-As I reached this depressing conclusion--not a novel or original one,
-but always a rather cheerless one--a sort of orphaned feeling stole over
-me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
-from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
-eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly
-in the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a
-gay time on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during
-yesterday's storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of
-his comrades at an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges
-before him, was crying something that sounded like “Al-lay! Al-lay!”
- counting the money in his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he
-doubted whether it was all there, but because he liked the feel and
-the look of it. A sprightly young rascal, dressed as they all were in a
-grotesque mixture of garments, French and English and German, picked
-up on the battlefields of France, where they had been working for three
-years, stole up behind the orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me
-as he did so) snatched an orange and bolted. There followed a roaring
-scrimmage on deck, in the midst of which the orange-seller's coppers
-were sent flying along the boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and
-scuffling, and from which the author of the mischief emerged riotously
-happy and, lighting a cigarette, flung himself down with an air of
-radiant good humour, in which he enveloped me with a glance of his bold
-and merry eye.
-
-The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
-illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass,
-not intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The
-experiences were always associated with great physical weariness and
-the sense of the endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the
-Dauphiné coming down from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other
-experience in the Lake District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a
-companion in the doorway of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain.
-We had come to the end of our days in the mountains, and now we were
-going back to Keswick, climbing Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was
-robed in clouds, and the rain was of that determined kind that admits of
-no hope. And so, after a long wait, we decided that Helvellyn “would
-not go,” as the climber would say, and, putting on our mackintoshes and
-shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for Keswick by the lower slopes of
-the mountains--by the track that skirts Great Dodd and descends by the
-moorlands into the Vale of St John.
-
-All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung
-low over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
-booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
-tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
-struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to
-be without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious
-loneliness of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the
-late afternoon we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the
-Vale of St John and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the
-road. What with battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the
-dripping mackintosh and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked
-myself into that passive mental state which is like a waking dream,
-in which your voice sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your
-thoughts seem to play irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering
-consciousness.
-
-Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember
-that it is what Mr Chesterton calls “a rolling road, a reeling road.”
- It is like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it
-is going down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for
-Penrith, then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that
-goal, only to give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so
-on, and all the time it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or
-to Penrith, but is sidling crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road
-which is like the whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of
-his signature, thus:
-
-[Illustration: 0148]
-
-Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw
-through the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that
-fine mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses
-that sustain the southern face were visible. They looked like the
-outstretched fingers of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds
-and clutching the earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The
-image fell in with the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the
-similitude out to my companion as we paced along the muddy road.
-
-Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and
-we went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As
-we did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds
-and clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere,
-far off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same
-mist of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
-gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been
-years ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might
-have been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was
-this evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the
-impression remained of something outside the confines of time. I had
-passed into a static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished,
-and Time was only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I
-had walked through the shadow into the deeps.
-
-But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when
-I reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very
-earnestly in order to discover the time of the trains for London next
-day. And the recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings
-brought my thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just
-below me, was happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread,
-one of those long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck
-from the shore at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed
-along a rope connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of
-the man as he devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the
-brown crust reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had
-gone for lunch long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this
-time. I turned hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch
-back three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the
-fiction of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.
-
-[Illustration: 0150]
-
-[Illustration: 0151]
-
-
-
-
-TWO DRINKS OF MILK
-
-|The cabin lay a hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between
-Sneam and Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and
-out to the open Atlantic.
-
-A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down
-the rocks.
-
-We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to
-the cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received
-us.
-
-Milk? Yes. Would we come in?
-
-We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade
-of the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother
-of the girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and
-having done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen
-floor out into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and
-on a bench by the ingle sat the third member of the family.
-
-She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her
-eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and
-untroubled as a child's. She paused in her knitting to make room for me
-on the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she
-played the hostess.
-
-If you have travelled in Kerry you don't need to be told of the charm
-of the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful
-country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of
-Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the
-look of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a
-spring morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and
-to know them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of
-Kerry, O'Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities
-of a poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always
-warm with the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted
-with wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving
-pleasure to others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every
-peasant you meet is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted
-if you will stop to talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be
-your guide. It is like being back in the childhood of the world, among
-elemental things and an ancient, unhasting people.
-
-The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess
-in disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that
-a duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of
-Sneam, five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin
-and among these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she
-had caught something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out
-there through the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of
-exiles had gone to far lands. Some few had returned and some had been
-for ever silent. As I sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle
-accents all the tale of a stricken people and of a deserted land. There
-was no word of complaint--only a cheerful acceptance of the decrees
-of Fate. There is the secret of the fascination of the Kérry
-temperament--the happy sunlight playing across the sorrow of things.
-
-The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost
-to the brim, and a couple of mugs.
-
-We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to
-pay.
-
-“Sure, there's nothing to pay,” said the old lady with just a touch of
-pride in her sweet voice. “There's not a cabin in Kerry where you'll not
-be welcome to a drink of milk.”
-
-The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed
-in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane,
-and as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they
-added a benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague
-M'Carty's hotel--Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker,
-whose rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits
-among the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with
-many-coloured flies--we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville and
-heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.
-
-When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take
-the northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much
-better made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before
-the coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)
-
-In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a
-day of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the
-lake we dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage--neat and
-well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense
-of plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark
-of a dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged
-interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and
-leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before
-us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt
-that we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver
-affairs than thirsty travelers to attend to.
-
-Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back
-to the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed
-suddenly less friendly.
-
-In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two
-glasses--a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of feature.
-While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the doorstep,
-looking away across the lake to where the noble form of Schiehallion
-dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time was money and
-talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty haste.
-
-“What have we to pay, please?”
-
-“Sixpence.”
-
-And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.
-
-It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked
-something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant
-memory.
-
-[Illustration: 0155]
-
-[Illustration: 0156]
-
-
-
-
-ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH
-
-|It was my fortune the other evening to be at dinner with a large
-company of doctors. While we were assembling I fell into conversation
-with an eminent physician, and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked
-that we English seasoned our dishes far too freely. We scattered salt
-and pepper and vinegar over our food so recklessly that we destroyed the
-delicacy of our taste, and did ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was
-especially unfriendly to the use of salt. He would not admit even
-that it improved the savour of things. It destroyed our sense of their
-natural flavour, and substituted a coarser appeal to the palate. From
-the hygienic point of view, the habit was all wrong. All the salts
-necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat, and the use of salt
-independently is entirely harmful.
-
-“Take the egg, for example,” he said. “It contains in it all the
-elements necessary for the growth of a chicken--salt among the rest.
-That is sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article
-of food. Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise
-its delicate flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.” And he
-concluded, as we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example
-of the Japanese in this matter. “They,” he said laughingly, “only take
-salt when they want to die.”
-
-At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
-and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
-applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
-who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with
-great energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we
-eat contain the salt required by the human body. “Not even the egg?”
- I asked. “No, not even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our
-foods, and even if the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw
-state they tend to lose their character cooked.” He admitted that
-that was an argument for eating things _au naturel_ more than is the
-practice. But he was firm in his conviction that the separate use of
-salt is essential. “And as for flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw,
-with or without salt. What comparison is there?”
-
-“But,” said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about
-the Japanese), “are there not races who do not use salt?” “My dear sir,”
- said he, “the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of
-salt is supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of
-the prime essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause
-or another, is seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute
-exactness in the mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of
-salt to eat with their food they die.”
-
-After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening
-in examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt
-I should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the
-face of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have
-quoted, especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians.
-Yet I daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the
-facts. For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice,
-the Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the
-world, and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat
-their fish in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would
-go far to explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
-
-But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
-the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about
-which there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be
-a commonplace thing like the use of salt.
-
-Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random--men
-whose whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its
-requirements--whose views on the subject were in violent antagonism.
-They approached their subject from contrary angles and with contrary
-sets of facts, and the truth they were in search of took a wholly
-different form for each.
-
-It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
-judicious manipulation.
-
-A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our
-air service. He was very confident that we were “simply out of it--that
-was all, simply out of it.” And he was full of facts on the subject.
-<b>I don't like people who brim over with facts--who lead facts about,
-as Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few
-people so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His
-conclusions are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot
-sort them out and add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès
-called “loose, unstitched minds.”
-
-Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
-facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember
-whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her
-husband had told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so
-bad as that, but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact
-away in the chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not
-infrequently, that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something
-chipped off, and I can never trust it until I have verified my
-references.
-
-But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was
-that, so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell
-you how many English machines had failed to return on each day of the
-week, and how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to
-descend. And judging from his figures he was quite right. “We were out
-of it--simply out of it.” Yet the truth is that while his facts were
-right, his deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken
-account of some facts, but had left other equally important facts out of
-consideration. For example, through all this time the German airmen had
-been on the defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen
-had taken great risks for a great object. They had gone miles over
-the enemy's lines--as much as fifty miles over--and had come back with
-priceless information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but
-the whole truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this
-time the most victorious element of our Army.
-
-I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are
-not always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is
-often composed of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to
-contradict each other. Take the handkerchief incident in “Othello.” Poor
-Desdemona could not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that
-the Moor saw. Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello
-believed she had given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio
-wipe his beard with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the
-catastrophe.
-
-But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them
-in real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
-free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
-report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
-knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
-knife discovered--also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of pawntickets
-for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he was a
-thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
-his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
-clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of
-the trousers was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt
-uncomfortable. He took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was
-doing so he saw a steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a
-timid person he furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches
-came on, and when he had got his “take” he left to transcribe it,
-having forgotten all about the knife. The rest followed as stated. The
-pawntickets, which seemed so strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were
-of course not his at all. They belonged to the owner of the suit.
-
-You remember that Browning in “The Ring and the Book,” tells the story
-of the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before
-he feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
-annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
-
-Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
-different aspects of one truth. “Mostly,” he says, “matters of any
-consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself,
-I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
-contradicted myself three times.” I fancy it is this discovery of
-the falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less
-cocksure as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts
-that belong to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that “a
-lie that is only half a truth is ever the blackest of lies”; but he is
-wrong. It is the fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter)
-which is the most dangerous lie--for a fact seems so absolute, so
-incontrovertible. Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts,
-their arrangement and concealment. It was never better stated than by a
-famous business man in an action for libel which I have referred to in
-another connection. He was being examined about the visit of Government
-experts to his works, and the instructions he gave to his manager. And
-this, as I remember it, was the dialogue between counsel and witness:
-
-“Did you tell him to tell them the facts?”
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“The whole facts?”
-
-“No.”
-
-“What facts?”
-
-“_Selected facts_.”
-
-It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the
-midst of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody
-bearing his name.
-
-If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to
-a scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things,
-we cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of
-politics and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a
-speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of
-which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is
-so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in
-the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation
-is denounced as the heresy of another. Justification by “works” is
-displaced by justification by faith, and that in turn is superseded by
-justification by “service” which is “works” in new terms. Which is
-truth and which error? Or is that the real alternative? May they not
-be different facets of one truth. The prism breaks up the sunlight into
-many different colours and facts are only the broken lights of truth.
-In this perplexing world we must be prepared to find the same truth
-demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die because they take salt, and
-the fact that Indians die because they don't take it.
-
-[Illustration: 0163]
-
-[Illustration: 0164]
-
-
-
-
-ON GREAT MEN
-
-|I was reading just now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of
-him expressed by Macaulay who declared him to be “the greatest man since
-Milton.” I paused over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally
-enough to ask myself who were the great Englishmen in history--for the
-sake of argument, the six greatest. I found the question so exciting
-that I had reached the end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time)
-almost before I had reached the end of my list. I began by laying down
-my premises or principles. I would not restrict the choice to men of
-action. The only grievance I have against Plutarch is that he followed
-that course. His incomparable “Lives,” would be still more satisfying, a
-still more priceless treasury of the ancient world, if, among his crowd
-of statesmen and warriors, we could make friends with Socrates and
-Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus, with the men whose work survived
-them as well as with the men whose work is a memory. And I rejected the
-blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I would not have in my list a mere
-homicidal genius. My great man may have been a great killer of his kind,
-but he must have some better claim to inclusion than the fact that he
-had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On the other hand, I would not
-exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to be a bad man. Henry
-Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad men. “Greatness,”
- he said, “consists in bringing all manner of mischief upon mankind,
-and goodness in removing it from them.” And it was to satirise the
-traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific satire
-“The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,” probably having in mind the
-Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
-traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad
-man. I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that
-he was a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful
-ogre, a sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless,
-ruthless jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent,
-merciless as a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a
-sort of mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought
-of nature.
-
-Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
-governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
-mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was
-a great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about
-Cæsar, but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds
-down twenty centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must
-have design. It must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere
-accident, emotion or effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured
-by its influence on the current of the world, on its extension of
-the kingdom of the mind, on its contribution to the riches of living.
-Applying tests like these, who are our six greatest Englishmen? For
-our first choice there would be a unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the
-greatest thing we have done. He is our challenger in the fists of the
-world, and there is none to cross swords with him. Like Sirius, he has a
-magnitude of his own. Take him away from our heavens, conceive him never
-to have been born, and the imaginative wealth of fife shrinks to a
-lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's phrase, “poor indeed.” There is
-nothing English for which we would exchange him. “Indian Empire or
-no Indian Empire,” we say with Carlyle, “we cannot do without our
-Shakespeare.”
-
-For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
-indisputably to him who had
-
-               ”... a voice whose sound was like the sea.”
-
-Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
-harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of
-the sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
-intangible, indestructible. With him stands his “chief of men”--the
-“great bad man” of Burke--the one man of action in our annals capable of
-measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
-Bismarck in the realm of the spirit--the man at whose name the cheek
-of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
-death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
-these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda)
-first made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
-
-But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as
-the bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning
-eternally with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his
-soul to tatters, and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding
-eloquence, and Burke, the prose Milton, to whose deep well all
-statesmanship goes with its pail, and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court
-in his brown wig, and Newton plumbing the ultimate secrets of this
-amazing universe, and deep-browed Darwin unravelling the mystery of
-life, and Wordsworth giving “to weary feet the gift of rest,” and
-Dickens bringing with him a world of creative splendour only less
-wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these and a host of others
-aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip him of all the
-legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name, and he is still
-one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic, enlightened
-man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first great
-Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
-quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be
-Roger--there by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range
-of his adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through
-which he ploughed his lonely way to truth.
-
-I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a
-woman, Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic “lady of the
-lamp,” but as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the
-adventurer into a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by
-a will of iron, a terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful
-and creative woman this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not
-because she is unworthy, but because she must head a companion fist of
-great Englishwomen. I hurriedly summon up two candidates from among
-our English saints--Sir Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the
-intolerance (incredible to modern ears) that could jest so diabolically
-at the martyrdom of the “heretic,” Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his
-place as the most fragrant flower of English culture, but if greatness
-be measured by achievement and enduring influence he must yield place to
-the astonishing revivalist of the eighteenth century who left a deeper
-mark upon the spiritual life of England than any man in our history.
-
-There is my list--Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
-Bacon, John Wesley--and anybody can make out another who cares and
-a better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
-unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is
-not a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the
-kibe of Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
-
-There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
-contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher.
-If the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness
-cannot be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left
-out of any list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature,
-we are poor in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see
-the great name of Turner.
-
-[Illustration: 0169]
-
-[Illustration: 0170]
-
-
-
-
-ON SWEARING
-
-|A young officer in the flying service was describing to me the other
-day some of his recent experiences in France. They were both amusing
-and sensational, though told with that happy freedom from vanity and
-self-consciousness which is so pleasant a feature of the British soldier
-of all ranks. The more he has done and seen the less disposed he seems
-to regard himself as a hero. It is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging
-is a sham currency. It is the base coin with which the fraudulent pay
-their way. F. C. Selous was the greatest big game hunter of modern
-times, but when he talked about his adventures he gave the impression of
-a man who had only been out in the back garden killing slugs. And Peary,
-who found the North Pole, writes as modestly as if he had only found a
-new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr Cook, who didn't find the North Pole
-and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who does the boasting. And the man who
-talks most about patriotism is usually the man who has least of that
-commodity, just as the man who talks most about his honesty is rarely to
-be trusted with your silver spoons. A man who really loves his country
-would no more brag about it than he would brag about loving his mother.
-
-But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to
-write of him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
-good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
-seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It
-was just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
-convolvulus overgrows my garden. “Hell” was his favourite expletive, and
-he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
-scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
-he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it
-as a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear
-that he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
-
-And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only
-secular quality it possesses--the quality of emphasis. It is speech
-breaking bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the
-dictionary and the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord
-in music that in shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music
-which is all discord is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is
-deadly dull.
-
-It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
-emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
-habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. “When I have said
-'Malaga,'” says Plancus, in the “Vicomte de Bragelonne,” “I am no
-longer a man.” He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his
-imprecations for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils
-swell and his eyes flash fire as he cries, “Malaga.” It is a good swear
-word. It has the advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely
-what a swear word should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying
-nothing. It should be incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the
-passion that evokes it.
-
-If “Malaga” has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was
-that defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. “'Damns'
-have had their day,” he said, and when he swore he used the “oath
-referential.” “Odds hilts and blades,” he said, or “Odds slanders and
-lies,” or “Odds bottles and glasses.” But when he sat down to write his
-challenge to Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him.
-“Do, Sir Lucius, let me begin with a damme,” he said. He had to give
-up artificial swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to
-something which had a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it
-is the idea of being a little wicked that is one of the attractions of
-swearing. It is a symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so.
-For in its origin always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates
-spoke “By the Gods,” he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest
-reverence he could command. But the oaths of to-day are not the
-expression of piety, but of violent passion, and the people who indulge
-in a certain familiar expletive would not find half so much satisfaction
-in it if they felt that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration
-of faith--“By our Lady.” That is the way our ancestors used to swear,
-and we have corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith
-and meaning.
-
-The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of
-life breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is
-the prerogative of the soldier to be “full of strange oaths.” In this
-respect Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used “strange
-oaths.” He stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most
-industrious in it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that
-have come down to us which are not garnished with “damns” or “By Gods.”
- Hear him on the morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to
-gossip Creevey--“It has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I
-have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing--the nearest run
-thing you ever saw in your life.” Or when some foolish Court flunkey
-appeals to him to support his claim to ride in the carriage with the
-young Queen on some public occasion--“Her Majesty can make you ride
-on the box or inside the carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's
-dog.” But in this he followed not only the practice of soldiers in all
-times, but the fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to
-have regarded himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at
-the language of the Prince Regent.
-
-“By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,” he remarks,
-speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. “Then he speaks and swears so
-like old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the
-room with him.” This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices,
-but whose recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It
-suggests also that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of
-his own comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and
-swore as naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that
-other famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy,
-as when, speaking of Grant, he said, “I'll tell you where he beats me,
-and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy
-does out of his sight, but it scares me like Hell.” Two centuries ago,
-according to Uncle Toby, our men “swore terribly in Flanders,” and they
-are swearing terribly there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time
-that the Flanders mud, which has been watered for centuries by English
-blood, will ensanguine the speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant
-young airman will talk a good deal less about “Hell” when he escapes
-from it to a cleaner world.
-
-[Illustration: 0174]
-
-[Illustration: 0175]
-
-
-
-
-ON A HANSOM CAB
-
-|I saw a surprising spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a
-hansom cab. Not a derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally
-see, with an obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the
-box, crawling along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has
-escaped from a cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way
-back--no, but a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting
-in the shafts and tossing its head as though it were full of beans
-and importance, and a slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as
-a sandboy as he flicked and flourished his whip, and, still more
-astonishing, a real passenger, a lady, inside the vehicle.
-
-I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the
-driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of
-the poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas
-of the past--sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the
-quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there
-flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs,
-the London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King
-Petrol, when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and
-the two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place
-then, of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a
-formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took
-your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver,
-you settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and
-the bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins
-of that “orf horse,” the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of
-the police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse
-joke to a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in
-the revelry. The conductor would stroll up to him and continue a
-conversation that had begun early in the morning and seemed to go on
-intermittently all day--a conversation of that jolly sort in which,
-as Washington Irving says, the jokes are rather small and the laughter
-abundant.
-
-In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside
-the bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It
-was an act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the
-top alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes.
-And even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been
-quite above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The
-hansom was a rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the
-thing for a lady to be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested
-romance, mysteries, elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of
-wickednesses. A staid, respectable “growler” was much more fitting for
-so delicate an exotic as Woman. If she began riding in hansoms
-alone anything might happen. She might want to go to public
-dinners next--think of it!--she might be wanting to ride a
-bicycle--horrors!--she might discover a shameless taste for cigarettes,
-or demand a living wage, or University degrees, or a vote, just for all
-the world as though she was the equal of Man, the Magnificent....
-
-As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and
-challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to
-the coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy,
-and impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable,
-mighty, but blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets,
-reeling from right to left like a drunken giant, encountering the
-kerb-stone, skimming the lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of
-boorish revolt, standing obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the
-street or across the street amidst the derision and rejoicing of those
-whose empire he threatened, and who saw in these pranks the assurance of
-his ultimate failure. Memory went back to the old One a.m. from the Law
-Courts, and to one night that sums up for me the spirit of those days of
-the great transition....
-
-It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to
-start from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew
-his power. He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along
-the Edgeware Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men
-who wrote him down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles
-
-                   (from Our Peking Correspondent)
-
-in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
-chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was “full
-up” hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded
-in with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen--yes,
-cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the
-One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only
-cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end
-of the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the
-tipsy gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at
-Baker Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is
-being swept on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are
-exchanged, what jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the
-top hat, under the impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the
-floor--oh, then the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy
-gentleman opens his dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these
-revels soon are ended.
-
-An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:
-
-                   First a shiver, and then a thrill,
-
-                   Then something decidedly like a spill--
-
-                         O. W. Holmes,
-
-                        _The Deacon's Masterpiece_ (DW)
-
-and we are left sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with
-the clock over the shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.
-
-It is the spirit of Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting
-himself. He disapproves of the passengers having all the fun. Is he not
-a humorist too? May he not be merry in the dawn of this May morning?
-
-We take our fate like Englishmen, bravely, even merrily.
-
-The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment. This is worth living
-for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base betrayer of the
-innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though it is two
-or three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the morning! Who
-cares?
-
-Only the gentleman with the big bag in the corner.
-
-“'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?” he asks the conductor with tears
-in his voice.
-
-The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help the driver. They busy
-themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn handles, they work
-pumps, they probe here and thump there.
-
-They come out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They
-have the cheerful philosophy of people who meddle with things that
-move--cab drivers, bus-drivers, engine-drivers.
-
-               If, when looking well won't move thee.
-
-                        Looking ill prevail?
-
-So they take a breather, light cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it
-again.
-
-Meanwhile all the hansoms in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us,
-like sharks upon the dead whale. Up they rattle from this side and that,
-and every cabman flings a jibe as he passes.
-
-“Look 'ere,” says one, pulling up. “Why don't yer take the
-genelmen where they want to go? That's what I asks yer.
-Why--don't--yer--take--the--genelmen--where--they--want--to go? It's
-only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't want
-to go.”
-
-For the cabman is like “the wise thrush who sings his song twice over.”
-
-“'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!” cries another.
-
-“We can't 'elp larfin', yer know,” says a third feelingly.
-
-“Well, you keep on larfin',” says the chauffeur looking up from the
-inside of One a.m. “It suits your style o' beauty.”
-
-A mellow voice breaks out:
-
-                   We won't go home till morning,
-
-                   Till daylight does appear.
-
-And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen in comic chorus.
-Those who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither sing nor
-whistle, croak.
-
-We sit inside patiently. We even joke too. All but the man with the big
-bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his life-long enemy.
-
-He appeals again to the conductor, who laughs.
-
-The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back, puts
-his head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and says:
-
-“It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning.”
-
-We think better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is
-that of the politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart.
-He is like Dick Steele--“when he was sober he was delightful; when he
-was drunk he was irresistible.”
-
-“She won't go any more to-night,” says the conductor.
-
-So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal away. All but
-the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a problem
-that looks insoluble.
-
-Two of us jump into a hansom that still prowls around, the last of the
-shoal of sharks.
-
-“Drive up West End Lane.”
-
-“Right, sir.”
-
-Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's face, wreathed in smiles,
-beams down on us.
-
-“I see what was coming all the way from Baker Street,” he savs. “I see
-the petrol was on fire.”
-
-“Ah!”
-
-“Yus,” he says. “Thought I should pick you up about 'ere.”
-
-“Ah!”
-
-“No good, motors,” he goes on, cheerfully. “My opinion is they'll go
-out as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the aristocracy are
-giving 'em up and goin' back to 'orses.”
-
-“Hope they'll get better horses than this,” for we are crawling
-painfully up the tortuous reaches of West End Lane.
-
-“Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's overworked. 'E ain't earned more
-than three bob to-night. That's jest what' e's earned. Three bob. It's
-the cold weather, you know. That's what it is. It's the cold weather
-as makes 'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And 'e does go after
-all, even if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't say of that
-there motor-bus.”
-
-We had no reply to this thrust, and the lid dropped down with a sound of
-quiet triumph.
-
-And so home. And my dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge
-Monster, reeking with strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious
-laughter and standing for ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road
-with the clock opposite pointing to a quarter to two, a rueful face in
-the corner staring fixedly at a big bag and a tipsy gentleman in a
-tall hat finding his way back to Baker Street in happy converse with a
-policeman.
-
-Gone is the old London over which the shade of Mr Hansom presided like
-a king. Gone is the “orf horse” with all its sins; gone is the
-rosy-cheeked driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent whip and his
-tales of the streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you your
-ticket, talked to you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about the
-weather, the Boat Race, or the latest clue to the latest mystery. We
-amble no more. We have banished laughter and leisure from the streets,
-and the face of the motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the symbol
-of the change. We have passed into a breathless world, a world of
-wonderful mechanical contrivances that have quickened the tempo of life
-and will soon have made the horse as much a memory as the bow and arrow
-or the wherry that used to be the principal vehicle of Elizabethan
-London. As I watched the hansom bowling along Regent Street until it
-was lost in the swirl of motor-buses and taxis I seemed to see in it the
-last straggler of an epoch passing away into oblivion. I am glad it went
-so gallantly, and I am half sorry I did not give the driver a parting
-cheer as he flicked his whip in the face of the night.
-
-[Illustration: 0183]
-
-[Illustration: 0184]
-
-
-
-
-ON MANNERS
-
-
-I
-
-|It is always surprising, if not always agreeable, <b>to see ourselves
-as others see us</b>. The picture we present to others is never the
-picture we present to ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally
-it is a much plainer picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always
-a strange picture. Just now we English are having our portrait painted
-by an American lady, Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been
-appearing in the press. It is not a flattering portrait, and it seems to
-have angered a good many people who deny the truth of the likeness very
-passionately. The chief accusation seems to be that we have no manners,
-are lacking in the civilities and politenesses of life, and so on, and
-are inferior in these things to the French, the Americans, and other
-peoples. It is not an uncommon charge, and it comes from many quarters.
-It came to me the other day in a letter from a correspondent, French
-or Belgian, who has been living in this country during the war, and who
-wrote bitterly about the manners of the English towards foreigners. In
-the course of his letter he quoted with approval the following cruel
-remark of Jean Carrière, written, needless to say, before the war:
-
-“Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal élevé du fait
-qu'il manque de manières; il ignore encore la politesse, voilà tout.”
-
-The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the
-whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.
-
-I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have
-enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken
-up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and
-we suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should
-be told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At
-the same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's
-warning about the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty
-millions of us, and we have some forty million different manners, and it
-is not easy to get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will
-take this “copy” to the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who
-preceded him was a monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all
-civility; another is all bad temper, and between the two extremes you
-will get every shade of good and bad manners. And so through every phase
-of society.
-
-Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the
-widest differences of manner in different parts of the country. In
-Lancashire and Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There
-is a deep-seated distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the
-code of conduct differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral
-town as the manner of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But
-even here you will find behind the general bearing infinite shades of
-difference that make your generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more
-you know of any people the less you feel able to sum them up in broad
-categories.
-
-Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our
-ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete
-darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting--apropos of the
-Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because
-of the strangeness of his appearance--lamenting the deplorable manners
-of the people. “Lord!” he says, “to see the absurd nature of Englishmen
-that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks
-strange.” Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him
-describing the English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
-
-But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
-earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. “To mention but a
-single attraction,” he says in one of his letters, “the English girls
-are divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses.
-They have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go
-anywhere on a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you
-arrive, they kiss you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you
-return. Go where you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if
-you had once tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish
-to spend your life there.” Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens
-a good deal changed to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a
-cigarette.
-
-I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing
-and less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the
-saying of O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good
-criticism. Our lack of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but
-more probably it is traceable not to a physical but to a social source.
-Unlike the Celtic and the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have
-not the ease that comes from the ingrained tradition of human equality.
-The French have that ease. So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So
-have the Americans. But the English are class conscious. The dead
-hand of feudalism is still heavy upon our souls. If it were not, the
-degrading traffic in titles would long since have been abolished as an
-insult to our intelligence. But we not only tolerate it: we delight
-in this artificial scheme of relationship. It is not human values, but
-social discriminations that count. And while human values are cohesive
-in their effect, social discriminations are separatist. They break
-society up into castes, and permeate it with the twin vices of snobbery
-and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is subdivided into
-infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious restraints of a
-people uncertain of their social relationships create a defensive manner
-which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true root is a
-timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his ground
-tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is proud: it
-may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away from this
-fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners for
-independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.
-
-The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from
-a sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented
-to keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression
-that he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he
-had more _abandon_. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical
-politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the
-spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which
-makes the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably
-what Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the
-impression that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good
-manners that they exist most where they do not exist at all--that is to
-say, where conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told
-James Hogg that no man who was content to be himself, without either
-diffidence or egotism, would fail to be at home in any company, and I do
-not know a better recipe for good manners.
-
-
-II
-
-I was riding in a bus yesterday afternoon when I overheard a
-conversation between a couple of smartly dressed young people--a youth
-and a maiden--at the other end of the vehicle. It was not an amusing
-conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about. Indeed,
-I could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be about
-anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which consist
-chiefly of “Awfullys” and “Reallys!” and “Don't-you-knows” and tattle
-about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and similar
-common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter but
-because of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the speakers
-were alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of wind.
-
-The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to hear,
-while others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not of
-approval. They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved an
-air of being unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of not
-being aware that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact, their
-manner indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings. They
-were really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the bus.
-If they had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in quite
-reasonable tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly and
-defiantly to an empty bus. They would have made no impression on an
-empty bus. But they were happily sensible of making quite a marked
-impression on a full bus.
-
-But it was not the impression they imagined. It was another impression
-altogether. There are few more unpleasing and vulgar habits than that of
-loud, aggressive conversation in public places. It is an impertinence to
-inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who do not want to know about
-them, and who may want to read or doze or think or look out of the
-window at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The assumption
-behind the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is an
-announcement to the world that we are someone in particular and can
-talk as loudly as we please whenever we please. It is a sort of social
-Prussianism that presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by a
-superior egotism. The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in the
-world is mistaken. On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an inverted
-self-consciousness. These young people were talking loudly, not because
-they were unconscious of themselves in relation to their fellows, but
-because they were much too conscious and were not content to be just
-quiet, ordinary people like the rest of us.
-
-I hesitate to say that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not
-lived abroad sufficiently to judge. But it is a common experience
-of those who travel to find, as I have often found, their country
-humiliated by this habit of aggressive bearing in public places. It is
-unlovely at home, but it is much more offensive abroad, for then it is
-not only the person who is brought into disrepute, but the country he
-(and not less frequently she) is supposed to represent. We in the bus
-could afford to bear the affliction of that young couple with tolerance
-and even amusement, for they only hurt themselves. We could discount
-them. But the same bearing in a foreign capital gives the impression
-that we are all like this, just as the rather crude boasting of certain
-types of American grossly misrepresent a people whose general
-conduct, as anyone who sees them at home will agree, is unaffected,
-unpretentious, and good-natured.
-
-The truth, I suspect, is that every country sends abroad a
-disproportionate number of its “bounders.” It is inevitable that it
-should be so, for the people who can afford to travel are the people who
-have made money, and while many admirable qualities may be involved
-in the capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain coarse
-assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got so
-hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are better
-than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot attune
-his voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second generation,
-this congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high school
-it is apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the bus
-yesterday.
-
-So far from being representative of the English, they are violently
-unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take
-an average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust
-the sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted
-with egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and
-monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract attention
-without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy
-mean between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the
-overbearing note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk
-of our affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without
-desiring to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without
-wishing to be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we
-have achieved that social ease which consists in the adjustment of
-a reasonable confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the
-sensibilities of others.
-
-[Illustration: 0192]
-
-[Illustration: 0193]
-
-
-
-
-ON A FINE DAY
-
-|It's just like summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have
-forgotten to say it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it
-from the orchard with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery.
-There are some people of penurious emotions and speech, like the
-Drumtochty farmer in Ian Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of
-this iteration. They would find it wasteful and frivolous. They do not
-understand that we go on saying it over and over again, like the birds,
-for the sheer joy of saying it. Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice.
-There he goes skipping from branch to branch and twig to twig, and
-after each skip he pauses to say, “It's just like summer,” and from a
-neighbouring tree his mate twitters confirmation in perfect time. I've
-listened to them for half an hour and they've talked about nothing else.
-
-In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great
-baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the
-paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully
-and tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well
-aired before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows
-his score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has
-only one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the
-world, but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer,
-and not a conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who
-seems never to forget the listening world.
-
-In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
-There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along
-the turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football
-match, I fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the
-cheerful outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens
-and the fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of
-hammering; from the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor
-voice that comes up from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I
-have not heard it for four years or more; but it has been heard in many
-lands and by many rivers from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would
-rather be singing in the allotment with his young brother Sam (the
-leader of the trebles in the village choir) than anywhere else in the
-vide world. “Yes, I've been to Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the
-'Oly Land,” he says. “I don't care if I never see the 'Oly Land again.
-Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far as I'm concerned. This is good
-enough for me--that is, if there's a place for a chap that wants to get
-married to live in.”
-
-Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at
-her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. “Well, this is all
-right, ain't it, mother?”
-
-“Yes,” says the old lady, “it's just like summer.”
-
-“And to think,” continues the voice, “that there was a thick layer o'
-snow a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to
-come yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar,
-and it stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though
-it do seem like it, don't it?”
-
-“Yes, it's just like summer,” repeats the old lady tranquilly.
-
-There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
-sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
-like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we
-are here. Weather in town is only an incident--a pleasurable incident
-or a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella,
-whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a
-mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or
-outside. It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your
-visit to the theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for
-this reason the incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as
-an acquaintance of a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he
-is in a good humour and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
-
-But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven.
-It is politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual
-diversion. You study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and
-watch the change of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the
-mood of the public. When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a
-fine day, or has been a cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a
-conventional civility. It is the formal opening of the discussion of
-weighty matters. It involves the prospects of potatoes and the sowing of
-onions, the blossoms on the trees, the effects of weather on the poultry
-and the state of the hives. I do not suppose that there is a moment of
-his life when Jim is unconscious of the weather or indifferent to
-it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not care what happens to
-the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands and secular
-interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is a stem
-Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the chapel
-in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always
-trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi'
-work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to
-dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. “I don't hold wi'
-work on Sundays,” he would repeat inflexibly.
-
-[Illustration: 0197]
-
-And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other
-end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the
-weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call
-her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward.
-It is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants
-hens. If the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an
-unerring instinct to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin
-of feathers. The hard frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes
-when everybody else's escaped, and it was her hive that brought the
-“Isle of Wight” into our midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds
-that the last was a visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a
-death in the family--true, it was only a second cousin, but it was “in
-the family”--and had neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive.
-And of course they died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow
-Walsh has no patience with people who fly in the face of Providence in
-this way.
-
-But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is the most
-unremittingly malevolent. It is either “smarty hot” or “smarty cold.” If
-it isn't giving her a touch of “brownchitis,” or “a blowy feeling all up
-the back,” or making her feel “blubbed all over,” it is dripping through
-her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke,
-or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary
-life. I think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the
-hill-side like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even
-smiles, but his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the
-bottom he is a terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country
-woman no end of work, and makes her life a burden.
-
-But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
-When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that “it is
-a bit better to-day.” This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays
-to the weather. And we translate it for her into “Yes, it's just like
-summer.”
-
-In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
-damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most
-part the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees
-are white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees
-which fill the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note
-of an aerial violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of
-his double bass to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way
-from blossom to blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is
-as full of the gossip of summer as the peacock butterfly that comes
-flitting back across the orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old
-Benjy, who saluted me over the hedge just now with the remark that
-he didn't recall the like of this for a matter o' seventy year. Yes,
-seventy year if 'twas a day.
-
-Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy
-years ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks
-about anything in the memory of this generation. “I be nearer a
-'underd,” he says, “than seventy,” by which I think he means that he is
-eighty-six. He longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see
-no reason why he shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old boy,
-still does a good day's gardening and has come up the lane on this hot
-day at a nimble speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to
-have made his coffin and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from
-any morbid yearning for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding
-him off, just as the rest of us “touch wood” lest evil befall. “It's
-just like summer,” he says.
-
-“I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty....”
-
-
-[Illustration: 0200]
-
-[Illustration: 0201]
-
-
-
-
-ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO
-
-|I see that Mr Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to
-women very seriously on the subject of smoking. “Would you like to see
-your mother smoke?” asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he was
-addressing, and Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco
-smoke in the face of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed
-feelings on this subject, and in order to find out what I really think I
-will write about it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby.
-I do not want to see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the
-baby. But neither do I want to see father doing so. If father is smoking
-when he nurses the baby he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs
-out his smoke. Do not let us drag in the baby.
-
-The real point is in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your
-affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would
-not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be
-absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because
-he smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of
-disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of
-taste which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is
-wasteful and unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the
-habit regardless of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that _women_ must not
-smoke because the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that _men_ may.
-He would no more say this than he would say that it is right for men to
-live in stuffy rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right
-for men to get drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of
-drunkenness there is no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel
-that it is more tragic in the case of the woman, but it is equally
-disgusting in both sexes.
-
-What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men
-is vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up
-morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women
-not smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom
-been otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle,
-for example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he would have answered the
-question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their
-pipes together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and
-eternity, and no one who has read his letters will doubt his love for
-her. There are no such letters from son to mother in all literature. And
-of course Mr Hicks knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be
-surprised to know that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of
-some women who smoke, and that he will be as cordial with them as with
-those who do not smoke.
-
-And yet.... Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of
-a bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to
-smoke. And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these
-now not infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I
-had been smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If
-smoking is an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the
-case of women as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women
-smoking outdoors while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an
-irrational fellow, said I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I
-replied. We are all irrational fellows. If we were brought to the
-judgment seat of pure reason how few of us would escape the cells.
-
-Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young
-women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke
-was a flag--the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got perplexed
-again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women--this universal
-claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous fact of
-the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag. Yet when
-I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it myself),
-flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I rejoice, I
-felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I came to
-the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These young
-women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men smoked
-on the top of the bus they must smoke too--not perhaps because they
-liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them on
-an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge
-of servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the
-symbols of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of
-women, but preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to
-their finer perceptions and traditions.
-
-But here my perplexity returned. It is not the fact of those young women
-smoking that offends you, I said addressing myself. It is the fact of
-their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you agree that the habit of
-smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of women as of men,
-why should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised in their
-case, while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself are
-smoking at this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged in
-defending the propriety of women smoking, and at the same time mentally
-reprobating the conduct of the young women who are smoking in front
-of you, not because they are smoking, but because (like you) they are
-smoking in public. How do you reconcile such confusions of mind?
-
-At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the horns
-of a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to the
-habit. And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to defend
-differential smoking conditions for men and women. If the main position
-was surrendered no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked in
-public then women could smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and cigars
-then women could smoke pipes and cigars. And at the thought of women
-smoking pipes on the top of buses, I realised that I had not yet found a
-path out of the absurd bog in which I had become mentally involved.
-
-Then something happened which suggested another solution. The young
-women rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was
-wafted with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown
-their cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy,
-languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial
-fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man's
-tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt
-the woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and
-wear rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity.
-The mind revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered and
-be-ringed. Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their cheeks.
-But Disraeli was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort of
-belated tale from the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of men
-universally revolts against paint, powder, and perfume. And asking
-myself why a habit, which custom had made tolerable in the case of
-women, became grotesque and offensive if imagined in connection with
-men, I saw a way out of my puzzle. I dismissed the view that the
-difference of sex accounted for the different emotions awakened. It was
-the habit itself which was objectionable. Familiarity with it in the
-case of women had dulled our perceptions to the reality. It was only
-when we conceived the habit in an unusual connection--imagined men going
-about with painted and powdered faces, with rings in their ears
-and heavy scents on their clothes--that its essential vulgarity and
-uncleanness were freshly and intensely presented to the mind.
-
-And that, said I, is the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit
-in the abstract which is vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in
-the case of man has deadened our sense of the fact, but the adoption
-of the habit by women, coupled with the fact that there is no logical
-halting-place between the cigarette indoors and a pipe on the top of the
-bus, gives us what the Americans call a new view-point. From that new
-view-point we are bound to admit that there is much to be said against
-tobacco and not much to be said for it--except, of course, that we like
-it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk to the
-men as well as to the women.
-
-Then perhaps we will see what can be done. For myself, I make no
-promise. After forty, says Meredith, we are wedded to our habits. And I,
-alas, am long past forty....
-
-[Illustration: 0207]
-
-[Illustration: 0208]
-
-
-
-
-DOWN TOWN
-
-|Through the grey mists that hang over the water in the late autumn
-afternoon there emerges a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of
-a distant range of mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with
-a precision that suggests the work of man rather than the careless
-architecture of Nature The mass is compact and isolated. It rises
-from the level of the water, sheer on either side, in bold precipitous
-cliffs, broken by horizontal lines, and dominated by one kingly, central
-peak that might be the Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the
-spire of some cathedral fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race.
-As the vessel from afar moves slowly through the populous waters and
-between the vaguely defined shores of the harbour, another shadow
-emerges ahead, rising out of the sea in front of the mountain mass. It
-is a colossal statue, holding up a torch to the open Atlantic.
-
-Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition.
-It turns to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable
-windows. Even the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of
-myriad windows. The day begins to darken and a swift transformation
-takes place. Points of light begin to shine from the windows like stars
-in the darkening firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters
-with thousands of tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy
-palace, glowing with illuminations from the foundations to the topmost
-height of the giddy precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in
-the scintillating pinnacle of the slender cathedral spire. The first
-daylight impression was of something as solid and enduring as the
-foundations of the earth; the second, in the gathering twilight, is of
-something slight and fanciful, of' towering proportions but infinitely
-fragile structure, a spectacle as airy and dream-like as a tale from the
-“Arabian Nights.”
-
-It is “down town.” It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its
-astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that
-lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest
-group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over
-the tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable
-maze of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion
-of the London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its
-direction, but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east
-and west, crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to
-the Harlem River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing
-island of Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the
-noble Fifth Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty
-buildings that shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to
-gild the upper storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many
-churches and the gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving,
-on a sunny afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you
-move in the shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the
-air above. And around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the
-architectural glories of “up town” New York, the great hotels stand
-like mighty fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great
-terminus. And in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled
-to the twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you
-are summoned.
-
-But it is in “down town,” on the tip of the tongue that is put out
-to the Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the
-stranger. It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no
-doubt, that make an equally striking appeal to the eye--Salzburg,
-Innsbruck, Edinburgh, Tunis--but it is the appeal of nature supplemented
-by art. Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not
-an approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of
-surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind,
-that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous,
-and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New
-York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you
-land. It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It
-ascends its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation
-over the Atlantic. “Down town” stands like a strong man on the shore
-of the ocean, asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind
-these terrific battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to
-the skies. Look at this muscular development. And I am only the advance
-agent. I am only the symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste
-of the power that heaves and throbs through the veins of the giant that
-bestrides this continent for three thousand miles, from his gateway to
-the Atlantic to his gateway, to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to
-the Gulf of Mexico.
-
-And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this
-terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from
-within, stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway
-ends, a street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned
-between two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more'
-lofty than the cross of St Paul's Cathedral--square towers, honeycombed
-with thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying
-up in lifts--called “elevators” for short--clicking at typewriters,
-performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns
-at the threshold of the giant.
-
-For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which
-he rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon
-is Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure
-in the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the
-high priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds
-are shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on
-the kerbstone of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its
-sovereigns wilting away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you
-stand, in devout respect before the modest threshold of the high priest
-a babel of strange sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn
-towards it and come suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange
-than anything pictured by Hogarth--in the street a jostling mass of
-human beings, fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like
-jockeys or pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended
-high as if in prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working
-with frantic symbols, their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at
-a hundred windows in the great buildings on either side of the street
-little groups of men and women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob
-below. It is the outside market of Mammon.
-
-You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
-great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements
-like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender
-and beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle
-nearly twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the
-temple of St Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth
-acquired in his sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most
-significant building in America and the first turret to catch the noose
-of light that the dawn flings daily over the Atlantic from the East.
-You enter its marble halls and take an express train to the forty-ninth
-floor, flashing in your journey past visions of crowded offices, tier
-after tier, offices of banks and publishers and merchants and
-jewellers, like a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been
-miraculously turned skywards by some violent geological “fault.” And at
-the forty-ninth floor you get out and take another “local” train to the
-top, and from thence you look giddily down, far down even upon the great
-precipices of the Grand Canon, down to the streets where the moving
-throng you left a few minutes ago looks like a colony of ants or
-black-beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement.
-
-And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
-with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to
-be large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
-churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are
-swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that
-loom above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George
-Washington still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the
-original union. Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted
-world an inverted civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the
-vision of the great dome that seems to float in the heavens over the
-secular activities of another city, still holding aloft, to however
-negligent and indifferent a generation, the symbol of the supremacy
-of spiritual things. And you will wonder whether in this astonishing
-spectacle below you, in which the temples of the ancient worship crouch
-at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce, there is the
-unconscious expression of another philosophy of life in which St
-Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to the stars.
-
-And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the
-scene below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so
-near that you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open
-Atlantic, with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million
-a year, that has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of
-hopes, past the statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the
-harbour, to be swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that
-lies behind you. You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught
-in the arms of its two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before
-you, with its overflow of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream,
-and its overflow of Jersey City on the far bank of the other. In the
-brilliant sunshine and the clear, smokeless atmosphere the eye travels
-far over this incredible vista of human activity. And beyond the vision
-of the eye, the mind carries the thought onward to the great lakes and
-the seething cities by their shores, and over the illimitable plains
-westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe, but still obedient to
-the stars and stripes, and southward by the great rivers to the tropic
-sea.
-
-And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the
-far horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings.
-They will not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those
-horizons, after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields
-of activity, you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the
-contrary, they will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense
-of power unlike anything else the world has to offer--the power of
-immeasurable resources, still only in the infancy of their development,
-of inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the
-mind, of a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one--one in a
-certain fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident
-prime of their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of
-the day before them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its
-crudeness and freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as
-to something avuncular and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late
-afternoon, a little tired and more than a little disillusioned and
-battered by the journey. For him the light has left the morning
-hills, but here it still clothes those hills with hope and spurs on to
-adventure.
-
-That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
-his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
-“the goods.” He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
-power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the
-inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the
-tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and
-the squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the
-chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction
-at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush,
-and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism
-has shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American
-interests, and the “100 per cent. American” in every disguise of
-designing self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything
-that is significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not
-a moment when the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the
-harbour, can feel very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no
-longer lit to invite the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the
-contrary, she turns her back on America and warns the alien away. Her
-torch has become a policeman's baton.
-
-And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
-breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous
-waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back
-upon the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun
-floods the land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near
-his setting, but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his
-morning prime, so vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of
-your first impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud
-pinnacle that looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the
-temple of primeval gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And
-as you gaze you are conscious of a great note of interrogation taking
-shape in the mind. Is that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic
-expression of the soul of America, or has this mighty power you
-are leaving another gospel for mankind? And as the light fades and
-battlements and pinnacle merge into the encompassing dark there sounds
-in the mind the echoes of an immortal voice--“Let us here highly resolve
-that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under
-God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the
-people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth!”
-
-And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell
-to America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of
-Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
-
-[Illustration: 0217]
-
-[Illustration: 0208]
-
-
-
-
-ON KEYHOLE MORALS
-
-|My neighbour at the breakfast table complained that he had had a bad
-night. What with the gale and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of
-the timbers of the ship and the pair in the next cabin--especially the
-pair in the next cabin.... How they talked! It was two o'clock
-before they sank into silence. And such revelations! He couldn't help
-overhearing them. He was alone in his cabin, and what was he to do? He
-couldn't talk to himself to let them know they were being overheard. And
-he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And, in short, there was nothing
-for it but to overhear. And the things he heard--well.... And with a
-gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he left it to me to imagine the
-worst. I suggested that he might cure the trouble by telling the steward
-to give the couple a hint that the next cabin was occupied. He received
-the idea as a possible way out of a painful and delicate situation.
-Strange, he said, it had not occurred to him.
-
-Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very
-important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man.
-It would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper,
-and there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are
-not to be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper
-enough when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not
-our public hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only
-indicates the kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We
-want the world's good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company
-manners as we put on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would
-put his ear to a keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole
-behind him watching him in the act. The true estimate of your character
-(and mine) depends on what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole
-behind us. It depends, not on whether you are chivalrous to some one
-else's wife in public, but whether you are chivalrous to your own wife
-in private. The eminent judge who, checking himself in a torrent of
-abuse of his partner at whist, contritely observed, “I beg your pardon,
-madam; I thought you were my wife,” did not improve matters. He only
-lifted the curtain of a rather shabby private cabin. He white-washed
-himself publicly out of his dirty private pail.
-
-Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the
-quiet and undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps
-you have accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the
-pockets bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental
-concern is awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own
-son. It is natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing
-and weighty reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that
-all those respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard
-young John's step approaching. You know that this very reasonable
-display of paternal interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying
-of which you would be ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is
-miles off--perhaps down in the city, perhaps far away in the country.
-You are left alone with his letters and your own sense of decency. You
-can read the letters in perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you
-can share them. Not a soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled
-to know those secrets, and young John may be benefited by your knowing
-them. What do you do in these circumstances? The answer will provide you
-with a fairly reliable tape measure for your own spiritual contents.
-
-There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next
-Cabin. We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of “Le
-Diable Boiteux,” Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one
-house to another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside,
-with very surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the
-guise of a very civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and
-offered to do the same for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and
-lift with magic and inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the
-mysteries and privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should have
-the decency to thank him and send him away. The amusement would be
-purchased at too high a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm,
-but it would do me a lot of harm. For, after all, the important thing
-is not that we should be able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the
-whole world in the face, but that we should be able to look ourselves in
-the face. And it is our private standard of conduct and not our public
-standard of conduct which gives or denies us that privilege. We are
-merely counterfeit coin if our respect for the Eleventh Commandment only
-applies to being found out by other people. It is being found out by
-ourselves that ought to hurt us.
-
-It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass
-a tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never
-committed a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or
-forged a cheque. But these things are not evidence of good character.
-They may only mean that I never had enough honest indignation to commit
-a murder, nor enough courage to break into a house. They may only mean
-that I never needed to forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may
-only mean that I am afraid of the police. Respect for the law is a
-testimonial that will not go far in the Valley of Jehosophat. The
-question that will be asked of me there is not whether I picked my
-neighbour's lock, but whether I put my ear to his keyhole; not whether
-I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but whether I read his
-letters when his back was turned--in short, not whether I had respect
-for the law, but whether I had respect for myself and the sanctities
-that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is what went on in my
-private cabin which will probably be my undoing.
-
-[Illustration: 0222]
-
-[Illustration: 0223]
-
-
-
-
-FLEET STREET NO MORE
-
-|To-day I am among the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a
-lifetime and am a person at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that
-is told, a rumour on the wind; a memory of far-off things and battles
-long ago. At this hour I fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm.
-There is the thunder of machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above,
-the click-click-click of the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph
-operators, the tinkling of telephones, the ringing of bells for
-messengers who tarry, reporters coming in with “stories” or without
-“stories,” leader-writers writing for dear life and wondering whether
-they will beat the clock and what will happen if they don't, night
-editors planning their pages as a shopman dresses his shop window,
-sub-editors breasting the torrent of “flimsies” that flows in from the
-ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and the other. I hear
-the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit might hear the
-murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as a policeman
-must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the Strand
-submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his glory
-departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the
-middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible
-embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong
-arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and
-the waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a
-personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could
-stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the
-street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to
-the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety.
-His cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of
-the Constitution, and his truncheon was as indispensable as a
-field-marshal's baton.
-
-And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on
-the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make
-a pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk
-across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers.
-Even “J. B.,” who has never been known to pass a policeman without a
-gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived
-under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly
-Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates
-or in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished
-magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free,
-independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He
-can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand,
-but he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting,
-or Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in
-the shop windows, or turn into the “pictures” or go home to tea. He can
-light his pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as
-he pleases. He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a
-realm where the clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes
-without stirring his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will
-not care.
-
-And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock
-and take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous
-thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me
-as my own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life
-until I have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have
-heard its chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the
-swanking swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its
-unceasing life during every hour of the twenty-four--in the afternoon
-when the pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are
-crossing to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air
-is shrill with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide
-of the day's life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work,
-and the telegraph boys flit from door to door with their tidings of
-the world's happenings; in the small hours when the great lorries come
-thundering up the side streets with their mountains of papers and rattle
-through the sleeping city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag
-of morn in sovereign state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral
-that looks down so grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. “I see it
-arl so plainly as I saw et, long ago.” I have worn its paving stones as
-industriously as Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as
-one who had the run of the estate and the freeman's right. I have
-known its _habitues_ as familiarly as if they had belonged to my own
-household, and its multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have
-drunk the solemn toast with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken
-counsel with the lawyers in the Temple, and wandered in its green and
-cloistered calm in the hot afternoons, and written thousands of leaders
-and millions of words on this, that, and the other, wise words and
-foolish words, and words without any particular quality at all, except
-that they filled up space, and have had many friendships and fought many
-battles, winning some and losing others, and have seen the generations
-go by, and the young fellows grow into old fellows who scan a little
-severely the new race of ardent boys that come along so gaily to the
-enchanted street and are doomed to grow old and weary in its service
-also. And at the end it has come to be a street of ghosts--a street of
-memories, with faces that I knew lurking in its shadows and peopling
-its rooms and mingling with the moving pageant that seems like a phantom
-too.
-
-Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like
-the Chambered Nautilus, I
-
-                   ... seal up the idle door,
-
-          Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.
-
-I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape
-at its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no
-more. No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual
-footsteps. No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had
-always “gone out to supper, sir,” or been called to the news-room or
-sent on an errand. No more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous
-clock that ticked so much faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will
-come down from above like snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults
-of the world will boil in like the roar of many waters, but I shall not
-hear them. For I have come into the inheritance of leisure. Time, that
-has lorded it over me so long, is henceforth my slave, and the future
-stretches before me like an infinite green pasture in which I can wander
-till the sun sets. I shall let the legions thunder by while I tend
-my bees and water my plants, and mark how my celery grows and how the
-apples ripen.
-
-And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the
-chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great
-noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him
-a tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his
-orchard when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys,
-bearing an urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in
-the Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to
-their plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water,
-took a sponge _and washed out his ears._
-
-[Illustration: 0228]
-
-[Illustration: 0229]
-
-
-
-
-ON WAKING UP
-
-|When I awoke this morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the
-valley and the beech woods glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and
-heard the ducks clamouring for their breakfast, and felt all the kindly
-intimacies of life coming back in a flood for the new day, I felt,
-as the Americans say, “good.” Waking up is always--given a clear
-conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy faculty of sleep--a joyous
-experience. It has the pleasing excitement with which the tuning up of
-the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the symphony affects you. It is
-like starting out for a new adventure, or coming into an unexpected
-inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling suddenly upon some author
-whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes to your heart like a
-brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden and beautiful and
-full of promise.
-
-But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is
-now that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of
-consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has
-happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and
-realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The
-fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does
-not diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into
-the future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking
-to each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over,
-that the years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining
-and the birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going
-forth to their labour until the evening without fear and without hate.
-As the day advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find
-it is very much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment
-when you step over the threshold of sleep into the living world the
-revelation is simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed.
-The devil is dead. The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the
-earth. You recall the far different emotions of a few brief months ago
-when the morning sun woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling
-of the birds seemed pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the
-paper spoiled your breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the
-Kaiser. Poor wretch, he is waking, too, probably about this time and
-wondering what will happen to him before nightfall, wondering where
-he will spend the miserable remnant of his days, wondering whether his
-great ancestor's habit of carrying a dose of poison was not after all a
-practice worth thinking about. He wanted the whole, earth, and now he is
-discovering that he is entitled to just six feet of it--the same as the
-lowliest peasant in his land. “The foxes have holes and the birds of
-the air have nests,” but there is neither hole nor nest where he will be
-welcome. There is not much joy for him in waking to a new day.
-
-But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has “murdered
-Sleep,” and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose
-a crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to
-enter the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease
-of life after our present lease had run out and were told that we could
-nominate our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor
-an earldom, nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my
-childhood when I thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin
-man, eternally perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a
-basket on my head and shouting “Muffins,” in the ears of a delighted
-populace. I loved muffins and I loved bells, and here was a man who had
-those joys about him all day long and every day. But now my ambitions
-are more restrained. I would no more wish to be born a muffin man than
-a poet or an Archbishop. The first gift I should ask would be something
-modest. It would be the faculty of sleeping eight solid hours every
-night, and waking each morning with the sense of unfathomable and
-illimitable content with which I opened my eyes to the world to-day.
-
-All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to
-their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put
-eating first, “for,” said he, “there is no other pleasure that comes
-three times a day and lasts an hour each time.” But sleep lasts eight
-hours. It fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it
-fills it up with the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom
-of democracy. “All equal are within the church's gate,” said George
-Herbert. It may have been so in George Herbert's parish; but it is
-hardly so in most parishes. It is true of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you
-enter its portals all discriminations vanish, and Hodge and his master,
-the prince and the pauper, are alike clothed in the royal purple and
-inherit the same golden realm. There is more harmony and equality in
-life than wre are apt to admit. For a good twenty-five years of our
-seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an agreement that is simply
-wonderful.
-
-And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What
-delight is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing
-the sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of
-the birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or
-the cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or
-(as now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the
-day will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as
-any that have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there
-is eternal renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best
-that is still to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot
-stale nor familiarity make tame.
-
-That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note
-of the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that
-all must feel on this exultant morning--
-
-                   Good morning, Life--and all
-
-                   Things glad and beautiful.
-
-                   My pockets nothing hold,
-
-                   But he that owns the gold,
-
-                   The Sun, is my great friend--
-
-                   His spending has no end.
-
-Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the
-bells. There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
-
-It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of
-sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain
-perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we
-can hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall
-get through it. We shall not “get through it,” of course, but speech is
-only fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have
-had a sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror
-of a dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of
-consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite
-mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of
-immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than
-from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose
-love and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this
-perplexity the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of
-happy awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not
-being. I can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than
-
-                   To dream as I may,
-
-                        And awake when I will,
-
-                   With the song of the bird,
-
-                        And the sun on the hill.
-
-Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in
-which, once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, “Are you there,
-beloved?” and hear the reply, “Yes, beloved, I am here,” and with
-that sweet assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The
-tenderness and beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred
-Austin, whom some one in a jest made Poet Laureate. “For my part,” he
-said, “I should like to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of
-another victory for the British Empire.” It would not be easy to invent
-a more perfect contrast between the feeling of a poet and the simulated
-passion of a professional patriot. He did not really think that, of
-course. He was simply a timid, amiable little man who thought it was
-heroic and patriotic to think that. He had so habituated his tiny talent
-to strutting about in the grotesque disguise of a swashbuckler that it
-had lost all touch with the primal emotions of poetry. Forgive me for
-intruding him upon the theme. The happy awakenings of eternity
-must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings and its vulgar
-patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to sleep on.
-
-[Illustration: 0235]
-
-[Illustration: 0236]
-
-
-
-
-ON RE-READING
-
-
-I
-
-|A weekly paper has been asking well-known people what books they
-re-read. The most pathetic reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir
-Arthur Conan Doyle. “I seldom re-read now,” says that unhappy man. “Time
-is so short and literature so vast and unexplored.” What a desolating
-picture! It is like saying, “I never meet my old friends now. Time is so
-short and there are so many strangers I have not yet shaken hands with.”
- I see the poor man, hot and breathless, scurrying over the “vast and
-unexplored” fields of literature, shaking hands and saying, “How
-d'ye do?” to everybody he meets and reaching the end of his journey,
-impoverished and pitiable, like the peasant in Tolstoi's “How much land
-does a man need?”
-
-I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with
-strangers. I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North
-Pole and the South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson
-said of the Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should
-not like _to go_ to see them. And so with books. Time is so short that
-I have none to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library.
-I could almost say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is
-published I read an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion,
-and a book has to weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I
-embark on it. When it has proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but
-meanwhile the old ships are good enough for me. I know the captain
-and the crew, the fare I shall get and the port I shall make and the
-companionship I shall have by the way.
-
-Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write--Boswell, “The
-Bible in Spain,” Pepys, Horace, “Elia,” Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve,
-“Travels with a Donkey,” Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, “The Early
-Life of Charles James Fox,”
-
-“Under the Greenwood Tree,” and so on. Do not call them books.
-
-                   Camerado, this is no book.
-
-                   Who touches this, touches a man,
-
-as Walt Whitman said of his own “Leaves of Grass.” They are not books.
-They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on
-my pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was
-worth making the great adventure of life to find such company. Come
-revolutions and bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace,
-gain or loss--these friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes
-of the journey. The friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are
-estranged, die, but these friends of the spirit are not touched with
-mortality. They were not born for death, no hungry generations tread
-them down, and with their immortal wisdom and laughter they give us
-the password to the eternal. You can no more exhaust them than you
-can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the joyous melody of Mozart or
-Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or any other thing of beauty.
-They are a part of ourselves, and through their noble fellowship we are
-made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind--
-
-               ... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
-
-               In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
-
-We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion
-with these spirits.
-
-I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old
-friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever
-and went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he
-sits in his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale.
-It is a way Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph
-captive. They cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern
-flight without thinking that they are going to breathe the air that
-Horace breathed, and asking them to carry some such message as John
-Marshall's:
-
-                        Tell him, bird,
-
-               That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
-
-               One man at least seeks not admittance there.
-
-This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss
-the figure of Horace--short and fat, according to Suetonius--in the
-fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with
-equal animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry.
-Meanwhile, so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would
-say, is imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading
-the books in which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored
-tracts of the desert to those who like deserts.
-
-
-II
-
-|A correspondent asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve
-Books that he ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not
-know what he had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs
-were, and even with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for
-another. But I compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed
-that for some offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a
-desert island out in the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for
-twelve months, or perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a
-mitigation of the penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve
-books of my own choosing. On what principles should I set about so
-momentous a choice?
-
-In the first place I decided that they must be books of the
-inexhaustible kind. Rowland Hill said that “the love of God was like a
-generous roast of beef--you could cut and come again.” That must be the
-first quality of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could
-go on reading and re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in
-Borrow went on reading “Moll Flanders.” If only her son had known that
-immortal book, she said, he would never have got transported for life.
-That was the sort of book I must have with me on my desert island. But
-my choice would be different from that of the old apple-woman of Old
-London Bridge. I dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the
-best of novels are exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my
-bundle of books would be complete before I had made a start with the
-essentials, for I should want “Tristram Shandy” and “Tom Jones,” two
-or three of Scott's, Gogol's “Dead Souls,” “David Copperfield,” “Evan
-Harrington,” “The Brothers Karamazoff,” “Père Goriot,” “War and Peace,”
- “The Three Musketeers,” all of Hardy's, “Treasure Island,” “Robinson
-Crusoe,” “Silas Marner,” “Don Quixote,” the “Cloister and the Hearth,”
- “Esmond”--no, no, it would never do to include novels. They must be left
-behind.
-
-The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but
-these had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not
-come in the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale,
-so that I can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have
-no doubt about my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first
-among the historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him
-by the lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and
-understanding that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf
-of twenty-three centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and
-fro, as it were, from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty
-drama of ancient Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the
-same ambitions, the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and
-the same heroes. Yes, Thucydides of course.
-
-And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is
-there to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history
-and philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come
-to the story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned
-Mommsen, or the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard
-choice. I shut my eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well,
-I make no complaint. And then I will have those three fat volumes of
-Motley's, “Rise of the Dutch Republic” (4) put in my boat, please,
-and--yes, Carlyle's “French Revolution” (5), which is history and drama
-and poetry and fiction all in one. And, since I must take the story of
-my own land with me, just throw in Green's “Short History” (6). It is
-lovable for its serene and gracious temper as much as for its story.
-
-That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the
-more personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep
-the fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course,
-there is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition,
-for there only is the real Samuel revealed “wart and all”). I should
-like to take “Elia” and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit
-my personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place
-must be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that
-frank, sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to
-these good fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality
-of open-air romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more
-I choose indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a
-choice between the “Bible in Spain,” “The Romany Rye,” “Lavengro,” and
-“Wild Wales.” But I rejoice when I find that “Lavengro” (10) is in the
-boat.
-
-I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could
-have had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is
-Wordsworth (11) _contra mundum_, I have no doubt. He is the man who will
-“soothe and heal and bless.” My last selection shall be given to a
-work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's
-“Voyages” and the “Voyage of the Beagle,” and while I am balancing their
-claims the “Beagle” (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library
-is complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the
-Pacific.
-
-[Illustration: 0243]
-
-
-
-
-FEBRUARY DAYS
-
-
-|The snow has gone from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of
-setting, has got round to the wood that crowns the hill on the other
-side of the valley. Soon it will set on the slope of the hill and then
-down on the plain. Then we shall know that spring has come. Two days
-ago a blackbird, from the paddock below the orchard, added his golden
-baritone to the tenor of the thrush who had been shouting good news
-from the beech tree across the road for weeks past. I don't know why the
-thrush should glimpse the dawn of the year before the blackbird, unless
-it is that his habit of choosing the topmost branches of the tree gives
-him a better view of the world than that which the golden-throated
-fellow gets on the lower branches that he always affects. It may be
-the same habit of living in the top storey that accounts for the early
-activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours, but never so noisy as
-in these late February days, when they are breaking up into families and
-quarrelling over their slatternly household arrangements in the topmost
-branches of the elm trees. They are comic ruffians who wash all their
-dirty linen in public, and seem almost as disorderly and bad-tempered as
-the human family itself. If they had only a little of our ingenuity
-in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my friend the farmer to
-light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive the female from
-the eggs and save his crops.
-
-A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his
-modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but
-he is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden
-and the pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is
-as industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the
-starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been
-observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two
-minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that
-deserves encouragement--a bird that loves caterpillars and does not love
-cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So hang
-out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
-
-And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no
-unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape
-the general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been
-agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below
-the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting
-industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with
-that innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just
-in front of you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of
-hide-and-seek. But not now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in
-the best of us. Now he reminds us that he too is a part of that nature
-which feeds so relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing
-about in his own erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that
-the coast is clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his
-beak. He skips away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper
-of the hive comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops
-the great tit and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in
-spite of his air of innocence.
-
-There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the
-starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months
-hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's
-“Oh, that the Romans had only one neck!” For then he will come out of
-the beech woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive
-against my cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an
-obscene picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and
-the stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I
-can be just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not
-all bad any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See
-him on autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his
-forages in the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in
-the sky that are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud
-approaches like a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting,
-changing formation, breaking up into battalions, merging into columns,
-opening out on a wide front, throwing out flanks and advance guards
-and rear guards, every complication unravelled in perfect order, every
-movement as serene and assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat
-of some invisible conductor below--a very symphony of the air, in which
-motion merges into music, until it seems that you are not watching a
-flight of birds, but listening with the inner ear to great waves of
-soundless harmony. And then, the overture over, down the cloud descends
-upon the fields, and the farmers' pests vanish before the invasion.
-And if you will follow them into the fields you will find infinite tiny
-holes that they have drilled and from which they have extracted the
-lurking enemy of the drops, and you will remember that it is to their
-beneficial activities that we owe the extermination of the May beetle,
-whose devastations were so menacing a generation ago. And after the
-flock has broken up and he has paired, and the responsibilities of
-housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy labours. When spring has
-come you can see him dart from his nest in the hollow of the tree and
-make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field, returning each
-time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other succulent, but
-pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at home. That
-acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted eighteen such
-journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for a fellow of
-such benignant spirit?
-
-But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and
-see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
-
-Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration.
-Sufficient unto the day---- And to-day I will think only good of the
-sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the brave
-news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as
-this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that
-all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, “according
-to plan,” and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score
-of hives in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its
-perils. We saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay
-on the ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had
-come from a neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there
-was no admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he
-came. Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness
-and great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him
-trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh,
-these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.
-
-In the garden the news is coming up from below, borne by those unfailing
-outriders of the spring, the snowdrop and the winter aconite. A modest
-company; but in their pennons is the assurance of the many-coloured host
-that is falling unseen into the vast pageant of summer and will fill the
-woods with the trumpets of the harebell and the wild hyacinth, and make
-the hedges burst into foam, and the orchard a glory of pink and white,
-and the ditches heavy with the scent of the meadowsweet, and the fields
-golden with harvest and the gardens a riot of luxuriant life. I said
-it was all right, chirps little red waistcoat from the fence--all the
-winter I've told you that there was a good time coming and now you see
-for yourself. Look at those flowers. Ain't they real? The philosopher in
-the red waistcoat is perfectly right. He has kept his end up all through
-the winter, and has taken us into his fullest confidence. Formerly he
-never came beyond the kitchen, but this winter when the snow was about
-he advanced to the parlour where he pottered about like one of the
-family. Now, however, with the great news outside and the earth full of
-good things to pick up, he has no time to call.
-
-Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save
-for the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the
-message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of
-the spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the
-sunrise is unlike the spirit of the sunset. It is the lusty breath of
-life coming back to the dead earth, and making these February days the
-most thrilling of the year. For in these expanding skies and tremors of
-life and unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and
-hope, and nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes
-that the joy of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The
-cherry blossom comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the
-spring with it, and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent
-of the lime trees and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days
-of birth when
-
-          “Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.”
-
-there is no hint of mortality and no reverted glance. The curtain is
-rising and the pageant is all before us.
-
-[Illustration: 0249]
-
-[Illustration: 0250]
-
-
-
-
-ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE
-
-
-|Among my letters this morning was one requesting that if I were in
-favour of “the reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the
-Jewish people,” I should sign the enclosed declaration and return it in
-the envelope (unstamped), also enclosed. I dislike unstamped envelopes.
-I also dislike stamped envelopes. You can ignore an unstamped enveloped
-but a stamped envelope compels you to write a letter, when perhaps you
-don't want to write a letter. My objection to unstamped envelopes is
-that they show a meagre spirit and a lack of confidence in you. They
-suggest that you are regarded with suspicion as a person who will
-probably steam off the stamp and use it to receipt a bill.
-
-But I waived the objection, signed the declaration, stamped the envelope
-and put it in the post. I did all this because I am a Zionist. I am so
-keen a Zionist that I would use a whole bookful of stamps in the cause.
-I am a Zionist, not on sentimental grounds, but on very practical
-grounds. I want the Jews to have Palestine, so that the English may have
-England and the Germans Germany and the Russians Russia. I want them to
-have a home of their own so that the rest of us can have a home of
-our own. By this I do not mean that I am an anti-Semite. I loathe
-Jew-baiting, and regard the Jew-baiter as a very unlovely person. But I
-want the Jew to be able to decide whether he is an alien or a citizen.
-I want him to shed the dualism that makes him such an affliction to
-himself and to other people. I want him to possess Palestine so that he
-may cease to want to possess the earth.
-
-I am therefore fiercely on the side of the Zionist Jews, and fiercely
-against their opponents. These people want to be Jews, but they do not
-want Jewry. They do not want to be compelled to make a choice between
-being Jews and being Englishmen or Americans, Germans or French. They
-want the best of both worlds. We are not a nation, they say; we are
-Englishmen, or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, or
-Russians, or Japanese “of the Jewish persuasion.” We are a religious
-community like the Catholics, or the Presbyterians, or the Unitarians,
-or the Plymouth Brethren. Indeed! And what is your religion, pray? _It
-is the religion of the Chosen People_. Great heavens! You deny that
-you are a nation, and in the same breath claim that you are the Chosen
-Nation. The very foundation of your religion is that Jehovah has picked
-you out from all the races of men as his own. Over you his hand is
-spread in everlasting protection. For you the cloud by day and the
-pillar of fire by night; for the rest of us the utter darkness of the
-breeds that have not the signature of Jehovah. We cannot enter your
-kingdom by praying or fasting, by bribe or entreaty. Every other nation
-is accessible to us on its own conditions; every other religion is eager
-to welcome us, sends its missionaries to us to implore us to come in.
-But you, the rejected of nations, yourself reject all nations and forbid
-your sacraments to those who are not bom of your household. You are
-the Chosen People, whose religion is the nation and whose nationhood is
-religion.
-
-Why, my dear sir, history offers no parallel to your astounding claim to
-nationality--the claim that has held your race together through nearly
-two thousand years of dispersion and wandering, of persecution and
-pride, of servitude and supremacy--
-
-          Slaves in eternal Egypts, baking your strawless bricks;
-
-          At ease in successive Zions, prating your politics.
-
-All nations are afflicted with egoism. It is the national egoism
-of Prussia that has just brought it to such catastrophic ruin. The
-Frenchman entertains the firm conviction that civilisation ends at the
-French frontier. Being a polite person, he does his best not to betray
-the conviction to us, and sometimes almost succeeds. The Englishman,
-being less sophisticated, does not try to conceal the fact that he has
-a similar conviction. It does not occur to him that anyone can doubt his
-claim. He knows that every foreigner would like to be an Englishman if
-he knew how. The pride of the Spaniard is a legend, and you have only to
-see Arab salute Arab to understand what a low person the European must
-seem in their eyes. In short, national egoism is a folly which is pretty
-equally distributed among all of us. But your national egoism is unlike
-any other brand on earth. In the humility of Shylock is the pride of the
-most arrogant racial aristocracy the world has ever seen. God appeared
-to you in the burning bush and spoke to you in the thunders of Sinai,
-and set you apart as his own exclusive household. And when one of your
-prophets declared that all nations were one in the sight of God, you
-rejected his gospel and slew the prophet. By comparison with you we are
-a humble people. We know we are a mixed race and that we have no more
-divine origin--and no less--than anybody else. Mr Kipling, it is true,
-has caught your arrogant note:
-
-          For the Lord our God Most High,
-
-          He hath made the deep as dry,
-
-          He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.
-
-But that is because Mr Kipling seems to be one of those who believe we
-are one of the lost tribes of your Chosen race. I gather that is so from
-another of his poems in which he cautions us against
-
-                   Such boastings as the Gentiles use
-
-                   And lesser breeds without the law.
-
-But Mr Kipling is only a curiosity among us. We are much more modest
-than that. But you are like that. You are not only a nation. You are,
-except the Chinese, the most isolated, the most tenacious, the most
-exclusive nation in history. Other races have changed through the
-centuries beyond recognition or have disappeared altogether. Where are
-the Persians of the spacious days of Cyrus? Who finds in the Egyptians
-of to-day the spirit and genius of the mighty people who built the
-Pyramids and created the art of the Third Dynasty? What trace is there
-in the modern Cretans of the imperial race whose seapower had become
-a legend before Homer sang? Can we find in the Greeks of our time any
-reminiscence of the Athens of Pericles? Or in the Romans any kinship
-with the sovereign people that conquered the world from Parthia to
-Britain, and stamped it with the signature of its civilisation as
-indelibly as it stamped it with its great highways? The nations chase
-each other across the stage of time, and vanish as the generations
-of men chase each other and vanish. You and the Chinese alone seem
-indestructible. It is no extravagant fancy that foresees that when the
-last fire is lit on this expiring planet it will be a Chinaman and a Jew
-who will stretch their hands to its warmth, drink in the last breath of
-air, and write the final epitaph of earth. No, it is too late by many a
-thousand years to deny your nationhood, for it is the most enduring fact
-in human records. And being a nation without a fatherland, you run like
-a disturbing immiscible fluid through the blood of all the nations. You
-need a home for your own peace and for the world's peace. I am going to
-try and help you to get one.
-
-[Illustration: 0254]
-
-[Illustration: 0201]
-
-
-
-
-ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
-
-|I think, on the whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good
-display of moral fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen
-(and admired) I propose to let them off in public. When I awoke in
-the morning I made a good resolution.... At this point, if I am
-not mistaken, I observe a slight shudder on your part, madam. “How
-Victorian!” I think I hear you remark. You compel me, madam, to digress.
-
-It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year's resolutions
-nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we
-elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No
-one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian
-England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This
-querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like
-the scorn of youth for its elders.
-
-I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I
-should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as
-it is to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the
-Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as
-we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren
-will be as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of
-yesterday. The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered
-poison gas, and have invented submarines and guns that will kill a
-churchful of people seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding
-the Nineteenth Century as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good
-things as well as very bad things about our old Victorian England. It
-did not go to the Ritz to dance in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz
-did not exist, and the modern hotel life had not been invented. It used
-to go instead to the watch-night service, and it was not above making
-good resolutions, which for the most part, no doubt, it promptly
-proceeded to break.
-
-Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of
-watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I
-had my way I would be as “merry” as Pepys, if in a different fashion.
-“Merry” is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that
-merriment is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a
-mere spasm, whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy
-of life. But the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other,
-and an occasional burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for
-anybody--even for an Archbishop--especially for an Archbishop. The
-trouble with an Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take
-himself too seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad
-for him. He needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally
-that his virtue is not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary
-humanity. At least once a year he should indulge in a certain
-liveliness, wear the cap and bells, dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe,
-not too publicly, but just publicly enough so that there should be
-nothing furtive about it. If not done on the village green it might
-at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and chronicled in the
-local newspapers. “Last evening His Grace the Archbishop attended the
-servants' ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the chief
-scullery-maid.”
-
-[Illustration: 0257]
-
-And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its
-good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you “A Merry Christmas
-and a Happy New Year.” Nowadays the formula is “A Happy Christmas and a
-Prosperous New Year.” It is a priggish, sophisticated change--a sort of
-shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being “merry.”
- There isn't. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a
-Merry Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a
-Happy New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
-
-If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making
-good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that
-virtue is a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride
-Victorian England because it went to watch-night services it is not
-because I think there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is
-because, in the words of the old song, I think “It is good to be
-merry _and_ wise.” I like a festival of foolishness and I like good
-resolutions, too. Why shouldn't I? Lewis Carrol's gift for mathematics
-was not less admirable because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at
-doing sums in his head.
-
-From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution.
-The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New
-Year's morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is
-that you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn't call you an
-intolerant fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow.
-Perhaps to put the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous
-reaction to events is a little too immediate. I don't want to be
-unpleasant, but I think you see what I mean. Do not suppose that I am
-asking you to be a cold-blooded, calculating person. God forbid. But it
-would do you no harm to wear a snaffle bar and a tightish rein--or, as
-we used to say in our Victorian England, to “count ten.” I accepted
-the criticism with approval. For though we do not like to hear of our
-failings from other people, that does not mean that we are unconscious
-of them. The more conscious we are of them, the less we like to hear of
-them from others and the more we hear of them from ourselves. So I said
-“Agreed. We will adopt 'Second thoughts' as our New Year policy and
-begin the campaign at once.”
-
-And then came my letters--nice letters and nasty letters and indifferent
-letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say, “raised
-the waters.” No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters which
-anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I
-might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting
-assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of
-writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different.
-As I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding
-expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I
-said “Second thoughts,” and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as
-the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect
-to dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old
-imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to
-have a periodical brush with one's habits, even if one knows one is
-pretty sure to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a
-reminder that we are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of
-the imperfections of others. And that, I think, is the case for our old
-Victorian habit of New Year's Day commandments.
-
-I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite _pianissimo_ and
-nice.
-
-[Illustration: 0261]
-
-
-
-
-ON A GRECIAN PROFILE
-
-|I see that the ghouls have descended upon George Meredith, and are
-desecrating his remains. They have learned from the life of him just
-published that he did not get on well with his father, or his eldest
-son, and that he did not attend his first wife's funeral. Above all,
-he was a snob. He was ashamed of the tailoring business from which he
-sprang, concealed the fact that he was bom at Portsmouth, and generally
-turned his Grecian profile to the world and left it to be assumed that
-his pedigree was wrapped in mystery and magnificence.
-
-I daresay it is all true. Many of us have an indifferent record at home
-and most of us like to turn our Grecian profiles to the world, if we
-have Grecian profiles. We are like the girl in Hardy's story who always
-managed to walk on the right side of her lover, because she fancied that
-the left side of her face was her strong point. The most distinguished
-and, I think, the noblest American of our time always turns his profile
-to the camera--and a beautiful profile it is--for reasons quite
-obvious and quite pardonable to those who have seen the birth-mark that
-disfigures the other cheek. I suspect that I do not myself object to
-being caught unaware in favourable attitudes or pleasing situations that
-dispose the observer to agreeable impressions. And, indeed, why should I
-(or you) be ashamed to give-a pleasant thrill to anybody if it is in
-our power. If we pretend we are above these human frailties, what is the
-meaning of the pains we take about choosing a hat, or about the cut of
-a coat, or the colour of a cloth for the new suit? Why do we so seldom
-find pleasure in a photograph of ourselves--so seldom feel that it
-does justice to that benignant and Olympian ideal of ourselves which we
-cherish secretly in our hearts? I should have to admit, if I went into
-the confession box, that I had never seen a photograph of myself that
-had satisfied me. And I fancy you would do the same if you were honest.
-We may pretend to ourselves that it is only abstract beauty or absolute
-truth that we are concerned about, but we know better. We are thinking
-of our Grecian profile.
-
-It is no doubt regrettable to find that great men are so often afflicted
-with little weaknesses. There are some people who delight in pillorying
-the immortals and shying dead cats and rotten eggs at them.
-
-They enjoy the discovery that no one is better than he should be. It
-gives them a comfortable feeling to discover that the austere outside of
-the lord Angelo conceals the libertine. If you praise Caesar they will
-remind you that after dinner he took emetics; if Brutus, they will say
-he made an idol of his public virtue. They like to remember that Lamb
-was not quite the St Charles he is represented to be, but took far
-too much wine at dinner and dosed beautifully, but alcoholically,
-afterwards, as you may read in De Quincey. They like to recall that
-Scott was something of a snob, and put the wine-glass that the Prince
-Regent had used at dinner in his pocket, sitting down on it afterwards
-in a moment of happy forgetfulness. In short, they go about like
-Alcibiades mutilating the statues of Hermes (if he was indeed the
-culprit), and will leave us nothing in human nature that we can entirely
-reverence.
-
-I suppose they are right enough on the facts. Considering what
-multitudinous persons we are it would be a miracle if, when we button
-up ourselves in the morning we did not button up some individual of
-unpleasant propensities, whom we pretend we do not know. I have never
-been interested in my pedigree. I am sure it is a very ancient one,
-and I leave it at that. But I once made a calculation--based on the
-elementary fact that I had two parents and they had each two parents,
-and so on--and came to the conclusion that about the time of the Norman
-Conquest my ancestors were much more numerous than the population
-then inhabiting this island. I am aware that this proves rather too
-much--that it is an example of the fact that you can prove anything by
-statistics, including the impossible. But the truth remains that I am
-the temporary embodiment of a very large number of people--of millions
-of millions of people, if you trace me back to my ancestors who used to
-sharpen flints some six hundred thousand years ago. It would be singular
-if in such a crowd there were not some ne'er-do-wells jostling about
-among the nice, reputable persons who, I flatter myself, constitute my
-Parliamentary majority. Sometimes I fancy that, in a snap election taken
-at a moment of public excitement within myself, the ne'er-do-wells get
-on top. These accidents will happen, and the best I can hope is that the
-general trend of policy in the multitudinous kingdom that I carry under
-my hat is in the hands of the decent people.
-
-And that is the best we can expect from anybody--the great as well as
-the least. If we demand of the supreme man that he shall be a perfect
-whole we shall have no supreme man--only a plaster saint. Certainly we
-shall have no great literature. Shakespeare did not sit aloof like a
-perfect god imagining the world of imperfect creatures that he created.
-The world was within him and he was only the vehicle of his enormous
-ancestry and of the tumultuous life that they reproduced in the theatre
-of his mind. In him was the mirth of a roystering Falstaff of long ago,
-the calculating devilry of some Warwickshire Iago, the pity of Hubert,
-the perplexity of some village Hamlet, the swagger of Ancient Pistol,
-the bucolic simplicity of Cousin Silence, the mingled nobleness and
-baseness of Macbeth, the agony of Lear, the sweetness of many a maiden
-who walked by Avon's banks in ancient days and lived again in
-the Portias and Rosalinds of his mind. All these people dwelt in
-Shakespeare. They were the ghosts of his ancestors. He was, like the
-rest of us, not a man, but multitudes of men. He created all these
-people because he was all these people, contained in a larger measure
-than any man who ever lived all the attributes, good and bad, of
-humanity. Each character was a peep into the gallery of his ancestors.
-Meredith, himself, recognised the ancestral source of creative power.
-When Lady Butcher asked him to explain his insight into the character of
-women he replied, “It is the spirit of my mother in me.” It was indeed
-the spirit of many mothers working in and through him.
-
-It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it
-so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never
-more difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along
-the Embankment last evening with a friend--a man known alike for his
-learning and character--when he turned to me and said, “I will
-never have a hero again.” We had been speaking of the causes of
-the catastrophe of Paris, and his remark referred especially to his
-disappointment with President Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair
-to the President. He did not make allowance for the devil's broth of
-intrigue and ambitions into which the President was plunged on this side
-of the Atlantic. But, leaving that point aside, his remark expressed a
-very common feeling. There has been a calamitous slump in heroes. They
-have fallen into as much disrepute as kings.
-
-And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the
-fabulous offspring of comfortable times--supermen reigning on Olympus
-and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the
-storm and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy
-and prove that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they
-are discovered to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind,
-feeble folk like you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as
-helpless as any of us. Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and
-their feet have come down from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of
-clay.
-
-It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of
-the Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron
-expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:
-
-          I want a hero: an uncommon want,
-
-               When every year and month sends forth a new one.
-
-          Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
-
-               The age discovers he is not the true one.
-
-The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that “no man is
-a hero to his valet.” To be a hero you must be remote in time or
-circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and
-fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities
-and angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is
-privileged to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the
-tricks you have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a
-faithful secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture
-he gives of Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome
-loathing for that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name
-thunders down the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his
-contemporaries. It was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom
-he had just appointed to the choicest command in his gift, who went to
-Caesar's house on that March morning, two thousand years ago, to bring
-him to the slaughter.
-
-If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men
-I should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely
-than anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance
-in secondary things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and
-tenderness with resolution and strength, he stands alone in history.
-But even he was not a hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too
-near--near enough to note his frailties, for he was human, too near to
-realise the grand and significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was
-not until he was dead that the world realised what a leader had fallen
-in Israel. Motley thanked heaven, as for something unusual, that he had
-been privileged to appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed
-him to men. Stanton fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end,
-and it was only when life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur
-of the force that had been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. “There
-lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen,” he said,
-as he stood with other colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had
-breathed his last. But the point here is that, sublime though the sum of
-the man was, his heroic profile had its abundant human warts.
-
-It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of
-reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It
-will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have
-made the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not
-find them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are
-these the men--these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards--the
-demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the
-microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than
-demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and
-then you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.
-
-It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto
-Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless
-picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its
-arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion
-to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is
-a painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never
-will be such a being. The best of us is woven of “mingled yarn, good and
-ill together.” And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and
-the ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he “contained
-multitudes” too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful
-for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects
-of that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
-
-[Illustration: 0269]
-
-[Illustration: 0270]
-
-
-
-
-ON TAKING A HOLIDAY
-
-|I hope the two ladies from the country who have been writing to the
-newspapers to know what sights they ought to see in London during their
-Easter holiday will have a nice time. I hope they will enjoy the tube
-and have fine weather for the Monument, and whisper to each other
-successfully in the whispering gallery of St Paul's, and see the
-dungeons at the Tower and the seats of the mighty at Westminster, and
-return home with a harvest of joyful memories. But I can promise them
-that there is one sight they will not see. They will not see me. Their
-idea of a holiday is London. My idea of a holiday is forgetting there is
-such a place as London.
-
-Not that I dislike London. I should like to see it.
-
-I have long promised myself that I would see it. Some day, I have said,
-I will surely have a look at this place. It is a shame, I have said, to
-have lived in it so long and never to have seen it. I suppose I am not
-much worse than other Londoners. Do you, sir, who have been taking the
-morning bus from Balham for heaven knows how many years--do you, when
-you are walking down Fleet Street, stand still with a shock of delight
-as the dome of St Paul's and its cross of gold burst on your astonished
-sight? Do you go on a fine afternoon and take your stand on Waterloo
-Bridge to see that wondrous river façade that stretches with its
-cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces from Westminster to St Paul's?
-Do you know the spot where Charles was executed, or the church where
-there are the best Grinling Gibbons carvings? Did you ever go into
-Somerset House to see the will of William Shakespeare, or--in short, did
-you ever see London? Did you ever see it, not with your eyes merely, hut
-with your mind, with the sense of revelation, of surprise, of discovery?
-Did you ever see it as those two ladies from the country will see it
-this Easter as they pass breathlessly from wonder to wonder? Of course
-not. You need a holiday in London as I do. You need to set out with
-young Tom (aged ten) on a voyage of discovery and see all the sights of
-this astonishing city as though you had come to it from a far country.
-
-That is how I hope to visit it--some day. But not this Easter, not when
-I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the cherry
-blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the chestnut
-tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long and the
-April meadows are “smoored wi' new grass,” as they say in the Yorkshire
-dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at the magic
-casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn to the
-fringe of Dartmoor and let loose--shall it be from Okehampton or Bovey
-Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? what matter the gate by which we enter the
-sanctuary?--let loose, I say, into the vast spaces of earth and sky
-where the moorland streams sing their ancient runes over the boulders
-and the great tors stand out like castles of the gods against the
-horizon and the Easter sun dances, as the legend has it, overhead and
-founders gloriously in the night beyond Plymouth Sound.
-
-Or, perhaps, ladies, if you come from the North, I may pass you
-unawares, and just about the time when you are cracking your breakfast
-egg in the boarding house at Russell Square--heavens, Russell
-Square!--and discussing whether you shall first go down the deepest
-lift or up the highest tower, or stand before the august ugliness of
-Buckingham Palace, or see the largest station or the smallest church,
-I shall be stepping out from Keswick, by the lapping waters of Derwent
-water, hailing the old familiar mountains as they loom into sight,
-looking down again--think of it!--into the' Jaws of Borrowdale, having
-a snack at Rosthwaite, and then, hey for Styehead! up, up ever the rough
-mountain track, with the buzzard circling with slow flapping wings about
-the mountain flanks, with glorious Great Gable for my companion on the
-right hand and no less glorious Scafell for my companion on the left
-hand, and at the rocky turn in the track--lo! the great amphitheatre of
-Wasdale, the last Sanctuary of lakeland.
-
-And at this point, ladies, you may as you crane your neck to see the
-Duke of York at the top of his column--wondering all the while who the
-deuce the fellow was that he should stand so high--you may, I say, if
-you like, conceive me standing at the top of the pass, taking my hat
-from my head and pronouncing a terrific curse on the vandals who would
-desecrate the last temple of solitude by driving a road over this
-fastness of the mountains in order that the gross tribe of motorists may
-come with their hoots and their odours, their hurry and vulgarity, and
-chase the spirit of the mountains away from us for ever.... And then
-by the screes of Great Gable to the hollow among the mountains. Or
-perchance, I may turn by Sprinkling Tam and see the Pikes of Langdale
-come into view and stumble down Rossett Ghyll and so by the green
-pastures of Langdale to Grasmere.
-
-In short, ladies, I may be found in many places. But I shall not tell
-you where. I am not quite sure that I could tell you where at this
-moment, for I am like a fellow who has come into great riches and
-is doubtful how he can squander them most gloriously. But, I repeat,
-ladies, that you will not find me in London. I leave London to you. May
-you enjoy it.
-
-[Illustration: 0201]
-
-
-
-
-UNDER THE SYCAMORE
-
-|An odd question was put to me the other day which I think I may venture
-to pass on to a wider circle. It was this: What is the best dish that
-life has set before you? At first blush it seems an easy question to
-answer. It was answered gaily enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked
-what was the best thing that had ever happened to him. “The best thing
-that ever happened to me was to be born,” he replied. But that is not an
-answer: it is an evasion. It belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether
-life is worth living. Life may be worth living or not worth living on
-balance, but in either case we can still say what was the thing in it
-that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a dinner on the whole and yet
-make an exception of the trout, or the braised ham and spinach or the
-dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and still admit that he
-has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift and many more, have
-cursed the day you were born and still remember many pleasant things
-that have happened to you--falling in love, making friends, climbing
-mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs, watching the
-sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You may write
-off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush outside.
-It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very sad heart
-who has never had anything to thank his stars for.
-
-But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it
-grows difficult on reflection.
-
-In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily
-answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over
-and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things
-that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long
-sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and
-agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree--sycamore or chestnut
-for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because their
-generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade--to sit, I say, and
-think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball which the
-Blessèd Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven near by,
-sees “spinning like a midge” below.
-
-And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and
-asked us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play
-to which we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped
-away so quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we
-should make now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will
-be there) will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer.
-That glorious contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool
-million--come now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair
-to remember your journey by. You will have to think of something better
-than that as the splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to
-confess to a very complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser
-pleasures seemed so important, you will not like to admit, even to
-yourself, that your most rapturous memory of earth centres round the
-grillroom at the Savoy. You will probably find that the things best
-worth remembering are the things you rejected.
-
-I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose
-pleasures were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of
-life, after all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers
-in money, and traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those
-occupations to hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon
-under that sycamore tree--which of them, now that it is all over, will
-have most joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one
-and a gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the
-earth as a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the
-mountains, and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and
-where season followed season with a processional glory that never grew
-dim. And Mozart will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and
-Turner as a panorama of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect,
-with what delight they will look back on the great moments of
-life--Columbus seeing the new world dawning on his vision, Copernicus
-feeling the sublime architecture of the universe taking shape in his
-mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal mystery of the human frame, Darwin
-thrilling with the birth pangs of the immense secret that he wrung
-from Nature. These men will be able to answer the question grandly. The
-banquet they had on earth will bear talking about even in Heaven.
-
-But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the
-scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will,
-I fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and
-humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we
-won the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or
-shook hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our
-name in the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament.
-It will be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human
-comradeship we had on the journey--the friendships of the spirit,
-whether made in the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or
-art. We shall remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its
-affections--
-
-               For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
-
-               The fates some recompense have sent--
-
-               Thrice blessed are the things that last,
-
-               The things that are more excellent.
-
-[Illustration: 0278]
-
-[Illustration: 0279]
-
-
-
-
-ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE
-
-
-|I met an old gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with
-whom I have a slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he
-asked me whether I remembered Walker of _The Daily News_. No, said I,
-he was before my time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the
-'seventies.
-
-“Before that,” said the old gentleman. “Must have been in the 'sixties.”
-
-“Probably,” I said. “Did you know him in the 'sixties?”
-
-“Oh, I knew him before then,” said the old gentleman, warming to his
-subject. “I knew him in the 'forties.”
-
-I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman
-enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.
-
-“Heavens!” said I, “the 'forties!”
-
-“No,” said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a
-better view across the ages. “No.... It must have been in
-the 'thirties.... Yes, it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school
-together in the 'thirties. We called him Sawney Walker.”
-
-I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I
-had paid him the one compliment that appealed to him--the compliment of
-astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.
-
-His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety
-not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked “well
-set” for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance
-as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his
-hundred at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement
-was mixed with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent
-vanity is the last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last
-infirmity that humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that
-rages around Dean Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the
-angels. I want to feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are
-moving upwards in the scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round
-and round and biting our tail. I think the case for the ascent of man
-is stronger than the Dean admits. A creature that has emerged from the
-primordial slime and evolved a moral law has progressed a good way. It
-is not unreasonable to think that he has a future. Give him time--and it
-may be that the world is still only in its rebellious childhood--and he
-will go far.
-
-But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a
-time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant
-and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first
-knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We
-are vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of
-his acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all
-the year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes
-at the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots
-and his cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of
-mine who, in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing
-boots to the children at a London school, heard one day a little child
-pattering behind her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of
-the beneficiaries “keeping up” with her. She turned and recognised the
-wearer. “So you've got your new boots on, Mary?” she said. “Yes,” said
-little Mary grandly. “Don't they squeak beautiful, mum.” And though, as
-we grow older, we cease to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we
-find other material to keep the flame of vanity alive. “What for should
-I ride in a carriage if the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?” said
-the Fifer, putting his head out of the window. He spoke for all of
-us. We are all a little like that. I confess that I cannot ride in
-a motor-car that whizzes past other motor-cars without an absurd and
-irrational vanity. I despise the emotion, but it is there in spite of
-me. And I remember that when I was young I could hardly free-wheel down
-a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior to the man who was grinding
-his way up with heavings and perspiration. I have no shame in making
-these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that you, sir (or madam),
-will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite audible echo of
-yourself.
-
-And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we
-are vain of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our
-neighbours as we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our
-neighbours. We are like the old maltster in “Far from the Madding
-Crowd,” when Henery Fray claimed to be “a strange old piece, goodmen.”
-
-“A strange old piece, ye say!” interposed the maltster in a querulous
-voice. “Ye be no old man worth naming--no old man at all. Yer teeth
-bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
-bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis
-a poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore--a boast
-weak as water.”
-
-It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences
-when the maltster had to be pacified.
-
-“Weak as water, yes,” said Jan Coggan. “Malter, we feel ye to be a
-wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.”
-
-“Nobody,” said Joseph Poorgrass. “Ye be a very rare old spectacle,
-malter, and we all respect ye for that gift.”
-
-That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in
-being “a very rare old spectacle.” We count the reigns we've lived in
-and exalt the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes
-at midnight. Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite
-early, as in the case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of
-Cicero who was only in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as
-an old man and wrote his “De Senectute,” exalting the pleasures of old
-age. In the eyes of the maltster he would never have been an old man
-worth naming, for he was only sixty-four when he was murdered. I
-have noticed in my own case of late a growing tendency to flourish my
-antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure in recalling the 'seventies to
-those who can remember, say, only the 'nineties, that my fine old friend
-in the lane had in talking to me about the 'thirties. I met two nice
-boys the other day at a country house, and they were full, as boys ought
-to be, of the subject of the cricket. And when they found I was worth
-talking to on that high theme, they submitted their ideal team to me
-for approval, and I launched out about the giants that lived in the
-days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds of “W. G.” and
-Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G. Steel, and
-many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their stature
-did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those memories
-as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I shall be
-proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning nurse.
-She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope
-and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our
-toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant
-vanity we are soothed to sleep.
-
-[Illustration: 0284]
-
-[Illustration: 0285]
-
-
-
-
-ON SIGHTING LAND
-
-|I was in the midst of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me
-to my feet with a leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a
-doughty fellow, who wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and
-had trained it to stand up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of
-interrogation. “I offer you a draw,” I said with a regal wave of the
-hand, as though I was offering him Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or
-something substantial like that. “Accepted,” he cried with a gesture no
-less reckless and comprehensive. And then we bolted for the top deck.
-For the cry we had heard was “Land in sight!” And if there are three
-more comfortable words to hear when you have been tossing about on the
-ocean for a week or two, I do not know them.
-
-For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the
-Atlantic is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely
-facetious when he said he was “disappointed with the Atlantic.” But now
-I am disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way
-I knew it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order
-to know what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until
-he was a middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to
-his conception of the sea because “we have in us the glance of the
-universe.” But though the actual experience of the ocean adds little to
-the broad imaginative conception of it formed by the mind, we are
-not prepared for the effect of sameness, still less for the sense
-of smallness. It is as though we are sitting day after day in the
-geometrical centre of a very round table-top.
-
-The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are
-told that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before
-yesterday and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility
-to the fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured
-by and here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is
-perfectly flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn
-by compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have “a
-drop into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.” You
-conceive yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth
-which hangs over the sides.
-
-For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its
-appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue
-cloth, with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption
-of transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey
-cloth; sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth
-and tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the
-table, and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth
-flinging itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an
-incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion
-and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under
-the impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment
-suspended in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like
-a wrestler fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning,
-every joint creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful
-strain. A gleam of sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching
-the clouds of spray turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling
-ship with the glamour of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there
-is nothing but the raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler
-in their midst, and far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the
-horizon, as if it were a pencil of white flame, to a spectral and
-unearthly beauty.
-
-But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are
-moveless in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our
-magic carpet (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or
-Europe, as the case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we
-are standing still for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers
-progress to the mind. The circle we looked out on last night is
-indistinguishable from the circle we look out on this morning. Even the
-sky and cloud effects are lost on this flat contracted stage, with its
-hard horizon and its thwarted vision. There is a curious absence of the
-sense of distance, even of distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as
-abruptly as the sea at that severely drawn circumference and there is
-no vague merging of the seen into the unseen, which alone gives the
-imagination room for flight. To live in this world is to be imprisoned
-in a double sense--in the physical sense that Johnson had in mind in
-his famous retort, and in the emotional sense that I have attempted
-to describe. In my growing list of undesirable occupations--sewermen,
-lift-men, stokers, tram-conductors, and so on--I shall henceforth
-include ships' stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being
-shot like a shuttle in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New
-York and back from New York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the
-ill-humour of the ocean and to play the sick nurse to a never-ending
-mob of strangers, is as dreary a part as one could be cast for. I would
-rather navigate a barge on the Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall
-in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet, on second thoughts, they have their
-joys. They hear, every fortnight or so, that thrilling cry, “Land in
-sight!”
-
-It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and
-however familiar it may be.
-
-The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example.
-Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the
-first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some
-unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively,
-comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment
-seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination.
-Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the
-monotonous rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with
-the emotion of the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of
-the sea. Such a cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three
-hundred years ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of
-that immortal little company of the _Mayflower_ caught sight of the land
-where, they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down
-through the centuries that cry of “Land in sight!” has been sounded in
-the ears of generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to
-the new land of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see
-that land shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great
-drama of the ages.
-
-But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English
-eyes as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this
-sunny morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the
-sight there is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself
-heaving with a hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders.
-I have a fleeting vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling
-down there amid a glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to
-sea, and standing on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home
-to the Ark that is for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.
-
-I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is
-a rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his
-hills hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager
-comes from, whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic
-from the Cape, or round the Cape from Australia, or through the
-Mediterranean from India, this is the first glimpse of the homeland that
-greets him, carrying his mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the
-journey's end. And that vision links him up with the great pageant of
-history. Drake, sailing in from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and
-knew he was once more in his Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck
-beside me with a wisp of hair, curled and questioning, on his baldish
-forehead, and I mark the shine in his eyes....
-
-[Illustration: 0291]
-
-[Illustration: 0294]
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-***** This file should be named 47429-0.txt or 47429-0.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/7/4/2/47429/
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
-will be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
-one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
-(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
-permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
-set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
-copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
-protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
-Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
-charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
-do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
-rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
-such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
-research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
-practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
-subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
-redistribution.
-
-
-
-*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
-Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-  www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works
-
-1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
-all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
-If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
-
-1.B.  “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark.  It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
-paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation”
- or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
-collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
-copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
-works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
-are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
-Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
-freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
-this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
-the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
-keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
-a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
-Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
-States.
-
-1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
-access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
-whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
-phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
-Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
-copied or distributed:
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
-from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
-posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
-and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
-or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
-with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
-work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
-through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
-Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
-1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
-terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
-to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
-permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
-word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
-“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
-you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
-copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
-request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
-form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
-that
-
-- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
-     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
-     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
-     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
-     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
-     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
-     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
-     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
-     address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to
-     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
-
-- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-     License.  You must require such a user to return or
-     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
-     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
-     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
-     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
-     of receipt of the work.
-
-- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
-forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
-both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
-collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
-“Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
-corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
-property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
-computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
-your equipment.
-
-1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
-of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
-your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
-refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
-opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
-the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
-Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
-
-
-Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
-people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
-To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
-and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
-and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
-Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
-permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
-Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
-throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
-North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
-contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
-Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-     Chief Executive and Director
-     gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
-SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
-particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
-To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-
-Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
-with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
-Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
-unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
-keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
-
-     www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47429 ***
+
+Produced by David Widger from page images generously
+provided by the Internet Archive
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+WINDFALLS
+
+By Alfred George Gardiner
+
+(Alpha of the Plough)
+
+Illustrations by Clive Gardiner
+
+J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
+
+1920
+
+
+[Illustration: 0002]
+
+[Illustration: 0008]
+
+[Illustration: 0009]
+
+
+TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS
+
+I think this book belongs to you because, if it can be said to be about
+anything in particular--which it cannot--it is, in spite of its delusive
+title, about bees, and as I cannot dedicate it to them, I offer it to
+those who love them most.
+
+[Illustration: 0013]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+|In offering a third basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is
+hoped that the fruit will not be found to have deteriorated. If that is
+the case, I shall hold myself free to take another look under the
+trees at my leisure. But I fancy the three baskets will complete the
+garnering. The old orchard from which the fruit has been so largely
+gathered is passing from me, and the new orchard to which I go has not
+yet matured. Perhaps in the course of years it will furnish material for
+a collection of autumn leaves.
+
+[Illustration: 0015]
+
+[Illustration: 0021]
+
+
+
+
+JEMIMA
+
+|I took a garden fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes.
+When Jemima saw me crossing the orchard with a fork he called a
+committee meeting, or rather a general assembly, and after some joyous
+discussion it was decided _nem. con_. that the thing was worth looking
+into. Forthwith, the whole family of Indian runners lined up in single
+file, and led by Jemima followed faithfully in my track towards the
+artichoke bed, with a gabble of merry noises. Jemima was first into the
+breach. He always is...
+
+But before I proceed it is necessary to explain. You will have observed
+that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless,
+you said, “How careless of the printer. Once might be forgiven; but
+twice----” Dear madam' (or sir), the printer is on this occasion
+blameless. It seems incredible, but it's so. The truth is that Jemima
+was the victim of an accident at the christening ceremony. He was one of
+a brood who, as they came like little balls of yellow fluff out of the
+shell, received names of appropriate ambiguity--all except Jemima. There
+were Lob and Lop, Two Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?, Greedy
+and Baby, and so on. Every name as safe as the bank, equal to all
+contingencies--except Jemima. What reckless impulse led us to call him
+Jemima I forget. But regardless of his name, he grew up into a handsome
+drake--a proud and gaudy fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you call
+him so long as you call him to the Diet of Worms.
+
+And here he is, surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble,
+gobble, and crowd in on me so that I have to scare them off in order to
+drive in the fork. Jemima keeps his eye on the fork as a good batsman
+keeps his eye on the ball. The flash of a fork appeals to him like the
+sound of a trumpet to the warhorse. He will lead his battalion through
+fire and water in pursuit of it. He knows that a fork has some mystical
+connection with worms, and doubtless regards it as a beneficent deity.
+The others are content to grub in the new-turned soil, but he, with his
+larger reasoning power, knows that the fork produces the worms and that
+the way to get the fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the way
+he watches it I rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the fork.
+Look at him now. He cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating fork,
+expecting to see large, squirming worms dropping from it, and Greedy
+nips in under his nose and gobbles a waggling beauty. My excellent
+friend, I say, addressing Jemima, you know both too much and too little.
+If you had known a little more you would have had that worm; if you had
+known a little less you would have had that worm. Let me commend to you
+the words of the poet:
+
+               A little learning is a dangerous thing:
+
+               Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
+
+I've known many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too
+much but don't know enough. Now Greedy----
+
+But clear off all of you. What ho! there.... The scales!... Here is a
+bumper root.... Jemima realises that something unusual has happened,
+assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with great animation. It
+is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners such agreeable
+companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian runners
+about. Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the orchard
+without an idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in a
+perpetual gossip. The world is full of such a number of things that they
+hardly ever leave off talking, and though they all talk together they
+are so amiable about it that it makes you feel cheerful to hear them....
+But here are the scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do you
+say to that, Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.
+
+The idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am
+enveloped once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful
+risks in his attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be
+ungracious to complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it,
+I said, but you are feasting to-day in order that others may feast
+tomorrow. You devour the worm, and a larger and more cunning animal will
+devour you. He cocks up his head and fixes me with that beady eye that
+gleams with such artless yet searching intelligence.... You are right,
+Jemima. That, as you observe, is only half the tale. You eat the worm,
+and the large, cunning animal eats you, but--yes, Jemima, the crude
+fact has to be faced that the worm takes up the tale again where Man the
+Mighty leaves off:
+
+                        His heart is builded
+
+               For pride, for potency, infinity,
+
+               All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
+
+               Arrased with purple like the house of kings,
+
+               _To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm_
+
+               _Statelily lodge..._
+
+I accept your reminder, Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like
+you, am only a link in the chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries,
+who creates to devour and devours to create. I thank you, Jemima. And
+driving in the fork and turning up the soil I seized a large fat worm. I
+present you with this, Jemima, I said, as a mark of my esteem...
+
+[Illustration: 0024]
+
+[Illustration: 0025]
+
+
+
+
+ON BEING IDLE
+
+|I have long laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person.
+It is an entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in
+conversation, I do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am
+idle, in fact, to prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art
+of defence is attack. I defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a
+verdict of not guilty by the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm
+you by laying down my arms. “Ah, ah,” I expect you to say. “Ah, ah, you
+an idle person. Well, that is good.” And if you do not say it I at least
+give myself the pleasure of believing that you think it.
+
+This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things
+about ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about
+us. We say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way
+some people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their
+early decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as
+remote as it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating
+the sorrow it will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be
+missed. We all like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember
+a nice old gentleman whose favourite topic was “When I am gone.” One day
+he was telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee,
+what would happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up
+cheerfully and said, “When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at
+the funeral?” It was a devastating question, and it was observed that
+afterwards the old gentleman never discussed his latter end with his
+formidable grandchild. He made it too painfully literal.
+
+And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were
+to express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad
+as the old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and
+I daresay I should take care not to lay myself open again to such
+_gaucherie_. But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling
+self-deception. I can speak the plain truth about “Alpha of the Plough”
+ without asking for any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how
+he suffers. And I say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was
+never more satisfied of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has
+been engaged in the agreeable task of dodging his duty to _The Star_.
+
+It began quite early this morning--for you cannot help being about
+quite early now that the clock has been put forward--or is it back?--for
+summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and
+there at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved
+to write an article _en plein air_, as Corot used to paint his
+pictures--an article that would simply carry the intoxication of
+this May morning into Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare
+carolling with larks, and make it green with the green and dappled
+wonder of the beech woods. But first of all he had to saturate himself
+with the sunshine. You cannot give out sunshine until you have taken it
+in. That, said he, is plain to the meanest understanding. So he took it
+in. He just lay on his back and looked at the clouds sailing serenely in
+the blue. They were well worth looking at--large, fat, lazy, clouds
+that drifted along silently and dreamily, like vast bales of wool being
+wafted from one star to another. He looked at them “long and long” as
+Walt Whitman used to say. How that loafer of genius, he said, would have
+loved to lie and look at those woolly clouds.
+
+And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
+another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not
+have a picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began
+enumerating the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the
+wings of the west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could
+hear if one gave one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin
+whisper of the breeze in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of
+the woodland behind, the dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech
+near by, the boom of a bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of
+the meadow pipit rising from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo
+sailing up the valley, the clatter of magpies on the hillside, the
+“spink-spink” of the chaffinch, the whirr of a tractor in a distant
+field, the crowing of a far-off cock, the bark of a sheep dog, the ring
+of a hammer reverberating from a remote clearing in the beech woods,
+the voices of children who were gathering violets and bluebells in the
+wooded hollow on the other side of the hill. All these and many other
+things he heard, still lying on his back and looking at the heavenly
+bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him; their billowy softness
+invited to slumber....
+
+When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
+Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and
+the best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the
+blossoms falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you
+preaching the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He
+would catch something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did
+not lie about on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds.
+To them, life was real, life was earnest. They were always “up and
+doing.” It was true that there were the drones, impostors who make ten
+times the buzz of the workers, and would have you believe they do all
+the work because they make most of the noise. But the example of these
+lazy fellows he would ignore. Under the cherry tree he would labour like
+the honey bee.
+
+But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came
+out to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives
+alone, but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put
+on a veil and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time
+flies when you are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do
+and see. You always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure
+that she is there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took
+more time than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one
+of the hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other
+hives, and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was
+visible. The frames were turned over industriously without reward. At
+last, on the floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found.
+This deepened the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason,
+rejected her sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne
+appeared and given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last
+the new queen was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of
+her subjects. She had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped
+notice when the brood frames were put in and, according to the merciless
+law of the hive, had slain her senior. All this took time, and before
+he had finished, the cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard
+announced another interruption of his task.
+
+And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
+of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article
+about how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one
+virtue. It exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.
+
+[Illustration: 0030]
+
+[Illustration: 0031]
+
+
+
+
+ON HABITS
+
+|I sat down to write an article this morning, but found I could make
+no progress. There was grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels
+refused to revolve. I was writing with a pen--a new fountain pen
+that someone had been good enough to send me, in commemoration of an
+anniversary, my interest in which is now very slight, but of which one
+or two well-meaning friends are still in the habit of reminding me. It
+was an excellent pen, broad and free in its paces, and capable of a most
+satisfying flourish. It was a pen, you would have said, that could have
+written an article about anything. You had only to fill it with ink and
+give it its head, and it would gallop away to its journey's end without
+a pause. That is how I felt about it when I sat down. But instead of
+galloping, the thing was as obstinate as a mule. I could get no more
+speed out of it than Stevenson could get out of his donkey in the
+Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried the bastinado, equally without
+effect on my Modestine.
+
+Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
+practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without
+my using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
+there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
+thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
+extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
+bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a
+whole forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to
+me what his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke
+of Cambridge, or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to
+Jackson or--in short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my
+hand, seat me before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as
+they say of the children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an
+eight-day clock. I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten.
+But the magic wand must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen
+in my hand, and the whole complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an
+atmosphere of strangeness. The pen kept intruding between me and my
+thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the touch. It seemed to write a foreign
+language in which nothing pleased me.
+
+This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
+better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
+of his school days. “There was,” he said, “a boy in my class at school
+who stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant
+him. Day came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would;
+till at length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always
+fumbled with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
+waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in
+an evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know
+the success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was
+again questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not
+to be found. In his distress he looked down for it--it was to be seen no
+more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
+place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was
+the author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him
+smote me as I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some
+reparation; but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed
+my acquaintance with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior
+office in one of the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe
+he is dead, he took early to drinking.”
+
+It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
+regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
+and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come.
+to grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits,
+so long as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little
+more than bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take
+away our habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about.
+We could not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life.
+They enable us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we
+had to give fresh and original thought to them each time, would make
+existence an impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our
+commonplace activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more
+leisure we command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but
+not so large as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up
+your own hat and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long
+time it was my practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant
+hook and to take no note of the place. When I sought them I found it
+absurdly difficult to find them in the midst of so many similar hats and
+coats. Memory did not help me, for memory refused to burden itself with
+such trumpery things, and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering
+forlornly and vacuously between the rows and rows of clothes in search
+of my own garments murmuring, “Where _did_ I put my hat?” Then one day a
+brilliant inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on
+a certain peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to
+it. It needed a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked
+like a charm. I can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding
+them. I go to them as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to
+its mark. It is one of the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
+
+But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
+ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally
+break them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ
+them, without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once
+saw Mr Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial
+breach of habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of
+Trinity House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House.
+It is his custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the
+most comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms
+about in a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief
+and the body in repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no
+lapels, and when the hands went up in search of them they wandered about
+pathetically like a couple of children who had lost their parents on
+Blackpool sands. They fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung
+to each other in a visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed
+the search for the lost lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with
+the glasses on the table, sought again for the lapels, did everything
+but take refuge in the pockets of the trousers. It was a characteristic
+omission. Mr Balfour is too practised a speaker to come to disaster as
+the boy in Scott's story did; but his discomfiture was apparent. He
+struggled manfully through his speech, but all the time it was obvious
+that he was at a loss what to do with his hands, having no lapels on
+which to hang them.
+
+I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out
+a pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit,
+ticked away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I
+hope) pardonable result.
+
+[Illustration: 0036]
+
+
+
+
+IN DEFENCE OF WASPS
+
+|It is time, I think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He
+is no saint, but he is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been
+unusually prolific this summer, and agitated correspondents have been
+busy writing to the newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how
+by holding your breath you may miraculously prevent him stinging you.
+Now the point about the wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He
+is, in spite of his military uniform and his formidable weapon, not a
+bad fellow, and if you leave him alone he will leave you alone. He is
+a nuisance of course. He likes jam and honey; but then I am bound
+to confess that I like jam and honey too, and I daresay those
+correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam and honey. We
+shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like jam and honey.
+But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the plate, and he
+is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no doubt. He is
+an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously helpless condition
+from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness for beer. In the
+language of America, he is a “wet.” He cannot resist beer, and having
+rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully tight and
+staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that he
+won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
+Belloc--not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so waspishly
+about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about beer.
+
+This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty
+beer bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets
+out. He is indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings.
+He is excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody
+and nothing, and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of
+things; but a wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin
+that he is, and will never have the sense to walk out the way he went
+in. And on your plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You
+can descend on him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight
+for anything above him, and no sense of looking upward.
+
+His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
+fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
+glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
+familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
+the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.
+
+If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he
+cuts a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
+poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its
+time in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night
+during its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and
+for future generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow
+stripes just lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank
+you. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow----. He
+runs through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time
+in August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving
+only the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of
+20,000 or so next summer.
+
+But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
+you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
+it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet
+he could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than
+the bee, for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel
+competent to speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for
+I've been living in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the
+orchard, with an estimated population of a quarter of a million bees
+and tens of thousands of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never
+deliberately attacked by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around
+me I flee for shelter. There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp,
+the bee's hatred is personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some
+obscure reason, and is always ready to die for the satisfaction of
+its anger. And it dies very profusely. The expert, who has been taking
+sections from the hives, showed me her hat just now. It had nineteen
+stings in it, planted in as neatly as thorns in a bicycle tyre.
+
+It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
+him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
+nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
+devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked,
+and I like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little
+joint, usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real
+virtue, and this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean
+fellow, and is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of
+that supreme abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is
+very cunning. I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He
+got the blow fly down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed
+off one of the creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape,
+and then with a huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away.
+And I confess he carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a
+whole generation of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
+
+And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
+help a fellow in distress.
+
+Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to
+one that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was
+continued for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to
+stroke gently the injured wings.
+
+There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
+who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
+carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp
+as an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
+sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to
+kill her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
+preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we
+wish ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for
+their enemy.
+
+[Illustration: 0040]
+
+[Illustration: 0041]
+
+
+
+
+ON PILLAR ROCK
+
+|Those, we are told, who have heard the East a-calling “never heed
+naught else.” Perhaps it is so; but they can never have heard the call
+of Lakeland at New Year. They can never have scrambled up the screes of
+the Great Gable on winter days to try a fall with the Arrow Head and the
+Needle, the Chimney and Kern Knotts Crack; never have seen the mighty
+Pillar Rock beckoning them from the top of Black Sail Pass, nor the inn
+lights far down in the valley calling them back from the mountains when
+night has fallen; never have sat round the inn fire and talked of the
+jolly perils of the day, or played chess with the landlord--and been
+beaten--or gone to bed with the refrain of the climbers' chorus still
+challenging the roar of the wind outside--
+
+               Come, let us tie the rope, the rope, the rope,
+
+                   Come, let us link it round, round, round.
+
+               And he that will not climb to-day
+
+                   Why--leave him on the ground, the ground, the ground.
+
+If you have done these things you will not make much of the call of the
+temple bells and the palm trees and the spicy garlic smells--least of
+all at New Year. You will hear instead the call of the Pillar Rock and
+the chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your oldest clothes and
+wind the rope around you--singing meanwhile “the rope, the rope,”--and
+take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will step out
+at that gateway of the enchanted land--Keswick. Keswick! Wastdale!...
+Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to whom they
+open the magic casements at a breath.
+
+And at Keswick you call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go
+to Keswick without calling on George Abraham. You might as well go to
+Wastdale Head without calling on the Pillar Rock. And George tells you
+that of course he will be over at Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will
+climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle with you on New Year's Day.
+
+The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave adieus, and are soon
+jolting down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where every object is
+an old friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the Bowder
+Stone and there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow of
+Cat Bells. (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and picking
+wimberries and waking the echoes of Grisedale.)
+
+And there before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the
+billowy summits of Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky
+sentinels of the valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name.
+Perhaps you jump down at Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to
+Rosthwaite and lunch.
+
+And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street is
+a myth and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of the
+sanctuary and the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling your
+rucksack on your back and your rope over your shoulder and set out on
+the three hours' tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.
+
+It is dark when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and
+these December days are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by
+the landlord and landlady--heirs of Auld Will Ritson--and in the flagged
+entrance you see coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of
+climbers' boots--boots that make the heart sing to look upon, boots that
+have struck music out of many a rocky breast, boots whose missing nails
+has each a story of its own. You put your own among them, don your
+slippers, and plunge among your old companions of the rocks with jolly
+greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it is--a master from a
+school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a young clergyman, a
+barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham, and so on.
+But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and the eternal
+boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.
+
+Who shall tell of the days and nights that follow?--of the songs that
+are sung, and the “traverses” that are made round the billiard room and
+the barn, of the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous
+climb, of the letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and
+the departures for the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich
+with new memories, you all foregather again--save only, perhaps, the
+jolly lawyer and his fellows who have lost their way back from Scafell,
+and for whom you are about to send out a search party when they turn up
+out of the darkness with new material for fireside tales.
+
+Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's Day--clear and
+bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost in the
+air. In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up ropes,
+putting on putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for boots
+(the boots are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing nails).
+We separate at the threshold--this group for the Great Gable, that for
+Scafell, ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock. It
+is a two and a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and as
+daylight is short there is no time to waste. We follow the water course
+up the valley, splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice, cross
+the stream where the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount the
+steep ascent of Black Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down lonely
+Ennerdale, where, springing from the flank of the Pillar mountain,
+is the great Rock we have come to challenge. It stands like a tower,
+gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600 feet from its northern base to its
+summit, split on the south side by Jordan Gap that divides the High Man
+or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser rock.
+
+We have been overtaken by another party of three from the inn--one in
+a white jersey which, for reasons that will appear, I shall always
+remember. Together we follow the High Level Traverse, the track that
+leads round the flank of the mountain to the top of Walker's Gully, the
+grim descent to the valley, loved by the climber for the perils to which
+it invites him. Here wre lunch and here we separate. We, unambitious
+(having three passengers in our party of five), are climbing the East
+face by the Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending by the New
+West route, one of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here; theirs
+is from the other side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I wish
+to speak, but of theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will find
+the Slab and Notch route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it is
+held in little esteem.
+
+With five on the rope, however, our progress is slow, and it is two
+o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring and triumphant, and
+stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar Rock, where the
+wind blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over half the
+peaks of Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in the
+book that lies under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on the
+West face for signs of our late companions. The sound of their voices
+comes up from below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a glimpse
+of their forms. “They're going to be late,” says George Abraham--the
+discoverer of the New West--and then he indicates the closing stages of
+the climb and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the most
+thrilling escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock--two men
+falling, and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of those
+three, two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the next
+year on the Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and turn
+cheerfully to descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route which
+ends on the slope of the mountain near to the starting point of the New
+West route.
+
+The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in the East sheds
+no light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are quite
+distinct, coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the directions
+and distinguish the speakers. “Can't understand why those lads are
+cutting it so fine,” says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace down
+cracks and grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and safety.
+And now we look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one thing
+is visible--a figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at full
+stretch. There it hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the rocks.
+
+[Illustration: 0047]
+
+The party, then, are only just making the traverse from the chimney to
+the right, the most difficult manoeuvre of the climb--a manoeuvre in
+which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain stationary while his
+fellows pass him. “This is bad,” says George Abraham and he prepares
+for a possible emergency. “Are you in difficulties? Shall we wait?” he
+cries. “Yes, wait.” The words rebound from the cliff in the still air
+like stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white jersey,
+still moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every word
+they speak echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board. You
+hear the iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds on
+the ringing wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if both
+feet are dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a hold.
+I fancy one or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look at
+each other in silent comment. And all the time the figure in white, now
+growing dim, is impaled on the face of the darkness, and the voices
+come down to us in brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon is
+sailing into the clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.
+
+At last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery “All
+right” drops down from above. The difficult operation is over, the
+scattered rocks are reached and nothing remains but the final slabs,
+which in the absence of ice offer no great difficulty. Their descent by
+the easy Jordan route will be quick. We turn to go with the comment that
+it is perhaps more sensational to watch a climb than to do one.
+
+And then we plunge over the debris behind Pisgah, climb up the Great
+Doup, where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we reach the friendly
+fence that has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down to the top of
+Black Sail Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours later we
+have rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.
+
+In a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one
+to his office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem
+prosaic and ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say
+only the word “Wastdale” to them and you shall awake its echoes; then
+you shall see their faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable
+things. They are no longer men of the world; they are spirits of the
+mountains.
+
+[Illustration: 0049]
+
+[Illustration: 0050]
+
+
+
+
+TWO VOICES
+
+|Yes,” said the man with the big voice, “I've seen it coming for years.
+Years.”
+
+“Have you?” said the man with the timid voice. He had taken his seat
+on the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of the tube
+strike that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of London.
+
+“Yes, years,” said big voice, crowding as much modesty into the
+admission as possible. “I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long way
+off. Suppose I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit psychic.”
+
+“Ah,” said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning of the
+word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it meant.
+
+“Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George--that's the man that
+ up to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and
+property and things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.'
+Why, his speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's
+it's come back. I always said it would. I said we should pay for it.”
+
+“Did you, though?” observed timid voice--not questioningly, but as an
+assurance that he was listening attentively.
+
+“Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for years--years, I did.
+And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in no time. In the
+first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000 aeroplanes and
+train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what I said.
+But was it done?”
+
+“Of course not,” said timid voice.
+
+“I saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why,
+but there it is. I'm not much at the platform business--tub-thumping,
+I call it--but for seeing things far off--well, I'm a bit psychic, you
+know.”
+
+“Ah,” said timid voice, mournfully, “it's a pity some of those talking
+fellows are not psychic, too.” He'd got the word firmly now.
+
+“Them psychic!” said big voice, with scorn. “We know what they are.
+You see that Miss Asquith is marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word,
+he'll turn out to be a German, that's what he'll turn out to be. It's
+German money all round. Same with these strikes. There's German money
+behind them.”
+
+“Shouldn't wonder at all,” said timid voice.
+
+“I know,” said big voice. “I've a way of seeing things. The same in the
+Boer War. I saw that coming for years.”
+
+“Did you, indeed?” said timid voice.
+
+“Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to some of my friends. There it
+was in black and white. They said it was wonderful how it all turned
+out--two years, I said, 250 millions of money, and 20,000 casualties.
+That's what I said, and that's what it was. I said the Boers would win,
+and I claim they did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave them all
+they asked for.”
+
+“You were about right,” assented timid voice.
+
+“And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round his
+finger--that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his finger.
+Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building a
+fleet as big as ours.”
+
+“Never did like that man,” said timid voice.
+
+“It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the armistice
+means. They've escaped--and just when we'd got them down.”
+
+“It's a shame,” said timid voice.
+
+“This war ought to have gone on longer,” continued big voice. “My
+opinion is that the world wanted thinning out. People are too crowded.
+That's what they are--they're too crowded.”
+
+“I agree there,” said timid voice. “We wanted thinning.”
+
+“I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It ought to
+have gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should like to
+know his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says _John Bull_, and
+that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a case
+down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building society--regular
+chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building society
+went smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot.”
+
+“I don't like those goody-goody people,” said timid voice.
+
+“No,” said big voice. “William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what
+that man knew. 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women
+players,' he said. Strordinary how he knew things.”
+
+“Wonderful,” said timid voice.
+
+“There's never been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare
+knew--not one-half.”
+
+“No doubt about it,” said timid voice.
+
+“I consider that William Shakespeare was the most psychic man that ever
+lived. I don't suppose there was ever such a long-sighted man before
+_or_ since. He could see through anything. He'd have seen through Wilson
+and he'd have seen this war didn't stop before the job was done. It's a
+pity we haven't a William Shakespeare now. Lloyd George and Asquith
+are not in it with him. They're simply duds beside William Shakespeare.
+Couldn't hold a candle to him.”
+
+“Seems to me,” said timid voice, “that there's nobody, as you might say,
+worth anything to-day.”
+
+“Nobody,” said big voice. “We've gone right off. There used to be men.
+Old Dizzy, he was a man. So was Joseph Chamberlain. He was right about
+Tariff Reform. I saw it years before he did. Free Trade I said was all
+right years ago, when we were manufacturing for the world. But it's out
+of date. I saw it was out of date long before Joseph Chamberlain. It's
+the result of being long-sighted. I said to my father, 'If we stick to
+Free Trade this country is done.' That's what I said, and it's true. We
+_are_ done. Look at these strikes. We stick to things too long. I
+believe in looking ahead. When I was in America before the war they
+wouldn't believe I came from England. Wouldn't believe it. 'But the
+English are so slow,' they said, 'and you--why you want to be getting on
+in front of us.' That's my way. I look ahead and don't stand still.”
+
+“It's the best way too,” said timid voice. “We want more of it. We're
+too slow.”
+
+And so on. When I came to the end of my journey I rose so that the
+light of a lamp shone on the speakers as I passed. They were both
+well-dressed, ordinary-looking men. If I had passed them in the street
+I should have said they were intelligent men of the well-to-do business
+class. I have set down their conversation, which I could not help
+overhearing, and which was carried on by the big voice in a tone meant
+for publication, as exactly as I can recall it. There was a good deal
+more of it, all of the same character. You will laugh at it, or weep
+over it, according to your humour.
+
+[Illustration: 0055]
+
+
+
+
+ON BEING TIDY
+
+|Any careful observer of my habits would know that I am on the eve of
+an adventure--a holiday, or a bankruptcy, or a fire, or a voluntary
+liquidation (whatever that may be), or an elopement, or a duel, or a
+conspiracy, or--in short, of something out of the normal, something
+romantic or dangerous, pleasurable or painful, interrupting the calm
+current of my affairs. Being the end of July, he would probably say:
+That fellow is on the brink of the holiday fever. He has all the
+symptoms of the epidemic. Observe his negligent, abstracted manner.
+Notice his slackness about business--how he just comes and looks in and
+goes out as though he were a visitor paying a call, or a person who had
+been left a fortune and didn't care twopence what happened. Observe his
+clothes, how they are burgeoning into unaccustomed gaiety, even levity.
+Is not his hat set on at just a shade of a sporting angle? Does not
+his stick twirl with a hint of irresponsible emotions? Is there not the
+glint of far horizons in his eye? Did you not hear him humming as he
+came up the stairs? Yes, assuredly the fellow is going for a holiday.
+
+Your suspicions would be confirmed when you found me ransacking my
+private room and clearing up my desk. The news that I am clearing up my
+desk has been an annual sensation for years. I remember a colleague of
+mine once coming in and finding me engaged in that spectacular feat.
+His face fell with apprehension. His voice faltered. “I hope you are not
+leaving us,” he said. He, poor fellow, could not think of anything else
+that could account for so unusual an operation.
+
+For I am one of those people who treat their desks with respect. We do
+not believe in worrying them about their contents. We do not bully them
+into disclosing their secrets. We stuff the drawers full of papers and
+documents, and leave them to mellow and ripen. And when the drawers are
+full we pile up other papers and documents on either side of us; and the
+higher the pile gets the more comfortable and cosy we feel. We would not
+disturb them for worlds. Why should we set our sleeping dogs barking at
+us when they are willing to go on sleeping if we leave them alone? And
+consider the show they make. No one coming to see us can fail to be
+impressed by such piles of documents. They realise how busy we are. They
+understand that we have no time for idle talk. They see that we have
+all these papers to dispose of--otherwise, why are they there? They get
+their business done and go away quickly, and spread the news of what
+tremendous fellows we are for work.
+
+I am told by one who worked with him, that old Lord Strathcona knew the
+trick quite well, and used it unblushingly. When a visitor was announced
+he tumbled his papers about in imposing confusion and was discovered
+breasting the mighty ocean of his labours, his chin resolutely out
+of the water. But he was a supreme artist in this form of amiable
+imposture. On one occasion he was entertained at a great public dinner
+in a provincial city. In the midst of the proceedings a portly flunkey
+was observed carrying a huge envelope, with seals and trappings, on a
+salver. For whom was this momentous document intended? Ah, he has paused
+behind the grand old man with the wonderful snowy head. It is for him.
+The company looks on in respectful silence. Even here this astonishing
+old man cannot escape the cares of office. As he takes the envelope his
+neighbour at the table looks at the address. It was in Strathcona's own
+hand-writing!
+
+But we of the rank and file are not dishevelled by artifice, like this
+great man. It is a natural gift. And do not suppose that our disorder
+makes us unhappy. We like it. We follow our vocation, as Falstaff says.
+Some people are born tidy and some are born untidy. We were bom untidy,
+and if good people, taking pity on us, try to make us tidy we get lost.
+It was so with George Crabbe. He lived in magnificent disorder, papers
+and books and letters all over the floor, piled on every chair, surging
+up to the ceiling. Once, in his absence, his niece tidied up for him.
+When he came back he found himself like a stranger in a strange land.
+He did not know his way about in this desolation of tidiness, and he
+promptly restored the familiar disorder, so that he could find things.
+It sounds absurd, of course, but we people with a genius for untidiness
+must always seem absurd to the tidy people. They cannot understand that
+there is a method in our muddle, an order in our disorder, secret paths
+through the wilderness known only to our feet, that, in short, we are
+rather like cats whose perceptions become more acute the darker it gets.
+It is not true that we never find things. We often find things.
+
+And consider the joy of finding things you don't hope to find. You, sir,
+sitting at your spotless desk, with your ordered and labelled shelves
+about you, and your files and your letter-racks, and your card indexes
+and your cross references, and your this, that, and the other--what do
+you know of the delights of which I speak? You do not come suddenly
+and ecstatically upon the thing you seek. You do not know the shock of
+delighted discovery. You do not shout “Eureka,” and summon your family
+around you to rejoice in the miracle that has happened. No star swims
+into your ken out of the void. You cannot be said to find things at
+all, for you never lose them, and things must be lost before they can
+be truly found. The father of the Prodigal had to lose his son before
+he could experience the joy that has become an immortal legend of the
+world. It is we who lose things, not you, sir, who never find them, who
+know the Feast of the Fatted Calf.
+
+This is not a plea for untidiness. I am no hot gospeller of disorder.
+I only seek to make the best, of a bad job, and to show that we untidy
+fellows are not without a case, have our romantic compensations, moments
+of giddy exaltation unknown to those who are endowed with the pedestrian
+and profitable virtue of tidiness. That is all. I would have the
+pedestrian virtue if I could. In other days, before I had given up hope
+of reforming myself, and when I used to make good resolutions as piously
+as my neighbours, I had many a spasm of tidiness. I looked with envy on
+my friend Higginson, who was a miracle of order, could put his hand on
+anything he wanted in the dark, kept his documents and his files and
+records like regiments of soldiers obedient to call, knew what he had
+written on 4th March 1894, and what he had said on 10th January 1901,
+and had a desk that simply perspired with tidiness. And in a spirit
+of emulation I bought a roll-top desk. I believed that tidiness was a
+purchasable commodity. You went to a furniture dealer and bought a large
+roll-top desk, and when it came home the genius of order came home with
+it. The bigger the desk, the more intricate its devices, the larger
+was the measure of order bestowed on you. My desk was of the first
+magnitude. It had an inconceivable wealth of drawers and pigeon-holes.
+It was a desk of many mansions. And I labelled them all, and gave them
+all separate jobs to perform.
+
+And then I sat back and looked the future boldly in the face. Now, said
+I, the victory is won. Chaos and old night are banished. Order reigns
+in Warsaw. I have but to open a drawer and every secret I seek will
+leap magically to light. My articles will write themselves, for every
+reference will come to my call, obedient as Ariel to the bidding of
+Prospero.
+
+                   “Approach, my Ariel; come,”
+
+I shall say, and from some remote fastness the obedient spirit will
+appear with--
+
+               “All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come
+
+               To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,
+
+               To swim, to dive into the sea, to ride
+
+               On the curl'd clouds.”
+
+I shall know where Aunt Jane's letters are, and where my bills are,
+and my cuttings about this, that, and the other, and my diaries and
+notebooks, and the time-table and the street guide. I shall never be
+short of a match or a spare pair of spectacles, or a pencil, or--in
+short, life will henceforth be an easy amble to old age. For a week it
+worked like a charm. Then the demon of disorder took possession of the
+beast. It devoured everything and yielded up nothing. Into its soundless
+deeps my merchandise sank to oblivion. And I seemed to sink with it.
+It was not a desk, but a tomb. One day I got a man to take it away to a
+second-hand shop.
+
+Since then I have given up being tidy. I have realised that the quality
+of order is not purchasable at furniture shops, is not a quality of
+external things, but an indwelling spirit, a frame of mind, a habit that
+perhaps may be acquired but cannot be bought.
+
+I have a smaller desk with fewer drawers, all of them nicely choked up
+with the litter of the past. Once a year I have a gaol delivery of the
+incarcerated. The ghosts come out into the daylight, and I face them
+unflinching and unafraid. They file past, pointing minatory fingers at
+me as they go into the waste-paper basket. They file past now. But I
+do not care a dump; for to-morrow I shall seek fresh woods and pastures
+new. To-morrow the ghosts of that old untidy desk will have no terrors
+for my emancipated spirit.
+
+[Illustration: 0061]
+
+[Illustration: 0062]
+
+
+
+
+AN EPISODE
+
+|We were talking of the distinction between madness and sanity when one
+of the company said that we were all potential madmen, just as every
+gambler was a potential suicide, or just as every hero was a potential
+coward.
+
+“I mean,” he said, “that the difference between the sane and the
+insane is not that the sane man never has mad thoughts. He has, but he
+recognises them as mad, and keeps his hand on the rein of action. He
+thinks them, and dismisses them. It is so with the saint and the sinner.
+The saint is not exempt from evil thoughts, but he knows they are evil,
+is master of himself, and puts them away.
+
+“I speak with experience,” he went on, “for the potential madman in me
+once nearly got the upper hand. I won, but it was a near thing, and if
+I had gone down in that struggle I should have been branded for all
+time as a criminal lunatic, and very properly put away in some place of
+safety. Yet I suppose no one ever suspected me of lunacy.”
+
+“Tell us about it,” we said in chorus.
+
+“It was one evening in New York,” he said. “I had had a very exhausting
+time, and was no doubt mentally tired. I had taken tea with two friends
+at the Belmont Hotel, and as we found we were all disengaged that
+evening we agreed to spend it together at the Hippodrome, where a revue,
+winding up with a great spectacle that had thrilled New York, was being
+presented. When we went to the box office we found that we could not get
+three seats together, so we separated, my friends going to the floor of
+the house and I to the dress circle.
+
+“If you are familiar with the place you will know its enormous
+dimensions and the vastness of the stage. When I took my seat next but
+one to one of the gangways the house was crowded and the performance had
+begun. It was trivial and ordinary enough, but it kept me amused, and
+between the acts I went out to see the New Yorkers taking 'soft' drinks
+in the promenades. I did not join them in that mild indulgence, nor did
+I speak to anyone.
+
+“After the interval before the concluding spectacle I did not return to
+my seat until the curtain was up. The transformation hit me like a
+blow. The huge stage had been converted into a lake, and behind the lake
+through filmy draperies there was the suggestion of a world in flames.
+I passed to my seat and sat down. I turned from the blinding glow of the
+conflagration in front and cast my eye over the sea of faces that filled
+the great theatre from floor to ceiling. 'Heavens! if there were a fire
+in this place,' I thought. At that thought the word 'Fire' blazed in my
+brain like a furnace. 'What if some madman cried Fire?' flashed through
+my mind, and then '_What if I cried Fire?_'
+
+“At that hideous suggestion, the demon word that suffused my brain leapt
+like a shrieking maniac within me and screamed and fought for utterance.
+I felt it boiling in my throat, I felt it on my tongue. I felt myself to
+be two persons engaged in a deadly grapple--a sane person struggling to
+keep his feet against the mad rush of an insane monster. I clenched my
+teeth. So long as I kept my teeth tight--tight--tight the raging
+madman would fling himself at the bars in vain. But could I keep up the
+struggle till he fell exhausted? I gripped the arms of my seat. I felt
+beads of perspiration breaking out on my right brow. How singular that
+in moments of strain the moisture always broke out at that spot. I could
+notice these things with a curious sense of detachment as if there were
+a third person within me watching the frenzied conflict. And still
+that titanic impulse lay on my tongue and hammered madly at my clenched
+teeth. Should I go out? That would look odd, and be an ignominious
+surrender. I must fight this folly down honestly and not run away from
+it. If I had a book I would try to read. If I had a friend beside me I
+would talk. But both these expedients were denied me. Should I turn to
+my unknown neighbour and break the spell with an inconsequent remark or
+a request for his programme? I looked at him out of the tail of my eye.
+He was a youngish man, in evening dress, and sitting alone as I was. But
+his eyes were fixed intently on the stage. He was obviously gripped by
+the spectacle. Had I spoken to him earlier in the evening the course
+would have been simple; but to break the ice in the midst of this tense
+silence was impossible. Moreover, I had a programme on my knees and what
+was there to say?...
+
+“I turned my eyes from the stage. What was going on there I could not
+tell. It was a blinding blur of Fire that seemed to infuriate the
+monster within me. I looked round at the house. I looked up at the
+ceiling and marked its gilded ornaments. I turned and gazed intensely at
+the occupants of the boxes, trying to turn the current of my mind into
+speculations about their dress, their faces, their characters. But the
+tyrant was too strong to be overthrown by such conscious effort. I
+looked up at the gallery; I looked down at the pit; I tried to busy my
+thoughts with calculations about the numbers present, the amount of
+money in the house, the cost of running the establishment--anything. In
+vain. I leaned back in my seat, my teeth still clenched, my hands still
+gripping the arms of the chair. How still the house was! How enthralled
+it seemed!... I was conscious that people about me were noticing my
+restless inattention. If they knew the truth.... If they could see the
+raging torment that was battering at my teeth.... Would it never go? How
+long would this wild impulse burn on my tongue? Was there no distraction
+that would
+
+               Cleanse the stuffed bosom of this perilous stuff
+
+               That feeds upon the brain.
+
+“I recalled the reply--
+
+               Therein the patient must minister to himself.
+
+“How fantastic it seemed. Here was that cool observer within me quoting
+poetry over my own delirium without being able to allay it. What a
+mystery was the brain that could become the theatre of such wild
+drama. I turned my glance to the orchestra. Ah, what was that they were
+playing?... Yes, it was a passage from Dvorak's American Symphony. How
+familiar it was! My mind incontinently leapt to a remote scene, I saw
+a well-lit room and children round the hearth and a figure at the
+piano....
+
+“It was as though the madman within me had fallen stone dead. I looked
+at the stage coolly, and observed that someone was diving into the lake
+from a trapeze that seemed a hundred feet high. The glare was still
+behind, but I knew it for a sham glare. What a fool I had been.... But
+what a hideous time I had had.... And what a close shave.... I took out
+my handkerchief and drew it across my forehead.”
+
+[Illustration: 0066]
+
+[Illustration: 0067]
+
+
+
+ON SUPERSTITIONS
+
+|It was inevitable that the fact that a murder has taken place at a
+house with the number 13 in a street, the letters of whose name number
+13, would not pass unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that
+have been committed, I suppose we should find that as many have taken
+place at No. 6 or No. 7, or any other number you choose, as at No.
+13--that the law of averages is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But
+this consideration does not prevent the world remarking on the fact when
+No. 13 has its turn. Not that the world believes there is anything
+in the superstition. It is quite sure it is a mere childish folly, of
+course. Few of us would refuse to take a house because its number was
+13, or decline an invitation to dinner because there were to be 13 at
+table. But most of us would be just a shade happier if that desirable
+residence were numbered 11, and not any the less pleased with the dinner
+if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept him away. We would
+not confess this little weakness to each other. We might even refuse to
+admit it to ourselves, but it is there.
+
+That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are
+numerous streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which
+there is no house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a
+bed in a hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though
+it has worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations
+of a discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house,
+and into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of
+a bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession
+to the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery
+is a matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow
+on the mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat
+recovery. Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers
+in the sick bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of
+a certain state of mind in the patient. There are few more curious
+revelations in that moving record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences
+during the war, than the case of the man who died of a pimple on his
+nose. He had been hideously mutilated in battle and was brought into
+hospital a sheer wreck; but he was slowly patched up and seemed to have
+been saved when a pimple appeared on his nose. It was nothing in itself,
+but it was enough to produce a mental state that checked the flickering
+return of life. It assumed a fantastic importance in the mind of the
+patient who, having survived the heavy blows of fate, died of something
+less than a pin prick. It is not difficult to understand that so fragile
+a hold of life might yield to the sudden discovery that you were lying
+in No. 13 bed.
+
+I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
+wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of
+all the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that
+I constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have
+associated the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had
+anything but the most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved
+a bus, and as free from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I
+would not change its number if I had the power to do so. But there are
+other circumstances of which I should find it less easy to clear myself
+of suspicion under cross examination. I never see a ladder against a
+house side without feeling that it is advisable to walk round it rather
+than under it. I say to myself that this is not homage to a foolish
+superstition, but a duty to my family. One must think of one's family.
+The fellow at the top of the ladder may drop anything. He may even
+drop himself. He may have had too much to drink. He may be a victim of
+epileptic fits, and epileptic fits, as everyone knows, come on at the
+most unseasonable times and places. It is a mere measure of ordinary
+safety to walk round the ladder. No man is justified in inviting danger
+in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle fancy. Moreover, probably
+that fancy has its roots in the common-sense fact that a man on a ladder
+does occasionally drop things. No doubt many of our superstitions have
+these commonplace and sensible origins. I imagine, for example, that the
+Jewish objection to pork as unclean on religious grounds is only due to
+the fact that in Eastern climates it is unclean on physical grounds.
+
+All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather
+glad that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing
+so. Even if--conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to
+myself--I walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not
+done so as a kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have
+challenged it rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way
+of dodging the absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the
+ladder. This is not easy. In the same way I am sensible of a certain
+satisfaction when I see the new moon in the open rather than through
+glass, and over my right shoulder rather than my left. I would not for
+any consideration arrange these things consciously; but if they happen
+so I fancy I am better pleased than if they do not. And on these
+occasions I have even caught my hand--which chanced to be in my pocket
+at the time--turning over money, a little surreptitiously I thought,
+but still undeniably turning it. Hands have habits of their own and one
+can't always be watching them.
+
+But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover
+in ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a
+creed outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the
+laws of the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
+superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and
+man seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
+neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of
+their hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
+inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
+misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon
+of life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of
+battles being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more
+relation to the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When
+Pompey was afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as prætor he shouted
+to the Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election
+postponed, for the Romans would never transact business after it had
+thundered. Alexander surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took
+counsel with them as a modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers.
+Even so great a man as Cæsar and so modern and enlightened a man as
+Cicero left their fate to augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were
+right and sometimes they were wrong, but whether right or wrong they
+were equally meaningless. Cicero lost his life by trusting to the wisdom
+of crows. When he was in flight from Antony and Cæsar Augustus he put to
+sea and might have escaped. But some crows chanced to circle round his
+vessel, and he took the circumstance to be unfavourable to his action,
+returned to shore and was murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece
+consulted the omens and the oracles where the farmer to-day is only
+careful of his manures.
+
+I should have liked to have seen Cæsar and I should have liked to have
+heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later
+day and who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the
+better end of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad.
+We do not know much more of the Power that
+
+                   Turns the handle of this idle show
+
+than our forefathers did, but at least we have escaped the grotesque
+shadows that enveloped them. We do not look for divine guidance in the
+entrails of animals or the flight of crows, and the House of Commons
+does not adjourn at a clap of thunder.
+
+[Illustration: 0072]
+
+[Illustration: 0073]
+
+
+
+
+ON POSSESSION
+
+|I met a lady the other day who had travelled much and seen much, and
+who talked with great vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one
+peculiarity about her. If I happened to say that I too had been, let us
+say, to Tangier, her interest in Tangier immediately faded away and
+she switched the conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not
+been, and where therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about
+the Honble. Ulick de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had
+the honour of meeting that eminent personage. And so with books and
+curiosities, places and things--she was only interested in them so long
+as they were her exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and
+when she ceased to possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have
+Tangier all to herself she did not want it at all.
+
+And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
+people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
+not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
+exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
+countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else
+in the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching
+that appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he
+was getting something that no one else had got, and when he found that
+someone else had got it its value ceased to exist.
+
+The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything
+in the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
+material thing. I do not own--to take an example--that wonderful picture
+by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his grandchild. I
+have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own room I could
+not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for years. It
+is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries of the
+mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have read, and
+beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it whenever I
+like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the painter saw in
+the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the bottle nose as he
+stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long centuries ago. The
+pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may share this spiritual
+ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine, or the shade of
+a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or the song of the
+lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is common to
+all.
+
+From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
+woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of
+solitude which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient
+Britons hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense
+a certain noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether
+he has seen these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the
+little hamlet know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them
+for a perpetual playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but
+we could not have a richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on
+every tree. For the pleasure of things is not in their possession but in
+their use.
+
+It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised
+long ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who
+scurried through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to
+say that they had done something that other people had not done. Even
+so great a man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive
+possession. De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at
+the mountains, he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene,
+whereupon Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone
+else to praise _his_ mountains. He was the high priest of nature,
+and had something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of
+revelation, and anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence,
+except through him, was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to
+nature.
+
+In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
+possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and
+Bernard Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy
+of the free human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of
+communism. On this point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's
+doctrine and pointed out that the State is not a mere individual, but
+a body composed of dissimilar parts whose unity is to be drawn “ex
+dissimilium hominum consensu.” I am as sensitive as anyone about my
+title to my personal possessions. I dislike having my umbrella stolen
+or my pocket picked, and if I found a burglar on my premises I am sure I
+shouldn't be able to imitate the romantic example of the good bishop in
+“Les Misérables.” When I found the other day that some young fruit trees
+I had left in my orchard for planting had been removed in the night I
+was sensible of a very commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean
+Valjean was I shouldn't have asked him to come and take some more trees.
+I should have invited him to return what he had removed or submit to
+consequences that follow in such circumstances.
+
+I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
+necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
+society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who
+ventured to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or
+two hence. Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control
+and the range of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If
+mankind finds that it can live more conveniently and more happily
+without private property it will do so. In spite of the Decalogue
+private property is only a human arrangement, and no reasonable observer
+of the operation of the arrangement will pretend that it executes
+justice unfailingly in the affairs of men. But because the idea of
+private property has been permitted to override with its selfishness the
+common good of humanity, it does not follow that there are not limits
+within which that idea can function for the general convenience and
+advantage. The remedy is not in abolishing it altogether, but in
+subordinating it to the idea of equal justice and community of purpose.
+It will, reasonably understood, deny me the right to call the coal
+measures, which were laid with the foundations of the earth, my private
+property or to lay waste a countryside for deer forests, but it will
+still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of ownership. And the
+more true the equation of private and public rights is, the more secure
+shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and common
+interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the grotesque
+and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of private
+property which to some minds make the idea of private property itself
+inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea of
+private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
+the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger
+of attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard
+without any apprehensions as to their safety.
+
+But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
+ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
+things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment.
+I do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
+experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
+mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. “I do
+not know how it is,” said a very rich man in my hearing, “but when I
+am in London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I
+want to be in London.” He was not wanting to escape from London or the
+country, but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions
+and was bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher “his hands were full
+but his soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world.” There
+was wisdom as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that “he who was
+born first has the greatest number of old clothes.” It is not a bad rule
+for the pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage
+to those who take a pride in its abundance.
+
+[Illustration: 0078]
+
+
+[Illustration: 0079]
+
+
+
+
+ON BORES
+
+|I was talking in the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat
+blunt manner when Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and
+began:
+
+“Well, I think America is bound to----” “Now, do you mind giving us two
+minutes?” broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom, unabashed
+and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group. Poor
+Blossom! I had almost said “Dear Blossom.” For he is really an excellent
+fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that he is a
+bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable company.
+You feel that you could love Blossom if he would only keep away. If
+you heard of his death you would be genuinely grieved and would send
+a wreath to his grave and a nice letter of condolence to his wife and
+numerous children.
+
+But it is only absence that makes the heart grow fond of Blossom. When
+he appears all your affection for him withers. You hope that he will not
+see you. You shrink to your smallest dimensions. You talk with an air of
+intense privacy. You keep your face averted. You wonder whether the back
+of your head is easily distinguishable among so many heads. All in vain.
+He approacheth with the remorselessness of fate. He putteth his hand
+upon your shoulder. He remarketh with the air of one that bringeth new
+new's and good news--“Well, I think that America is bound to----” And
+then he taketh a chair and thou lookest at the clock and wonderest how
+soon thou canst decently remember another engagement.
+
+Blossom is the bore courageous. He descends on the choicest company
+without fear or parley. Out, sword, and at 'em, is his motto. He
+advances with a firm voice and a confident air, as of one who knows he
+is welcome everywhere and has only to choose his company. He will have
+nothing but the best, and as he enters the room you may see his
+eye roving from table to table, not in search of the glad eye of
+recognition, but of the most select companionship, and having marked
+down his prey he goes forward boldly to the attack. Salutes the circle
+with easy familiarity, draw's up his chair with assured and masterful
+authority, and plunges into the stream of talk with the heavy impact
+of a walrus or hippopotamus taking a bath. The company around him melts
+away, but he is not dismayed. Left alone with a circle of empty chairs,
+he riseth like a giant refreshed, casteth his eye abroad, noteth another
+group that whetteth his appetite for good fellowship, moveth towards it
+with bold and resolute front. You may see him put to flight as many as
+three circles inside an hour, and retire at the end, not because he is
+beaten, but because there is nothing left worth crossing swords with. “A
+very good club to-night,” he says to Mrs B. as he puts on his slippers.
+
+Not so Trip. He is the bore circumspect. He proceeds by sap and mine
+where Blossom charges the battlements sword in hand. He enters timidly
+as one who hopes that he will be unobserved. He goes to the table and
+examines the newspapers, takes one and seats himself alone. But not so
+much alone that he is entirely out of the range of those fellows in the
+corner who keep up such a cut-and-thrust of wit. Perchance one of them
+may catch his eye and open the circle to him. He readeth his paper
+sedulously, but his glance passeth incontinently outside the margin or
+over the top of the page to the coveted group. No responsive eye meets
+his. He moveth just a thought nearer along the sofa by the wall. Now
+he is well within hearing. Now he is almost of the company itself.
+But still unseen--noticeably unseen. He puts down his paper, not
+ostentatiously but furtively. He listens openly to the conversation,
+as one who has been enmeshed in it unconsciously, accidentally,
+almost unwillingly, for was he not absorbed in his paper until this
+conversation disturbed him? And now it would be almost uncivil not to
+listen. He waits for a convenient opening and then gently insinuates
+a remark like one venturing on untried ice. And the ice breaks and the
+circle melts. For Trip, too, is a bore.
+
+I remember in those wonderful submarine pictures of the brothers
+Williamson, which we saw in London some time ago, a strange fish at
+whose approach all the other fish turned tail. It was not, I think, that
+they feared him, nor that he was less presentable in appearance than any
+other fish, but simply that there was something about him that made them
+remember things. I forget what his name was, or whether he even had a
+name. But his calling was obvious. He was the Club Bore. He was the fish
+who sent the other fish about their business. I thought of Blossom as
+I saw that lonely creature whisking through the water in search of some
+friendly ear into which he could remark--“Well, I think that America is
+bound to----” or words to that effect. I thought how superior an animal
+is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish did. He
+hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb. He
+looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth even
+to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his
+feelings.
+
+It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of
+sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists
+on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but
+this is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. And the humour must
+not be that counterfeit currency which consists in the retailing of
+borrowed stories. “Of all bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang,
+and Heaven in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate its species,”
+ says De Quincey, “the most insufferable is the teller of good stories.”
+ It is an over hard saying, subject to exceptions; but it contains the
+essential truth, for the humour of good company must be an authentic
+emanation of personality and not a borrowed tale. It is no discredit to
+be a bore. Very great men have been bores! I fancy that Macaulay,
+with all his transcendent gifts, was a bore. My head aches even at the
+thought of an evening spent in the midst of the terrific torrent of
+facts and certainties that poured from that brilliant and amiable man. I
+find myself in agreement for once with Melbourne who wished that he
+was “as cocksure of one thing as Macaulay was of everything.” There is
+pretty clear evidence that Wordsworth was a bore and that Coleridge was
+a bore, and I am sure Bob Southey must have been an intolerable
+bore. And Neckar's daughter was fortunate to escape Gibbon for he was
+assuredly a prince of bores. He took pains to leave posterity in
+no doubt on the point. He wrote his “Autobiography” which, as a wit
+observed, showed that “he did not know the difference between himself
+and the Roman Empire. He has related his 'progressions from London to
+Bariton and from Bariton to London' in the same monotonous, majestic
+periods that he recorded the fall of states and empires.” Yes, an
+indubitable bore. Yet these were all admirable men and even great men.
+Let not therefore the Blossoms and the Trips be discomfited. It may be
+that it is not they who are not fit company for us, but we who are not
+fit company for them.
+
+[Illustration: 0084]
+
+[Illustration: 0085]
+
+
+
+
+A LOST SWARM
+
+|We were busy with the impossible hen when the alarm came. The
+impossible hen is sitting on a dozen eggs in the shed, and, like the boy
+on the burning deck, obstinately refuses to leave the post of duty. A
+sense of duty is an excellent thing, but even a sense of duty can be
+carried to excess, and this hen's sense of duty is simply a disease. She
+is so fiercely attached to her task that she cannot think of eating, and
+resents any attempt to make her eat as a personal affront or a malignant
+plot against her impending family. Lest she should die at her post, a
+victim to a misguided hunger strike, we were engaged in the delicate
+process of substituting a more reasonable hen, and it was at this moment
+that a shout from the orchard announced that No. 5 was swarming.
+
+It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had
+been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells
+visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around
+the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the
+thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more
+exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You
+pass it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched
+within. The next, the whole colony roars out like a cataract, envelops
+the hive in a cloud of living dust until the queen has emerged and gives
+direction to the masses that slowly cohere around her as she settles
+on some branch. The excitement is contagious. It is a call to adventure
+with the unknown, an adventure sharpened by the threat of loss and tense
+with the instancy of action. They have the start. It is your wit against
+their impulse, your strategy against their momentum. The cloud thins
+and expands as it moves away from the hive and you are puzzled to
+know whither the main stream is moving in these ever widening folds of
+motion. The first indeterminate signs of direction to-day were towards
+the beech woods behind the cottage, but with the aid of a syringe we put
+up a barrage of water in that direction, and headed them off towards a
+row of chestnuts and limes at the end of the paddock beyond the orchard.
+A swift encircling move, armed with syringe and pail, brought them again
+under the improvised rainstorm. They concluded that it was not such a
+fine day as they had thought after all, and that they had better take
+shelter at once, and to our entire content the mass settled in a great
+blob on a conveniently low bough of a chestnut tree. Then, by the aid of
+a ladder and patient coaxing, the blob was safely transferred to a skep,
+and carried off triumphantly to the orchard.
+
+[Illustration: 0089]
+
+And now, but for the war, all would have been well. For, but for the
+war, there would have been a comfortable home in which the adventurers
+could have taken up their new quarters. But hives are as hard to come by
+in these days as petrol or matches, or butter or cheese, or most of the
+other common things of life. We had ransacked England for hives and the
+neighbourhood for wood with which to make hives; but neither could be
+had, though promises were plenty, and here was the beginning of the
+swarms of May, each of them worth a load of hay according to the adage,
+and never a hive to welcome them with. Perhaps to-morrow something would
+arrive, if not from Gloucester, then from Surrey. If only the creatures
+would make themselves at home in the skep for a day or two....
+
+But no. For two hours or so all seemed well. Then perhaps they found
+the skep too hot, perhaps they detected the odour of previous tenants,
+perhaps--but who can read the thoughts of these inscrutable creatures?
+Suddenly the skep was enveloped in a cyclone of bees, and again the
+orchard sang with the exciting song of the wings. For a moment the cloud
+seemed to hover over an apple tree near by, and once more the syringe
+was at work insisting, in spite of the sunshine, that it was a
+dreadfully wet day on which to be about, and that a dry skep,
+even though pervaded by the smell of other bees, had points worth
+considering. In vain. This time they had made up their minds. It may
+be that news had come to them, from one of the couriers sent out to
+prospect for fresh quarters, of a suitable home elsewhere, perhaps a
+deserted hive, perhaps a snug hollow in some porch or in the bole of an
+ancient tree. Whatever the goal, the decision was final. One moment the
+cloud was about us; the air was filled with the high-pitched roar of
+thirty thousand pair of wings. The next moment the cloud had gone--gone
+sailing high over the trees in the paddock and out across the valley. We
+burst through the paddock fence into the cornfield beyond; but we might
+as well have chased the wind. Our first load of hay had taken wings
+and gone beyond recovery. For an hour or two there circled round the
+deserted skep a few hundred odd bees who had apparently been out when
+the second decision to migrate was taken, and found themselves homeless
+and queenless. I saw some of them try to enter other hives, but they
+were promptly ejected as foreigners by the sentries who keep the porch
+and admit none who do not carry the authentic odour of the hive. Perhaps
+the forlorn creatures got back to No. 5, and the young colony left in
+possession of that tenement.
+
+We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full of
+hope, for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's bench
+under the pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and plane,
+and before nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And it
+never rains but it pours--here is a telegram telling us of three hives
+on the way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We will
+harvest our loads of hay before they take wing.
+
+[Illustration: 0090]
+
+[Illustration: 0091]
+
+
+
+
+YOUNG AMERICA
+
+|If you want to understand America,” said my host, “come and see
+her young barbarians at play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at
+Princeton. It will be a great game. Come and see it.”
+
+He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured
+victory in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but
+consider the record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was
+as much ahead of Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of
+Cambridge on the river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It
+was like a Derby Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the
+great hall of that magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated
+men and women, wearing the favours of the rival colleges--yellow for
+Princeton and red for Harvard--passed through the gateways to the
+platform, filling train after train, that dipped under the Hudson and,
+coming out into the sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered
+away with its jolly load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country,
+through historic Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off
+towers of Princeton.
+
+And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges,
+such a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
+“how-d'ye-do's” and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
+times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
+haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured
+in the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some
+terrific memorial of antiquity--seen from without a mighty circular wall
+of masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval,
+or rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the
+level of the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand
+spectators--on this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side,
+with the sunlight full upon them, the yellows.
+
+Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
+playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings---for this American
+game is much more complicated than English Rugger--its goal-posts and
+its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
+minute record of the game.
+
+The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
+there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
+music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
+like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
+horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
+opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
+
+Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
+Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
+greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.
+
+The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war.
+Three flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They
+shout through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line,
+they wave their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with
+that leap there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of
+cheers roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
+demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of
+a tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey--the growl rising
+to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
+
+The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell,
+roar for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of
+us, and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their
+limbs we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I
+cannot hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off
+with the battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand
+lusty pairs of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid,
+we rise like one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our
+cheer-leaders, gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad
+dervishes, we shout back the song of “Har-vard! Har-vard!”
+
+And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into
+the field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson,
+that in the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and
+helmeted so that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic
+muscular development and horrific visage. At their entrance the
+megaphones opposite are heard again, and the enemy host rises and
+repeats its wonderful cheer and tiger growl. We rise and heave the
+challenge back. And now the teams are in position, the front lines, with
+the ball between, crouching on the ground for the spring. In the silence
+that has suddenly fallen on the scene, one hears short, sharp cries of
+numbers. “Five!” “Eleven!” “Three!” “Six!” “Ten!” like the rattle of
+musketry. Then--crash! The front lines have leapt on each other. There
+is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs and bodies. The swirl clears and
+men are seen lying about all over the line as though a shell had burst
+in their midst, while away to the right a man with the ball is brought
+down with a crash to the ground by another, who leaps at him like a
+projectile that completes its trajectory at his ankles.
+
+I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
+thrilling minutes--which, with intervals and stoppages for the
+attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours--how the battle
+surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the tension
+of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how Harvard
+scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm of
+victory, how Princeton drew level--a cyclone from the other side!--and
+forged ahead--another cyclone--how man after man went down like an ox,
+was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how another
+brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last hardly a
+man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every convenient
+interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we jumped up
+and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how the match
+ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of victory that
+is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters--all this is recorded
+in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives in my mind as
+a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous “rag” in which young and old, gravity
+and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly confounded.
+
+“And what did you think of it?” asked my host as we rattled back to New
+York in the darkness that night. “I think it has helped me to understand
+America,” I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
+explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.
+
+[Illustration: 0095]
+
+[Illustration: 0096]
+
+
+
+
+ON GREAT REPLIES
+
+|At a dinner table the other night, the talk turned upon a certain
+politician whose cynical traffic in principles and loyalties has
+eclipsed even the record of Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one
+defender, an amiable and rather portentous gentleman who did not so much
+talk as lecture, and whose habit of looking up abstractedly and fixedly
+at some invisible altitude gave him the impression of communing with the
+Almighty. He was profuse in his admissions and apologies, but he wound
+up triumphantly with the remark:
+
+“But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.”
+
+“So was Madame de Pompadour,” said a voice from the other side of the
+table.
+
+It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
+replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician
+with a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of
+democracy who, like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things
+for ambition and power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through
+the dull, solemn man on the other side of the table like a rapier. There
+was no reply. There was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash
+of lightning. It revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift,
+searching intelligence, equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that
+went with deadly certainty to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed
+on the whole landscape of discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that
+gave it larger significance and range.
+
+It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour
+and finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
+absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and
+personality. There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning
+phrase that has leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental
+things. I do not know much about the military genius or the deeds of
+Augureau, but I know the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon
+about the celebration at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial
+ambitions of the First Consul. Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought
+of the ceremony. “Oh, it was very fine,” replied the general; “there was
+nothing wanting, _except the million of men who have perished in pulling
+down what you are setting up_.”
+
+And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
+the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
+make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
+bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
+him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud
+Italian, a poor peasant's son--a miserable friar of a country town--was
+prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
+Christendom.
+
+“What!” said the Cardinal at last to him, “do you think the Pope cares
+for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
+than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
+_you--you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you
+be then--where will you be then?”
+
+“Then, as now,” replied Luther. “Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
+God.”
+
+<b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
+venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
+century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man--one of the
+profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
+country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
+brilliant author of the papers on “The Crisis,” that kept the flame of
+the rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of
+the United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the
+Bastille for presentation to Washington. The true character of this
+great Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had
+discoursed “On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.” And
+Paine answered, “God did not make rich and poor. God made male and
+female and gave the earth for their inheritance.”</b>
+
+It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
+this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
+to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
+Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
+boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
+remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. “Indeed,”
+ said the President. “Then whose boots do they black?” There was the same
+mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
+inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. “I do not know,
+madam,” he said, “but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.”
+
+And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
+when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
+dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
+disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
+using his department to further his ambitions. “Raymond,” he said, “you
+were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
+is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving
+the horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he
+rushed across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely
+keep pace with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an
+enormous chin fly fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother
+asked me what I did that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse
+bitten in that way. 'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him
+go!' Now, if Mr Chase has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm
+not going to knock it off, if it will only make his department _go!_” If
+one were asked to name the most famous answer in history, one might, not
+unreasonably, give the palm to a woman--a poor woman, too, who has been
+dust for three thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke
+six words that gave her immortality. They have been recalled on
+thousands of occasions and in all lands, but never more memorably than
+by John Bright when he was speaking of the hesitation with which he
+accepted cabinet office: “I should have preferred much,” he said, “to
+have remained in the common rank of citizenship in which heretofore I
+have lived. There is a passage in the Old Testament that has often
+struck me as being one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect that
+the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very hospitably entertained
+by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make her some amends, and
+he called her to him and asked her what there was he should do for her.
+'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to the captain of the
+host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the Shunamite woman
+returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the prophet's offer,
+'I dwell among mine own people.'”
+
+It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
+point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
+babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if
+by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the
+spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty
+replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp
+tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit or
+cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he never
+made one. His repartees are perfect of their kind, but they belong to
+the debating club and the law court. They raise a laugh and score a
+point, but they are summer lightnings. The great reply does not come
+from witty minds, but from rare and profound souls. The brilliant
+adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that reply of Augereau
+than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it because with
+all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a great part on
+the world's stage.
+
+[Illustration: 0101]
+
+[Illustration: 0102]
+
+
+
+
+ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES
+
+|I went recently to an industrial town in the North on some business,
+and while there had occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and
+engines and machinery of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers
+and engines and machinery of all sorts, and I did my best to appear
+interested and understanding. But I was neither one nor the other. I was
+only bored. Boilers and engines, I know, are important things. Compared
+with a boiler, the finest lyric that was ever written is only a perfume
+on the gale. There is a practical downrightness about a boiler that
+makes “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” or “O mistress mine, where are
+you roaming?” or even “Twelfth Night” itself, a mere idle frivolity.
+All you can say in favour of “Twelfth Night,” from the strictly business
+point of view, is that it doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank
+heaven for that.
+
+But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
+never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought
+to be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How,
+for example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of
+a boiler? How--and this was still more important--how could I hope
+to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
+gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
+great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it
+as much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
+discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no
+bowels of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the
+symbol of brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional
+values. In Dante's “Inferno” each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted
+to give him the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room
+for me, and there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever
+among wheels and pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying
+amidst the thud and din of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily
+“waste” to catch those perfumes on the gale, those frivolous rhythms
+to which I had devoted so much of that life' which should be “real and
+earnest” and occupied with serious things like boilers. And so it came
+about that as my friend talked I spiritually wilted away.
+
+I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
+learned and articulate boiler.
+
+Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
+boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
+inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a “b” in
+boilers and a “b” in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect
+was miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit.
+The light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if
+I were a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved
+brother. Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come,
+I must see his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could
+whisk us to his house in the suburbs, and there in a great room,
+surrounded with hundreds of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from
+the ends of the earth, butterflies from the forests of Brazil and
+butterflies from the plains of India, and butterflies from the veldt of
+South Africa and butterflies from the bush of Australia, all arranged
+in the foliage natural to their habitat to show how their scheme of
+coloration conformed to their setting. Some of them had their wings
+folded back and were indistinguishable from the leaves among which they
+lay. And as my friend, with growing excitement, revealed his treasure,
+he talked of his adventures in the pursuit of them, and of the law of
+natural selection and all its bearing upon the mystery of life, its
+survivals and its failures. This hobby of his was, in short, the key
+of his world. The boiler house was the prison where he did time. At the
+magic word “butterflies” the prison door opened, and out he sailed on
+the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the mind.
+
+There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
+something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a
+ship without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair
+that most of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the
+end of the journey without ever having found a path and a sense of
+direction. But a hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial
+a thing, but it supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm
+outside the mere routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it
+will lead. You may begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in
+continents. You may collect coins, and find that the history of man is
+written on them. You may begin with bees, and end with the science of
+life. Ruskin began with pictures and found they led to economics and
+everything else. For as every road was said to lead to Rome, so every
+hobby leads out into the universe, and supplies us with a compass
+for the adventure. It saves us from the humiliation of being merely
+smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in general, for the world
+is too full of things to permit us to be anything else, but one field
+of intensive culture will give even our smattering a respectable
+foundation.
+
+It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who
+knows even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might
+be when he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not
+know them and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of
+measurement which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters.
+He will have, above all, an attachment to life which will make him at
+home in the world. Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged
+into this bewildering whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of
+circumstance. We have in us the genius of speculation, but the further
+our speculations penetrate the profounder becomes the mystery that
+baffles us. We are caught in the toils of affections that crumble to
+dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither like grass, beaten about by
+storms that shatter our stoutest battlements like spray blown upon the
+wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little more than dreams within
+a dream--or as Carlyle puts it, “exhalations that are and then are not.”
+ And we share the poet's sense of exile--
+
+               In this house with starry dome,
+
+                   Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
+
+               Shall I never be at home?
+
+                   Never wholly at my ease?
+
+From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
+stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
+hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
+that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
+without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
+find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come
+and go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always
+renewed. Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with
+Horace or Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the
+sense of the mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden
+of the mind, self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of
+intractible circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the
+spirit and endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman
+in “Romany Rye,” you will remember, found his deliverance in studying
+Chinese. His bereavement had left him without God and without hope in
+the world, without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the
+things that reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly
+before him, when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and
+he thought he heard a voice say, “The marks! the marks! cling to the
+marks! or-----” And from this beginning--but the story is too fruity,
+too rich with the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book
+down, turn to the episode, and thank me for sending you again into the
+enchanted Borrovian realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in
+books. It is enough for the purpose here to recall this perfect example
+of the healing power of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little
+world of our own where we can be at ease, and from whose warmth and
+friendliness we can look out on the vast conundrum without expecting an
+answer or being much troubled because we do not get one. It was a hobby
+that poor Pascal needed to allay that horror of the universe which he
+expressed in the desolating phrase, “Le silence étemel de ces espaces
+infinis m'effraie.” For on the wings of the butterfly one can not only
+outrange the boiler, but can adventure into the infinite in the spirit
+of happy and confident adventure.
+
+[Illustration: 0108]
+
+[Illustration: 0109]
+
+
+
+
+ON HEREFORD BEACON
+
+|Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she
+died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble
+range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester beacon
+to Gloucester beacon.
+
+It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way
+up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its
+descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire
+country.
+
+Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
+range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the
+deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as
+this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman
+legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural
+ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the
+work to----. But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell
+his own story.
+
+He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
+conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
+the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
+slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of
+the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up
+the steep road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the
+Cotswolds, Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and
+the other features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the
+road, Hereford beacon came in view.
+
+“That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.”
+
+He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
+
+“Killed?” said I, a little stunned.
+
+“Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
+from about here you know, sir.”
+
+“But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he
+wasn't killed at all. He died in his bed.”
+
+The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
+
+“Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
+captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
+sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard
+tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.”
+
+He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but
+the capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
+Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must
+be fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
+
+“He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,” he went on. “He blowed
+away Little Malvern Church down yonder.”
+
+He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
+visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
+ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of
+Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
+
+“Left the tower standing he did, sir,” pursued the historian. “Now, why
+should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?”
+
+And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought
+us to Wynd's Point.
+
+The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an
+old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the
+little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out
+on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently
+declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred
+to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and
+singer.
+
+It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of
+a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
+roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
+chalet, “the golden cage,” of the singer fronting the drawing-room
+bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter
+pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls--all speak with mute
+eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres,
+whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet
+simplicity of her name.
+
+“Why did you leave the stage?” asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
+like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
+surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for
+the sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for
+charity.
+
+Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
+
+“Because,” she said, touching the Bible, “it left me so little time for
+this, and” (looking at the sunset) “none for that.”
+
+There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
+cuckoo--his voice failing slightly in these hot June days--wakes you in
+the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows
+lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
+against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
+deepening gloom of the vast plain.
+
+Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
+unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the
+road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the
+broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come
+out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the
+green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of
+Worcester beacon.
+
+Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon
+to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these
+ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled
+at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of
+exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It
+is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of
+the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and
+look out over half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills,
+Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where
+southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the
+imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you
+may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill, and
+plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs are
+grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of that
+ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of
+smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of
+the Roses, of “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the
+field at Tewkesbury,” and of Ancient Pistol, whose “wits were thick as
+Tewkesbury mustard.” There is the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and
+far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of that
+great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at Worcester,
+where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land and
+where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.
+
+The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to
+cast its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the
+wide plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing
+here through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to
+Oxford and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are
+coming up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom.
+Now is the moment to turn westward, where
+
+                   Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
+
+                   Bleeds upon the road to Wales.
+
+All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun,
+and in the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the
+far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of
+alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that clothe these western
+slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the startled noise and
+flurry of its flight.
+
+The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
+the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
+suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
+
+Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and
+a late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through
+the twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great
+sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads
+of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an
+unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all
+save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its
+graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come
+those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that close
+the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is unbroken.
+
+          And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
+
+          In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
+
+Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
+
+[Illustration: 0115]
+
+[Illustration: 0116]
+
+
+
+
+CHUM
+
+|When I turned the key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a
+familiar sound. It was the “thump, thump, thump,” of a tail on the floor
+at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place
+was vacant. Chum had gone, and he would not return. I knew that the
+veterinary must have called, pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him
+away, and that I should hear no more his “welcome home!” at midnight. No
+matter what the labours of the day had been or how profound his sleep,
+he never failed to give me a cheer with the stump of his tail and to
+blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him “Good dog” and a pat on the head.
+Then with a huge sigh of content he would lapse back into slumber,
+satisfied that the last duty of the day was done, and that all was well
+with the world for the night. Now he has lapsed into sleep altogether.
+
+I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will
+pay my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and
+in any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that
+I enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he
+enjoyed my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom
+he went, and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to
+go with, unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person.
+It was not that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned
+after a longish absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would
+leap round and round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent
+her to the floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's
+schoolmaster who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and
+explained that “he didn't know his own strength.”
+
+But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and
+I was the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the
+woodlands, and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his
+reddish-brown coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan,
+and his head down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there
+was more than a hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was
+precisely no one ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up.
+His fine liquid brown eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but
+he had a nobler head than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain
+of the Irish terrier in him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat
+was all his own. And all his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and
+his genius for friendship.
+
+There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he
+was reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had
+been sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
+grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin,
+and he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
+schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
+eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
+something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
+when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
+abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
+ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
+You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about
+his affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to
+the forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled
+to any good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and
+watchful, his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury
+and pity for the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the
+qualities of a rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into
+an unspeakable abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your
+voice and all the world was young and full of singing birds again.
+
+He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
+that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
+For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or
+his colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more
+than a little of the spirit of the flunkey. “A man's a man, for a'
+that,” was not his creed. He discriminated between the people who came
+to the front door and the people who came to the side door. To the
+former he was systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly
+hostile. “The poor in a loomp is bad,” was his fixed principle, and any
+one carrying a basket, wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was _ipso
+facto_ suspect. He held, in short, to the servile philosophy of
+clothes as firmly as any waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair.
+Familiarity never altered his convictions. No amount of correction
+affected his stubborn dislike of postmen. They offended him in many
+ways. They wore uniforms; they came, nevertheless, to the front door;
+they knocked with a challenging violence that revolted his sense of
+propriety. In the end, the burden of their insults was too much for
+him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of trousers. Perhaps that
+incident was not unconnected with his passing.
+
+One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
+Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in
+leaping a stile--he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow--or
+had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
+latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
+for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted.
+But whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all
+the veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to
+the revels in his native woods--for he had come to us as a pup from a
+cottage in the heart of the woodland country--no longer made him tense
+as a drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and
+left his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the
+hill to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into
+the house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to
+be forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a
+place he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream
+of the happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there
+waiting to scour the woods with me as of old.
+
+[Illustration: 0120]
+
+[Illustration: 0121]
+
+
+
+
+ON MATCHES AND THINGS
+
+|I had an agreeable assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I
+went-into a tea-shop and sat down. There were several young waitresses
+by the counter engaged in animated conversation. They eyed me with that
+cold aloofness which is the ritual of the order, and which, I take
+it, is intended to convey to you the fact that they are princesses in
+disguise who only serve in shops for a pastime. When I had taken out
+my watch twice with an appearance of ostentatious urgency, one of the
+princesses came towards me, took my order (looking meanwhile out of
+the window to remind me that she was not really aware of me, but only
+happened to be there by chance), and moved languorously away. When she
+returned she brought tea--and sugar. In that moment her disdain was
+transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel who under the disguise of
+indifference went about scattering benedictions among her customers and
+assuring them that the spring had come back to the earth.
+
+It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future
+became suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine)
+had passed magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be
+sweetened thrice a day by honest sugar.
+
+Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised
+how I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my
+friends through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump
+person, but in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the
+spoon and stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer
+did the spoon seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere
+survival of an antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the
+back of your coat. It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the
+tea-table. To stir your tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It
+keeps tune with your thoughts if you are alone, and it keeps time with
+your tongue if you are talking. It helps out the argument, fills up
+the gaps, provides the animated commentary on your discourse. There are
+people I shall always remember in the attitude of standing, cup in hand,
+and stirring, stirring, stirring as the current of talk flowed on. Such
+a one was that fine old tea-drinker, Prince Kropotkin--rest his gentle
+soul if he indeed be among the slain.... With what universal benevolence
+his patriarchal face used to gleam as he stood stirring and talking,
+talking and stirring, with the hurry of his teeming thoughts.
+
+It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
+for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
+little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
+of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
+solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
+with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon
+the grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all
+the pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious
+than you had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days
+knitting up your severed friendships with things. You slip into the
+National Gallery just to see what old favourites have come up from the
+darkness of the cellars. You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in
+the great moon that shines again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that
+chimes gives you a pleasant emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds
+like the salutation of an old friend who had been given up as lost. And
+matches.... There was a time when I thought nothing of a match. I would
+strike a match as thoughtlessly as I would breathe. And for the same
+reason, that matches were as plentiful as air. I would strike a match
+and let the wind puff it out; another and let it burn out before using
+it, simply because I was too busy talking or listening or thinking
+or doing nothing. I would try to light a pipe in a gale of wind on a
+mountain top, crouching behind a boulder, getting inside my hat, lying
+on the ground under my coat, and wasting matches by the dozen. I would
+get rid of a box of matches a day, and not care a dump. The world was
+simply choked with matches, and it was almost a duty to go on striking
+them to make room for the rest. You could get a dozen boxes for a penny
+or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see great bags of matches with
+boxes bursting out at the top, and simply asking to be taken. If by some
+accident you found yourself without a box in your pocket you asked the
+stranger for a light as confidently as you would ask him for the time
+o' day. You were asking for something that cost him nothing except a
+commonplace civility.
+
+And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
+Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
+away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, “No; we haven't any.” They
+simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
+smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the
+habit and just go on in their sleep. “Oh, you funny people,” they seem
+to say, dreamily. “Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach
+you that there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years
+and years; never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let
+the other fools follow on.” And you go away, feeling much as though you
+had been caught trying to pass a bad half-crown.
+
+No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, “Can you oblige me
+with a light, sir?” You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or
+a pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
+wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
+fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting
+to pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket,
+preparing to have “After you, sir,” on your lips at the exact moment
+when he has lit his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out
+the precious flame. Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps
+the fellow is only waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting
+for what the other hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless
+world.
+
+I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which
+I can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips
+I know that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that
+excellent fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine,
+and I have had more lights from him in these days than from any other
+man on earth. I never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it
+quite boldly, fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me--but not so
+often, not nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If--having
+borrowed a little too recklessly from him of late--I go into his room
+and begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the
+Peace Conference, or things like that--is he deceived? Not at all. He
+knows that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has
+one left it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his
+pipe because he knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man
+Higginson is. I cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
+
+But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
+tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
+authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
+before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
+welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
+Lords and the Oval.
+
+And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning,
+Your young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is
+sailing home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds
+instead of khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters
+who are strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on
+historic battlefields and now ask you whether you will have “thick or
+clear,” with the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your
+galley proof is brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you
+look at with a shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he
+is that pale, thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago,
+and who in the interval has been fighting in many lands near and far,
+in France and Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing
+the burnished livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a
+stoutish fellow who turns out to be the old professional released from
+Germany after long months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one
+“of the lucky ones; nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and
+lived with the farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir,
+nothing to complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.”
+
+Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men
+and things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those
+who will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound
+of Big Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we
+enter the new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the
+stimulus of the princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the
+credit side of things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We
+have left the deathly solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the
+moraine is rough and toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we
+can hear the pleasant tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old
+pastures.
+
+[Illustration: 0127]
+
+[Illustration: 0128]
+
+
+
+
+ON BEING REMEMBERED
+
+|As I lay on the hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods
+watching the harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows
+chasing each other across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were
+looking down with me. For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an
+old school book is scored with the names of generations of scholars.
+Near by are the earthworks of the ancient Britons, and on the face of
+the hill is a great white horse carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those
+white marks, that look like sheep feeding on the green hill-side, are
+reminders of the great war. How long ago it seems since the recruits
+from the valley used to come up here to learn the art of trench-digging,
+leaving these memorials behind them before they marched away to whatever
+fate awaited them! All over the hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit
+by merry parties on happy holidays. One scorched and blackened area,
+more spacious than the rest, marks the spot where the beacon fire was
+lit to celebrate the signing of Peace. And on the boles of the beech
+trees are initials carved deep in the bark--some linked like those of
+lovers, some freshly cut, some old and covered with lichen.
+
+What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and
+school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is
+as ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school
+desks of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of
+the schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted
+them. There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood
+or scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled.
+And the joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found
+pleasure in whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice
+white ceiling above me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's
+hankering for a charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies.
+But at the back of it all, the explanation of those initials
+on the boles of the beeches is a desire for some sort of
+immortality--terrestrial if not celestial. Even the least of us would
+like to be remembered, and so we carve our names on tree trunks and
+tombstones to remind later generations that we too once passed this way.
+
+If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great.
+One of the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will
+trumpet its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries
+to take care that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's “Exegi
+monumentum ære perennius” is one of many confident assertions that he
+knew he would be among the immortals. “I have raised a monument,” he
+says, “more enduring than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings;
+a monument which shall not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by
+the rage of the north wind, nor by the countless years and the flight
+of ages.” The same magnificent confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud
+declaration--
+
+               Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
+
+               Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
+
+and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had
+written a song of a sparrow--
+
+               And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
+
+               Of which I sang one song that will not die.
+
+Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was “writ in water,” but
+behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for
+immortality.
+
+Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable
+confidence. “I'll be more respected,” he said, “a hundred years after
+I am dead than I am at present;” and even John Knox had his eye on
+an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus.
+“Theologians there will always be in abundance,” he said; “the like of
+me comes but once in centuries.”
+
+Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
+their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
+conceit on the subject. “What I write,” he said, “is not written on
+slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of
+years can efface it.” And again, “I shall dine late, but the dining-room
+will be well-lighted, the guests few and select.” A proud fellow, if
+ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le
+Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. “I do not die,” he
+said grandly; “_I quit the time_.” And beside this we may put Victor
+Hugo's rather truculent, “It is time my name ceased to fill the world.”
+
+But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
+that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. “Do you suppose,” he
+said, “to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
+should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
+service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
+Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
+toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has
+ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life,
+then at last it would begin to live.” The context, it is true,
+suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a
+terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.
+
+Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject
+is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in
+books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable
+terms. In the preface to his “Account of Corsica” he says:--
+
+_For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
+ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should
+imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able
+to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established
+himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any
+danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his
+weaknesses. (_Oh, you rogue!_) To preserve a uniform dignity among those
+who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us
+under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved
+book may allow his natural disposition an easy play (“_You were drunk
+last night, you dog_”), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius
+when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he
+never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and
+discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are
+at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may
+cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great
+object of the noblest minds in all ages._
+
+We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition.
+Most of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of
+Gray's depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the “dull
+cold ear of death.” In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy
+and immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of
+“Alpha of the Plough” an agreeable fancy something like this. In the
+year two thousand--or it may be three thousand--yes, let us do the thing
+handsomely and not stint the centuries--in the year three thousand and
+ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and the
+Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe for
+democracy--at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer who has
+been swished that morning from the British Isles across the Atlantic
+to the Patagonian capital--swished, I need hardly remark, being the
+expression used to describe the method of flight which consists in
+being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made
+to complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be
+desired--bursts in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered
+by him in the course of some daring investigations of the famous
+subterranean passages of the ancient British capital--those passages
+which have so long perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the
+Patagonian savants, some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers,
+and some that they were the roadways of a people who had become
+so afflicted with photophobia that they had to build their cities
+underground. The trophy is a book by one “Alpha of the Plough.” It
+creates an enormous sensation. It is put under a glass case in the
+Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is translated into every Patagonian
+dialect. It is read in schools. It is referred to in pulpits. It is
+discussed in learned societies. Its author, dimly descried across the
+ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
+
+[Illustration: 0134]
+
+An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
+celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
+assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
+marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha--a gentleman with a flowing
+beard and a dome-like brow--that overlooks the market-place, and places
+wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of bells
+and a salvo of artillery.
+
+There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you,
+my dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in
+the New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved
+for most, even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world
+to-day. And yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who
+writes has the best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox,
+who among the statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But
+Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb,
+even second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the
+temple of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military
+feats of Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza
+of the poem in which he poured out his creed--
+
+               He either fears his fate too much,
+
+                   Or his deserts are small.
+
+               That dares not put it to the touch
+
+                   To win or lose it all.
+
+Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship
+with Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he
+befriended a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the
+name of his benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of
+Ægina is full of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would
+like to be remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went
+to Pindar and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his
+praise. Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. “Why, for
+so much money,” said Pytheas, “I can erect a statue of bronze in the
+temple.”
+
+“Very likely.” On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And
+now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the
+statues of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples
+themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the
+ode of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer
+paths to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of
+the Earl of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of
+Shakespeare live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their
+dedication. But one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise
+you to go and give Mr -------- £200 and a commission to send your name
+echoing down the corridors of time.
+
+Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr -------- (you will fill in the
+blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them. It would be
+safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a rose, or an
+overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can confer a modest
+immortality. They have done so for many. A certain Maréchal Neil is
+wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which is as enviable
+a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr Mackintosh is
+talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of rain, and even
+Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his battles. It would
+not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone will be thought
+of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just as Archimedes
+is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.
+
+But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the
+healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps
+one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of
+forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike,
+and we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as
+if the world babbles about us for ever.
+
+[Illustration: 0137]
+
+[Illustration: 0138]
+
+
+
+
+ON DINING
+
+|There are people who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can
+hoard it not for the sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy,
+for the satisfaction of feeling that they have got something locked up
+that they could spend if they chose without being any the poorer and
+that other people would enjoy knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending
+what they can afford to spend. It is a pleasure akin to the economy of
+the Scotsman, which, according to a distinguished member of that race,
+finds its perfect expression in taking the tube when you can afford a
+cab. But the gift of secrecy is rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the
+sake of telling them. We spend our secrets as Lamb's spendthrift spent
+his money--while they are fresh. The joy of creating an emotion in other
+people is too much for us. We like to surprise them, or shock them, or
+please them as the case may be, and we give away the secret with which
+we have been entrusted with a liberal hand and a solemn request “to say
+nothing about it.” We relish the luxury of telling the secret, and leave
+the painful duty of keeping it to the other fellow. We let the horse out
+and then solemnly demand that the stable door shall be shut so that
+it shan't escape, I have done it myself--often. I have no doubt that
+I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret to reveal, but I
+shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely selfish reasons,
+which will appear later. You may conceive me going about choking with
+mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years have
+I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can
+dine wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the
+atmosphere restful, and the prices moderate--in short, the happy
+mean between the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the
+uncompromising cheapness of Lockhart's. In those extremes I find no
+satisfaction.
+
+It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its
+ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to
+a good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren't many
+families that enjoyed their “vittles” more than her's did, and I can
+claim the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that
+I count good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I
+could join very heartily in Peacock's chorus:
+
+                   “How can a man, in his life of a span,
+
+                   Do anything better than dine.”
+
+Give me a satisfactory' dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel
+themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads
+the landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who
+insisted that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life.
+That, I think, is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few
+things more revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by
+taking emetics. But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise
+for enjoying a good dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good
+dinners. I see no necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and
+a holy mind. There was a saintly man once in this city--a famous man,
+too--who was afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out
+to dinner, he had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to
+enable him to start even with the other guests. And it is on record
+that when the ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with
+Cardinal Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses
+that hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season
+of fasting, “I fear,” said one of them, “that there is a lobster salad
+side to the Cardinal.” I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side
+too. A hot day and a lobster salad--what happier conjunction can we look
+for in a plaguey world?
+
+But, in making this confession, I am neither _gourmand_ nor _gourmet_.
+Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic
+conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and
+the great language of the _menu_ does not stir my pulse. I do not ask
+for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt
+would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for
+talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was
+pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have
+for supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as
+the shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right
+spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes--eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
+smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke
+approvingly of Sancho's choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way
+with him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against
+his rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with
+conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the
+matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to
+follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart's desire at
+the Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel
+when I enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things.
+I stroke the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and
+rises, purring with dignity, under my caress. I say “Good evening” to
+the landlord who greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once
+cordial and restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of
+his hand. No frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a
+neat-handed Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress
+and white cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility
+and aloofness that establishes the perfect relationship--obliging,
+but not familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The
+napery makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a
+mirror, and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced
+dish of hors d'ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the
+modest four-course table d'hôte begins, and when at the end you light
+your cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only
+dined, but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement,
+touched with the subtle note of a personality.
+
+And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall
+not tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It
+may be in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's
+Inn, or it may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you
+because I sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it
+I shall shatter the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the
+Mermaid and find its old English note of kindly welcome and decorous
+moderation gone, and that in its place there will be a noisy, bustling,
+popular restaurant with a band, from which I shall flee. When it is
+“discovered” it will be lost, as the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so
+I shall keep its secret. I only purr it to the cat who arches her back
+and purrs understanding in response. It is the bond of freemasonry
+between us.
+
+[Illustration: 0142]
+
+[Illustration: 0143]
+
+
+
+
+IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA
+
+|I was leaning over the rails of the upper deck idly watching the
+Chinese whom, to the number of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre
+and were to disgorge at Halifax, when the bugle sounded for lunch. A
+mistake, I thought, looking at my watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon
+hour was one. Then I remembered. I had not corrected my watch that
+morning by the ship's clock. In our pursuit of yesterday across the
+Atlantic we had put on another three-quarters of an hour. Already on
+this journey we had outdistanced to-day by two and a half hours. By
+the time we reached Halifax we should have gained perhaps six hours. In
+thought I followed the Chinamen thundering across Canada to Vancouver,
+and thence onward across the Pacific on the last stage of their voyage.
+And I realised that by the time they reached home they would have caught
+yesterday up.
+
+But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
+this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
+years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
+thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always
+the same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of
+it than I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind
+as insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
+beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we
+were overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by
+sea and land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight
+across the plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it
+was neither yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a
+confusion of all three.
+
+In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
+absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom--a parochial illusion
+of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
+axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
+light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that
+they were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
+numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away
+on the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length
+of light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
+meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
+and dark--what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for ever
+and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark--not many days, but
+just one day and that always midday.
+
+At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
+itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck
+of dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A
+few hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of
+dark, I should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo
+sky--specks whose strip of daylight was many times the length of
+ours, and whose year would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the
+astronomers tell us that Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years?
+Think of it--our Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round
+a single solar year of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and
+live to a green old age according to our reckoning, and still never see
+the glory of midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our
+ideas of Time have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune--if,
+that is, there be any dwellers on Neptune.
+
+And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts
+of other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this
+regal orb above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and
+numbered their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons
+by the illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of
+other systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to
+have any fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the
+unthinkable void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time:
+there was only duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of
+fable.
+
+As I reached this depressing conclusion--not a novel or original one,
+but always a rather cheerless one--a sort of orphaned feeling stole over
+me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
+from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
+eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly
+in the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a
+gay time on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during
+yesterday's storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of
+his comrades at an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges
+before him, was crying something that sounded like “Al-lay! Al-lay!”
+ counting the money in his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he
+doubted whether it was all there, but because he liked the feel and
+the look of it. A sprightly young rascal, dressed as they all were in a
+grotesque mixture of garments, French and English and German, picked
+up on the battlefields of France, where they had been working for three
+years, stole up behind the orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me
+as he did so) snatched an orange and bolted. There followed a roaring
+scrimmage on deck, in the midst of which the orange-seller's coppers
+were sent flying along the boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and
+scuffling, and from which the author of the mischief emerged riotously
+happy and, lighting a cigarette, flung himself down with an air of
+radiant good humour, in which he enveloped me with a glance of his bold
+and merry eye.
+
+The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
+illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass,
+not intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The
+experiences were always associated with great physical weariness and
+the sense of the endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the
+Dauphiné coming down from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other
+experience in the Lake District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a
+companion in the doorway of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain.
+We had come to the end of our days in the mountains, and now we were
+going back to Keswick, climbing Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was
+robed in clouds, and the rain was of that determined kind that admits of
+no hope. And so, after a long wait, we decided that Helvellyn “would
+not go,” as the climber would say, and, putting on our mackintoshes and
+shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for Keswick by the lower slopes of
+the mountains--by the track that skirts Great Dodd and descends by the
+moorlands into the Vale of St John.
+
+All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung
+low over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
+booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
+tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
+struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to
+be without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious
+loneliness of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the
+late afternoon we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the
+Vale of St John and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the
+road. What with battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the
+dripping mackintosh and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked
+myself into that passive mental state which is like a waking dream,
+in which your voice sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your
+thoughts seem to play irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering
+consciousness.
+
+Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember
+that it is what Mr Chesterton calls “a rolling road, a reeling road.”
+ It is like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it
+is going down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for
+Penrith, then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that
+goal, only to give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so
+on, and all the time it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or
+to Penrith, but is sidling crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road
+which is like the whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of
+his signature, thus:
+
+[Illustration: 0148]
+
+Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw
+through the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that
+fine mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses
+that sustain the southern face were visible. They looked like the
+outstretched fingers of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds
+and clutching the earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The
+image fell in with the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the
+similitude out to my companion as we paced along the muddy road.
+
+Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and
+we went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As
+we did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds
+and clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere,
+far off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same
+mist of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
+gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been
+years ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might
+have been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was
+this evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the
+impression remained of something outside the confines of time. I had
+passed into a static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished,
+and Time was only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I
+had walked through the shadow into the deeps.
+
+But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when
+I reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very
+earnestly in order to discover the time of the trains for London next
+day. And the recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings
+brought my thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just
+below me, was happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread,
+one of those long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck
+from the shore at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed
+along a rope connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of
+the man as he devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the
+brown crust reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had
+gone for lunch long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this
+time. I turned hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch
+back three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the
+fiction of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.
+
+[Illustration: 0150]
+
+[Illustration: 0151]
+
+
+
+
+TWO DRINKS OF MILK
+
+|The cabin lay a hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between
+Sneam and Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and
+out to the open Atlantic.
+
+A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down
+the rocks.
+
+We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to
+the cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received
+us.
+
+Milk? Yes. Would we come in?
+
+We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade
+of the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother
+of the girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and
+having done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen
+floor out into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and
+on a bench by the ingle sat the third member of the family.
+
+She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her
+eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and
+untroubled as a child's. She paused in her knitting to make room for me
+on the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she
+played the hostess.
+
+If you have travelled in Kerry you don't need to be told of the charm
+of the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful
+country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of
+Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the
+look of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a
+spring morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and
+to know them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of
+Kerry, O'Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities
+of a poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always
+warm with the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted
+with wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving
+pleasure to others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every
+peasant you meet is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted
+if you will stop to talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be
+your guide. It is like being back in the childhood of the world, among
+elemental things and an ancient, unhasting people.
+
+The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess
+in disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that
+a duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of
+Sneam, five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin
+and among these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she
+had caught something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out
+there through the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of
+exiles had gone to far lands. Some few had returned and some had been
+for ever silent. As I sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle
+accents all the tale of a stricken people and of a deserted land. There
+was no word of complaint--only a cheerful acceptance of the decrees
+of Fate. There is the secret of the fascination of the Kérry
+temperament--the happy sunlight playing across the sorrow of things.
+
+The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost
+to the brim, and a couple of mugs.
+
+We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to
+pay.
+
+“Sure, there's nothing to pay,” said the old lady with just a touch of
+pride in her sweet voice. “There's not a cabin in Kerry where you'll not
+be welcome to a drink of milk.”
+
+The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed
+in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane,
+and as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they
+added a benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague
+M'Carty's hotel--Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker,
+whose rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits
+among the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with
+many-coloured flies--we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville and
+heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.
+
+When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take
+the northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much
+better made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before
+the coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)
+
+In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a
+day of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the
+lake we dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage--neat and
+well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense
+of plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark
+of a dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged
+interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and
+leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before
+us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt
+that we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver
+affairs than thirsty travelers to attend to.
+
+Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back
+to the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed
+suddenly less friendly.
+
+In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two
+glasses--a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of feature.
+While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the doorstep,
+looking away across the lake to where the noble form of Schiehallion
+dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time was money and
+talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty haste.
+
+“What have we to pay, please?”
+
+“Sixpence.”
+
+And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.
+
+It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked
+something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant
+memory.
+
+[Illustration: 0155]
+
+[Illustration: 0156]
+
+
+
+
+ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH
+
+|It was my fortune the other evening to be at dinner with a large
+company of doctors. While we were assembling I fell into conversation
+with an eminent physician, and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked
+that we English seasoned our dishes far too freely. We scattered salt
+and pepper and vinegar over our food so recklessly that we destroyed the
+delicacy of our taste, and did ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was
+especially unfriendly to the use of salt. He would not admit even
+that it improved the savour of things. It destroyed our sense of their
+natural flavour, and substituted a coarser appeal to the palate. From
+the hygienic point of view, the habit was all wrong. All the salts
+necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat, and the use of salt
+independently is entirely harmful.
+
+“Take the egg, for example,” he said. “It contains in it all the
+elements necessary for the growth of a chicken--salt among the rest.
+That is sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article
+of food. Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise
+its delicate flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.” And he
+concluded, as we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example
+of the Japanese in this matter. “They,” he said laughingly, “only take
+salt when they want to die.”
+
+At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
+and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
+applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
+who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with
+great energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we
+eat contain the salt required by the human body. “Not even the egg?”
+ I asked. “No, not even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our
+foods, and even if the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw
+state they tend to lose their character cooked.” He admitted that
+that was an argument for eating things _au naturel_ more than is the
+practice. But he was firm in his conviction that the separate use of
+salt is essential. “And as for flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw,
+with or without salt. What comparison is there?”
+
+“But,” said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about
+the Japanese), “are there not races who do not use salt?” “My dear sir,”
+ said he, “the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of
+salt is supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of
+the prime essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause
+or another, is seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute
+exactness in the mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of
+salt to eat with their food they die.”
+
+After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening
+in examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt
+I should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the
+face of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have
+quoted, especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians.
+Yet I daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the
+facts. For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice,
+the Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the
+world, and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat
+their fish in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would
+go far to explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
+
+But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
+the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about
+which there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be
+a commonplace thing like the use of salt.
+
+Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random--men
+whose whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its
+requirements--whose views on the subject were in violent antagonism.
+They approached their subject from contrary angles and with contrary
+sets of facts, and the truth they were in search of took a wholly
+different form for each.
+
+It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
+judicious manipulation.
+
+A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our
+air service. He was very confident that we were “simply out of it--that
+was all, simply out of it.” And he was full of facts on the subject.
+<b>I don't like people who brim over with facts--who lead facts about,
+as Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few
+people so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His
+conclusions are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot
+sort them out and add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès
+called “loose, unstitched minds.”
+
+Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
+facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember
+whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her
+husband had told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so
+bad as that, but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact
+away in the chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not
+infrequently, that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something
+chipped off, and I can never trust it until I have verified my
+references.
+
+But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was
+that, so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell
+you how many English machines had failed to return on each day of the
+week, and how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to
+descend. And judging from his figures he was quite right. “We were out
+of it--simply out of it.” Yet the truth is that while his facts were
+right, his deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken
+account of some facts, but had left other equally important facts out of
+consideration. For example, through all this time the German airmen had
+been on the defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen
+had taken great risks for a great object. They had gone miles over
+the enemy's lines--as much as fifty miles over--and had come back with
+priceless information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but
+the whole truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this
+time the most victorious element of our Army.
+
+I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are
+not always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is
+often composed of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to
+contradict each other. Take the handkerchief incident in “Othello.” Poor
+Desdemona could not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that
+the Moor saw. Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello
+believed she had given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio
+wipe his beard with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the
+catastrophe.
+
+But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them
+in real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
+free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
+report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
+knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
+knife discovered--also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of pawntickets
+for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he was a
+thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
+his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
+clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of
+the trousers was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt
+uncomfortable. He took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was
+doing so he saw a steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a
+timid person he furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches
+came on, and when he had got his “take” he left to transcribe it,
+having forgotten all about the knife. The rest followed as stated. The
+pawntickets, which seemed so strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were
+of course not his at all. They belonged to the owner of the suit.
+
+You remember that Browning in “The Ring and the Book,” tells the story
+of the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before
+he feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
+annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
+
+Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
+different aspects of one truth. “Mostly,” he says, “matters of any
+consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself,
+I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
+contradicted myself three times.” I fancy it is this discovery of
+the falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less
+cocksure as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts
+that belong to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that “a
+lie that is only half a truth is ever the blackest of lies”; but he is
+wrong. It is the fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter)
+which is the most dangerous lie--for a fact seems so absolute, so
+incontrovertible. Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts,
+their arrangement and concealment. It was never better stated than by a
+famous business man in an action for libel which I have referred to in
+another connection. He was being examined about the visit of Government
+experts to his works, and the instructions he gave to his manager. And
+this, as I remember it, was the dialogue between counsel and witness:
+
+“Did you tell him to tell them the facts?”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+“The whole facts?”
+
+“No.”
+
+“What facts?”
+
+“_Selected facts_.”
+
+It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the
+midst of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody
+bearing his name.
+
+If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to
+a scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things,
+we cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of
+politics and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a
+speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of
+which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is
+so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in
+the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation
+is denounced as the heresy of another. Justification by “works” is
+displaced by justification by faith, and that in turn is superseded by
+justification by “service” which is “works” in new terms. Which is
+truth and which error? Or is that the real alternative? May they not
+be different facets of one truth. The prism breaks up the sunlight into
+many different colours and facts are only the broken lights of truth.
+In this perplexing world we must be prepared to find the same truth
+demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die because they take salt, and
+the fact that Indians die because they don't take it.
+
+[Illustration: 0163]
+
+[Illustration: 0164]
+
+
+
+
+ON GREAT MEN
+
+|I was reading just now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of
+him expressed by Macaulay who declared him to be “the greatest man since
+Milton.” I paused over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally
+enough to ask myself who were the great Englishmen in history--for the
+sake of argument, the six greatest. I found the question so exciting
+that I had reached the end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time)
+almost before I had reached the end of my list. I began by laying down
+my premises or principles. I would not restrict the choice to men of
+action. The only grievance I have against Plutarch is that he followed
+that course. His incomparable “Lives,” would be still more satisfying, a
+still more priceless treasury of the ancient world, if, among his crowd
+of statesmen and warriors, we could make friends with Socrates and
+Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus, with the men whose work survived
+them as well as with the men whose work is a memory. And I rejected the
+blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I would not have in my list a mere
+homicidal genius. My great man may have been a great killer of his kind,
+but he must have some better claim to inclusion than the fact that he
+had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On the other hand, I would not
+exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to be a bad man. Henry
+Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad men. “Greatness,”
+ he said, “consists in bringing all manner of mischief upon mankind,
+and goodness in removing it from them.” And it was to satirise the
+traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific satire
+“The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,” probably having in mind the
+Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
+traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad
+man. I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that
+he was a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful
+ogre, a sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless,
+ruthless jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent,
+merciless as a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a
+sort of mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought
+of nature.
+
+Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
+governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
+mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was
+a great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about
+Cæsar, but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds
+down twenty centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must
+have design. It must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere
+accident, emotion or effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured
+by its influence on the current of the world, on its extension of
+the kingdom of the mind, on its contribution to the riches of living.
+Applying tests like these, who are our six greatest Englishmen? For
+our first choice there would be a unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the
+greatest thing we have done. He is our challenger in the fists of the
+world, and there is none to cross swords with him. Like Sirius, he has a
+magnitude of his own. Take him away from our heavens, conceive him never
+to have been born, and the imaginative wealth of fife shrinks to a
+lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's phrase, “poor indeed.” There is
+nothing English for which we would exchange him. “Indian Empire or
+no Indian Empire,” we say with Carlyle, “we cannot do without our
+Shakespeare.”
+
+For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
+indisputably to him who had
+
+               ”... a voice whose sound was like the sea.”
+
+Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
+harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of
+the sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
+intangible, indestructible. With him stands his “chief of men”--the
+“great bad man” of Burke--the one man of action in our annals capable of
+measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
+Bismarck in the realm of the spirit--the man at whose name the cheek
+of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
+death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
+these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda)
+first made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
+
+But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as
+the bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning
+eternally with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his
+soul to tatters, and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding
+eloquence, and Burke, the prose Milton, to whose deep well all
+statesmanship goes with its pail, and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court
+in his brown wig, and Newton plumbing the ultimate secrets of this
+amazing universe, and deep-browed Darwin unravelling the mystery of
+life, and Wordsworth giving “to weary feet the gift of rest,” and
+Dickens bringing with him a world of creative splendour only less
+wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these and a host of others
+aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip him of all the
+legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name, and he is still
+one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic, enlightened
+man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first great
+Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
+quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be
+Roger--there by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range
+of his adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through
+which he ploughed his lonely way to truth.
+
+I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a
+woman, Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic “lady of the
+lamp,” but as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the
+adventurer into a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by
+a will of iron, a terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful
+and creative woman this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not
+because she is unworthy, but because she must head a companion fist of
+great Englishwomen. I hurriedly summon up two candidates from among
+our English saints--Sir Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the
+intolerance (incredible to modern ears) that could jest so diabolically
+at the martyrdom of the “heretic,” Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his
+place as the most fragrant flower of English culture, but if greatness
+be measured by achievement and enduring influence he must yield place to
+the astonishing revivalist of the eighteenth century who left a deeper
+mark upon the spiritual life of England than any man in our history.
+
+There is my list--Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
+Bacon, John Wesley--and anybody can make out another who cares and
+a better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
+unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is
+not a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the
+kibe of Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
+
+There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
+contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher.
+If the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness
+cannot be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left
+out of any list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature,
+we are poor in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see
+the great name of Turner.
+
+[Illustration: 0169]
+
+[Illustration: 0170]
+
+
+
+
+ON SWEARING
+
+|A young officer in the flying service was describing to me the other
+day some of his recent experiences in France. They were both amusing
+and sensational, though told with that happy freedom from vanity and
+self-consciousness which is so pleasant a feature of the British soldier
+of all ranks. The more he has done and seen the less disposed he seems
+to regard himself as a hero. It is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging
+is a sham currency. It is the base coin with which the fraudulent pay
+their way. F. C. Selous was the greatest big game hunter of modern
+times, but when he talked about his adventures he gave the impression of
+a man who had only been out in the back garden killing slugs. And Peary,
+who found the North Pole, writes as modestly as if he had only found a
+new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr Cook, who didn't find the North Pole
+and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who does the boasting. And the man who
+talks most about patriotism is usually the man who has least of that
+commodity, just as the man who talks most about his honesty is rarely to
+be trusted with your silver spoons. A man who really loves his country
+would no more brag about it than he would brag about loving his mother.
+
+But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to
+write of him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
+good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
+seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It
+was just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
+convolvulus overgrows my garden. “Hell” was his favourite expletive, and
+he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
+scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
+he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it
+as a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear
+that he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
+
+And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only
+secular quality it possesses--the quality of emphasis. It is speech
+breaking bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the
+dictionary and the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord
+in music that in shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music
+which is all discord is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is
+deadly dull.
+
+It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
+emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
+habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. “When I have said
+'Malaga,'” says Plancus, in the “Vicomte de Bragelonne,” “I am no
+longer a man.” He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his
+imprecations for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils
+swell and his eyes flash fire as he cries, “Malaga.” It is a good swear
+word. It has the advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely
+what a swear word should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying
+nothing. It should be incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the
+passion that evokes it.
+
+If “Malaga” has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was
+that defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. “'Damns'
+have had their day,” he said, and when he swore he used the “oath
+referential.” “Odds hilts and blades,” he said, or “Odds slanders and
+lies,” or “Odds bottles and glasses.” But when he sat down to write his
+challenge to Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him.
+“Do, Sir Lucius, let me begin with a damme,” he said. He had to give
+up artificial swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to
+something which had a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it
+is the idea of being a little wicked that is one of the attractions of
+swearing. It is a symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so.
+For in its origin always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates
+spoke “By the Gods,” he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest
+reverence he could command. But the oaths of to-day are not the
+expression of piety, but of violent passion, and the people who indulge
+in a certain familiar expletive would not find half so much satisfaction
+in it if they felt that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration
+of faith--“By our Lady.” That is the way our ancestors used to swear,
+and we have corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith
+and meaning.
+
+The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of
+life breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is
+the prerogative of the soldier to be “full of strange oaths.” In this
+respect Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used “strange
+oaths.” He stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most
+industrious in it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that
+have come down to us which are not garnished with “damns” or “By Gods.”
+ Hear him on the morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to
+gossip Creevey--“It has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I
+have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing--the nearest run
+thing you ever saw in your life.” Or when some foolish Court flunkey
+appeals to him to support his claim to ride in the carriage with the
+young Queen on some public occasion--“Her Majesty can make you ride
+on the box or inside the carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's
+dog.” But in this he followed not only the practice of soldiers in all
+times, but the fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to
+have regarded himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at
+the language of the Prince Regent.
+
+“By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,” he remarks,
+speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. “Then he speaks and swears so
+like old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the
+room with him.” This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices,
+but whose recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It
+suggests also that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of
+his own comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and
+swore as naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that
+other famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy,
+as when, speaking of Grant, he said, “I'll tell you where he beats me,
+and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy
+does out of his sight, but it scares me like Hell.” Two centuries ago,
+according to Uncle Toby, our men “swore terribly in Flanders,” and they
+are swearing terribly there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time
+that the Flanders mud, which has been watered for centuries by English
+blood, will ensanguine the speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant
+young airman will talk a good deal less about “Hell” when he escapes
+from it to a cleaner world.
+
+[Illustration: 0174]
+
+[Illustration: 0175]
+
+
+
+
+ON A HANSOM CAB
+
+|I saw a surprising spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a
+hansom cab. Not a derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally
+see, with an obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the
+box, crawling along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has
+escaped from a cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way
+back--no, but a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting
+in the shafts and tossing its head as though it were full of beans
+and importance, and a slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as
+a sandboy as he flicked and flourished his whip, and, still more
+astonishing, a real passenger, a lady, inside the vehicle.
+
+I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the
+driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of
+the poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas
+of the past--sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the
+quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there
+flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs,
+the London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King
+Petrol, when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and
+the two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place
+then, of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a
+formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took
+your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver,
+you settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and
+the bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins
+of that “orf horse,” the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of
+the police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse
+joke to a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in
+the revelry. The conductor would stroll up to him and continue a
+conversation that had begun early in the morning and seemed to go on
+intermittently all day--a conversation of that jolly sort in which,
+as Washington Irving says, the jokes are rather small and the laughter
+abundant.
+
+In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside
+the bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It
+was an act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the
+top alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes.
+And even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been
+quite above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The
+hansom was a rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the
+thing for a lady to be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested
+romance, mysteries, elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of
+wickednesses. A staid, respectable “growler” was much more fitting for
+so delicate an exotic as Woman. If she began riding in hansoms
+alone anything might happen. She might want to go to public
+dinners next--think of it!--she might be wanting to ride a
+bicycle--horrors!--she might discover a shameless taste for cigarettes,
+or demand a living wage, or University degrees, or a vote, just for all
+the world as though she was the equal of Man, the Magnificent....
+
+As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and
+challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to
+the coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy,
+and impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable,
+mighty, but blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets,
+reeling from right to left like a drunken giant, encountering the
+kerb-stone, skimming the lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of
+boorish revolt, standing obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the
+street or across the street amidst the derision and rejoicing of those
+whose empire he threatened, and who saw in these pranks the assurance of
+his ultimate failure. Memory went back to the old One a.m. from the Law
+Courts, and to one night that sums up for me the spirit of those days of
+the great transition....
+
+It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to
+start from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew
+his power. He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along
+the Edgeware Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men
+who wrote him down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles
+
+                   (from Our Peking Correspondent)
+
+in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
+chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was “full
+up” hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded
+in with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen--yes,
+cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the
+One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only
+cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end
+of the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the
+tipsy gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at
+Baker Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is
+being swept on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are
+exchanged, what jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the
+top hat, under the impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the
+floor--oh, then the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy
+gentleman opens his dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these
+revels soon are ended.
+
+An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:
+
+                   First a shiver, and then a thrill,
+
+                   Then something decidedly like a spill--
+
+                         O. W. Holmes,
+
+                        _The Deacon's Masterpiece_ (DW)
+
+and we are left sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with
+the clock over the shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.
+
+It is the spirit of Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting
+himself. He disapproves of the passengers having all the fun. Is he not
+a humorist too? May he not be merry in the dawn of this May morning?
+
+We take our fate like Englishmen, bravely, even merrily.
+
+The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment. This is worth living
+for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base betrayer of the
+innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though it is two
+or three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the morning! Who
+cares?
+
+Only the gentleman with the big bag in the corner.
+
+“'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?” he asks the conductor with tears
+in his voice.
+
+The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help the driver. They busy
+themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn handles, they work
+pumps, they probe here and thump there.
+
+They come out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They
+have the cheerful philosophy of people who meddle with things that
+move--cab drivers, bus-drivers, engine-drivers.
+
+               If, when looking well won't move thee.
+
+                        Looking ill prevail?
+
+So they take a breather, light cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it
+again.
+
+Meanwhile all the hansoms in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us,
+like sharks upon the dead whale. Up they rattle from this side and that,
+and every cabman flings a jibe as he passes.
+
+“Look 'ere,” says one, pulling up. “Why don't yer take the
+genelmen where they want to go? That's what I asks yer.
+Why--don't--yer--take--the--genelmen--where--they--want--to go? It's
+only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't want
+to go.”
+
+For the cabman is like “the wise thrush who sings his song twice over.”
+
+“'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!” cries another.
+
+“We can't 'elp larfin', yer know,” says a third feelingly.
+
+“Well, you keep on larfin',” says the chauffeur looking up from the
+inside of One a.m. “It suits your style o' beauty.”
+
+A mellow voice breaks out:
+
+                   We won't go home till morning,
+
+                   Till daylight does appear.
+
+And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen in comic chorus.
+Those who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither sing nor
+whistle, croak.
+
+We sit inside patiently. We even joke too. All but the man with the big
+bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his life-long enemy.
+
+He appeals again to the conductor, who laughs.
+
+The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back, puts
+his head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and says:
+
+“It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning.”
+
+We think better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is
+that of the politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart.
+He is like Dick Steele--“when he was sober he was delightful; when he
+was drunk he was irresistible.”
+
+“She won't go any more to-night,” says the conductor.
+
+So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal away. All but
+the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a problem
+that looks insoluble.
+
+Two of us jump into a hansom that still prowls around, the last of the
+shoal of sharks.
+
+“Drive up West End Lane.”
+
+“Right, sir.”
+
+Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's face, wreathed in smiles,
+beams down on us.
+
+“I see what was coming all the way from Baker Street,” he savs. “I see
+the petrol was on fire.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“Yus,” he says. “Thought I should pick you up about 'ere.”
+
+“Ah!”
+
+“No good, motors,” he goes on, cheerfully. “My opinion is they'll go
+out as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the aristocracy are
+giving 'em up and goin' back to 'orses.”
+
+“Hope they'll get better horses than this,” for we are crawling
+painfully up the tortuous reaches of West End Lane.
+
+“Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's overworked. 'E ain't earned more
+than three bob to-night. That's jest what' e's earned. Three bob. It's
+the cold weather, you know. That's what it is. It's the cold weather
+as makes 'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And 'e does go after
+all, even if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't say of that
+there motor-bus.”
+
+We had no reply to this thrust, and the lid dropped down with a sound of
+quiet triumph.
+
+And so home. And my dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge
+Monster, reeking with strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious
+laughter and standing for ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road
+with the clock opposite pointing to a quarter to two, a rueful face in
+the corner staring fixedly at a big bag and a tipsy gentleman in a
+tall hat finding his way back to Baker Street in happy converse with a
+policeman.
+
+Gone is the old London over which the shade of Mr Hansom presided like
+a king. Gone is the “orf horse” with all its sins; gone is the
+rosy-cheeked driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent whip and his
+tales of the streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you your
+ticket, talked to you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about the
+weather, the Boat Race, or the latest clue to the latest mystery. We
+amble no more. We have banished laughter and leisure from the streets,
+and the face of the motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the symbol
+of the change. We have passed into a breathless world, a world of
+wonderful mechanical contrivances that have quickened the tempo of life
+and will soon have made the horse as much a memory as the bow and arrow
+or the wherry that used to be the principal vehicle of Elizabethan
+London. As I watched the hansom bowling along Regent Street until it
+was lost in the swirl of motor-buses and taxis I seemed to see in it the
+last straggler of an epoch passing away into oblivion. I am glad it went
+so gallantly, and I am half sorry I did not give the driver a parting
+cheer as he flicked his whip in the face of the night.
+
+[Illustration: 0183]
+
+[Illustration: 0184]
+
+
+
+
+ON MANNERS
+
+
+I
+
+|It is always surprising, if not always agreeable, <b>to see ourselves
+as others see us</b>. The picture we present to others is never the
+picture we present to ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally
+it is a much plainer picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always
+a strange picture. Just now we English are having our portrait painted
+by an American lady, Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been
+appearing in the press. It is not a flattering portrait, and it seems to
+have angered a good many people who deny the truth of the likeness very
+passionately. The chief accusation seems to be that we have no manners,
+are lacking in the civilities and politenesses of life, and so on, and
+are inferior in these things to the French, the Americans, and other
+peoples. It is not an uncommon charge, and it comes from many quarters.
+It came to me the other day in a letter from a correspondent, French
+or Belgian, who has been living in this country during the war, and who
+wrote bitterly about the manners of the English towards foreigners. In
+the course of his letter he quoted with approval the following cruel
+remark of Jean Carrière, written, needless to say, before the war:
+
+“Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal élevé du fait
+qu'il manque de manières; il ignore encore la politesse, voilà tout.”
+
+The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the
+whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.
+
+I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have
+enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken
+up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and
+we suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should
+be told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At
+the same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's
+warning about the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty
+millions of us, and we have some forty million different manners, and it
+is not easy to get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will
+take this “copy” to the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who
+preceded him was a monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all
+civility; another is all bad temper, and between the two extremes you
+will get every shade of good and bad manners. And so through every phase
+of society.
+
+Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the
+widest differences of manner in different parts of the country. In
+Lancashire and Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There
+is a deep-seated distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the
+code of conduct differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral
+town as the manner of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But
+even here you will find behind the general bearing infinite shades of
+difference that make your generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more
+you know of any people the less you feel able to sum them up in broad
+categories.
+
+Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our
+ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete
+darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting--apropos of the
+Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because
+of the strangeness of his appearance--lamenting the deplorable manners
+of the people. “Lord!” he says, “to see the absurd nature of Englishmen
+that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks
+strange.” Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him
+describing the English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
+
+But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
+earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. “To mention but a
+single attraction,” he says in one of his letters, “the English girls
+are divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses.
+They have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go
+anywhere on a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you
+arrive, they kiss you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you
+return. Go where you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if
+you had once tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish
+to spend your life there.” Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens
+a good deal changed to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a
+cigarette.
+
+I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing
+and less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the
+saying of O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good
+criticism. Our lack of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but
+more probably it is traceable not to a physical but to a social source.
+Unlike the Celtic and the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have
+not the ease that comes from the ingrained tradition of human equality.
+The French have that ease. So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So
+have the Americans. But the English are class conscious. The dead
+hand of feudalism is still heavy upon our souls. If it were not, the
+degrading traffic in titles would long since have been abolished as an
+insult to our intelligence. But we not only tolerate it: we delight
+in this artificial scheme of relationship. It is not human values, but
+social discriminations that count. And while human values are cohesive
+in their effect, social discriminations are separatist. They break
+society up into castes, and permeate it with the twin vices of snobbery
+and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is subdivided into
+infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious restraints of a
+people uncertain of their social relationships create a defensive manner
+which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true root is a
+timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his ground
+tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is proud: it
+may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away from this
+fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners for
+independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.
+
+The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from
+a sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented
+to keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression
+that he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he
+had more _abandon_. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical
+politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the
+spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which
+makes the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably
+what Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the
+impression that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good
+manners that they exist most where they do not exist at all--that is to
+say, where conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told
+James Hogg that no man who was content to be himself, without either
+diffidence or egotism, would fail to be at home in any company, and I do
+not know a better recipe for good manners.
+
+
+II
+
+I was riding in a bus yesterday afternoon when I overheard a
+conversation between a couple of smartly dressed young people--a youth
+and a maiden--at the other end of the vehicle. It was not an amusing
+conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about. Indeed,
+I could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be about
+anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which consist
+chiefly of “Awfullys” and “Reallys!” and “Don't-you-knows” and tattle
+about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and similar
+common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter but
+because of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the speakers
+were alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of wind.
+
+The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to hear,
+while others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not of
+approval. They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved an
+air of being unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of not
+being aware that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact, their
+manner indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings. They
+were really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the bus.
+If they had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in quite
+reasonable tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly and
+defiantly to an empty bus. They would have made no impression on an
+empty bus. But they were happily sensible of making quite a marked
+impression on a full bus.
+
+But it was not the impression they imagined. It was another impression
+altogether. There are few more unpleasing and vulgar habits than that of
+loud, aggressive conversation in public places. It is an impertinence to
+inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who do not want to know about
+them, and who may want to read or doze or think or look out of the
+window at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The assumption
+behind the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is an
+announcement to the world that we are someone in particular and can
+talk as loudly as we please whenever we please. It is a sort of social
+Prussianism that presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by a
+superior egotism. The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in the
+world is mistaken. On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an inverted
+self-consciousness. These young people were talking loudly, not because
+they were unconscious of themselves in relation to their fellows, but
+because they were much too conscious and were not content to be just
+quiet, ordinary people like the rest of us.
+
+I hesitate to say that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not
+lived abroad sufficiently to judge. But it is a common experience
+of those who travel to find, as I have often found, their country
+humiliated by this habit of aggressive bearing in public places. It is
+unlovely at home, but it is much more offensive abroad, for then it is
+not only the person who is brought into disrepute, but the country he
+(and not less frequently she) is supposed to represent. We in the bus
+could afford to bear the affliction of that young couple with tolerance
+and even amusement, for they only hurt themselves. We could discount
+them. But the same bearing in a foreign capital gives the impression
+that we are all like this, just as the rather crude boasting of certain
+types of American grossly misrepresent a people whose general
+conduct, as anyone who sees them at home will agree, is unaffected,
+unpretentious, and good-natured.
+
+The truth, I suspect, is that every country sends abroad a
+disproportionate number of its “bounders.” It is inevitable that it
+should be so, for the people who can afford to travel are the people who
+have made money, and while many admirable qualities may be involved
+in the capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain coarse
+assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got so
+hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are better
+than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot attune
+his voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second generation,
+this congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high school
+it is apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the bus
+yesterday.
+
+So far from being representative of the English, they are violently
+unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take
+an average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust
+the sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted
+with egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and
+monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract attention
+without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy
+mean between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the
+overbearing note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk
+of our affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without
+desiring to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without
+wishing to be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we
+have achieved that social ease which consists in the adjustment of
+a reasonable confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the
+sensibilities of others.
+
+[Illustration: 0192]
+
+[Illustration: 0193]
+
+
+
+
+ON A FINE DAY
+
+|It's just like summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have
+forgotten to say it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it
+from the orchard with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery.
+There are some people of penurious emotions and speech, like the
+Drumtochty farmer in Ian Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of
+this iteration. They would find it wasteful and frivolous. They do not
+understand that we go on saying it over and over again, like the birds,
+for the sheer joy of saying it. Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice.
+There he goes skipping from branch to branch and twig to twig, and
+after each skip he pauses to say, “It's just like summer,” and from a
+neighbouring tree his mate twitters confirmation in perfect time. I've
+listened to them for half an hour and they've talked about nothing else.
+
+In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great
+baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the
+paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully
+and tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well
+aired before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows
+his score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has
+only one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the
+world, but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer,
+and not a conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who
+seems never to forget the listening world.
+
+In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
+There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along
+the turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football
+match, I fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the
+cheerful outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens
+and the fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of
+hammering; from the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor
+voice that comes up from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I
+have not heard it for four years or more; but it has been heard in many
+lands and by many rivers from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would
+rather be singing in the allotment with his young brother Sam (the
+leader of the trebles in the village choir) than anywhere else in the
+vide world. “Yes, I've been to Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the
+'Oly Land,” he says. “I don't care if I never see the 'Oly Land again.
+Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far as I'm concerned. This is good
+enough for me--that is, if there's a place for a chap that wants to get
+married to live in.”
+
+Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at
+her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. “Well, this is all
+right, ain't it, mother?”
+
+“Yes,” says the old lady, “it's just like summer.”
+
+“And to think,” continues the voice, “that there was a thick layer o'
+snow a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to
+come yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar,
+and it stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though
+it do seem like it, don't it?”
+
+“Yes, it's just like summer,” repeats the old lady tranquilly.
+
+There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
+sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
+like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we
+are here. Weather in town is only an incident--a pleasurable incident
+or a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella,
+whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a
+mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or
+outside. It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your
+visit to the theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for
+this reason the incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as
+an acquaintance of a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he
+is in a good humour and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
+
+But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven.
+It is politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual
+diversion. You study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and
+watch the change of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the
+mood of the public. When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a
+fine day, or has been a cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a
+conventional civility. It is the formal opening of the discussion of
+weighty matters. It involves the prospects of potatoes and the sowing of
+onions, the blossoms on the trees, the effects of weather on the poultry
+and the state of the hives. I do not suppose that there is a moment of
+his life when Jim is unconscious of the weather or indifferent to
+it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not care what happens to
+the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands and secular
+interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is a stem
+Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the chapel
+in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always
+trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi'
+work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to
+dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. “I don't hold wi'
+work on Sundays,” he would repeat inflexibly.
+
+[Illustration: 0197]
+
+And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other
+end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the
+weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call
+her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward.
+It is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants
+hens. If the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an
+unerring instinct to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin
+of feathers. The hard frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes
+when everybody else's escaped, and it was her hive that brought the
+“Isle of Wight” into our midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds
+that the last was a visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a
+death in the family--true, it was only a second cousin, but it was “in
+the family”--and had neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive.
+And of course they died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow
+Walsh has no patience with people who fly in the face of Providence in
+this way.
+
+But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is the most
+unremittingly malevolent. It is either “smarty hot” or “smarty cold.” If
+it isn't giving her a touch of “brownchitis,” or “a blowy feeling all up
+the back,” or making her feel “blubbed all over,” it is dripping through
+her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke,
+or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary
+life. I think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the
+hill-side like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even
+smiles, but his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the
+bottom he is a terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country
+woman no end of work, and makes her life a burden.
+
+But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
+When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that “it is
+a bit better to-day.” This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays
+to the weather. And we translate it for her into “Yes, it's just like
+summer.”
+
+In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
+damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most
+part the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees
+are white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees
+which fill the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note
+of an aerial violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of
+his double bass to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way
+from blossom to blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is
+as full of the gossip of summer as the peacock butterfly that comes
+flitting back across the orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old
+Benjy, who saluted me over the hedge just now with the remark that
+he didn't recall the like of this for a matter o' seventy year. Yes,
+seventy year if 'twas a day.
+
+Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy
+years ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks
+about anything in the memory of this generation. “I be nearer a
+'underd,” he says, “than seventy,” by which I think he means that he is
+eighty-six. He longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see
+no reason why he shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old boy,
+still does a good day's gardening and has come up the lane on this hot
+day at a nimble speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to
+have made his coffin and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from
+any morbid yearning for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding
+him off, just as the rest of us “touch wood” lest evil befall. “It's
+just like summer,” he says.
+
+“I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty....”
+
+
+[Illustration: 0200]
+
+[Illustration: 0201]
+
+
+
+
+ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO
+
+|I see that Mr Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to
+women very seriously on the subject of smoking. “Would you like to see
+your mother smoke?” asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he was
+addressing, and Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco
+smoke in the face of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed
+feelings on this subject, and in order to find out what I really think I
+will write about it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby.
+I do not want to see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the
+baby. But neither do I want to see father doing so. If father is smoking
+when he nurses the baby he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs
+out his smoke. Do not let us drag in the baby.
+
+The real point is in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your
+affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would
+not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be
+absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because
+he smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of
+disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of
+taste which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is
+wasteful and unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the
+habit regardless of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that _women_ must not
+smoke because the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that _men_ may.
+He would no more say this than he would say that it is right for men to
+live in stuffy rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right
+for men to get drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of
+drunkenness there is no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel
+that it is more tragic in the case of the woman, but it is equally
+disgusting in both sexes.
+
+What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men
+is vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up
+morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women
+not smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom
+been otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle,
+for example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he would have answered the
+question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their
+pipes together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and
+eternity, and no one who has read his letters will doubt his love for
+her. There are no such letters from son to mother in all literature. And
+of course Mr Hicks knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be
+surprised to know that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of
+some women who smoke, and that he will be as cordial with them as with
+those who do not smoke.
+
+And yet.... Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of
+a bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to
+smoke. And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these
+now not infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I
+had been smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If
+smoking is an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the
+case of women as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women
+smoking outdoors while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an
+irrational fellow, said I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I
+replied. We are all irrational fellows. If we were brought to the
+judgment seat of pure reason how few of us would escape the cells.
+
+Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young
+women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke
+was a flag--the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got perplexed
+again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women--this universal
+claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous fact of
+the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag. Yet when
+I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it myself),
+flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I rejoice, I
+felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I came to
+the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These young
+women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men smoked
+on the top of the bus they must smoke too--not perhaps because they
+liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them on
+an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge
+of servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the
+symbols of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of
+women, but preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to
+their finer perceptions and traditions.
+
+But here my perplexity returned. It is not the fact of those young women
+smoking that offends you, I said addressing myself. It is the fact of
+their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you agree that the habit of
+smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of women as of men,
+why should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised in their
+case, while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself are
+smoking at this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged in
+defending the propriety of women smoking, and at the same time mentally
+reprobating the conduct of the young women who are smoking in front
+of you, not because they are smoking, but because (like you) they are
+smoking in public. How do you reconcile such confusions of mind?
+
+At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the horns
+of a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to the
+habit. And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to defend
+differential smoking conditions for men and women. If the main position
+was surrendered no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked in
+public then women could smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and cigars
+then women could smoke pipes and cigars. And at the thought of women
+smoking pipes on the top of buses, I realised that I had not yet found a
+path out of the absurd bog in which I had become mentally involved.
+
+Then something happened which suggested another solution. The young
+women rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was
+wafted with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown
+their cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy,
+languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial
+fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man's
+tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt
+the woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and
+wear rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity.
+The mind revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered and
+be-ringed. Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their cheeks.
+But Disraeli was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort of
+belated tale from the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of men
+universally revolts against paint, powder, and perfume. And asking
+myself why a habit, which custom had made tolerable in the case of
+women, became grotesque and offensive if imagined in connection with
+men, I saw a way out of my puzzle. I dismissed the view that the
+difference of sex accounted for the different emotions awakened. It was
+the habit itself which was objectionable. Familiarity with it in the
+case of women had dulled our perceptions to the reality. It was only
+when we conceived the habit in an unusual connection--imagined men going
+about with painted and powdered faces, with rings in their ears
+and heavy scents on their clothes--that its essential vulgarity and
+uncleanness were freshly and intensely presented to the mind.
+
+And that, said I, is the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit
+in the abstract which is vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in
+the case of man has deadened our sense of the fact, but the adoption
+of the habit by women, coupled with the fact that there is no logical
+halting-place between the cigarette indoors and a pipe on the top of the
+bus, gives us what the Americans call a new view-point. From that new
+view-point we are bound to admit that there is much to be said against
+tobacco and not much to be said for it--except, of course, that we like
+it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk to the
+men as well as to the women.
+
+Then perhaps we will see what can be done. For myself, I make no
+promise. After forty, says Meredith, we are wedded to our habits. And I,
+alas, am long past forty....
+
+[Illustration: 0207]
+
+[Illustration: 0208]
+
+
+
+
+DOWN TOWN
+
+|Through the grey mists that hang over the water in the late autumn
+afternoon there emerges a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of
+a distant range of mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with
+a precision that suggests the work of man rather than the careless
+architecture of Nature The mass is compact and isolated. It rises
+from the level of the water, sheer on either side, in bold precipitous
+cliffs, broken by horizontal lines, and dominated by one kingly, central
+peak that might be the Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the
+spire of some cathedral fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race.
+As the vessel from afar moves slowly through the populous waters and
+between the vaguely defined shores of the harbour, another shadow
+emerges ahead, rising out of the sea in front of the mountain mass. It
+is a colossal statue, holding up a torch to the open Atlantic.
+
+Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition.
+It turns to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable
+windows. Even the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of
+myriad windows. The day begins to darken and a swift transformation
+takes place. Points of light begin to shine from the windows like stars
+in the darkening firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters
+with thousands of tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy
+palace, glowing with illuminations from the foundations to the topmost
+height of the giddy precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in
+the scintillating pinnacle of the slender cathedral spire. The first
+daylight impression was of something as solid and enduring as the
+foundations of the earth; the second, in the gathering twilight, is of
+something slight and fanciful, of' towering proportions but infinitely
+fragile structure, a spectacle as airy and dream-like as a tale from the
+“Arabian Nights.”
+
+It is “down town.” It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its
+astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that
+lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest
+group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over
+the tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable
+maze of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion
+of the London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its
+direction, but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east
+and west, crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to
+the Harlem River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing
+island of Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the
+noble Fifth Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty
+buildings that shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to
+gild the upper storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many
+churches and the gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving,
+on a sunny afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you
+move in the shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the
+air above. And around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the
+architectural glories of “up town” New York, the great hotels stand
+like mighty fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great
+terminus. And in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled
+to the twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you
+are summoned.
+
+But it is in “down town,” on the tip of the tongue that is put out
+to the Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the
+stranger. It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no
+doubt, that make an equally striking appeal to the eye--Salzburg,
+Innsbruck, Edinburgh, Tunis--but it is the appeal of nature supplemented
+by art. Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not
+an approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of
+surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind,
+that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous,
+and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New
+York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you
+land. It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It
+ascends its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation
+over the Atlantic. “Down town” stands like a strong man on the shore
+of the ocean, asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind
+these terrific battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to
+the skies. Look at this muscular development. And I am only the advance
+agent. I am only the symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste
+of the power that heaves and throbs through the veins of the giant that
+bestrides this continent for three thousand miles, from his gateway to
+the Atlantic to his gateway, to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to
+the Gulf of Mexico.
+
+And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this
+terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from
+within, stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway
+ends, a street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned
+between two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more'
+lofty than the cross of St Paul's Cathedral--square towers, honeycombed
+with thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying
+up in lifts--called “elevators” for short--clicking at typewriters,
+performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns
+at the threshold of the giant.
+
+For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which
+he rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon
+is Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure
+in the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the
+high priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds
+are shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on
+the kerbstone of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its
+sovereigns wilting away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you
+stand, in devout respect before the modest threshold of the high priest
+a babel of strange sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn
+towards it and come suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange
+than anything pictured by Hogarth--in the street a jostling mass of
+human beings, fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like
+jockeys or pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended
+high as if in prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working
+with frantic symbols, their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at
+a hundred windows in the great buildings on either side of the street
+little groups of men and women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob
+below. It is the outside market of Mammon.
+
+You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
+great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements
+like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender
+and beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle
+nearly twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the
+temple of St Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth
+acquired in his sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most
+significant building in America and the first turret to catch the noose
+of light that the dawn flings daily over the Atlantic from the East.
+You enter its marble halls and take an express train to the forty-ninth
+floor, flashing in your journey past visions of crowded offices, tier
+after tier, offices of banks and publishers and merchants and
+jewellers, like a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been
+miraculously turned skywards by some violent geological “fault.” And at
+the forty-ninth floor you get out and take another “local” train to the
+top, and from thence you look giddily down, far down even upon the great
+precipices of the Grand Canon, down to the streets where the moving
+throng you left a few minutes ago looks like a colony of ants or
+black-beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement.
+
+And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
+with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to
+be large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
+churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are
+swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that
+loom above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George
+Washington still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the
+original union. Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted
+world an inverted civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the
+vision of the great dome that seems to float in the heavens over the
+secular activities of another city, still holding aloft, to however
+negligent and indifferent a generation, the symbol of the supremacy
+of spiritual things. And you will wonder whether in this astonishing
+spectacle below you, in which the temples of the ancient worship crouch
+at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce, there is the
+unconscious expression of another philosophy of life in which St
+Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to the stars.
+
+And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the
+scene below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so
+near that you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open
+Atlantic, with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million
+a year, that has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of
+hopes, past the statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the
+harbour, to be swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that
+lies behind you. You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught
+in the arms of its two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before
+you, with its overflow of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream,
+and its overflow of Jersey City on the far bank of the other. In the
+brilliant sunshine and the clear, smokeless atmosphere the eye travels
+far over this incredible vista of human activity. And beyond the vision
+of the eye, the mind carries the thought onward to the great lakes and
+the seething cities by their shores, and over the illimitable plains
+westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe, but still obedient to
+the stars and stripes, and southward by the great rivers to the tropic
+sea.
+
+And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the
+far horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings.
+They will not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those
+horizons, after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields
+of activity, you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the
+contrary, they will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense
+of power unlike anything else the world has to offer--the power of
+immeasurable resources, still only in the infancy of their development,
+of inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the
+mind, of a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one--one in a
+certain fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident
+prime of their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of
+the day before them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its
+crudeness and freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as
+to something avuncular and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late
+afternoon, a little tired and more than a little disillusioned and
+battered by the journey. For him the light has left the morning
+hills, but here it still clothes those hills with hope and spurs on to
+adventure.
+
+That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
+his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
+“the goods.” He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
+power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the
+inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the
+tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and
+the squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the
+chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction
+at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush,
+and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism
+has shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American
+interests, and the “100 per cent. American” in every disguise of
+designing self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything
+that is significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not
+a moment when the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the
+harbour, can feel very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no
+longer lit to invite the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the
+contrary, she turns her back on America and warns the alien away. Her
+torch has become a policeman's baton.
+
+And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
+breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous
+waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back
+upon the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun
+floods the land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near
+his setting, but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his
+morning prime, so vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of
+your first impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud
+pinnacle that looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the
+temple of primeval gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And
+as you gaze you are conscious of a great note of interrogation taking
+shape in the mind. Is that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic
+expression of the soul of America, or has this mighty power you
+are leaving another gospel for mankind? And as the light fades and
+battlements and pinnacle merge into the encompassing dark there sounds
+in the mind the echoes of an immortal voice--“Let us here highly resolve
+that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under
+God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the
+people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth!”
+
+And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell
+to America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of
+Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
+
+[Illustration: 0217]
+
+[Illustration: 0208]
+
+
+
+
+ON KEYHOLE MORALS
+
+|My neighbour at the breakfast table complained that he had had a bad
+night. What with the gale and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of
+the timbers of the ship and the pair in the next cabin--especially the
+pair in the next cabin.... How they talked! It was two o'clock
+before they sank into silence. And such revelations! He couldn't help
+overhearing them. He was alone in his cabin, and what was he to do? He
+couldn't talk to himself to let them know they were being overheard. And
+he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And, in short, there was nothing
+for it but to overhear. And the things he heard--well.... And with a
+gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he left it to me to imagine the
+worst. I suggested that he might cure the trouble by telling the steward
+to give the couple a hint that the next cabin was occupied. He received
+the idea as a possible way out of a painful and delicate situation.
+Strange, he said, it had not occurred to him.
+
+Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very
+important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man.
+It would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper,
+and there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are
+not to be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper
+enough when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not
+our public hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only
+indicates the kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We
+want the world's good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company
+manners as we put on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would
+put his ear to a keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole
+behind him watching him in the act. The true estimate of your character
+(and mine) depends on what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole
+behind us. It depends, not on whether you are chivalrous to some one
+else's wife in public, but whether you are chivalrous to your own wife
+in private. The eminent judge who, checking himself in a torrent of
+abuse of his partner at whist, contritely observed, “I beg your pardon,
+madam; I thought you were my wife,” did not improve matters. He only
+lifted the curtain of a rather shabby private cabin. He white-washed
+himself publicly out of his dirty private pail.
+
+Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the
+quiet and undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps
+you have accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the
+pockets bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental
+concern is awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own
+son. It is natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing
+and weighty reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that
+all those respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard
+young John's step approaching. You know that this very reasonable
+display of paternal interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying
+of which you would be ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is
+miles off--perhaps down in the city, perhaps far away in the country.
+You are left alone with his letters and your own sense of decency. You
+can read the letters in perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you
+can share them. Not a soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled
+to know those secrets, and young John may be benefited by your knowing
+them. What do you do in these circumstances? The answer will provide you
+with a fairly reliable tape measure for your own spiritual contents.
+
+There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next
+Cabin. We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of “Le
+Diable Boiteux,” Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one
+house to another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside,
+with very surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the
+guise of a very civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and
+offered to do the same for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and
+lift with magic and inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the
+mysteries and privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should have
+the decency to thank him and send him away. The amusement would be
+purchased at too high a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm,
+but it would do me a lot of harm. For, after all, the important thing
+is not that we should be able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the
+whole world in the face, but that we should be able to look ourselves in
+the face. And it is our private standard of conduct and not our public
+standard of conduct which gives or denies us that privilege. We are
+merely counterfeit coin if our respect for the Eleventh Commandment only
+applies to being found out by other people. It is being found out by
+ourselves that ought to hurt us.
+
+It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass
+a tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never
+committed a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or
+forged a cheque. But these things are not evidence of good character.
+They may only mean that I never had enough honest indignation to commit
+a murder, nor enough courage to break into a house. They may only mean
+that I never needed to forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may
+only mean that I am afraid of the police. Respect for the law is a
+testimonial that will not go far in the Valley of Jehosophat. The
+question that will be asked of me there is not whether I picked my
+neighbour's lock, but whether I put my ear to his keyhole; not whether
+I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but whether I read his
+letters when his back was turned--in short, not whether I had respect
+for the law, but whether I had respect for myself and the sanctities
+that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is what went on in my
+private cabin which will probably be my undoing.
+
+[Illustration: 0222]
+
+[Illustration: 0223]
+
+
+
+
+FLEET STREET NO MORE
+
+|To-day I am among the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a
+lifetime and am a person at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that
+is told, a rumour on the wind; a memory of far-off things and battles
+long ago. At this hour I fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm.
+There is the thunder of machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above,
+the click-click-click of the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph
+operators, the tinkling of telephones, the ringing of bells for
+messengers who tarry, reporters coming in with “stories” or without
+“stories,” leader-writers writing for dear life and wondering whether
+they will beat the clock and what will happen if they don't, night
+editors planning their pages as a shopman dresses his shop window,
+sub-editors breasting the torrent of “flimsies” that flows in from the
+ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and the other. I hear
+the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit might hear the
+murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as a policeman
+must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the Strand
+submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his glory
+departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the
+middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible
+embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong
+arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and
+the waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a
+personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could
+stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the
+street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to
+the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety.
+His cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of
+the Constitution, and his truncheon was as indispensable as a
+field-marshal's baton.
+
+And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on
+the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make
+a pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk
+across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers.
+Even “J. B.,” who has never been known to pass a policeman without a
+gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived
+under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly
+Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates
+or in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished
+magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free,
+independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He
+can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand,
+but he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting,
+or Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in
+the shop windows, or turn into the “pictures” or go home to tea. He can
+light his pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as
+he pleases. He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a
+realm where the clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes
+without stirring his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will
+not care.
+
+And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock
+and take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous
+thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me
+as my own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life
+until I have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have
+heard its chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the
+swanking swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its
+unceasing life during every hour of the twenty-four--in the afternoon
+when the pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are
+crossing to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air
+is shrill with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide
+of the day's life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work,
+and the telegraph boys flit from door to door with their tidings of
+the world's happenings; in the small hours when the great lorries come
+thundering up the side streets with their mountains of papers and rattle
+through the sleeping city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag
+of morn in sovereign state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral
+that looks down so grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. “I see it
+arl so plainly as I saw et, long ago.” I have worn its paving stones as
+industriously as Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as
+one who had the run of the estate and the freeman's right. I have
+known its _habitues_ as familiarly as if they had belonged to my own
+household, and its multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have
+drunk the solemn toast with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken
+counsel with the lawyers in the Temple, and wandered in its green and
+cloistered calm in the hot afternoons, and written thousands of leaders
+and millions of words on this, that, and the other, wise words and
+foolish words, and words without any particular quality at all, except
+that they filled up space, and have had many friendships and fought many
+battles, winning some and losing others, and have seen the generations
+go by, and the young fellows grow into old fellows who scan a little
+severely the new race of ardent boys that come along so gaily to the
+enchanted street and are doomed to grow old and weary in its service
+also. And at the end it has come to be a street of ghosts--a street of
+memories, with faces that I knew lurking in its shadows and peopling
+its rooms and mingling with the moving pageant that seems like a phantom
+too.
+
+Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like
+the Chambered Nautilus, I
+
+                   ... seal up the idle door,
+
+          Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.
+
+I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape
+at its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no
+more. No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual
+footsteps. No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had
+always “gone out to supper, sir,” or been called to the news-room or
+sent on an errand. No more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous
+clock that ticked so much faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will
+come down from above like snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults
+of the world will boil in like the roar of many waters, but I shall not
+hear them. For I have come into the inheritance of leisure. Time, that
+has lorded it over me so long, is henceforth my slave, and the future
+stretches before me like an infinite green pasture in which I can wander
+till the sun sets. I shall let the legions thunder by while I tend
+my bees and water my plants, and mark how my celery grows and how the
+apples ripen.
+
+And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the
+chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great
+noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him
+a tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his
+orchard when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys,
+bearing an urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in
+the Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to
+their plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water,
+took a sponge _and washed out his ears._
+
+[Illustration: 0228]
+
+[Illustration: 0229]
+
+
+
+
+ON WAKING UP
+
+|When I awoke this morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the
+valley and the beech woods glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and
+heard the ducks clamouring for their breakfast, and felt all the kindly
+intimacies of life coming back in a flood for the new day, I felt,
+as the Americans say, “good.” Waking up is always--given a clear
+conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy faculty of sleep--a joyous
+experience. It has the pleasing excitement with which the tuning up of
+the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the symphony affects you. It is
+like starting out for a new adventure, or coming into an unexpected
+inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling suddenly upon some author
+whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes to your heart like a
+brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden and beautiful and
+full of promise.
+
+But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is
+now that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of
+consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has
+happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and
+realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The
+fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does
+not diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into
+the future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking
+to each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over,
+that the years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining
+and the birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going
+forth to their labour until the evening without fear and without hate.
+As the day advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find
+it is very much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment
+when you step over the threshold of sleep into the living world the
+revelation is simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed.
+The devil is dead. The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the
+earth. You recall the far different emotions of a few brief months ago
+when the morning sun woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling
+of the birds seemed pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the
+paper spoiled your breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the
+Kaiser. Poor wretch, he is waking, too, probably about this time and
+wondering what will happen to him before nightfall, wondering where
+he will spend the miserable remnant of his days, wondering whether his
+great ancestor's habit of carrying a dose of poison was not after all a
+practice worth thinking about. He wanted the whole, earth, and now he is
+discovering that he is entitled to just six feet of it--the same as the
+lowliest peasant in his land. “The foxes have holes and the birds of
+the air have nests,” but there is neither hole nor nest where he will be
+welcome. There is not much joy for him in waking to a new day.
+
+But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has “murdered
+Sleep,” and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose
+a crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to
+enter the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease
+of life after our present lease had run out and were told that we could
+nominate our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor
+an earldom, nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my
+childhood when I thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin
+man, eternally perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a
+basket on my head and shouting “Muffins,” in the ears of a delighted
+populace. I loved muffins and I loved bells, and here was a man who had
+those joys about him all day long and every day. But now my ambitions
+are more restrained. I would no more wish to be born a muffin man than
+a poet or an Archbishop. The first gift I should ask would be something
+modest. It would be the faculty of sleeping eight solid hours every
+night, and waking each morning with the sense of unfathomable and
+illimitable content with which I opened my eyes to the world to-day.
+
+All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to
+their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put
+eating first, “for,” said he, “there is no other pleasure that comes
+three times a day and lasts an hour each time.” But sleep lasts eight
+hours. It fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it
+fills it up with the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom
+of democracy. “All equal are within the church's gate,” said George
+Herbert. It may have been so in George Herbert's parish; but it is
+hardly so in most parishes. It is true of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you
+enter its portals all discriminations vanish, and Hodge and his master,
+the prince and the pauper, are alike clothed in the royal purple and
+inherit the same golden realm. There is more harmony and equality in
+life than wre are apt to admit. For a good twenty-five years of our
+seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an agreement that is simply
+wonderful.
+
+And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What
+delight is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing
+the sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of
+the birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or
+the cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or
+(as now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the
+day will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as
+any that have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there
+is eternal renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best
+that is still to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot
+stale nor familiarity make tame.
+
+That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note
+of the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that
+all must feel on this exultant morning--
+
+                   Good morning, Life--and all
+
+                   Things glad and beautiful.
+
+                   My pockets nothing hold,
+
+                   But he that owns the gold,
+
+                   The Sun, is my great friend--
+
+                   His spending has no end.
+
+Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the
+bells. There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
+
+It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of
+sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain
+perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we
+can hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall
+get through it. We shall not “get through it,” of course, but speech is
+only fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have
+had a sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror
+of a dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of
+consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite
+mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of
+immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than
+from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose
+love and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this
+perplexity the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of
+happy awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not
+being. I can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than
+
+                   To dream as I may,
+
+                        And awake when I will,
+
+                   With the song of the bird,
+
+                        And the sun on the hill.
+
+Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in
+which, once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, “Are you there,
+beloved?” and hear the reply, “Yes, beloved, I am here,” and with
+that sweet assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The
+tenderness and beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred
+Austin, whom some one in a jest made Poet Laureate. “For my part,” he
+said, “I should like to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of
+another victory for the British Empire.” It would not be easy to invent
+a more perfect contrast between the feeling of a poet and the simulated
+passion of a professional patriot. He did not really think that, of
+course. He was simply a timid, amiable little man who thought it was
+heroic and patriotic to think that. He had so habituated his tiny talent
+to strutting about in the grotesque disguise of a swashbuckler that it
+had lost all touch with the primal emotions of poetry. Forgive me for
+intruding him upon the theme. The happy awakenings of eternity
+must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings and its vulgar
+patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to sleep on.
+
+[Illustration: 0235]
+
+[Illustration: 0236]
+
+
+
+
+ON RE-READING
+
+
+I
+
+|A weekly paper has been asking well-known people what books they
+re-read. The most pathetic reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir
+Arthur Conan Doyle. “I seldom re-read now,” says that unhappy man. “Time
+is so short and literature so vast and unexplored.” What a desolating
+picture! It is like saying, “I never meet my old friends now. Time is so
+short and there are so many strangers I have not yet shaken hands with.”
+ I see the poor man, hot and breathless, scurrying over the “vast and
+unexplored” fields of literature, shaking hands and saying, “How
+d'ye do?” to everybody he meets and reaching the end of his journey,
+impoverished and pitiable, like the peasant in Tolstoi's “How much land
+does a man need?”
+
+I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with
+strangers. I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North
+Pole and the South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson
+said of the Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should
+not like _to go_ to see them. And so with books. Time is so short that
+I have none to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library.
+I could almost say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is
+published I read an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion,
+and a book has to weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I
+embark on it. When it has proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but
+meanwhile the old ships are good enough for me. I know the captain
+and the crew, the fare I shall get and the port I shall make and the
+companionship I shall have by the way.
+
+Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write--Boswell, “The
+Bible in Spain,” Pepys, Horace, “Elia,” Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve,
+“Travels with a Donkey,” Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, “The Early
+Life of Charles James Fox,”
+
+“Under the Greenwood Tree,” and so on. Do not call them books.
+
+                   Camerado, this is no book.
+
+                   Who touches this, touches a man,
+
+as Walt Whitman said of his own “Leaves of Grass.” They are not books.
+They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on
+my pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was
+worth making the great adventure of life to find such company. Come
+revolutions and bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace,
+gain or loss--these friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes
+of the journey. The friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are
+estranged, die, but these friends of the spirit are not touched with
+mortality. They were not born for death, no hungry generations tread
+them down, and with their immortal wisdom and laughter they give us
+the password to the eternal. You can no more exhaust them than you
+can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the joyous melody of Mozart or
+Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or any other thing of beauty.
+They are a part of ourselves, and through their noble fellowship we are
+made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind--
+
+               ... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
+
+               In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
+
+We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion
+with these spirits.
+
+I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old
+friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever
+and went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he
+sits in his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale.
+It is a way Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph
+captive. They cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern
+flight without thinking that they are going to breathe the air that
+Horace breathed, and asking them to carry some such message as John
+Marshall's:
+
+                        Tell him, bird,
+
+               That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
+
+               One man at least seeks not admittance there.
+
+This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss
+the figure of Horace--short and fat, according to Suetonius--in the
+fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with
+equal animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry.
+Meanwhile, so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would
+say, is imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading
+the books in which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored
+tracts of the desert to those who like deserts.
+
+
+II
+
+|A correspondent asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve
+Books that he ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not
+know what he had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs
+were, and even with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for
+another. But I compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed
+that for some offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a
+desert island out in the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for
+twelve months, or perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a
+mitigation of the penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve
+books of my own choosing. On what principles should I set about so
+momentous a choice?
+
+In the first place I decided that they must be books of the
+inexhaustible kind. Rowland Hill said that “the love of God was like a
+generous roast of beef--you could cut and come again.” That must be the
+first quality of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could
+go on reading and re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in
+Borrow went on reading “Moll Flanders.” If only her son had known that
+immortal book, she said, he would never have got transported for life.
+That was the sort of book I must have with me on my desert island. But
+my choice would be different from that of the old apple-woman of Old
+London Bridge. I dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the
+best of novels are exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my
+bundle of books would be complete before I had made a start with the
+essentials, for I should want “Tristram Shandy” and “Tom Jones,” two
+or three of Scott's, Gogol's “Dead Souls,” “David Copperfield,” “Evan
+Harrington,” “The Brothers Karamazoff,” “Père Goriot,” “War and Peace,”
+ “The Three Musketeers,” all of Hardy's, “Treasure Island,” “Robinson
+Crusoe,” “Silas Marner,” “Don Quixote,” the “Cloister and the Hearth,”
+ “Esmond”--no, no, it would never do to include novels. They must be left
+behind.
+
+The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but
+these had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not
+come in the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale,
+so that I can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have
+no doubt about my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first
+among the historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him
+by the lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and
+understanding that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf
+of twenty-three centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and
+fro, as it were, from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty
+drama of ancient Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the
+same ambitions, the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and
+the same heroes. Yes, Thucydides of course.
+
+And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is
+there to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history
+and philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come
+to the story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned
+Mommsen, or the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard
+choice. I shut my eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well,
+I make no complaint. And then I will have those three fat volumes of
+Motley's, “Rise of the Dutch Republic” (4) put in my boat, please,
+and--yes, Carlyle's “French Revolution” (5), which is history and drama
+and poetry and fiction all in one. And, since I must take the story of
+my own land with me, just throw in Green's “Short History” (6). It is
+lovable for its serene and gracious temper as much as for its story.
+
+That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the
+more personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep
+the fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course,
+there is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition,
+for there only is the real Samuel revealed “wart and all”). I should
+like to take “Elia” and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit
+my personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place
+must be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that
+frank, sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to
+these good fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality
+of open-air romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more
+I choose indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a
+choice between the “Bible in Spain,” “The Romany Rye,” “Lavengro,” and
+“Wild Wales.” But I rejoice when I find that “Lavengro” (10) is in the
+boat.
+
+I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could
+have had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is
+Wordsworth (11) _contra mundum_, I have no doubt. He is the man who will
+“soothe and heal and bless.” My last selection shall be given to a
+work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's
+“Voyages” and the “Voyage of the Beagle,” and while I am balancing their
+claims the “Beagle” (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library
+is complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the
+Pacific.
+
+[Illustration: 0243]
+
+
+
+
+FEBRUARY DAYS
+
+
+|The snow has gone from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of
+setting, has got round to the wood that crowns the hill on the other
+side of the valley. Soon it will set on the slope of the hill and then
+down on the plain. Then we shall know that spring has come. Two days
+ago a blackbird, from the paddock below the orchard, added his golden
+baritone to the tenor of the thrush who had been shouting good news
+from the beech tree across the road for weeks past. I don't know why the
+thrush should glimpse the dawn of the year before the blackbird, unless
+it is that his habit of choosing the topmost branches of the tree gives
+him a better view of the world than that which the golden-throated
+fellow gets on the lower branches that he always affects. It may be
+the same habit of living in the top storey that accounts for the early
+activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours, but never so noisy as
+in these late February days, when they are breaking up into families and
+quarrelling over their slatternly household arrangements in the topmost
+branches of the elm trees. They are comic ruffians who wash all their
+dirty linen in public, and seem almost as disorderly and bad-tempered as
+the human family itself. If they had only a little of our ingenuity
+in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my friend the farmer to
+light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive the female from
+the eggs and save his crops.
+
+A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his
+modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but
+he is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden
+and the pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is
+as industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the
+starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been
+observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two
+minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that
+deserves encouragement--a bird that loves caterpillars and does not love
+cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So hang
+out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
+
+And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no
+unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape
+the general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been
+agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below
+the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting
+industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with
+that innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just
+in front of you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of
+hide-and-seek. But not now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in
+the best of us. Now he reminds us that he too is a part of that nature
+which feeds so relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing
+about in his own erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that
+the coast is clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his
+beak. He skips away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper
+of the hive comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops
+the great tit and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in
+spite of his air of innocence.
+
+There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the
+starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months
+hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's
+“Oh, that the Romans had only one neck!” For then he will come out of
+the beech woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive
+against my cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an
+obscene picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and
+the stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I
+can be just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not
+all bad any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See
+him on autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his
+forages in the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in
+the sky that are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud
+approaches like a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting,
+changing formation, breaking up into battalions, merging into columns,
+opening out on a wide front, throwing out flanks and advance guards
+and rear guards, every complication unravelled in perfect order, every
+movement as serene and assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat
+of some invisible conductor below--a very symphony of the air, in which
+motion merges into music, until it seems that you are not watching a
+flight of birds, but listening with the inner ear to great waves of
+soundless harmony. And then, the overture over, down the cloud descends
+upon the fields, and the farmers' pests vanish before the invasion.
+And if you will follow them into the fields you will find infinite tiny
+holes that they have drilled and from which they have extracted the
+lurking enemy of the drops, and you will remember that it is to their
+beneficial activities that we owe the extermination of the May beetle,
+whose devastations were so menacing a generation ago. And after the
+flock has broken up and he has paired, and the responsibilities of
+housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy labours. When spring has
+come you can see him dart from his nest in the hollow of the tree and
+make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field, returning each
+time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other succulent, but
+pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at home. That
+acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted eighteen such
+journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for a fellow of
+such benignant spirit?
+
+But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and
+see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
+
+Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration.
+Sufficient unto the day---- And to-day I will think only good of the
+sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the brave
+news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as
+this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that
+all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, “according
+to plan,” and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score
+of hives in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its
+perils. We saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay
+on the ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had
+come from a neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there
+was no admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he
+came. Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness
+and great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him
+trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh,
+these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.
+
+In the garden the news is coming up from below, borne by those unfailing
+outriders of the spring, the snowdrop and the winter aconite. A modest
+company; but in their pennons is the assurance of the many-coloured host
+that is falling unseen into the vast pageant of summer and will fill the
+woods with the trumpets of the harebell and the wild hyacinth, and make
+the hedges burst into foam, and the orchard a glory of pink and white,
+and the ditches heavy with the scent of the meadowsweet, and the fields
+golden with harvest and the gardens a riot of luxuriant life. I said
+it was all right, chirps little red waistcoat from the fence--all the
+winter I've told you that there was a good time coming and now you see
+for yourself. Look at those flowers. Ain't they real? The philosopher in
+the red waistcoat is perfectly right. He has kept his end up all through
+the winter, and has taken us into his fullest confidence. Formerly he
+never came beyond the kitchen, but this winter when the snow was about
+he advanced to the parlour where he pottered about like one of the
+family. Now, however, with the great news outside and the earth full of
+good things to pick up, he has no time to call.
+
+Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save
+for the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the
+message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of
+the spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the
+sunrise is unlike the spirit of the sunset. It is the lusty breath of
+life coming back to the dead earth, and making these February days the
+most thrilling of the year. For in these expanding skies and tremors of
+life and unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and
+hope, and nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes
+that the joy of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The
+cherry blossom comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the
+spring with it, and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent
+of the lime trees and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days
+of birth when
+
+          “Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.”
+
+there is no hint of mortality and no reverted glance. The curtain is
+rising and the pageant is all before us.
+
+[Illustration: 0249]
+
+[Illustration: 0250]
+
+
+
+
+ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE
+
+
+|Among my letters this morning was one requesting that if I were in
+favour of “the reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the
+Jewish people,” I should sign the enclosed declaration and return it in
+the envelope (unstamped), also enclosed. I dislike unstamped envelopes.
+I also dislike stamped envelopes. You can ignore an unstamped enveloped
+but a stamped envelope compels you to write a letter, when perhaps you
+don't want to write a letter. My objection to unstamped envelopes is
+that they show a meagre spirit and a lack of confidence in you. They
+suggest that you are regarded with suspicion as a person who will
+probably steam off the stamp and use it to receipt a bill.
+
+But I waived the objection, signed the declaration, stamped the envelope
+and put it in the post. I did all this because I am a Zionist. I am so
+keen a Zionist that I would use a whole bookful of stamps in the cause.
+I am a Zionist, not on sentimental grounds, but on very practical
+grounds. I want the Jews to have Palestine, so that the English may have
+England and the Germans Germany and the Russians Russia. I want them to
+have a home of their own so that the rest of us can have a home of
+our own. By this I do not mean that I am an anti-Semite. I loathe
+Jew-baiting, and regard the Jew-baiter as a very unlovely person. But I
+want the Jew to be able to decide whether he is an alien or a citizen.
+I want him to shed the dualism that makes him such an affliction to
+himself and to other people. I want him to possess Palestine so that he
+may cease to want to possess the earth.
+
+I am therefore fiercely on the side of the Zionist Jews, and fiercely
+against their opponents. These people want to be Jews, but they do not
+want Jewry. They do not want to be compelled to make a choice between
+being Jews and being Englishmen or Americans, Germans or French. They
+want the best of both worlds. We are not a nation, they say; we are
+Englishmen, or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, or
+Russians, or Japanese “of the Jewish persuasion.” We are a religious
+community like the Catholics, or the Presbyterians, or the Unitarians,
+or the Plymouth Brethren. Indeed! And what is your religion, pray? _It
+is the religion of the Chosen People_. Great heavens! You deny that
+you are a nation, and in the same breath claim that you are the Chosen
+Nation. The very foundation of your religion is that Jehovah has picked
+you out from all the races of men as his own. Over you his hand is
+spread in everlasting protection. For you the cloud by day and the
+pillar of fire by night; for the rest of us the utter darkness of the
+breeds that have not the signature of Jehovah. We cannot enter your
+kingdom by praying or fasting, by bribe or entreaty. Every other nation
+is accessible to us on its own conditions; every other religion is eager
+to welcome us, sends its missionaries to us to implore us to come in.
+But you, the rejected of nations, yourself reject all nations and forbid
+your sacraments to those who are not bom of your household. You are
+the Chosen People, whose religion is the nation and whose nationhood is
+religion.
+
+Why, my dear sir, history offers no parallel to your astounding claim to
+nationality--the claim that has held your race together through nearly
+two thousand years of dispersion and wandering, of persecution and
+pride, of servitude and supremacy--
+
+          Slaves in eternal Egypts, baking your strawless bricks;
+
+          At ease in successive Zions, prating your politics.
+
+All nations are afflicted with egoism. It is the national egoism
+of Prussia that has just brought it to such catastrophic ruin. The
+Frenchman entertains the firm conviction that civilisation ends at the
+French frontier. Being a polite person, he does his best not to betray
+the conviction to us, and sometimes almost succeeds. The Englishman,
+being less sophisticated, does not try to conceal the fact that he has
+a similar conviction. It does not occur to him that anyone can doubt his
+claim. He knows that every foreigner would like to be an Englishman if
+he knew how. The pride of the Spaniard is a legend, and you have only to
+see Arab salute Arab to understand what a low person the European must
+seem in their eyes. In short, national egoism is a folly which is pretty
+equally distributed among all of us. But your national egoism is unlike
+any other brand on earth. In the humility of Shylock is the pride of the
+most arrogant racial aristocracy the world has ever seen. God appeared
+to you in the burning bush and spoke to you in the thunders of Sinai,
+and set you apart as his own exclusive household. And when one of your
+prophets declared that all nations were one in the sight of God, you
+rejected his gospel and slew the prophet. By comparison with you we are
+a humble people. We know we are a mixed race and that we have no more
+divine origin--and no less--than anybody else. Mr Kipling, it is true,
+has caught your arrogant note:
+
+          For the Lord our God Most High,
+
+          He hath made the deep as dry,
+
+          He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.
+
+But that is because Mr Kipling seems to be one of those who believe we
+are one of the lost tribes of your Chosen race. I gather that is so from
+another of his poems in which he cautions us against
+
+                   Such boastings as the Gentiles use
+
+                   And lesser breeds without the law.
+
+But Mr Kipling is only a curiosity among us. We are much more modest
+than that. But you are like that. You are not only a nation. You are,
+except the Chinese, the most isolated, the most tenacious, the most
+exclusive nation in history. Other races have changed through the
+centuries beyond recognition or have disappeared altogether. Where are
+the Persians of the spacious days of Cyrus? Who finds in the Egyptians
+of to-day the spirit and genius of the mighty people who built the
+Pyramids and created the art of the Third Dynasty? What trace is there
+in the modern Cretans of the imperial race whose seapower had become
+a legend before Homer sang? Can we find in the Greeks of our time any
+reminiscence of the Athens of Pericles? Or in the Romans any kinship
+with the sovereign people that conquered the world from Parthia to
+Britain, and stamped it with the signature of its civilisation as
+indelibly as it stamped it with its great highways? The nations chase
+each other across the stage of time, and vanish as the generations
+of men chase each other and vanish. You and the Chinese alone seem
+indestructible. It is no extravagant fancy that foresees that when the
+last fire is lit on this expiring planet it will be a Chinaman and a Jew
+who will stretch their hands to its warmth, drink in the last breath of
+air, and write the final epitaph of earth. No, it is too late by many a
+thousand years to deny your nationhood, for it is the most enduring fact
+in human records. And being a nation without a fatherland, you run like
+a disturbing immiscible fluid through the blood of all the nations. You
+need a home for your own peace and for the world's peace. I am going to
+try and help you to get one.
+
+[Illustration: 0254]
+
+[Illustration: 0201]
+
+
+
+
+ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
+
+|I think, on the whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good
+display of moral fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen
+(and admired) I propose to let them off in public. When I awoke in
+the morning I made a good resolution.... At this point, if I am
+not mistaken, I observe a slight shudder on your part, madam. “How
+Victorian!” I think I hear you remark. You compel me, madam, to digress.
+
+It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year's resolutions
+nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we
+elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No
+one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian
+England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This
+querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like
+the scorn of youth for its elders.
+
+I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I
+should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as
+it is to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the
+Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as
+we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren
+will be as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of
+yesterday. The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered
+poison gas, and have invented submarines and guns that will kill a
+churchful of people seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding
+the Nineteenth Century as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good
+things as well as very bad things about our old Victorian England. It
+did not go to the Ritz to dance in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz
+did not exist, and the modern hotel life had not been invented. It used
+to go instead to the watch-night service, and it was not above making
+good resolutions, which for the most part, no doubt, it promptly
+proceeded to break.
+
+Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of
+watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I
+had my way I would be as “merry” as Pepys, if in a different fashion.
+“Merry” is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that
+merriment is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a
+mere spasm, whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy
+of life. But the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other,
+and an occasional burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for
+anybody--even for an Archbishop--especially for an Archbishop. The
+trouble with an Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take
+himself too seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad
+for him. He needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally
+that his virtue is not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary
+humanity. At least once a year he should indulge in a certain
+liveliness, wear the cap and bells, dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe,
+not too publicly, but just publicly enough so that there should be
+nothing furtive about it. If not done on the village green it might
+at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and chronicled in the
+local newspapers. “Last evening His Grace the Archbishop attended the
+servants' ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the chief
+scullery-maid.”
+
+[Illustration: 0257]
+
+And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its
+good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you “A Merry Christmas
+and a Happy New Year.” Nowadays the formula is “A Happy Christmas and a
+Prosperous New Year.” It is a priggish, sophisticated change--a sort of
+shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being “merry.”
+ There isn't. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a
+Merry Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a
+Happy New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
+
+If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making
+good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that
+virtue is a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride
+Victorian England because it went to watch-night services it is not
+because I think there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is
+because, in the words of the old song, I think “It is good to be
+merry _and_ wise.” I like a festival of foolishness and I like good
+resolutions, too. Why shouldn't I? Lewis Carrol's gift for mathematics
+was not less admirable because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at
+doing sums in his head.
+
+From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution.
+The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New
+Year's morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is
+that you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn't call you an
+intolerant fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow.
+Perhaps to put the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous
+reaction to events is a little too immediate. I don't want to be
+unpleasant, but I think you see what I mean. Do not suppose that I am
+asking you to be a cold-blooded, calculating person. God forbid. But it
+would do you no harm to wear a snaffle bar and a tightish rein--or, as
+we used to say in our Victorian England, to “count ten.” I accepted
+the criticism with approval. For though we do not like to hear of our
+failings from other people, that does not mean that we are unconscious
+of them. The more conscious we are of them, the less we like to hear of
+them from others and the more we hear of them from ourselves. So I said
+“Agreed. We will adopt 'Second thoughts' as our New Year policy and
+begin the campaign at once.”
+
+And then came my letters--nice letters and nasty letters and indifferent
+letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say, “raised
+the waters.” No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters which
+anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I
+might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting
+assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of
+writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different.
+As I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding
+expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I
+said “Second thoughts,” and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as
+the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect
+to dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old
+imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to
+have a periodical brush with one's habits, even if one knows one is
+pretty sure to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a
+reminder that we are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of
+the imperfections of others. And that, I think, is the case for our old
+Victorian habit of New Year's Day commandments.
+
+I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite _pianissimo_ and
+nice.
+
+[Illustration: 0261]
+
+
+
+
+ON A GRECIAN PROFILE
+
+|I see that the ghouls have descended upon George Meredith, and are
+desecrating his remains. They have learned from the life of him just
+published that he did not get on well with his father, or his eldest
+son, and that he did not attend his first wife's funeral. Above all,
+he was a snob. He was ashamed of the tailoring business from which he
+sprang, concealed the fact that he was bom at Portsmouth, and generally
+turned his Grecian profile to the world and left it to be assumed that
+his pedigree was wrapped in mystery and magnificence.
+
+I daresay it is all true. Many of us have an indifferent record at home
+and most of us like to turn our Grecian profiles to the world, if we
+have Grecian profiles. We are like the girl in Hardy's story who always
+managed to walk on the right side of her lover, because she fancied that
+the left side of her face was her strong point. The most distinguished
+and, I think, the noblest American of our time always turns his profile
+to the camera--and a beautiful profile it is--for reasons quite
+obvious and quite pardonable to those who have seen the birth-mark that
+disfigures the other cheek. I suspect that I do not myself object to
+being caught unaware in favourable attitudes or pleasing situations that
+dispose the observer to agreeable impressions. And, indeed, why should I
+(or you) be ashamed to give-a pleasant thrill to anybody if it is in
+our power. If we pretend we are above these human frailties, what is the
+meaning of the pains we take about choosing a hat, or about the cut of
+a coat, or the colour of a cloth for the new suit? Why do we so seldom
+find pleasure in a photograph of ourselves--so seldom feel that it
+does justice to that benignant and Olympian ideal of ourselves which we
+cherish secretly in our hearts? I should have to admit, if I went into
+the confession box, that I had never seen a photograph of myself that
+had satisfied me. And I fancy you would do the same if you were honest.
+We may pretend to ourselves that it is only abstract beauty or absolute
+truth that we are concerned about, but we know better. We are thinking
+of our Grecian profile.
+
+It is no doubt regrettable to find that great men are so often afflicted
+with little weaknesses. There are some people who delight in pillorying
+the immortals and shying dead cats and rotten eggs at them.
+
+They enjoy the discovery that no one is better than he should be. It
+gives them a comfortable feeling to discover that the austere outside of
+the lord Angelo conceals the libertine. If you praise Caesar they will
+remind you that after dinner he took emetics; if Brutus, they will say
+he made an idol of his public virtue. They like to remember that Lamb
+was not quite the St Charles he is represented to be, but took far
+too much wine at dinner and dosed beautifully, but alcoholically,
+afterwards, as you may read in De Quincey. They like to recall that
+Scott was something of a snob, and put the wine-glass that the Prince
+Regent had used at dinner in his pocket, sitting down on it afterwards
+in a moment of happy forgetfulness. In short, they go about like
+Alcibiades mutilating the statues of Hermes (if he was indeed the
+culprit), and will leave us nothing in human nature that we can entirely
+reverence.
+
+I suppose they are right enough on the facts. Considering what
+multitudinous persons we are it would be a miracle if, when we button
+up ourselves in the morning we did not button up some individual of
+unpleasant propensities, whom we pretend we do not know. I have never
+been interested in my pedigree. I am sure it is a very ancient one,
+and I leave it at that. But I once made a calculation--based on the
+elementary fact that I had two parents and they had each two parents,
+and so on--and came to the conclusion that about the time of the Norman
+Conquest my ancestors were much more numerous than the population
+then inhabiting this island. I am aware that this proves rather too
+much--that it is an example of the fact that you can prove anything by
+statistics, including the impossible. But the truth remains that I am
+the temporary embodiment of a very large number of people--of millions
+of millions of people, if you trace me back to my ancestors who used to
+sharpen flints some six hundred thousand years ago. It would be singular
+if in such a crowd there were not some ne'er-do-wells jostling about
+among the nice, reputable persons who, I flatter myself, constitute my
+Parliamentary majority. Sometimes I fancy that, in a snap election taken
+at a moment of public excitement within myself, the ne'er-do-wells get
+on top. These accidents will happen, and the best I can hope is that the
+general trend of policy in the multitudinous kingdom that I carry under
+my hat is in the hands of the decent people.
+
+And that is the best we can expect from anybody--the great as well as
+the least. If we demand of the supreme man that he shall be a perfect
+whole we shall have no supreme man--only a plaster saint. Certainly we
+shall have no great literature. Shakespeare did not sit aloof like a
+perfect god imagining the world of imperfect creatures that he created.
+The world was within him and he was only the vehicle of his enormous
+ancestry and of the tumultuous life that they reproduced in the theatre
+of his mind. In him was the mirth of a roystering Falstaff of long ago,
+the calculating devilry of some Warwickshire Iago, the pity of Hubert,
+the perplexity of some village Hamlet, the swagger of Ancient Pistol,
+the bucolic simplicity of Cousin Silence, the mingled nobleness and
+baseness of Macbeth, the agony of Lear, the sweetness of many a maiden
+who walked by Avon's banks in ancient days and lived again in
+the Portias and Rosalinds of his mind. All these people dwelt in
+Shakespeare. They were the ghosts of his ancestors. He was, like the
+rest of us, not a man, but multitudes of men. He created all these
+people because he was all these people, contained in a larger measure
+than any man who ever lived all the attributes, good and bad, of
+humanity. Each character was a peep into the gallery of his ancestors.
+Meredith, himself, recognised the ancestral source of creative power.
+When Lady Butcher asked him to explain his insight into the character of
+women he replied, “It is the spirit of my mother in me.” It was indeed
+the spirit of many mothers working in and through him.
+
+It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it
+so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never
+more difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along
+the Embankment last evening with a friend--a man known alike for his
+learning and character--when he turned to me and said, “I will
+never have a hero again.” We had been speaking of the causes of
+the catastrophe of Paris, and his remark referred especially to his
+disappointment with President Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair
+to the President. He did not make allowance for the devil's broth of
+intrigue and ambitions into which the President was plunged on this side
+of the Atlantic. But, leaving that point aside, his remark expressed a
+very common feeling. There has been a calamitous slump in heroes. They
+have fallen into as much disrepute as kings.
+
+And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the
+fabulous offspring of comfortable times--supermen reigning on Olympus
+and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the
+storm and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy
+and prove that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they
+are discovered to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind,
+feeble folk like you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as
+helpless as any of us. Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and
+their feet have come down from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of
+clay.
+
+It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of
+the Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron
+expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:
+
+          I want a hero: an uncommon want,
+
+               When every year and month sends forth a new one.
+
+          Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
+
+               The age discovers he is not the true one.
+
+The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that “no man is
+a hero to his valet.” To be a hero you must be remote in time or
+circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and
+fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities
+and angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is
+privileged to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the
+tricks you have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a
+faithful secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture
+he gives of Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome
+loathing for that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name
+thunders down the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his
+contemporaries. It was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom
+he had just appointed to the choicest command in his gift, who went to
+Caesar's house on that March morning, two thousand years ago, to bring
+him to the slaughter.
+
+If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men
+I should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely
+than anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance
+in secondary things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and
+tenderness with resolution and strength, he stands alone in history.
+But even he was not a hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too
+near--near enough to note his frailties, for he was human, too near to
+realise the grand and significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was
+not until he was dead that the world realised what a leader had fallen
+in Israel. Motley thanked heaven, as for something unusual, that he had
+been privileged to appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed
+him to men. Stanton fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end,
+and it was only when life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur
+of the force that had been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. “There
+lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen,” he said,
+as he stood with other colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had
+breathed his last. But the point here is that, sublime though the sum of
+the man was, his heroic profile had its abundant human warts.
+
+It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of
+reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It
+will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have
+made the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not
+find them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are
+these the men--these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards--the
+demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the
+microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than
+demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and
+then you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.
+
+It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto
+Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless
+picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its
+arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion
+to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is
+a painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never
+will be such a being. The best of us is woven of “mingled yarn, good and
+ill together.” And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and
+the ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he “contained
+multitudes” too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful
+for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects
+of that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
+
+[Illustration: 0269]
+
+[Illustration: 0270]
+
+
+
+
+ON TAKING A HOLIDAY
+
+|I hope the two ladies from the country who have been writing to the
+newspapers to know what sights they ought to see in London during their
+Easter holiday will have a nice time. I hope they will enjoy the tube
+and have fine weather for the Monument, and whisper to each other
+successfully in the whispering gallery of St Paul's, and see the
+dungeons at the Tower and the seats of the mighty at Westminster, and
+return home with a harvest of joyful memories. But I can promise them
+that there is one sight they will not see. They will not see me. Their
+idea of a holiday is London. My idea of a holiday is forgetting there is
+such a place as London.
+
+Not that I dislike London. I should like to see it.
+
+I have long promised myself that I would see it. Some day, I have said,
+I will surely have a look at this place. It is a shame, I have said, to
+have lived in it so long and never to have seen it. I suppose I am not
+much worse than other Londoners. Do you, sir, who have been taking the
+morning bus from Balham for heaven knows how many years--do you, when
+you are walking down Fleet Street, stand still with a shock of delight
+as the dome of St Paul's and its cross of gold burst on your astonished
+sight? Do you go on a fine afternoon and take your stand on Waterloo
+Bridge to see that wondrous river façade that stretches with its
+cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces from Westminster to St Paul's?
+Do you know the spot where Charles was executed, or the church where
+there are the best Grinling Gibbons carvings? Did you ever go into
+Somerset House to see the will of William Shakespeare, or--in short, did
+you ever see London? Did you ever see it, not with your eyes merely, hut
+with your mind, with the sense of revelation, of surprise, of discovery?
+Did you ever see it as those two ladies from the country will see it
+this Easter as they pass breathlessly from wonder to wonder? Of course
+not. You need a holiday in London as I do. You need to set out with
+young Tom (aged ten) on a voyage of discovery and see all the sights of
+this astonishing city as though you had come to it from a far country.
+
+That is how I hope to visit it--some day. But not this Easter, not when
+I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the cherry
+blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the chestnut
+tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long and the
+April meadows are “smoored wi' new grass,” as they say in the Yorkshire
+dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at the magic
+casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn to the
+fringe of Dartmoor and let loose--shall it be from Okehampton or Bovey
+Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? what matter the gate by which we enter the
+sanctuary?--let loose, I say, into the vast spaces of earth and sky
+where the moorland streams sing their ancient runes over the boulders
+and the great tors stand out like castles of the gods against the
+horizon and the Easter sun dances, as the legend has it, overhead and
+founders gloriously in the night beyond Plymouth Sound.
+
+Or, perhaps, ladies, if you come from the North, I may pass you
+unawares, and just about the time when you are cracking your breakfast
+egg in the boarding house at Russell Square--heavens, Russell
+Square!--and discussing whether you shall first go down the deepest
+lift or up the highest tower, or stand before the august ugliness of
+Buckingham Palace, or see the largest station or the smallest church,
+I shall be stepping out from Keswick, by the lapping waters of Derwent
+water, hailing the old familiar mountains as they loom into sight,
+looking down again--think of it!--into the' Jaws of Borrowdale, having
+a snack at Rosthwaite, and then, hey for Styehead! up, up ever the rough
+mountain track, with the buzzard circling with slow flapping wings about
+the mountain flanks, with glorious Great Gable for my companion on the
+right hand and no less glorious Scafell for my companion on the left
+hand, and at the rocky turn in the track--lo! the great amphitheatre of
+Wasdale, the last Sanctuary of lakeland.
+
+And at this point, ladies, you may as you crane your neck to see the
+Duke of York at the top of his column--wondering all the while who the
+deuce the fellow was that he should stand so high--you may, I say, if
+you like, conceive me standing at the top of the pass, taking my hat
+from my head and pronouncing a terrific curse on the vandals who would
+desecrate the last temple of solitude by driving a road over this
+fastness of the mountains in order that the gross tribe of motorists may
+come with their hoots and their odours, their hurry and vulgarity, and
+chase the spirit of the mountains away from us for ever.... And then
+by the screes of Great Gable to the hollow among the mountains. Or
+perchance, I may turn by Sprinkling Tam and see the Pikes of Langdale
+come into view and stumble down Rossett Ghyll and so by the green
+pastures of Langdale to Grasmere.
+
+In short, ladies, I may be found in many places. But I shall not tell
+you where. I am not quite sure that I could tell you where at this
+moment, for I am like a fellow who has come into great riches and
+is doubtful how he can squander them most gloriously. But, I repeat,
+ladies, that you will not find me in London. I leave London to you. May
+you enjoy it.
+
+[Illustration: 0201]
+
+
+
+
+UNDER THE SYCAMORE
+
+|An odd question was put to me the other day which I think I may venture
+to pass on to a wider circle. It was this: What is the best dish that
+life has set before you? At first blush it seems an easy question to
+answer. It was answered gaily enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked
+what was the best thing that had ever happened to him. “The best thing
+that ever happened to me was to be born,” he replied. But that is not an
+answer: it is an evasion. It belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether
+life is worth living. Life may be worth living or not worth living on
+balance, but in either case we can still say what was the thing in it
+that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a dinner on the whole and yet
+make an exception of the trout, or the braised ham and spinach or the
+dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and still admit that he
+has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift and many more, have
+cursed the day you were born and still remember many pleasant things
+that have happened to you--falling in love, making friends, climbing
+mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs, watching the
+sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You may write
+off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush outside.
+It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very sad heart
+who has never had anything to thank his stars for.
+
+But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it
+grows difficult on reflection.
+
+In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily
+answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over
+and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things
+that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long
+sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and
+agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree--sycamore or chestnut
+for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because their
+generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade--to sit, I say, and
+think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball which the
+Blessèd Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven near by,
+sees “spinning like a midge” below.
+
+And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and
+asked us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play
+to which we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped
+away so quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we
+should make now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will
+be there) will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer.
+That glorious contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool
+million--come now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair
+to remember your journey by. You will have to think of something better
+than that as the splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to
+confess to a very complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser
+pleasures seemed so important, you will not like to admit, even to
+yourself, that your most rapturous memory of earth centres round the
+grillroom at the Savoy. You will probably find that the things best
+worth remembering are the things you rejected.
+
+I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose
+pleasures were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of
+life, after all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers
+in money, and traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those
+occupations to hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon
+under that sycamore tree--which of them, now that it is all over, will
+have most joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one
+and a gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the
+earth as a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the
+mountains, and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and
+where season followed season with a processional glory that never grew
+dim. And Mozart will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and
+Turner as a panorama of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect,
+with what delight they will look back on the great moments of
+life--Columbus seeing the new world dawning on his vision, Copernicus
+feeling the sublime architecture of the universe taking shape in his
+mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal mystery of the human frame, Darwin
+thrilling with the birth pangs of the immense secret that he wrung
+from Nature. These men will be able to answer the question grandly. The
+banquet they had on earth will bear talking about even in Heaven.
+
+But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the
+scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will,
+I fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and
+humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we
+won the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or
+shook hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our
+name in the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament.
+It will be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human
+comradeship we had on the journey--the friendships of the spirit,
+whether made in the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or
+art. We shall remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its
+affections--
+
+               For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
+
+               The fates some recompense have sent--
+
+               Thrice blessed are the things that last,
+
+               The things that are more excellent.
+
+[Illustration: 0278]
+
+[Illustration: 0279]
+
+
+
+
+ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE
+
+
+|I met an old gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with
+whom I have a slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he
+asked me whether I remembered Walker of _The Daily News_. No, said I,
+he was before my time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the
+'seventies.
+
+“Before that,” said the old gentleman. “Must have been in the 'sixties.”
+
+“Probably,” I said. “Did you know him in the 'sixties?”
+
+“Oh, I knew him before then,” said the old gentleman, warming to his
+subject. “I knew him in the 'forties.”
+
+I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman
+enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.
+
+“Heavens!” said I, “the 'forties!”
+
+“No,” said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a
+better view across the ages. “No.... It must have been in
+the 'thirties.... Yes, it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school
+together in the 'thirties. We called him Sawney Walker.”
+
+I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I
+had paid him the one compliment that appealed to him--the compliment of
+astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.
+
+His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety
+not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked “well
+set” for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance
+as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his
+hundred at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement
+was mixed with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent
+vanity is the last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last
+infirmity that humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that
+rages around Dean Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the
+angels. I want to feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are
+moving upwards in the scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round
+and round and biting our tail. I think the case for the ascent of man
+is stronger than the Dean admits. A creature that has emerged from the
+primordial slime and evolved a moral law has progressed a good way. It
+is not unreasonable to think that he has a future. Give him time--and it
+may be that the world is still only in its rebellious childhood--and he
+will go far.
+
+But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a
+time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant
+and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first
+knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We
+are vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of
+his acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all
+the year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes
+at the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots
+and his cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of
+mine who, in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing
+boots to the children at a London school, heard one day a little child
+pattering behind her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of
+the beneficiaries “keeping up” with her. She turned and recognised the
+wearer. “So you've got your new boots on, Mary?” she said. “Yes,” said
+little Mary grandly. “Don't they squeak beautiful, mum.” And though, as
+we grow older, we cease to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we
+find other material to keep the flame of vanity alive. “What for should
+I ride in a carriage if the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?” said
+the Fifer, putting his head out of the window. He spoke for all of
+us. We are all a little like that. I confess that I cannot ride in
+a motor-car that whizzes past other motor-cars without an absurd and
+irrational vanity. I despise the emotion, but it is there in spite of
+me. And I remember that when I was young I could hardly free-wheel down
+a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior to the man who was grinding
+his way up with heavings and perspiration. I have no shame in making
+these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that you, sir (or madam),
+will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite audible echo of
+yourself.
+
+And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we
+are vain of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our
+neighbours as we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our
+neighbours. We are like the old maltster in “Far from the Madding
+Crowd,” when Henery Fray claimed to be “a strange old piece, goodmen.”
+
+“A strange old piece, ye say!” interposed the maltster in a querulous
+voice. “Ye be no old man worth naming--no old man at all. Yer teeth
+bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
+bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis
+a poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore--a boast
+weak as water.”
+
+It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences
+when the maltster had to be pacified.
+
+“Weak as water, yes,” said Jan Coggan. “Malter, we feel ye to be a
+wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.”
+
+“Nobody,” said Joseph Poorgrass. “Ye be a very rare old spectacle,
+malter, and we all respect ye for that gift.”
+
+That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in
+being “a very rare old spectacle.” We count the reigns we've lived in
+and exalt the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes
+at midnight. Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite
+early, as in the case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of
+Cicero who was only in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as
+an old man and wrote his “De Senectute,” exalting the pleasures of old
+age. In the eyes of the maltster he would never have been an old man
+worth naming, for he was only sixty-four when he was murdered. I
+have noticed in my own case of late a growing tendency to flourish my
+antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure in recalling the 'seventies to
+those who can remember, say, only the 'nineties, that my fine old friend
+in the lane had in talking to me about the 'thirties. I met two nice
+boys the other day at a country house, and they were full, as boys ought
+to be, of the subject of the cricket. And when they found I was worth
+talking to on that high theme, they submitted their ideal team to me
+for approval, and I launched out about the giants that lived in the
+days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds of “W. G.” and
+Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G. Steel, and
+many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their stature
+did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those memories
+as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I shall be
+proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning nurse.
+She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope
+and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our
+toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant
+vanity we are soothed to sleep.
+
+[Illustration: 0284]
+
+[Illustration: 0285]
+
+
+
+
+ON SIGHTING LAND
+
+|I was in the midst of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me
+to my feet with a leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a
+doughty fellow, who wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and
+had trained it to stand up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of
+interrogation. “I offer you a draw,” I said with a regal wave of the
+hand, as though I was offering him Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or
+something substantial like that. “Accepted,” he cried with a gesture no
+less reckless and comprehensive. And then we bolted for the top deck.
+For the cry we had heard was “Land in sight!” And if there are three
+more comfortable words to hear when you have been tossing about on the
+ocean for a week or two, I do not know them.
+
+For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the
+Atlantic is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely
+facetious when he said he was “disappointed with the Atlantic.” But now
+I am disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way
+I knew it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order
+to know what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until
+he was a middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to
+his conception of the sea because “we have in us the glance of the
+universe.” But though the actual experience of the ocean adds little to
+the broad imaginative conception of it formed by the mind, we are
+not prepared for the effect of sameness, still less for the sense
+of smallness. It is as though we are sitting day after day in the
+geometrical centre of a very round table-top.
+
+The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are
+told that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before
+yesterday and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility
+to the fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured
+by and here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is
+perfectly flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn
+by compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have “a
+drop into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.” You
+conceive yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth
+which hangs over the sides.
+
+For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its
+appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue
+cloth, with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption
+of transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey
+cloth; sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth
+and tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the
+table, and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth
+flinging itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an
+incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion
+and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under
+the impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment
+suspended in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like
+a wrestler fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning,
+every joint creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful
+strain. A gleam of sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching
+the clouds of spray turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling
+ship with the glamour of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there
+is nothing but the raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler
+in their midst, and far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the
+horizon, as if it were a pencil of white flame, to a spectral and
+unearthly beauty.
+
+But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are
+moveless in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our
+magic carpet (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or
+Europe, as the case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we
+are standing still for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers
+progress to the mind. The circle we looked out on last night is
+indistinguishable from the circle we look out on this morning. Even the
+sky and cloud effects are lost on this flat contracted stage, with its
+hard horizon and its thwarted vision. There is a curious absence of the
+sense of distance, even of distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as
+abruptly as the sea at that severely drawn circumference and there is
+no vague merging of the seen into the unseen, which alone gives the
+imagination room for flight. To live in this world is to be imprisoned
+in a double sense--in the physical sense that Johnson had in mind in
+his famous retort, and in the emotional sense that I have attempted
+to describe. In my growing list of undesirable occupations--sewermen,
+lift-men, stokers, tram-conductors, and so on--I shall henceforth
+include ships' stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being
+shot like a shuttle in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New
+York and back from New York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the
+ill-humour of the ocean and to play the sick nurse to a never-ending
+mob of strangers, is as dreary a part as one could be cast for. I would
+rather navigate a barge on the Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall
+in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet, on second thoughts, they have their
+joys. They hear, every fortnight or so, that thrilling cry, “Land in
+sight!”
+
+It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and
+however familiar it may be.
+
+The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example.
+Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the
+first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some
+unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively,
+comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment
+seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination.
+Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the
+monotonous rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with
+the emotion of the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of
+the sea. Such a cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three
+hundred years ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of
+that immortal little company of the _Mayflower_ caught sight of the land
+where, they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down
+through the centuries that cry of “Land in sight!” has been sounded in
+the ears of generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to
+the new land of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see
+that land shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great
+drama of the ages.
+
+But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English
+eyes as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this
+sunny morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the
+sight there is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself
+heaving with a hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders.
+I have a fleeting vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling
+down there amid a glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to
+sea, and standing on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home
+to the Ark that is for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.
+
+I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is
+a rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his
+hills hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager
+comes from, whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic
+from the Cape, or round the Cape from Australia, or through the
+Mediterranean from India, this is the first glimpse of the homeland that
+greets him, carrying his mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the
+journey's end. And that vision links him up with the great pageant of
+history. Drake, sailing in from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and
+knew he was once more in his Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck
+beside me with a wisp of hair, curled and questioning, on his baldish
+forehead, and I mark the shine in his eyes....
+
+[Illustration: 0291]
+
+[Illustration: 0294]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
+(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47429 ***
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/47429-h.htm b/47429-h/47429-h.htm
index caaab4b..acd2c1b 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/47429-h.htm
+++ b/47429-h/47429-h.htm
@@ -1,8128 +1,8128 @@
-<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html
-   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
-   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
-
-<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
-  <head>
-    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
-    <title>
-      Windfalls, by By Alfred George Gardiner
-    </title>
-    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
-    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
-
-    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
-    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
-    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
-    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
-    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
-    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
-    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
-    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
-    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
-    .indent5   { margin-left: 5%;}
-    .indent10  { margin-left: 10%;}
-    .indent15  { margin-left: 15%;}
-    .indent20  { margin-left: 20%;}
-    .indent30  { margin-left: 30%;}
-    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
-    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
-    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
-    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
-    .pagenum   {position: absolute; right: 1%; font-size: 0.6em;
-                font-variant: normal; font-style: normal;
-                text-align: right; background-color: #FFFACD;
-                border: 1px solid; padding: 0.3em;text-indent: 0em;}
-    .side      { float: left; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
-               border-left: dashed thin; text-align: left;
-               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
-               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
-    p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
-    span.dropcap         { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 }
-    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
-
-</style>
-  </head>
-  <body>
-<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47429 ***</div>
-
-    <div style="height: 8em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h1>
-      WINDFALLS
-    </h1>
-    <h2>
-      By Alfred George Gardiner
-</h2>
-<h3>
-(Alpha of the Plough)
-    </h3>
-
-<h3>Illustrations by Clive Gardiner
-</h3>
-    <h4>
-      J. M. Dent &amp; Sons, Ltd.
-    </h4>
-    <h5>
-      1920
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0002m.jpg" alt="0002m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0002.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0008m.jpg" alt="0008m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0008.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0009m.jpg" alt="0009m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0009.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <h3>
-      TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      I think this book belongs to you because, if it can be said to be about
-      anything in particular&mdash;which it cannot&mdash;it is, in spite of its
-      delusive title, about bees, and as I cannot dedicate it to them, I offer
-      it to those who love them most.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0015m.jpg" alt="0015m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0015.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> JEMIMA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> ON BEING IDLE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> ON HABITS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> IN DEFENCE OF WASPS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> ON PILLAR ROCK </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> TWO VOICES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> ON BEING TIDY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> AN EPISODE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> ON POSSESSION </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> ON BORES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> A LOST SWARM </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> YOUNG AMERICA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> ON GREAT REPLIES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> ON HEREFORD BEACON </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> CHUM </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> ON MATCHES AND THINGS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> ON BEING REMEMBERED </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> ON DINING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> TWO DRINKS OF MILK </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> ON GREAT MEN </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> ON SWEARING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> ON A HANSOM CAB </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> ON MANNERS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> ON A FINE DAY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> DOWN TOWN </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> ON KEYHOLE MORALS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> FLEET STREET NO MORE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> ON WAKING UP </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> ON RE-READING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> FEBRUARY DAYS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> ON A GRECIAN PROFILE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> ON TAKING A HOLIDAY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> UNDER THE SYCAMORE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> ON SIGHTING LAND </a>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a> <br /><br /><a
-      name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0013m.jpg" alt="0013m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0013.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      PREFACE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>n offering a third
-      basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is hoped that the fruit will
-      not be found to have deteriorated. If that is the case, I shall hold
-      myself free to take another look under the trees at my leisure. But I
-      fancy the three baskets will complete the garnering. The old orchard from
-      which the fruit has been so largely gathered is passing from me, and the
-      new orchard to which I go has not yet matured. Perhaps in the course of
-      years it will furnish material for a collection of autumn leaves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0021m.jpg" alt="0021m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0021.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      JEMIMA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> took a garden
-      fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes. When Jemima saw me
-      crossing the orchard with a fork he called a committee meeting, or rather
-      a general assembly, and after some joyous discussion it was decided <i>nem.
-      con</i>. that the thing was worth looking into. Forthwith, the whole
-      family of Indian runners lined up in single file, and led by Jemima
-      followed faithfully in my track towards the artichoke bed, with a gabble
-      of merry noises. Jemima was first into the breach. He always is...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But before I proceed it is necessary to explain. You will have observed
-      that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless,
-      you said, &ldquo;How careless of the printer. Once might be forgiven; but twice&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
-       Dear madam' (or sir), the printer is on this occasion blameless. It seems
-      incredible, but it's so. The truth is that Jemima was the victim of an
-      accident at the christening ceremony. He was one of a brood who, as they
-      came like little balls of yellow fluff out of the shell, received names of
-      appropriate ambiguity&mdash;all except Jemima. There were Lob and Lop, Two
-      Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?, Greedy and Baby, and so on. Every
-      name as safe as the bank, equal to all contingencies&mdash;except Jemima.
-      What reckless impulse led us to call him Jemima I forget. But regardless
-      of his name, he grew up into a handsome drake&mdash;a proud and gaudy
-      fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you call him so long as you call
-      him to the Diet of Worms.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And here he is, surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble, gobble,
-      and crowd in on me so that I have to scare them off in order to drive in
-      the fork. Jemima keeps his eye on the fork as a good batsman keeps his eye
-      on the ball. The flash of a fork appeals to him like the sound of a
-      trumpet to the warhorse. He will lead his battalion through fire and water
-      in pursuit of it. He knows that a fork has some mystical connection with
-      worms, and doubtless regards it as a beneficent deity. The others are
-      content to grub in the new-turned soil, but he, with his larger reasoning
-      power, knows that the fork produces the worms and that the way to get the
-      fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the way he watches it I
-      rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the fork. Look at him now. He
-      cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating fork, expecting to see large,
-      squirming worms dropping from it, and Greedy nips in under his nose and
-      gobbles a waggling beauty. My excellent friend, I say, addressing Jemima,
-      you know both too much and too little. If you had known a little more you
-      would have had that worm; if you had known a little less you would have
-      had that worm. Let me commend to you the words of the poet:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      A little learning is a dangerous thing:
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I've known many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too
-      much but don't know enough. Now Greedy&mdash;&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But clear off all of you. What ho! there.... The scales!... Here is a
-      bumper root.... Jemima realises that something unusual has happened,
-      assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with great animation. It
-      is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners such agreeable
-      companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian runners about.
-      Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the orchard without an
-      idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in a perpetual gossip. The
-      world is full of such a number of things that they hardly ever leave off
-      talking, and though they all talk together they are so amiable about it
-      that it makes you feel cheerful to hear them.... But here are the
-      scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do you say to that,
-      Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am
-      enveloped once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful
-      risks in his attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be
-      ungracious to complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it, I
-      said, but you are feasting to-day in order that others may feast tomorrow.
-      You devour the worm, and a larger and more cunning animal will devour you.
-      He cocks up his head and fixes me with that beady eye that gleams with
-      such artless yet searching intelligence.... You are right, Jemima. That,
-      as you observe, is only half the tale. You eat the worm, and the large,
-      cunning animal eats you, but&mdash;yes, Jemima, the crude fact has to be
-      faced that the worm takes up the tale again where Man the Mighty leaves
-      off:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      His heart is builded
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      For pride, for potency, infinity,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Arrased with purple like the house of kings,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      <i>To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm</i>
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      <i>Statelily lodge...</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I accept your reminder, Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like you,
-      am only a link in the chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries, who creates
-      to devour and devours to create. I thank you, Jemima. And driving in the
-      fork and turning up the soil I seized a large fat worm. I present you with
-      this, Jemima, I said, as a mark of my esteem...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0025m.jpg" alt="0025m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0025.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING IDLE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> have long
-      laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person. It is an
-      entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in conversation, I
-      do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am idle, in fact, to
-      prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art of defence is attack. I
-      defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a verdict of not guilty by
-      the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm you by laying down my
-      arms. &ldquo;Ah, ah,&rdquo; I expect you to say. &ldquo;Ah, ah, you an idle person. Well,
-      that is good.&rdquo; And if you do not say it I at least give myself the
-      pleasure of believing that you think it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things about
-      ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about us. We
-      say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way some
-      people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their early
-      decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as remote as
-      it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating the sorrow it
-      will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be missed. We all
-      like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember a nice old
-      gentleman whose favourite topic was &ldquo;When I am gone.&rdquo; One day he was
-      telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee, what would
-      happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up cheerfully and
-      said, &ldquo;When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at the funeral?&rdquo; It was
-      a devastating question, and it was observed that afterwards the old
-      gentleman never discussed his latter end with his formidable grandchild.
-      He made it too painfully literal.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were to
-      express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad as the
-      old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and I daresay
-      I should take care not to lay myself open again to such <i>gaucherie</i>.
-      But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling self-deception.
-      I can speak the plain truth about &ldquo;Alpha of the Plough&rdquo; without asking for
-      any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how he suffers. And I
-      say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was never more satisfied
-      of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has been engaged in the
-      agreeable task of dodging his duty to <i>The Star</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It began quite early this morning&mdash;for you cannot help being about
-      quite early now that the clock has been put forward&mdash;or is it back?&mdash;for
-      summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and there
-      at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved to write
-      an article <i>en plein air</i>, as Corot used to paint his pictures&mdash;an
-      article that would simply carry the intoxication of this May morning into
-      Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare carolling with larks, and
-      make it green with the green and dappled wonder of the beech woods. But
-      first of all he had to saturate himself with the sunshine. You cannot give
-      out sunshine until you have taken it in. That, said he, is plain to the
-      meanest understanding. So he took it in. He just lay on his back and
-      looked at the clouds sailing serenely in the blue. They were well worth
-      looking at&mdash;large, fat, lazy, clouds that drifted along silently and
-      dreamily, like vast bales of wool being wafted from one star to another.
-      He looked at them &ldquo;long and long&rdquo; as Walt Whitman used to say. How that
-      loafer of genius, he said, would have loved to lie and look at those
-      woolly clouds.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
-      another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not have a
-      picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began enumerating
-      the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the wings of the
-      west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could hear if one gave
-      one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin whisper of the breeze
-      in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of the woodland behind, the
-      dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech near by, the boom of a
-      bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of the meadow pipit rising
-      from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo sailing up the valley, the
-      clatter of magpies on the hillside, the &ldquo;spink-spink&rdquo; of the chaffinch,
-      the whirr of a tractor in a distant field, the crowing of a far-off cock,
-      the bark of a sheep dog, the ring of a hammer reverberating from a remote
-      clearing in the beech woods, the voices of children who were gathering
-      violets and bluebells in the wooded hollow on the other side of the hill.
-      All these and many other things he heard, still lying on his back and
-      looking at the heavenly bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him;
-      their billowy softness invited to slumber....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
-      Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and the
-      best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the blossoms
-      falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you preaching
-      the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He would catch
-      something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did not lie about
-      on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds. To them, life was
-      real, life was earnest. They were always &ldquo;up and doing.&rdquo; It was true that
-      there were the drones, impostors who make ten times the buzz of the
-      workers, and would have you believe they do all the work because they make
-      most of the noise. But the example of these lazy fellows he would ignore.
-      Under the cherry tree he would labour like the honey bee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came out
-      to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives alone,
-      but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put on a veil
-      and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time flies when you
-      are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do and see. You
-      always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure that she is
-      there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took more time
-      than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one of the
-      hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other hives,
-      and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was visible. The
-      frames were turned over industriously without reward. At last, on the
-      floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found. This deepened
-      the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason, rejected her
-      sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne appeared and
-      given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last the new queen
-      was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of her subjects. She
-      had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped notice when the brood
-      frames were put in and, according to the merciless law of the hive, had
-      slain her senior. All this took time, and before he had finished, the
-      cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard announced another
-      interruption of his task.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
-      of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article about
-      how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one virtue. It
-      exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0030m.jpg" alt="0030m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0030.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0031m.jpg" alt="0031m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0031.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON HABITS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> sat down to write
-      an article this morning, but found I could make no progress. There was
-      grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels refused to revolve. I was
-      writing with a pen&mdash;a new fountain pen that someone had been good
-      enough to send me, in commemoration of an anniversary, my interest in
-      which is now very slight, but of which one or two well-meaning friends are
-      still in the habit of reminding me. It was an excellent pen, broad and
-      free in its paces, and capable of a most satisfying flourish. It was a
-      pen, you would have said, that could have written an article about
-      anything. You had only to fill it with ink and give it its head, and it
-      would gallop away to its journey's end without a pause. That is how I felt
-      about it when I sat down. But instead of galloping, the thing was as
-      obstinate as a mule. I could get no more speed out of it than Stevenson
-      could get out of his donkey in the Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried
-      the bastinado, equally without effect on my Modestine.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
-      practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without my
-      using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
-      there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
-      thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
-      extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
-      bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a whole
-      forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to me what
-      his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke of Cambridge,
-      or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to Jackson or&mdash;in
-      short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my hand, seat me
-      before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as they say of the
-      children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an eight-day clock.
-      I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten. But the magic wand
-      must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen in my hand, and the whole
-      complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an atmosphere of strangeness. The
-      pen kept intruding between me and my thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the
-      touch. It seemed to write a foreign language in which nothing pleased me.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
-      better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
-      of his school days. &ldquo;There was,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a boy in my class at school who
-      stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant him. Day
-      came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would; till at
-      length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always fumbled
-      with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
-      waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in an
-      evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know the
-      success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was again
-      questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not to be
-      found. In his distress he looked down for it&mdash;it was to be seen no
-      more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
-      place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was the
-      author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him smote me as
-      I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some reparation;
-      but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance
-      with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior office in one of
-      the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe he is dead, he took
-      early to drinking.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
-      regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
-      and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come. to
-      grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits, so long
-      as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little more than
-      bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take away our
-      habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about. We could
-      not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life. They enable
-      us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we had to give
-      fresh and original thought to them each time, would make existence an
-      impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our commonplace
-      activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more leisure we
-      command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but not so large
-      as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up your own hat
-      and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long time it was my
-      practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant hook and to take
-      no note of the place. When I sought them I found it absurdly difficult to
-      find them in the midst of so many similar hats and coats. Memory did not
-      help me, for memory refused to burden itself with such trumpery things,
-      and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering forlornly and vacuously
-      between the rows and rows of clothes in search of my own garments
-      murmuring, &ldquo;Where <i>did</i> I put my hat?&rdquo; Then one day a brilliant
-      inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on a certain
-      peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to it. It needed
-      a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked like a charm. I
-      can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding them. I go to them
-      as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to its mark. It is one of
-      the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
-      ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally break
-      them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ them,
-      without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once saw Mr
-      Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial breach of
-      habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of Trinity
-      House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House. It is his
-      custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the most
-      comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms about in
-      a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief and the body in
-      repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no lapels, and when the
-      hands went up in search of them they wandered about pathetically like a
-      couple of children who had lost their parents on Blackpool sands. They
-      fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung to each other in a
-      visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed the search for the lost
-      lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with the glasses on the table,
-      sought again for the lapels, did everything but take refuge in the pockets
-      of the trousers. It was a characteristic omission. Mr Balfour is too
-      practised a speaker to come to disaster as the boy in Scott's story did;
-      but his discomfiture was apparent. He struggled manfully through his
-      speech, but all the time it was obvious that he was at a loss what to do
-      with his hands, having no lapels on which to hang them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out a
-      pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit, ticked
-      away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I hope)
-      pardonable result.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0036m.jpg" alt="0036m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0036.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      IN DEFENCE OF WASPS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t is time, I
-      think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He is no saint, but he
-      is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been unusually prolific this
-      summer, and agitated correspondents have been busy writing to the
-      newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how by holding your breath
-      you may miraculously prevent him stinging you. Now the point about the
-      wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He is, in spite of his military
-      uniform and his formidable weapon, not a bad fellow, and if you leave him
-      alone he will leave you alone. He is a nuisance of course. He likes jam
-      and honey; but then I am bound to confess that I like jam and honey too,
-      and I daresay those correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam
-      and honey. We shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like
-      jam and honey. But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the
-      plate, and he is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no
-      doubt. He is an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously
-      helpless condition from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness
-      for beer. In the language of America, he is a &ldquo;wet.&rdquo; He cannot resist
-      beer, and having rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully
-      tight and staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that
-      he won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
-      Belloc&mdash;not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so
-      waspishly about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about
-      beer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty beer
-      bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets out. He is
-      indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings. He is
-      excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody and nothing,
-      and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of things; but a
-      wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin that he is, and
-      will never have the sense to walk out the way he went in. And on your
-      plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You can descend on
-      him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight for anything above
-      him, and no sense of looking upward.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
-      fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
-      glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
-      familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
-      the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he cuts
-      a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
-      poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its time
-      in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night during
-      its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and for future
-      generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow stripes just
-      lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank you. Let us
-      eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow&mdash;&mdash;. He runs
-      through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time in
-      August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving only
-      the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of 20,000 or
-      so next summer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
-      you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
-      it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet he
-      could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than the bee,
-      for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel competent to
-      speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for I've been living
-      in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the orchard, with an
-      estimated population of a quarter of a million bees and tens of thousands
-      of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never deliberately attacked
-      by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around me I flee for shelter.
-      There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp, the bee's hatred is
-      personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some obscure reason, and is
-      always ready to die for the satisfaction of its anger. And it dies very
-      profusely. The expert, who has been taking sections from the hives, showed
-      me her hat just now. It had nineteen stings in it, planted in as neatly as
-      thorns in a bicycle tyre.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
-      him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
-      nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
-      devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked, and I
-      like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little joint,
-      usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real virtue, and
-      this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean fellow, and
-      is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of that supreme
-      abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is very cunning.
-      I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He got the blow fly
-      down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed off one of the
-      creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape, and then with a
-      huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away. And I confess he
-      carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a whole generation
-      of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
-      help a fellow in distress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to one
-      that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was continued
-      for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to stroke gently
-      the injured wings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
-      who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
-      carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp as
-      an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
-      sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to kill
-      her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
-      preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we wish
-      ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for their
-      enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0012" id="linkimage-0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0040m.jpg" alt="0040m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0040.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0041m.jpg" alt="0041m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0041.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON PILLAR ROCK
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>hose, we are told,
-      who have heard the East a-calling &ldquo;never heed naught else.&rdquo; Perhaps it is
-      so; but they can never have heard the call of Lakeland at New Year. They
-      can never have scrambled up the screes of the Great Gable on winter days
-      to try a fall with the Arrow Head and the Needle, the Chimney and Kern
-      Knotts Crack; never have seen the mighty Pillar Rock beckoning them from
-      the top of Black Sail Pass, nor the inn lights far down in the valley
-      calling them back from the mountains when night has fallen; never have sat
-      round the inn fire and talked of the jolly perils of the day, or played
-      chess with the landlord&mdash;and been beaten&mdash;or gone to bed with
-      the refrain of the climbers' chorus still challenging the roar of the wind
-      outside&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Come, let us tie the rope, the rope, the rope,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Come, let us link it round, round, round.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And he that will not climb to-day
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Why&mdash;leave him on the ground, the ground, the ground.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you have done these things you will not make much of the call of the
-      temple bells and the palm trees and the spicy garlic smells&mdash;least of
-      all at New Year. You will hear instead the call of the Pillar Rock and the
-      chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your oldest clothes and wind the
-      rope around you&mdash;singing meanwhile &ldquo;the rope, the rope,&rdquo;&mdash;and
-      take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will step out at
-      that gateway of the enchanted land&mdash;Keswick. Keswick! Wastdale!...
-      Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to whom they
-      open the magic casements at a breath.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And at Keswick you call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go to
-      Keswick without calling on George Abraham. You might as well go to
-      Wastdale Head without calling on the Pillar Rock. And George tells you
-      that of course he will be over at Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will
-      climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle with you on New Year's Day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave adieus, and are soon jolting
-      down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where every object is an old
-      friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the Bowder Stone and
-      there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow of Cat Bells.
-      (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and picking wimberries and
-      waking the echoes of Grisedale.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the
-      billowy summits of Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky
-      sentinels of the valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name.
-      Perhaps you jump down at Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to
-      Rosthwaite and lunch.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street is a myth
-      and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of the sanctuary and
-      the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling your rucksack on your
-      back and your rope over your shoulder and set out on the three hours'
-      tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is dark when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and these
-      December days are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by the
-      landlord and landlady&mdash;heirs of Auld Will Ritson&mdash;and in the
-      flagged entrance you see coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of
-      climbers' boots&mdash;boots that make the heart sing to look upon, boots
-      that have struck music out of many a rocky breast, boots whose missing
-      nails has each a story of its own. You put your own among them, don your
-      slippers, and plunge among your old companions of the rocks with jolly
-      greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it is&mdash;a master
-      from a school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a young
-      clergyman, a barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham,
-      and so on. But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and
-      the eternal boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Who shall tell of the days and nights that follow?&mdash;of the songs that
-      are sung, and the &ldquo;traverses&rdquo; that are made round the billiard room and
-      the barn, of the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous
-      climb, of the letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and the
-      departures for the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich with new
-      memories, you all foregather again&mdash;save only, perhaps, the jolly
-      lawyer and his fellows who have lost their way back from Scafell, and for
-      whom you are about to send out a search party when they turn up out of the
-      darkness with new material for fireside tales.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's Day&mdash;clear and
-      bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost in the air.
-      In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up ropes, putting on
-      putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for boots (the boots
-      are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing nails). We separate
-      at the threshold&mdash;this group for the Great Gable, that for Scafell,
-      ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock. It is a two and
-      a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and as daylight is short
-      there is no time to waste. We follow the water course up the valley,
-      splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice, cross the stream where
-      the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount the steep ascent of Black
-      Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down lonely Ennerdale, where,
-      springing from the flank of the Pillar mountain, is the great Rock we have
-      come to challenge. It stands like a tower, gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600
-      feet from its northern base to its summit, split on the south side by
-      Jordan Gap that divides the High Man or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser
-      rock.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have been overtaken by another party of three from the inn&mdash;one in
-      a white jersey which, for reasons that will appear, I shall always
-      remember. Together we follow the High Level Traverse, the track that leads
-      round the flank of the mountain to the top of Walker's Gully, the grim
-      descent to the valley, loved by the climber for the perils to which it
-      invites him. Here wre lunch and here we separate. We, unambitious (having
-      three passengers in our party of five), are climbing the East face by the
-      Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending by the New West route, one
-      of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here; theirs is from the other
-      side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I wish to speak, but of
-      theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will find the Slab and Notch
-      route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it is held in little esteem.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      With five on the rope, however, our progress is slow, and it is two
-      o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring and triumphant, and
-      stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar Rock, where the wind
-      blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over half the peaks of
-      Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in the book that lies
-      under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on the West face for
-      signs of our late companions. The sound of their voices comes up from
-      below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a glimpse of their forms.
-      &ldquo;They're going to be late,&rdquo; says George Abraham&mdash;the discoverer of
-      the New West&mdash;and then he indicates the closing stages of the climb
-      and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the most thrilling
-      escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock&mdash;two men falling,
-      and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of those three,
-      two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the next year on the
-      Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and turn cheerfully to
-      descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route which ends on the slope
-      of the mountain near to the starting point of the New West route.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in the East sheds no
-      light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are quite distinct,
-      coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the directions and
-      distinguish the speakers. &ldquo;Can't understand why those lads are cutting it
-      so fine,&rdquo; says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace down cracks and
-      grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and safety. And now we
-      look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one thing is visible&mdash;a
-      figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at full stretch. There it
-      hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the rocks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0047m.jpg" alt="0047m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0047.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The party, then, are only just making the traverse from the chimney to the
-      right, the most difficult manoeuvre of the climb&mdash;a manoeuvre in
-      which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain stationary while his
-      fellows pass him. &ldquo;This is bad,&rdquo; says George Abraham and he prepares for a
-      possible emergency. &ldquo;Are you in difficulties? Shall we wait?&rdquo; he cries.
-      &ldquo;Yes, wait.&rdquo; The words rebound from the cliff in the still air like
-      stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white jersey, still
-      moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every word they speak
-      echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board. You hear the
-      iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds on the ringing
-      wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if both feet are
-      dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a hold. I fancy one
-      or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look at each other in
-      silent comment. And all the time the figure in white, now growing dim, is
-      impaled on the face of the darkness, and the voices come down to us in
-      brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon is sailing into the
-      clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery &ldquo;All right&rdquo;
-       drops down from above. The difficult operation is over, the scattered
-      rocks are reached and nothing remains but the final slabs, which in the
-      absence of ice offer no great difficulty. Their descent by the easy Jordan
-      route will be quick. We turn to go with the comment that it is perhaps
-      more sensational to watch a climb than to do one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And then we plunge over the debris behind Pisgah, climb up the Great Doup,
-      where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we reach the friendly fence that
-      has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down to the top of Black Sail
-      Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours later we have
-      rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one to
-      his office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem
-      prosaic and ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say
-      only the word &ldquo;Wastdale&rdquo; to them and you shall awake its echoes; then you
-      shall see their faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable things.
-      They are no longer men of the world; they are spirits of the mountains.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0049m.jpg" alt="0049m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0049.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0050m.jpg" alt="0050m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0050.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      TWO VOICES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">Y</span>es,&rdquo; said the man
-      with the big voice, &ldquo;I've seen it coming for years. Years.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Have you?&rdquo; said the man with the timid voice. He had taken his seat on
-      the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of the tube strike
-      that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of London.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, years,&rdquo; said big voice, crowding as much modesty into the admission
-      as possible. &ldquo;I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long way off. Suppose
-      I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit psychic.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning of the
-      word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it meant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George&mdash;that's the man that up
-      to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and property and
-      things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.' Why, his
-      speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's it's come
-      back. I always said it would. I said we should pay for it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you, though?&rdquo; observed timid voice&mdash;not questioningly, but as an
-      assurance that he was listening attentively.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for years&mdash;years, I did.
-      And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in no time. In the
-      first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000 aeroplanes and
-      train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what I said. But
-      was it done?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why, but
-      there it is. I'm not much at the platform business&mdash;tub-thumping, I
-      call it&mdash;but for seeing things far off&mdash;well, I'm a bit psychic,
-      you know.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said timid voice, mournfully, &ldquo;it's a pity some of those talking
-      fellows are not psychic, too.&rdquo; He'd got the word firmly now.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Them psychic!&rdquo; said big voice, with scorn. &ldquo;We know what they are. You
-      see that Miss Asquith is marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word, he'll
-      turn out to be a German, that's what he'll turn out to be. It's German
-      money all round. Same with these strikes. There's German money behind
-      them.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Shouldn't wonder at all,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;I've a way of seeing things. The same in the
-      Boer War. I saw that coming for years.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you, indeed?&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to some of my friends. There it was
-      in black and white. They said it was wonderful how it all turned out&mdash;two
-      years, I said, 250 millions of money, and 20,000 casualties. That's what I
-      said, and that's what it was. I said the Boers would win, and I claim they
-      did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave them all they asked for.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You were about right,&rdquo; assented timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round his
-      finger&mdash;that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his finger.
-      Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building a
-      fleet as big as ours.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Never did like that man,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the armistice
-      means. They've escaped&mdash;and just when we'd got them down.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's a shame,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;This war ought to have gone on longer,&rdquo; continued big voice. &ldquo;My opinion
-      is that the world wanted thinning out. People are too crowded. That's what
-      they are&mdash;they're too crowded.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I agree there,&rdquo; said timid voice. &ldquo;We wanted thinning.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It ought to have
-      gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should like to know
-      his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says <i>John Bull</i>, and
-      that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a case
-      down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building society&mdash;regular
-      chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building society went
-      smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I don't like those goody-goody people,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what that
-      man knew. 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women players,' he
-      said. Strordinary how he knew things.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Wonderful,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;There's never been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare
-      knew&mdash;not one-half.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No doubt about it,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I consider that William Shakespeare was the most psychic man that ever
-      lived. I don't suppose there was ever such a long-sighted man before <i>or</i>
-      since. He could see through anything. He'd have seen through Wilson and
-      he'd have seen this war didn't stop before the job was done. It's a pity
-      we haven't a William Shakespeare now. Lloyd George and Asquith are not in
-      it with him. They're simply duds beside William Shakespeare. Couldn't hold
-      a candle to him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Seems to me,&rdquo; said timid voice, &ldquo;that there's nobody, as you might say,
-      worth anything to-day.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;We've gone right off. There used to be men. Old
-      Dizzy, he was a man. So was Joseph Chamberlain. He was right about Tariff
-      Reform. I saw it years before he did. Free Trade I said was all right
-      years ago, when we were manufacturing for the world. But it's out of date.
-      I saw it was out of date long before Joseph Chamberlain. It's the result
-      of being long-sighted. I said to my father, 'If we stick to Free Trade
-      this country is done.' That's what I said, and it's true. We <i>are</i>
-      done. Look at these strikes. We stick to things too long. I believe in
-      looking ahead. When I was in America before the war they wouldn't believe
-      I came from England. Wouldn't believe it. 'But the English are so slow,'
-      they said, 'and you&mdash;why you want to be getting on in front of us.'
-      That's my way. I look ahead and don't stand still.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's the best way too,&rdquo; said timid voice. &ldquo;We want more of it. We're too
-      slow.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And so on. When I came to the end of my journey I rose so that the light
-      of a lamp shone on the speakers as I passed. They were both well-dressed,
-      ordinary-looking men. If I had passed them in the street I should have
-      said they were intelligent men of the well-to-do business class. I have
-      set down their conversation, which I could not help overhearing, and which
-      was carried on by the big voice in a tone meant for publication, as
-      exactly as I can recall it. There was a good deal more of it, all of the
-      same character. You will laugh at it, or weep over it, according to your
-      humour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0055m.jpg" alt="0055m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0055.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING TIDY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>ny careful
-      observer of my habits would know that I am on the eve of an adventure&mdash;a
-      holiday, or a bankruptcy, or a fire, or a voluntary liquidation (whatever
-      that may be), or an elopement, or a duel, or a conspiracy, or&mdash;in
-      short, of something out of the normal, something romantic or dangerous,
-      pleasurable or painful, interrupting the calm current of my affairs. Being
-      the end of July, he would probably say: That fellow is on the brink of the
-      holiday fever. He has all the symptoms of the epidemic. Observe his
-      negligent, abstracted manner. Notice his slackness about business&mdash;how
-      he just comes and looks in and goes out as though he were a visitor paying
-      a call, or a person who had been left a fortune and didn't care twopence
-      what happened. Observe his clothes, how they are burgeoning into
-      unaccustomed gaiety, even levity. Is not his hat set on at just a shade of
-      a sporting angle? Does not his stick twirl with a hint of irresponsible
-      emotions? Is there not the glint of far horizons in his eye? Did you not
-      hear him humming as he came up the stairs? Yes, assuredly the fellow is
-      going for a holiday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Your suspicions would be confirmed when you found me ransacking my private
-      room and clearing up my desk. The news that I am clearing up my desk has
-      been an annual sensation for years. I remember a colleague of mine once
-      coming in and finding me engaged in that spectacular feat. His face fell
-      with apprehension. His voice faltered. &ldquo;I hope you are not leaving us,&rdquo; he
-      said. He, poor fellow, could not think of anything else that could account
-      for so unusual an operation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For I am one of those people who treat their desks with respect. We do not
-      believe in worrying them about their contents. We do not bully them into
-      disclosing their secrets. We stuff the drawers full of papers and
-      documents, and leave them to mellow and ripen. And when the drawers are
-      full we pile up other papers and documents on either side of us; and the
-      higher the pile gets the more comfortable and cosy we feel. We would not
-      disturb them for worlds. Why should we set our sleeping dogs barking at us
-      when they are willing to go on sleeping if we leave them alone? And
-      consider the show they make. No one coming to see us can fail to be
-      impressed by such piles of documents. They realise how busy we are. They
-      understand that we have no time for idle talk. They see that we have all
-      these papers to dispose of&mdash;otherwise, why are they there? They get
-      their business done and go away quickly, and spread the news of what
-      tremendous fellows we are for work.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am told by one who worked with him, that old Lord Strathcona knew the
-      trick quite well, and used it unblushingly. When a visitor was announced
-      he tumbled his papers about in imposing confusion and was discovered
-      breasting the mighty ocean of his labours, his chin resolutely out of the
-      water. But he was a supreme artist in this form of amiable imposture. On
-      one occasion he was entertained at a great public dinner in a provincial
-      city. In the midst of the proceedings a portly flunkey was observed
-      carrying a huge envelope, with seals and trappings, on a salver. For whom
-      was this momentous document intended? Ah, he has paused behind the grand
-      old man with the wonderful snowy head. It is for him. The company looks on
-      in respectful silence. Even here this astonishing old man cannot escape
-      the cares of office. As he takes the envelope his neighbour at the table
-      looks at the address. It was in Strathcona's own hand-writing!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we of the rank and file are not dishevelled by artifice, like this
-      great man. It is a natural gift. And do not suppose that our disorder
-      makes us unhappy. We like it. We follow our vocation, as Falstaff says.
-      Some people are born tidy and some are born untidy. We were bom untidy,
-      and if good people, taking pity on us, try to make us tidy we get lost. It
-      was so with George Crabbe. He lived in magnificent disorder, papers and
-      books and letters all over the floor, piled on every chair, surging up to
-      the ceiling. Once, in his absence, his niece tidied up for him. When he
-      came back he found himself like a stranger in a strange land. He did not
-      know his way about in this desolation of tidiness, and he promptly
-      restored the familiar disorder, so that he could find things. It sounds
-      absurd, of course, but we people with a genius for untidiness must always
-      seem absurd to the tidy people. They cannot understand that there is a
-      method in our muddle, an order in our disorder, secret paths through the
-      wilderness known only to our feet, that, in short, we are rather like cats
-      whose perceptions become more acute the darker it gets. It is not true
-      that we never find things. We often find things.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And consider the joy of finding things you don't hope to find. You, sir,
-      sitting at your spotless desk, with your ordered and labelled shelves
-      about you, and your files and your letter-racks, and your card indexes and
-      your cross references, and your this, that, and the other&mdash;what do
-      you know of the delights of which I speak? You do not come suddenly and
-      ecstatically upon the thing you seek. You do not know the shock of
-      delighted discovery. You do not shout &ldquo;Eureka,&rdquo; and summon your family
-      around you to rejoice in the miracle that has happened. No star swims into
-      your ken out of the void. You cannot be said to find things at all, for
-      you never lose them, and things must be lost before they can be truly
-      found. The father of the Prodigal had to lose his son before he could
-      experience the joy that has become an immortal legend of the world. It is
-      we who lose things, not you, sir, who never find them, who know the Feast
-      of the Fatted Calf.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not a plea for untidiness. I am no hot gospeller of disorder. I
-      only seek to make the best, of a bad job, and to show that we untidy
-      fellows are not without a case, have our romantic compensations, moments
-      of giddy exaltation unknown to those who are endowed with the pedestrian
-      and profitable virtue of tidiness. That is all. I would have the
-      pedestrian virtue if I could. In other days, before I had given up hope of
-      reforming myself, and when I used to make good resolutions as piously as
-      my neighbours, I had many a spasm of tidiness. I looked with envy on my
-      friend Higginson, who was a miracle of order, could put his hand on
-      anything he wanted in the dark, kept his documents and his files and
-      records like regiments of soldiers obedient to call, knew what he had
-      written on 4th March 1894, and what he had said on 10th January 1901, and
-      had a desk that simply perspired with tidiness. And in a spirit of
-      emulation I bought a roll-top desk. I believed that tidiness was a
-      purchasable commodity. You went to a furniture dealer and bought a large
-      roll-top desk, and when it came home the genius of order came home with
-      it. The bigger the desk, the more intricate its devices, the larger was
-      the measure of order bestowed on you. My desk was of the first magnitude.
-      It had an inconceivable wealth of drawers and pigeon-holes. It was a desk
-      of many mansions. And I labelled them all, and gave them all separate jobs
-      to perform.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And then I sat back and looked the future boldly in the face. Now, said I,
-      the victory is won. Chaos and old night are banished. Order reigns in
-      Warsaw. I have but to open a drawer and every secret I seek will leap
-      magically to light. My articles will write themselves, for every reference
-      will come to my call, obedient as Ariel to the bidding of Prospero.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;Approach, my Ariel; come,&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I shall say, and from some remote fastness the obedient spirit will appear
-      with&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      To swim, to dive into the sea, to ride
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      On the curl'd clouds.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I shall know where Aunt Jane's letters are, and where my bills are, and my
-      cuttings about this, that, and the other, and my diaries and notebooks,
-      and the time-table and the street guide. I shall never be short of a match
-      or a spare pair of spectacles, or a pencil, or&mdash;in short, life will
-      henceforth be an easy amble to old age. For a week it worked like a charm.
-      Then the demon of disorder took possession of the beast. It devoured
-      everything and yielded up nothing. Into its soundless deeps my merchandise
-      sank to oblivion. And I seemed to sink with it. It was not a desk, but a
-      tomb. One day I got a man to take it away to a second-hand shop.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Since then I have given up being tidy. I have realised that the quality of
-      order is not purchasable at furniture shops, is not a quality of external
-      things, but an indwelling spirit, a frame of mind, a habit that perhaps
-      may be acquired but cannot be bought.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have a smaller desk with fewer drawers, all of them nicely choked up
-      with the litter of the past. Once a year I have a gaol delivery of the
-      incarcerated. The ghosts come out into the daylight, and I face them
-      unflinching and unafraid. They file past, pointing minatory fingers at me
-      as they go into the waste-paper basket. They file past now. But I do not
-      care a dump; for to-morrow I shall seek fresh woods and pastures new.
-      To-morrow the ghosts of that old untidy desk will have no terrors for my
-      emancipated spirit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0061m.jpg" alt="0061m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0061.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0062m.jpg" alt="0062m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0062.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      AN EPISODE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e were talking of
-      the distinction between madness and sanity when one of the company said
-      that we were all potential madmen, just as every gambler was a potential
-      suicide, or just as every hero was a potential coward.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I mean,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that the difference between the sane and the insane is
-      not that the sane man never has mad thoughts. He has, but he recognises
-      them as mad, and keeps his hand on the rein of action. He thinks them, and
-      dismisses them. It is so with the saint and the sinner. The saint is not
-      exempt from evil thoughts, but he knows they are evil, is master of
-      himself, and puts them away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I speak with experience,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;for the potential madman in me
-      once nearly got the upper hand. I won, but it was a near thing, and if I
-      had gone down in that struggle I should have been branded for all time as
-      a criminal lunatic, and very properly put away in some place of safety.
-      Yet I suppose no one ever suspected me of lunacy.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tell us about it,&rdquo; we said in chorus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It was one evening in New York,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I had had a very exhausting
-      time, and was no doubt mentally tired. I had taken tea with two friends at
-      the Belmont Hotel, and as we found we were all disengaged that evening we
-      agreed to spend it together at the Hippodrome, where a revue, winding up
-      with a great spectacle that had thrilled New York, was being presented.
-      When we went to the box office we found that we could not get three seats
-      together, so we separated, my friends going to the floor of the house and
-      I to the dress circle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;If you are familiar with the place you will know its enormous dimensions
-      and the vastness of the stage. When I took my seat next but one to one of
-      the gangways the house was crowded and the performance had begun. It was
-      trivial and ordinary enough, but it kept me amused, and between the acts I
-      went out to see the New Yorkers taking 'soft' drinks in the promenades. I
-      did not join them in that mild indulgence, nor did I speak to anyone.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;After the interval before the concluding spectacle I did not return to my
-      seat until the curtain was up. The transformation hit me like a blow. The
-      huge stage had been converted into a lake, and behind the lake through
-      filmy draperies there was the suggestion of a world in flames. I passed to
-      my seat and sat down. I turned from the blinding glow of the conflagration
-      in front and cast my eye over the sea of faces that filled the great
-      theatre from floor to ceiling. 'Heavens! if there were a fire in this
-      place,' I thought. At that thought the word 'Fire' blazed in my brain like
-      a furnace. 'What if some madman cried Fire?' flashed through my mind, and
-      then '<i>What if I cried Fire?</i>'
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;At that hideous suggestion, the demon word that suffused my brain leapt
-      like a shrieking maniac within me and screamed and fought for utterance. I
-      felt it boiling in my throat, I felt it on my tongue. I felt myself to be
-      two persons engaged in a deadly grapple&mdash;a sane person struggling to
-      keep his feet against the mad rush of an insane monster. I clenched my
-      teeth. So long as I kept my teeth tight&mdash;tight&mdash;tight the raging
-      madman would fling himself at the bars in vain. But could I keep up the
-      struggle till he fell exhausted? I gripped the arms of my seat. I felt
-      beads of perspiration breaking out on my right brow. How singular that in
-      moments of strain the moisture always broke out at that spot. I could
-      notice these things with a curious sense of detachment as if there were a
-      third person within me watching the frenzied conflict. And still that
-      titanic impulse lay on my tongue and hammered madly at my clenched teeth.
-      Should I go out? That would look odd, and be an ignominious surrender. I
-      must fight this folly down honestly and not run away from it. If I had a
-      book I would try to read. If I had a friend beside me I would talk. But
-      both these expedients were denied me. Should I turn to my unknown
-      neighbour and break the spell with an inconsequent remark or a request for
-      his programme? I looked at him out of the tail of my eye. He was a
-      youngish man, in evening dress, and sitting alone as I was. But his eyes
-      were fixed intently on the stage. He was obviously gripped by the
-      spectacle. Had I spoken to him earlier in the evening the course would
-      have been simple; but to break the ice in the midst of this tense silence
-      was impossible. Moreover, I had a programme on my knees and what was there
-      to say?...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I turned my eyes from the stage. What was going on there I could not
-      tell. It was a blinding blur of Fire that seemed to infuriate the monster
-      within me. I looked round at the house. I looked up at the ceiling and
-      marked its gilded ornaments. I turned and gazed intensely at the occupants
-      of the boxes, trying to turn the current of my mind into speculations
-      about their dress, their faces, their characters. But the tyrant was too
-      strong to be overthrown by such conscious effort. I looked up at the
-      gallery; I looked down at the pit; I tried to busy my thoughts with
-      calculations about the numbers present, the amount of money in the house,
-      the cost of running the establishment&mdash;anything. In vain. I leaned
-      back in my seat, my teeth still clenched, my hands still gripping the arms
-      of the chair. How still the house was! How enthralled it seemed!... I was
-      conscious that people about me were noticing my restless inattention. If
-      they knew the truth.... If they could see the raging torment that was
-      battering at my teeth.... Would it never go? How long would this wild
-      impulse burn on my tongue? Was there no distraction that would
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Cleanse the stuffed bosom of this perilous stuff
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That feeds upon the brain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I recalled the reply&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Therein the patient must minister to himself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How fantastic it seemed. Here was that cool observer within me quoting
-      poetry over my own delirium without being able to allay it. What a mystery
-      was the brain that could become the theatre of such wild drama. I turned
-      my glance to the orchestra. Ah, what was that they were playing?... Yes,
-      it was a passage from Dvorak's American Symphony. How familiar it was! My
-      mind incontinently leapt to a remote scene, I saw a well-lit room and
-      children round the hearth and a figure at the piano....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It was as though the madman within me had fallen stone dead. I looked at
-      the stage coolly, and observed that someone was diving into the lake from
-      a trapeze that seemed a hundred feet high. The glare was still behind, but
-      I knew it for a sham glare. What a fool I had been.... But what a hideous
-      time I had had.... And what a close shave.... I took out my handkerchief
-      and drew it across my forehead.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0066m.jpg" alt="0066m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0066.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0067m.jpg" alt="0067m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0067.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <h3>
-      ON SUPERSTITIONS
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was inevitable
-      that the fact that a murder has taken place at a house with the number 13
-      in a street, the letters of whose name number 13, would not pass
-      unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that have been committed, I
-      suppose we should find that as many have taken place at No. 6 or No. 7, or
-      any other number you choose, as at No. 13&mdash;that the law of averages
-      is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But this consideration does not
-      prevent the world remarking on the fact when No. 13 has its turn. Not that
-      the world believes there is anything in the superstition. It is quite sure
-      it is a mere childish folly, of course. Few of us would refuse to take a
-      house because its number was 13, or decline an invitation to dinner
-      because there were to be 13 at table. But most of us would be just a shade
-      happier if that desirable residence were numbered 11, and not any the less
-      pleased with the dinner if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept
-      him away. We would not confess this little weakness to each other. We
-      might even refuse to admit it to ourselves, but it is there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are numerous
-      streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which there is no
-      house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a bed in a
-      hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though it has
-      worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations of a
-      discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house, and
-      into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of a
-      bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession to
-      the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery is a
-      matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow on the
-      mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat recovery.
-      Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers in the sick
-      bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of a certain state of
-      mind in the patient. There are few more curious revelations in that moving
-      record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences during the war, than the case
-      of the man who died of a pimple on his nose. He had been hideously
-      mutilated in battle and was brought into hospital a sheer wreck; but he
-      was slowly patched up and seemed to have been saved when a pimple appeared
-      on his nose. It was nothing in itself, but it was enough to produce a
-      mental state that checked the flickering return of life. It assumed a
-      fantastic importance in the mind of the patient who, having survived the
-      heavy blows of fate, died of something less than a pin prick. It is not
-      difficult to understand that so fragile a hold of life might yield to the
-      sudden discovery that you were lying in No. 13 bed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
-      wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of all
-      the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that I
-      constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have associated
-      the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had anything but the
-      most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved a bus, and as free
-      from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I would not change its
-      number if I had the power to do so. But there are other circumstances of
-      which I should find it less easy to clear myself of suspicion under cross
-      examination. I never see a ladder against a house side without feeling
-      that it is advisable to walk round it rather than under it. I say to
-      myself that this is not homage to a foolish superstition, but a duty to my
-      family. One must think of one's family. The fellow at the top of the
-      ladder may drop anything. He may even drop himself. He may have had too
-      much to drink. He may be a victim of epileptic fits, and epileptic fits,
-      as everyone knows, come on at the most unseasonable times and places. It
-      is a mere measure of ordinary safety to walk round the ladder. No man is
-      justified in inviting danger in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle
-      fancy. Moreover, probably that fancy has its roots in the common-sense
-      fact that a man on a ladder does occasionally drop things. No doubt many
-      of our superstitions have these commonplace and sensible origins. I
-      imagine, for example, that the Jewish objection to pork as unclean on
-      religious grounds is only due to the fact that in Eastern climates it is
-      unclean on physical grounds.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather glad
-      that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing so. Even
-      if&mdash;conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to myself&mdash;I
-      walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not done so as a
-      kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have challenged it
-      rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way of dodging the
-      absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the ladder. This is not easy.
-      In the same way I am sensible of a certain satisfaction when I see the new
-      moon in the open rather than through glass, and over my right shoulder
-      rather than my left. I would not for any consideration arrange these
-      things consciously; but if they happen so I fancy I am better pleased than
-      if they do not. And on these occasions I have even caught my hand&mdash;which
-      chanced to be in my pocket at the time&mdash;turning over money, a little
-      surreptitiously I thought, but still undeniably turning it. Hands have
-      habits of their own and one can't always be watching them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover in
-      ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a creed
-      outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the laws of
-      the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
-      superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and man
-      seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
-      neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of their
-      hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
-      inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
-      misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon of
-      life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of battles
-      being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more relation to
-      the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When Pompey was
-      afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as prætor he shouted to the
-      Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election postponed, for
-      the Romans would never transact business after it had thundered. Alexander
-      surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took counsel with them as a
-      modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers. Even so great a man as
-      Cæsar and so modern and enlightened a man as Cicero left their fate to
-      augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were right and sometimes they were
-      wrong, but whether right or wrong they were equally meaningless. Cicero
-      lost his life by trusting to the wisdom of crows. When he was in flight
-      from Antony and Cæsar Augustus he put to sea and might have escaped. But
-      some crows chanced to circle round his vessel, and he took the
-      circumstance to be unfavourable to his action, returned to shore and was
-      murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece consulted the omens and the
-      oracles where the farmer to-day is only careful of his manures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I should have liked to have seen Cæsar and I should have liked to have
-      heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later day and
-      who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the better end
-      of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad. We do not
-      know much more of the Power that
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Turns the handle of this idle show
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      than our forefathers did, but at least we have escaped the grotesque
-      shadows that enveloped them. We do not look for divine guidance in the
-      entrails of animals or the flight of crows, and the House of Commons does
-      not adjourn at a clap of thunder.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0072m.jpg" alt="0072m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0072.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0073m.jpg" alt="0073m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0073.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON POSSESSION
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> met a lady the
-      other day who had travelled much and seen much, and who talked with great
-      vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one peculiarity about her.
-      If I happened to say that I too had been, let us say, to Tangier, her
-      interest in Tangier immediately faded away and she switched the
-      conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not been, and where
-      therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about the Honble. Ulick
-      de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had the honour of meeting
-      that eminent personage. And so with books and curiosities, places and
-      things&mdash;she was only interested in them so long as they were her
-      exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and when she ceased to
-      possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have Tangier all to herself
-      she did not want it at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
-      people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
-      not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
-      exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
-      countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else in
-      the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching that
-      appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he was getting
-      something that no one else had got, and when he found that someone else
-      had got it its value ceased to exist.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything in
-      the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
-      material thing. I do not own&mdash;to take an example&mdash;that wonderful
-      picture by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his
-      grandchild. I have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own
-      room I could not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for
-      years. It is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries
-      of the mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have
-      read, and beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it
-      whenever I like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the
-      painter saw in the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the
-      bottle nose as he stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long
-      centuries ago. The pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may
-      share this spiritual ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine,
-      or the shade of a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or
-      the song of the lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is
-      common to all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
-      woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of solitude
-      which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient Britons
-      hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense a certain
-      noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether he has seen
-      these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the little hamlet
-      know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them for a perpetual
-      playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but we could not have a
-      richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on every tree. For the
-      pleasure of things is not in their possession but in their use.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised long
-      ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who scurried
-      through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to say that
-      they had done something that other people had not done. Even so great a
-      man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive possession.
-      De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at the mountains,
-      he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene, whereupon
-      Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone else to
-      praise <i>his</i> mountains. He was the high priest of nature, and had
-      something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of revelation, and
-      anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence, except through him,
-      was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to nature.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
-      possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and Bernard
-      Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy of the free
-      human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of communism. On this
-      point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's doctrine and pointed out
-      that the State is not a mere individual, but a body composed of dissimilar
-      parts whose unity is to be drawn &ldquo;ex dissimilium hominum consensu.&rdquo; I am
-      as sensitive as anyone about my title to my personal possessions. I
-      dislike having my umbrella stolen or my pocket picked, and if I found a
-      burglar on my premises I am sure I shouldn't be able to imitate the
-      romantic example of the good bishop in &ldquo;Les Misérables.&rdquo; When I found the
-      other day that some young fruit trees I had left in my orchard for
-      planting had been removed in the night I was sensible of a very
-      commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean Valjean was I shouldn't have
-      asked him to come and take some more trees. I should have invited him to
-      return what he had removed or submit to consequences that follow in such
-      circumstances.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
-      necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
-      society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who ventured
-      to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or two hence.
-      Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control and the range
-      of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If mankind finds that
-      it can live more conveniently and more happily without private property it
-      will do so. In spite of the Decalogue private property is only a human
-      arrangement, and no reasonable observer of the operation of the
-      arrangement will pretend that it executes justice unfailingly in the
-      affairs of men. But because the idea of private property has been
-      permitted to override with its selfishness the common good of humanity, it
-      does not follow that there are not limits within which that idea can
-      function for the general convenience and advantage. The remedy is not in
-      abolishing it altogether, but in subordinating it to the idea of equal
-      justice and community of purpose. It will, reasonably understood, deny me
-      the right to call the coal measures, which were laid with the foundations
-      of the earth, my private property or to lay waste a countryside for deer
-      forests, but it will still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of
-      ownership. And the more true the equation of private and public rights is,
-      the more secure shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and
-      common interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the
-      grotesque and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of
-      private property which to some minds make the idea of private property
-      itself inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea
-      of private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
-      the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger of
-      attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard without
-      any apprehensions as to their safety.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
-      ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
-      things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment. I
-      do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
-      experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
-      mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. &ldquo;I do not
-      know how it is,&rdquo; said a very rich man in my hearing, &ldquo;but when I am in
-      London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I want to
-      be in London.&rdquo; He was not wanting to escape from London or the country,
-      but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions and was
-      bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher &ldquo;his hands were full but his
-      soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world.&rdquo; There was wisdom
-      as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that &ldquo;he who was born first
-      has the greatest number of old clothes.&rdquo; It is not a bad rule for the
-      pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage to those
-      who take a pride in its abundance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0078m.jpg" alt="0078m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0078.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0079m.jpg" alt="0079m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0079.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BORES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was talking in
-      the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat blunt manner when
-      Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and began:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, I think America is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; &ldquo;Now, do you mind giving
-      us two minutes?&rdquo; broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom,
-      unabashed and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group.
-      Poor Blossom! I had almost said &ldquo;Dear Blossom.&rdquo; For he is really an
-      excellent fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that
-      he is a bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable
-      company. You feel that you could love Blossom if he would only keep away.
-      If you heard of his death you would be genuinely grieved and would send a
-      wreath to his grave and a nice letter of condolence to his wife and
-      numerous children.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it is only absence that makes the heart grow fond of Blossom. When he
-      appears all your affection for him withers. You hope that he will not see
-      you. You shrink to your smallest dimensions. You talk with an air of
-      intense privacy. You keep your face averted. You wonder whether the back
-      of your head is easily distinguishable among so many heads. All in vain.
-      He approacheth with the remorselessness of fate. He putteth his hand upon
-      your shoulder. He remarketh with the air of one that bringeth new new's
-      and good news&mdash;&ldquo;Well, I think that America is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
-       And then he taketh a chair and thou lookest at the clock and wonderest how
-      soon thou canst decently remember another engagement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Blossom is the bore courageous. He descends on the choicest company
-      without fear or parley. Out, sword, and at 'em, is his motto. He advances
-      with a firm voice and a confident air, as of one who knows he is welcome
-      everywhere and has only to choose his company. He will have nothing but
-      the best, and as he enters the room you may see his eye roving from table
-      to table, not in search of the glad eye of recognition, but of the most
-      select companionship, and having marked down his prey he goes forward
-      boldly to the attack. Salutes the circle with easy familiarity, draw's up
-      his chair with assured and masterful authority, and plunges into the
-      stream of talk with the heavy impact of a walrus or hippopotamus taking a
-      bath. The company around him melts away, but he is not dismayed. Left
-      alone with a circle of empty chairs, he riseth like a giant refreshed,
-      casteth his eye abroad, noteth another group that whetteth his appetite
-      for good fellowship, moveth towards it with bold and resolute front. You
-      may see him put to flight as many as three circles inside an hour, and
-      retire at the end, not because he is beaten, but because there is nothing
-      left worth crossing swords with. &ldquo;A very good club to-night,&rdquo; he says to
-      Mrs B. as he puts on his slippers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not so Trip. He is the bore circumspect. He proceeds by sap and mine where
-      Blossom charges the battlements sword in hand. He enters timidly as one
-      who hopes that he will be unobserved. He goes to the table and examines
-      the newspapers, takes one and seats himself alone. But not so much alone
-      that he is entirely out of the range of those fellows in the corner who
-      keep up such a cut-and-thrust of wit. Perchance one of them may catch his
-      eye and open the circle to him. He readeth his paper sedulously, but his
-      glance passeth incontinently outside the margin or over the top of the
-      page to the coveted group. No responsive eye meets his. He moveth just a
-      thought nearer along the sofa by the wall. Now he is well within hearing.
-      Now he is almost of the company itself. But still unseen&mdash;noticeably
-      unseen. He puts down his paper, not ostentatiously but furtively. He
-      listens openly to the conversation, as one who has been enmeshed in it
-      unconsciously, accidentally, almost unwillingly, for was he not absorbed
-      in his paper until this conversation disturbed him? And now it would be
-      almost uncivil not to listen. He waits for a convenient opening and then
-      gently insinuates a remark like one venturing on untried ice. And the ice
-      breaks and the circle melts. For Trip, too, is a bore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I remember in those wonderful submarine pictures of the brothers
-      Williamson, which we saw in London some time ago, a strange fish at whose
-      approach all the other fish turned tail. It was not, I think, that they
-      feared him, nor that he was less presentable in appearance than any other
-      fish, but simply that there was something about him that made them
-      remember things. I forget what his name was, or whether he even had a
-      name. But his calling was obvious. He was the Club Bore. He was the fish
-      who sent the other fish about their business. I thought of Blossom as I
-      saw that lonely creature whisking through the water in search of some
-      friendly ear into which he could remark&mdash;&ldquo;Well, I think that America
-      is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; or words to that effect. I thought how superior
-      an animal is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish
-      did. He hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn
-      lamb. He looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth
-      even to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his
-      feelings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of
-      sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists
-      on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but this
-      is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. And the humour must not be
-      that counterfeit currency which consists in the retailing of borrowed
-      stories. &ldquo;Of all bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang, and Heaven
-      in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate its species,&rdquo; says De
-      Quincey, &ldquo;the most insufferable is the teller of good stories.&rdquo; It is an
-      over hard saying, subject to exceptions; but it contains the essential
-      truth, for the humour of good company must be an authentic emanation of
-      personality and not a borrowed tale. It is no discredit to be a bore. Very
-      great men have been bores! I fancy that Macaulay, with all his
-      transcendent gifts, was a bore. My head aches even at the thought of an
-      evening spent in the midst of the terrific torrent of facts and
-      certainties that poured from that brilliant and amiable man. I find myself
-      in agreement for once with Melbourne who wished that he was &ldquo;as cocksure
-      of one thing as Macaulay was of everything.&rdquo; There is pretty clear
-      evidence that Wordsworth was a bore and that Coleridge was a bore, and I
-      am sure Bob Southey must have been an intolerable bore. And Neckar's
-      daughter was fortunate to escape Gibbon for he was assuredly a prince of
-      bores. He took pains to leave posterity in no doubt on the point. He wrote
-      his &ldquo;Autobiography&rdquo; which, as a wit observed, showed that &ldquo;he did not know
-      the difference between himself and the Roman Empire. He has related his
-      'progressions from London to Bariton and from Bariton to London' in the
-      same monotonous, majestic periods that he recorded the fall of states and
-      empires.&rdquo; Yes, an indubitable bore. Yet these were all admirable men and
-      even great men. Let not therefore the Blossoms and the Trips be
-      discomfited. It may be that it is not they who are not fit company for us,
-      but we who are not fit company for them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0084m.jpg" alt="0084m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0084.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0027" id="linkimage-0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0085m.jpg" alt="0085m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0085.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      A LOST SWARM
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e were busy with
-      the impossible hen when the alarm came. The impossible hen is sitting on a
-      dozen eggs in the shed, and, like the boy on the burning deck, obstinately
-      refuses to leave the post of duty. A sense of duty is an excellent thing,
-      but even a sense of duty can be carried to excess, and this hen's sense of
-      duty is simply a disease. She is so fiercely attached to her task that she
-      cannot think of eating, and resents any attempt to make her eat as a
-      personal affront or a malignant plot against her impending family. Lest
-      she should die at her post, a victim to a misguided hunger strike, we were
-      engaged in the delicate process of substituting a more reasonable hen, and
-      it was at this moment that a shout from the orchard announced that No. 5
-      was swarming.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had
-      been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells
-      visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around
-      the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the
-      thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more
-      exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You pass
-      it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched
-      within. The next, the whole colony roars out like a cataract, envelops the
-      hive in a cloud of living dust until the queen has emerged and gives
-      direction to the masses that slowly cohere around her as she settles on
-      some branch. The excitement is contagious. It is a call to adventure with
-      the unknown, an adventure sharpened by the threat of loss and tense with
-      the instancy of action. They have the start. It is your wit against their
-      impulse, your strategy against their momentum. The cloud thins and expands
-      as it moves away from the hive and you are puzzled to know whither the
-      main stream is moving in these ever widening folds of motion. The first
-      indeterminate signs of direction to-day were towards the beech woods
-      behind the cottage, but with the aid of a syringe we put up a barrage of
-      water in that direction, and headed them off towards a row of chestnuts
-      and limes at the end of the paddock beyond the orchard. A swift encircling
-      move, armed with syringe and pail, brought them again under the improvised
-      rainstorm. They concluded that it was not such a fine day as they had
-      thought after all, and that they had better take shelter at once, and to
-      our entire content the mass settled in a great blob on a conveniently low
-      bough of a chestnut tree. Then, by the aid of a ladder and patient
-      coaxing, the blob was safely transferred to a skep, and carried off
-      triumphantly to the orchard.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0028" id="linkimage-0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0089m.jpg" alt="0089m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0089.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And now, but for the war, all would have been well. For, but for the war,
-      there would have been a comfortable home in which the adventurers could
-      have taken up their new quarters. But hives are as hard to come by in
-      these days as petrol or matches, or butter or cheese, or most of the other
-      common things of life. We had ransacked England for hives and the
-      neighbourhood for wood with which to make hives; but neither could be had,
-      though promises were plenty, and here was the beginning of the swarms of
-      May, each of them worth a load of hay according to the adage, and never a
-      hive to welcome them with. Perhaps to-morrow something would arrive, if
-      not from Gloucester, then from Surrey. If only the creatures would make
-      themselves at home in the skep for a day or two....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But no. For two hours or so all seemed well. Then perhaps they found the
-      skep too hot, perhaps they detected the odour of previous tenants, perhaps&mdash;but
-      who can read the thoughts of these inscrutable creatures? Suddenly the
-      skep was enveloped in a cyclone of bees, and again the orchard sang with
-      the exciting song of the wings. For a moment the cloud seemed to hover
-      over an apple tree near by, and once more the syringe was at work
-      insisting, in spite of the sunshine, that it was a dreadfully wet day on
-      which to be about, and that a dry skep, even though pervaded by the smell
-      of other bees, had points worth considering. In vain. This time they had
-      made up their minds. It may be that news had come to them, from one of the
-      couriers sent out to prospect for fresh quarters, of a suitable home
-      elsewhere, perhaps a deserted hive, perhaps a snug hollow in some porch or
-      in the bole of an ancient tree. Whatever the goal, the decision was final.
-      One moment the cloud was about us; the air was filled with the
-      high-pitched roar of thirty thousand pair of wings. The next moment the
-      cloud had gone&mdash;gone sailing high over the trees in the paddock and
-      out across the valley. We burst through the paddock fence into the
-      cornfield beyond; but we might as well have chased the wind. Our first
-      load of hay had taken wings and gone beyond recovery. For an hour or two
-      there circled round the deserted skep a few hundred odd bees who had
-      apparently been out when the second decision to migrate was taken, and
-      found themselves homeless and queenless. I saw some of them try to enter
-      other hives, but they were promptly ejected as foreigners by the sentries
-      who keep the porch and admit none who do not carry the authentic odour of
-      the hive. Perhaps the forlorn creatures got back to No. 5, and the young
-      colony left in possession of that tenement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full of hope,
-      for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's bench under the
-      pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and plane, and before
-      nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And it never rains
-      but it pours&mdash;here is a telegram telling us of three hives on the
-      way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We will harvest our
-      loads of hay before they take wing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0029" id="linkimage-0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0090m.jpg" alt="0090m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0090.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0030" id="linkimage-0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0091m.jpg" alt="0091m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0091.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      YOUNG AMERICA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>f you want to
-      understand America,&rdquo; said my host, &ldquo;come and see her young barbarians at
-      play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at Princeton. It will be a great
-      game. Come and see it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured victory
-      in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but consider the
-      record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was as much ahead of
-      Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of Cambridge on the
-      river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It was like a Derby
-      Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the great hall of that
-      magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated men and women, wearing
-      the favours of the rival colleges&mdash;yellow for Princeton and red for
-      Harvard&mdash;passed through the gateways to the platform, filling train
-      after train, that dipped under the Hudson and, coming out into the
-      sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered away with its jolly
-      load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country, through historic
-      Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off towers of Princeton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges, such
-      a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
-      &ldquo;how-d'ye-do's&rdquo; and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
-      times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
-      haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured in
-      the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some terrific
-      memorial of antiquity&mdash;seen from without a mighty circular wall of
-      masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval, or
-      rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the level of
-      the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand spectators&mdash;on
-      this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side, with the sunlight
-      full upon them, the yellows.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
-      playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings&mdash;-for this American
-      game is much more complicated than English Rugger&mdash;its goal-posts and
-      its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
-      minute record of the game.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
-      there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
-      music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
-      like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
-      horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
-      opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
-      Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
-      greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war. Three
-      flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They shout
-      through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line, they wave
-      their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with that leap
-      there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of cheers
-      roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
-      demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of a
-      tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey&mdash;the growl rising
-      to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell, roar
-      for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of us,
-      and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their limbs
-      we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I cannot
-      hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off with the
-      battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand lusty pairs
-      of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid, we rise like
-      one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our cheer-leaders,
-      gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad dervishes, we shout
-      back the song of &ldquo;Har-vard! Har-vard!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into the
-      field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson, that in
-      the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and helmeted so
-      that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic muscular
-      development and horrific visage. At their entrance the megaphones opposite
-      are heard again, and the enemy host rises and repeats its wonderful cheer
-      and tiger growl. We rise and heave the challenge back. And now the teams
-      are in position, the front lines, with the ball between, crouching on the
-      ground for the spring. In the silence that has suddenly fallen on the
-      scene, one hears short, sharp cries of numbers. &ldquo;Five!&rdquo; &ldquo;Eleven!&rdquo; &ldquo;Three!&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Six!&rdquo; &ldquo;Ten!&rdquo; like the rattle of musketry. Then&mdash;crash! The front
-      lines have leapt on each other. There is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs
-      and bodies. The swirl clears and men are seen lying about all over the
-      line as though a shell had burst in their midst, while away to the right a
-      man with the ball is brought down with a crash to the ground by another,
-      who leaps at him like a projectile that completes its trajectory at his
-      ankles.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
-      thrilling minutes&mdash;which, with intervals and stoppages for the
-      attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours&mdash;how the
-      battle surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the
-      tension of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how
-      Harvard scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm
-      of victory, how Princeton drew level&mdash;a cyclone from the other side!&mdash;and
-      forged ahead&mdash;another cyclone&mdash;how man after man went down like
-      an ox, was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how
-      another brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last
-      hardly a man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every
-      convenient interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we
-      jumped up and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how
-      the match ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of
-      victory that is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters&mdash;all
-      this is recorded in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives
-      in my mind as a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous &ldquo;rag&rdquo; in which young and
-      old, gravity and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly
-      confounded.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And what did you think of it?&rdquo; asked my host as we rattled back to New
-      York in the darkness that night. &ldquo;I think it has helped me to understand
-      America,&rdquo; I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
-      explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0031" id="linkimage-0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0095m.jpg" alt="0095m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0095.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0032" id="linkimage-0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0096m.jpg" alt="0096m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0096.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GREAT REPLIES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>t a dinner table
-      the other night, the talk turned upon a certain politician whose cynical
-      traffic in principles and loyalties has eclipsed even the record of
-      Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one defender, an amiable and rather
-      portentous gentleman who did not so much talk as lecture, and whose habit
-      of looking up abstractedly and fixedly at some invisible altitude gave him
-      the impression of communing with the Almighty. He was profuse in his
-      admissions and apologies, but he wound up triumphantly with the remark:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;So was Madame de Pompadour,&rdquo; said a voice from the other side of the
-      table.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
-      replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician with
-      a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of democracy who,
-      like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things for ambition and
-      power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through the dull, solemn man
-      on the other side of the table like a rapier. There was no reply. There
-      was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash of lightning. It
-      revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift, searching intelligence,
-      equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that went with deadly certainty
-      to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed on the whole landscape of
-      discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that gave it larger significance
-      and range.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour and
-      finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
-      absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and personality.
-      There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning phrase that has
-      leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental things. I do not
-      know much about the military genius or the deeds of Augureau, but I know
-      the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon about the celebration
-      at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial ambitions of the First Consul.
-      Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought of the ceremony. &ldquo;Oh, it was very
-      fine,&rdquo; replied the general; &ldquo;there was nothing wanting, <i>except the
-      million of men who have perished in pulling down what you are setting up</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
-      the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
-      make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
-      bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
-      him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian,
-      a poor peasant's son&mdash;a miserable friar of a country town&mdash;was
-      prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
-      Christendom.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; said the Cardinal at last to him, &ldquo;do you think the Pope cares for
-      the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger than
-      all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend <i>you&mdash;you</i>,
-      a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you be then&mdash;where
-      will you be then?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Then, as now,&rdquo; replied Luther. &ldquo;Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
-      God.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
-      venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
-      century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man&mdash;one of
-      the profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
-      country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
-      brilliant author of the papers on &ldquo;The Crisis,&rdquo; that kept the flame of the
-      rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of the
-      United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the Bastille
-      for presentation to Washington. The true character of this great
-      Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had discoursed
-      &ldquo;On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.&rdquo; And Paine answered,
-      &ldquo;God did not make rich and poor. God made male and female and gave the
-      earth for their inheritance."</b>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
-      this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
-      to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
-      Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
-      boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
-      remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo;
-       said the President. &ldquo;Then whose boots do they black?&rdquo; There was the same
-      mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
-      inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. &ldquo;I do not know,
-      madam,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
-      when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
-      dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
-      disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
-      using his department to further his ambitions. &ldquo;Raymond,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you
-      were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
-      is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving the
-      horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he rushed
-      across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely keep pace
-      with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an enormous chin fly
-      fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother asked me what I did
-      that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse bitten in that way.
-      'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him go!' Now, if Mr Chase
-      has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm not going to knock it
-      off, if it will only make his department <i>go!</i>&rdquo; If one were asked to
-      name the most famous answer in history, one might, not unreasonably, give
-      the palm to a woman&mdash;a poor woman, too, who has been dust for three
-      thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke six words that
-      gave her immortality. They have been recalled on thousands of occasions
-      and in all lands, but never more memorably than by John Bright when he was
-      speaking of the hesitation with which he accepted cabinet office: &ldquo;I
-      should have preferred much,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to have remained in the common rank
-      of citizenship in which heretofore I have lived. There is a passage in the
-      Old Testament that has often struck me as being one of great beauty. Many
-      of you will recollect that the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very
-      hospitably entertained by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make
-      her some amends, and he called her to him and asked her what there was he
-      should do for her. 'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to
-      the captain of the host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the
-      Shunamite woman returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the
-      prophet's offer, 'I dwell among mine own people.'&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
-      point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
-      babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if by magic,
-      from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the spiritual, from
-      the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty replies, are another
-      matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp tongue and a quick mind. But
-      great replies are not dependent on wit or cleverness. If they were Cicero
-      would have made many, whereas he never made one. His repartees are perfect
-      of their kind, but they belong to the debating club and the law court.
-      They raise a laugh and score a point, but they are summer lightnings. The
-      great reply does not come from witty minds, but from rare and profound
-      souls. The brilliant adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that
-      reply of Augereau than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it
-      because with all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a
-      great part on the world's stage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0033" id="linkimage-0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0101m.jpg" alt="0101m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0101.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0034" id="linkimage-0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0102m.jpg" alt="0102m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0102.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> went recently to
-      an industrial town in the North on some business, and while there had
-      occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and engines and machinery
-      of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers and engines and machinery of
-      all sorts, and I did my best to appear interested and understanding. But I
-      was neither one nor the other. I was only bored. Boilers and engines, I
-      know, are important things. Compared with a boiler, the finest lyric that
-      was ever written is only a perfume on the gale. There is a practical
-      downrightness about a boiler that makes &ldquo;Drink to me only with thine
-      eyes,&rdquo; or &ldquo;O mistress mine, where are you roaming?&rdquo; or even &ldquo;Twelfth
-      Night&rdquo; itself, a mere idle frivolity. All you can say in favour of
-      &ldquo;Twelfth Night,&rdquo; from the strictly business point of view, is that it
-      doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank heaven for that.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
-      never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought to
-      be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How, for
-      example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of a
-      boiler? How&mdash;and this was still more important&mdash;how could I hope
-      to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
-      gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
-      great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it as
-      much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
-      discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no bowels
-      of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the symbol of
-      brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional values. In
-      Dante's &ldquo;Inferno&rdquo; each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted to give him
-      the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room for me, and
-      there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever among wheels and
-      pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying amidst the thud and din
-      of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily &ldquo;waste&rdquo; to catch those perfumes
-      on the gale, those frivolous rhythms to which I had devoted so much of
-      that life' which should be &ldquo;real and earnest&rdquo; and occupied with serious
-      things like boilers. And so it came about that as my friend talked I
-      spiritually wilted away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
-      learned and articulate boiler.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
-      boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
-      inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a &ldquo;b&rdquo; in
-      boilers and a &ldquo;b&rdquo; in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect was
-      miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit. The
-      light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if I were
-      a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved brother.
-      Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come, I must see
-      his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could whisk us to his
-      house in the suburbs, and there in a great room, surrounded with hundreds
-      of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from the ends of the earth,
-      butterflies from the forests of Brazil and butterflies from the plains of
-      India, and butterflies from the veldt of South Africa and butterflies from
-      the bush of Australia, all arranged in the foliage natural to their
-      habitat to show how their scheme of coloration conformed to their setting.
-      Some of them had their wings folded back and were indistinguishable from
-      the leaves among which they lay. And as my friend, with growing
-      excitement, revealed his treasure, he talked of his adventures in the
-      pursuit of them, and of the law of natural selection and all its bearing
-      upon the mystery of life, its survivals and its failures. This hobby of
-      his was, in short, the key of his world. The boiler house was the prison
-      where he did time. At the magic word &ldquo;butterflies&rdquo; the prison door opened,
-      and out he sailed on the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the
-      mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
-      something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a ship
-      without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair that most
-      of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the end of the
-      journey without ever having found a path and a sense of direction. But a
-      hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial a thing, but it
-      supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm outside the mere
-      routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it will lead. You may
-      begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in continents. You may
-      collect coins, and find that the history of man is written on them. You
-      may begin with bees, and end with the science of life. Ruskin began with
-      pictures and found they led to economics and everything else. For as every
-      road was said to lead to Rome, so every hobby leads out into the universe,
-      and supplies us with a compass for the adventure. It saves us from the
-      humiliation of being merely smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in
-      general, for the world is too full of things to permit us to be anything
-      else, but one field of intensive culture will give even our smattering a
-      respectable foundation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who knows
-      even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might be when
-      he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not know them
-      and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of measurement
-      which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters. He will have,
-      above all, an attachment to life which will make him at home in the world.
-      Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged into this bewildering
-      whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of circumstance. We have in us
-      the genius of speculation, but the further our speculations penetrate the
-      profounder becomes the mystery that baffles us. We are caught in the toils
-      of affections that crumble to dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither
-      like grass, beaten about by storms that shatter our stoutest battlements
-      like spray blown upon the wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little
-      more than dreams within a dream&mdash;or as Carlyle puts it, &ldquo;exhalations
-      that are and then are not.&rdquo; And we share the poet's sense of exile&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      In this house with starry dome,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Shall I never be at home?
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Never wholly at my ease?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
-      stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
-      hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
-      that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
-      without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
-      find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come and
-      go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always renewed.
-      Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with Horace or
-      Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the sense of the
-      mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden of the mind,
-      self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of intractible
-      circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the spirit and
-      endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman in &ldquo;Romany Rye,&rdquo;
-       you will remember, found his deliverance in studying Chinese. His
-      bereavement had left him without God and without hope in the world,
-      without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the things that
-      reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly before him,
-      when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and he thought he
-      heard a voice say, &ldquo;The marks! the marks! cling to the marks! or&mdash;&mdash;-&rdquo;
-       And from this beginning&mdash;but the story is too fruity, too rich with
-      the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book down, turn to the
-      episode, and thank me for sending you again into the enchanted Borrovian
-      realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in books. It is enough
-      for the purpose here to recall this perfect example of the healing power
-      of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little world of our own where we
-      can be at ease, and from whose warmth and friendliness we can look out on
-      the vast conundrum without expecting an answer or being much troubled
-      because we do not get one. It was a hobby that poor Pascal needed to allay
-      that horror of the universe which he expressed in the desolating phrase,
-      &ldquo;Le silence étemel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.&rdquo; For on the wings of
-      the butterfly one can not only outrange the boiler, but can adventure into
-      the infinite in the spirit of happy and confident adventure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0035" id="linkimage-0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0108m.jpg" alt="0108m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0108.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0036" id="linkimage-0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0109m.jpg" alt="0109m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0109.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON HEREFORD BEACON
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">J</span>enny Lind sleeps
-      in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she died is four miles
-      away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble range of the Malverns
-      that marches north and south from Worcester beacon to Gloucester beacon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way up from
-      Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its descent into
-      the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
-      range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the deep
-      trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as this, the
-      Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman legions.
-      Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural ramparts; but
-      the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the work to&mdash;&mdash;.
-      But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell his own story.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
-      conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
-      the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
-      slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of the
-      district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up the steep
-      road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the Cotswolds,
-      Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and the other
-      features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the road,
-      Hereford beacon came in view.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Killed?&rdquo; said I, a little stunned.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
-      from about here you know, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he wasn't
-      killed at all. He died in his bed.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
-      captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
-      sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard tell
-      as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but the
-      capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
-      Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must be
-      fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;He blowed
-      away Little Malvern Church down yonder.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
-      visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
-      ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of Piers
-      Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Left the tower standing he did, sir,&rdquo; pursued the historian. &ldquo;Now, why
-      should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought us
-      to Wynd's Point.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an old
-      gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the little
-      arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out on the
-      beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently declined to
-      go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred to disturb. It was
-      the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and singer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of a
-      vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
-      roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
-      chalet, &ldquo;the golden cage,&rdquo; of the singer fronting the drawing-room bowered
-      in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter pictures
-      of saints, that hang upon the walls&mdash;all speak with mute eloquence of
-      the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres, whose life was an
-      anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet simplicity of her name.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Why did you leave the stage?&rdquo; asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
-      like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
-      surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for the
-      sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for charity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Because,&rdquo; she said, touching the Bible, &ldquo;it left me so little time for
-      this, and&rdquo; (looking at the sunset) &ldquo;none for that.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
-      cuckoo&mdash;his voice failing slightly in these hot June days&mdash;wakes
-      you in the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the
-      shadows lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
-      against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
-      deepening gloom of the vast plain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
-      unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the road,
-      with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the broom to
-      the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come out on the
-      path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the green summits that
-      march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of Worcester beacon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon to
-      Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these ten
-      miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled at your
-      feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of exhilaration
-      that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It is a cheerful
-      solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of the twin shout
-      of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and look out over
-      half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills, Birmingham
-      stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where southward the
-      shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the imagination away with
-      Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you may see our rough island
-      story traced in characters of city, hill, and plain. These grass-grown
-      trenches, where to-day the young lambs are grazing, take us back to the
-      dawn of things and the beginnings of that ancient tragedy of the Celtic
-      race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see
-      Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of the Roses, of &ldquo;false, fleeting,
-      perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the field at Tewkesbury,&rdquo; and of
-      Ancient Pistol, whose &ldquo;wits were thick as Tewkesbury mustard.&rdquo; There is
-      the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and far away Edgehill carries the
-      mind forward to the beginning of that great struggle for a free England
-      which finished yonder at Worcester, where the clash of arms was heard for
-      the last time in our land and where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword
-      for ever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to cast
-      its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the wide
-      plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing here
-      through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to Oxford
-      and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are coming
-      up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom. Now is
-      the moment to turn westward, where
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Bleeds upon the road to Wales.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun, and in
-      the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the far battlements
-      of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of alabaster, and in the
-      woods of the castle that clothe these western slopes a pheasant rends the
-      golden silence with the startled noise and flurry of its flight.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
-      the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
-      suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and a
-      late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through the
-      twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great sycamore
-      by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads of insects
-      has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an unfaltering
-      bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all save a pied
-      wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its graceful tail by the
-      rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come those intimate murmurs of
-      the birds, half chatter, half song, that close the day. Even these grow
-      few and faint until the silence is unbroken.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0037" id="linkimage-0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0115m.jpg" alt="0115m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0115.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0038" id="linkimage-0038"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0116m.jpg" alt="0116m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0116.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHUM
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>hen I turned the
-      key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a familiar sound. It was
-      the &ldquo;thump, thump, thump,&rdquo; of a tail on the floor at the foot of the
-      stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place was vacant. Chum had gone,
-      and he would not return. I knew that the veterinary must have called,
-      pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him away, and that I should hear
-      no more his &ldquo;welcome home!&rdquo; at midnight. No matter what the labours of the
-      day had been or how profound his sleep, he never failed to give me a cheer
-      with the stump of his tail and to blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him
-      &ldquo;Good dog&rdquo; and a pat on the head. Then with a huge sigh of content he
-      would lapse back into slumber, satisfied that the last duty of the day was
-      done, and that all was well with the world for the night. Now he has
-      lapsed into sleep altogether.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will pay
-      my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and in
-      any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that I
-      enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he enjoyed
-      my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom he went,
-      and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to go with,
-      unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person. It was not
-      that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned after a longish
-      absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would leap round and
-      round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent her to the
-      floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's schoolmaster
-      who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and explained that &ldquo;he
-      didn't know his own strength.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and I was
-      the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the woodlands,
-      and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his reddish-brown
-      coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan, and his head
-      down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there was more than a
-      hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was precisely no one
-      ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up. His fine liquid brown
-      eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but he had a nobler head
-      than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain of the Irish terrier in
-      him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat was all his own. And all
-      his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and his genius for friendship.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he was
-      reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had been
-      sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
-      grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin, and
-      he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
-      schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
-      eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
-      something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
-      when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
-      abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
-      ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
-      You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about his
-      affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to the
-      forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled to any
-      good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and watchful,
-      his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury and pity for
-      the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the qualities of a
-      rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into an unspeakable
-      abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your voice and all the
-      world was young and full of singing birds again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
-      that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
-      For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or his
-      colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more than a
-      little of the spirit of the flunkey. &ldquo;A man's a man, for a' that,&rdquo; was not
-      his creed. He discriminated between the people who came to the front door
-      and the people who came to the side door. To the former he was
-      systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly hostile. &ldquo;The poor in a
-      loomp is bad,&rdquo; was his fixed principle, and any one carrying a basket,
-      wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was <i>ipso facto</i> suspect. He
-      held, in short, to the servile philosophy of clothes as firmly as any
-      waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair. Familiarity never altered
-      his convictions. No amount of correction affected his stubborn dislike of
-      postmen. They offended him in many ways. They wore uniforms; they came,
-      nevertheless, to the front door; they knocked with a challenging violence
-      that revolted his sense of propriety. In the end, the burden of their
-      insults was too much for him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of
-      trousers. Perhaps that incident was not unconnected with his passing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
-      Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in leaping
-      a stile&mdash;he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow&mdash;or
-      had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
-      latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
-      for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted. But
-      whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all the
-      veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to the revels
-      in his native woods&mdash;for he had come to us as a pup from a cottage in
-      the heart of the woodland country&mdash;no longer made him tense as a
-      drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and left
-      his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the hill
-      to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into the
-      house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to be
-      forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a place
-      he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream of the
-      happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there waiting to
-      scour the woods with me as of old.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0039" id="linkimage-0039"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0120m.jpg" alt="0120m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0120.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0040" id="linkimage-0040"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0121m.jpg" alt="0121m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0121.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON MATCHES AND THINGS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> had an agreeable
-      assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I went-into a tea-shop and
-      sat down. There were several young waitresses by the counter engaged in
-      animated conversation. They eyed me with that cold aloofness which is the
-      ritual of the order, and which, I take it, is intended to convey to you
-      the fact that they are princesses in disguise who only serve in shops for
-      a pastime. When I had taken out my watch twice with an appearance of
-      ostentatious urgency, one of the princesses came towards me, took my order
-      (looking meanwhile out of the window to remind me that she was not really
-      aware of me, but only happened to be there by chance), and moved
-      languorously away. When she returned she brought tea&mdash;and sugar. In
-      that moment her disdain was transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel
-      who under the disguise of indifference went about scattering benedictions
-      among her customers and assuring them that the spring had come back to the
-      earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future became
-      suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine) had passed
-      magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be sweetened
-      thrice a day by honest sugar.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised how
-      I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my friends
-      through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump person, but
-      in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the spoon and
-      stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer did the spoon
-      seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere survival of an
-      antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the back of your coat.
-      It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the tea-table. To stir your
-      tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It keeps tune with your thoughts
-      if you are alone, and it keeps time with your tongue if you are talking.
-      It helps out the argument, fills up the gaps, provides the animated
-      commentary on your discourse. There are people I shall always remember in
-      the attitude of standing, cup in hand, and stirring, stirring, stirring as
-      the current of talk flowed on. Such a one was that fine old tea-drinker,
-      Prince Kropotkin&mdash;rest his gentle soul if he indeed be among the
-      slain.... With what universal benevolence his patriarchal face used to
-      gleam as he stood stirring and talking, talking and stirring, with the
-      hurry of his teeming thoughts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
-      for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
-      little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
-      of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
-      solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
-      with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon the
-      grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all the
-      pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious than you
-      had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days knitting up your
-      severed friendships with things. You slip into the National Gallery just
-      to see what old favourites have come up from the darkness of the cellars.
-      You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in the great moon that shines
-      again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that chimes gives you a pleasant
-      emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds like the salutation of an old
-      friend who had been given up as lost. And matches.... There was a time
-      when I thought nothing of a match. I would strike a match as thoughtlessly
-      as I would breathe. And for the same reason, that matches were as
-      plentiful as air. I would strike a match and let the wind puff it out;
-      another and let it burn out before using it, simply because I was too busy
-      talking or listening or thinking or doing nothing. I would try to light a
-      pipe in a gale of wind on a mountain top, crouching behind a boulder,
-      getting inside my hat, lying on the ground under my coat, and wasting
-      matches by the dozen. I would get rid of a box of matches a day, and not
-      care a dump. The world was simply choked with matches, and it was almost a
-      duty to go on striking them to make room for the rest. You could get a
-      dozen boxes for a penny or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see
-      great bags of matches with boxes bursting out at the top, and simply
-      asking to be taken. If by some accident you found yourself without a box
-      in your pocket you asked the stranger for a light as confidently as you
-      would ask him for the time o' day. You were asking for something that cost
-      him nothing except a commonplace civility.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
-      Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
-      away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, &ldquo;No; we haven't any.&rdquo; They
-      simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
-      smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the habit
-      and just go on in their sleep. &ldquo;Oh, you funny people,&rdquo; they seem to say,
-      dreamily. &ldquo;Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach you that
-      there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years and years;
-      never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let the other fools
-      follow on.&rdquo; And you go away, feeling much as though you had been caught
-      trying to pass a bad half-crown.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, &ldquo;Can you oblige me
-      with a light, sir?&rdquo; You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or a
-      pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
-      wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
-      fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting to
-      pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket, preparing
-      to have &ldquo;After you, sir,&rdquo; on your lips at the exact moment when he has lit
-      his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out the precious flame.
-      Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps the fellow is only
-      waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting for what the other
-      hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which I
-      can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips I know
-      that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that excellent
-      fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine, and I have
-      had more lights from him in these days than from any other man on earth. I
-      never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it quite boldly,
-      fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me&mdash;but not so often, not
-      nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If&mdash;having borrowed
-      a little too recklessly from him of late&mdash;I go into his room and
-      begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the Peace
-      Conference, or things like that&mdash;is he deceived? Not at all. He knows
-      that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has one left
-      it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his pipe because he
-      knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man Higginson is. I
-      cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
-      tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
-      authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
-      before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
-      welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
-      Lords and the Oval.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning, Your
-      young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is sailing
-      home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds instead of
-      khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters who are
-      strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on historic
-      battlefields and now ask you whether you will have &ldquo;thick or clear,&rdquo; with
-      the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your galley proof is
-      brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you look at with a
-      shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he is that pale,
-      thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago, and who in the
-      interval has been fighting in many lands near and far, in France and
-      Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing the burnished
-      livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a stoutish fellow
-      who turns out to be the old professional released from Germany after long
-      months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one &ldquo;of the lucky ones;
-      nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and lived with the
-      farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir, nothing to
-      complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men and
-      things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those who
-      will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound of Big
-      Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we enter the
-      new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the stimulus of the
-      princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the credit side of
-      things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We have left the deathly
-      solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the moraine is rough and
-      toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we can hear the pleasant
-      tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old pastures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0041" id="linkimage-0041"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0127m.jpg" alt="0127m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0127.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0042" id="linkimage-0042"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0128m.jpg" alt="0128m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0128.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING REMEMBERED
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>s I lay on the
-      hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods watching the
-      harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows chasing each other
-      across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were looking down with me.
-      For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an old school book is scored
-      with the names of generations of scholars. Near by are the earthworks of
-      the ancient Britons, and on the face of the hill is a great white horse
-      carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those white marks, that look like sheep
-      feeding on the green hill-side, are reminders of the great war. How long
-      ago it seems since the recruits from the valley used to come up here to
-      learn the art of trench-digging, leaving these memorials behind them
-      before they marched away to whatever fate awaited them! All over the
-      hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit by merry parties on happy
-      holidays. One scorched and blackened area, more spacious than the rest,
-      marks the spot where the beacon fire was lit to celebrate the signing of
-      Peace. And on the boles of the beech trees are initials carved deep in the
-      bark&mdash;some linked like those of lovers, some freshly cut, some old
-      and covered with lichen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and
-      school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is as
-      ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school desks
-      of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of the
-      schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted them.
-      There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood or
-      scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled. And the
-      joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found pleasure in
-      whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice white ceiling above
-      me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's hankering for a
-      charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies. But at the back of
-      it all, the explanation of those initials on the boles of the beeches is a
-      desire for some sort of immortality&mdash;terrestrial if not celestial.
-      Even the least of us would like to be remembered, and so we carve our
-      names on tree trunks and tombstones to remind later generations that we
-      too once passed this way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great. One of
-      the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will trumpet
-      its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries to take care
-      that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's &ldquo;Exegi monumentum ære
-      perennius&rdquo; is one of many confident assertions that he knew he would be
-      among the immortals. &ldquo;I have raised a monument,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;more enduring
-      than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings; a monument which shall
-      not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by the rage of the north wind,
-      nor by the countless years and the flight of ages.&rdquo; The same magnificent
-      confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud declaration&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had
-      written a song of a sparrow&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Of which I sang one song that will not die.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was &ldquo;writ in water,&rdquo; but behind
-      the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for immortality.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable confidence.
-      &ldquo;I'll be more respected,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a hundred years after I am dead than I
-      am at present;&rdquo; and even John Knox had his eye on an earthly as well as a
-      heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus. &ldquo;Theologians there will always
-      be in abundance,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;the like of me comes but once in centuries.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
-      their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
-      conceit on the subject. &ldquo;What I write,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is not written on slate
-      and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of years can
-      efface it.&rdquo; And again, &ldquo;I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be
-      well-lighted, the guests few and select.&rdquo; A proud fellow, if ever there
-      was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le Brun-Pindare,
-      cherished his dream of immortality. &ldquo;I do not die,&rdquo; he said grandly; &ldquo;<i>I
-      quit the time</i>.&rdquo; And beside this we may put Victor Hugo's rather
-      truculent, &ldquo;It is time my name ceased to fill the world.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
-      that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. &ldquo;Do you suppose,&rdquo; he
-      said, &ldquo;to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
-      should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
-      service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
-      Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
-      toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has ever
-      looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life, then at
-      last it would begin to live.&rdquo; The context, it is true, suggests that a
-      celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a terrestrial; but
-      earthly glory was never far from his mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject is one
-      of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in books. I
-      must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable terms. In the
-      preface to his &ldquo;Account of Corsica&rdquo; he says:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <i>For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
-      ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine
-      literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish
-      a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a
-      respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having the
-      character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. (</i>Oh, you
-      rogue!<i>) To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day
-      is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a
-      perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural
-      disposition an easy play (&rdquo;</i>You were drunk last night, you dog<i>&ldquo;),
-      and yet indulge the pride of superior genius when he considers that by
-      those who know him only as an author he never ceases to be respected. Such
-      an author in his hours of gloom and discontent may have the consolation to
-      think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers,
-      and such an author may cherish the hope of being remembered after death,
-      which has been a great object of the noblest minds in all ages.</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition. Most
-      of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of Gray's
-      depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the &ldquo;dull cold ear of
-      death.&rdquo; In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy and
-      immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of &ldquo;Alpha of
-      the Plough&rdquo; an agreeable fancy something like this. In the year two
-      thousand&mdash;or it may be three thousand&mdash;yes, let us do the thing
-      handsomely and not stint the centuries&mdash;in the year three thousand
-      and ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and
-      the Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe
-      for democracy&mdash;at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer
-      who has been swished that morning from the British Isles across the
-      Atlantic to the Patagonian capital&mdash;swished, I need hardly remark,
-      being the expression used to describe the method of flight which consists
-      in being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made to
-      complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be desired&mdash;bursts
-      in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered by him in the
-      course of some daring investigations of the famous subterranean passages
-      of the ancient British capital&mdash;those passages which have so long
-      perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the Patagonian savants,
-      some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers, and some that they
-      were the roadways of a people who had become so afflicted with photophobia
-      that they had to build their cities underground. The trophy is a book by
-      one &ldquo;Alpha of the Plough.&rdquo; It creates an enormous sensation. It is put
-      under a glass case in the Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is
-      translated into every Patagonian dialect. It is read in schools. It is
-      referred to in pulpits. It is discussed in learned societies. Its author,
-      dimly descried across the ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0043" id="linkimage-0043"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0134m.jpg" alt="0134m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0134.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
-      celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
-      assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
-      marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha&mdash;a gentleman with a flowing
-      beard and a dome-like brow&mdash;that overlooks the market-place, and
-      places wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of
-      bells and a salvo of artillery.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you, my
-      dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in the
-      New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved for most,
-      even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world to-day. And
-      yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who writes has the
-      best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox, who among the
-      statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But Wordsworth and
-      Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb, even
-      second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the temple
-      of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military feats of
-      Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza of the
-      poem in which he poured out his creed&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      He either fears his fate too much,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Or his deserts are small.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That dares not put it to the touch
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      To win or lose it all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship with
-      Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he befriended
-      a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the name of his
-      benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of Ægina is full
-      of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would like to be
-      remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went to Pindar
-      and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his praise.
-      Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. &ldquo;Why, for so much
-      money,&rdquo; said Pytheas, &ldquo;I can erect a statue of bronze in the temple.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Very likely.&rdquo; On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And
-      now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the statues
-      of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples
-      themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the ode
-      of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer paths
-      to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of the Earl
-      of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of Shakespeare
-      live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their dedication. But
-      one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise you to go and give
-      Mr &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; £200 and a commission to send your name
-      echoing down the corridors of time.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; (you
-      will fill in the blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them.
-      It would be safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a
-      rose, or an overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can
-      confer a modest immortality. They have done so for many. A certain
-      Maréchal Neil is wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which
-      is as enviable a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr
-      Mackintosh is talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of
-      rain, and even Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his
-      battles. It would not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone
-      will be thought of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just
-      as Archimedes is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the
-      healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps
-      one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of
-      forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike, and
-      we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as if the
-      world babbles about us for ever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0044" id="linkimage-0044"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0137m.jpg" alt="0137m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0137.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0045" id="linkimage-0045"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0138m.jpg" alt="0138m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0138.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON DINING
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>here are people
-      who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can hoard it not for the
-      sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy, for the satisfaction of
-      feeling that they have got something locked up that they could spend if
-      they chose without being any the poorer and that other people would enjoy
-      knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending what they can afford to spend.
-      It is a pleasure akin to the economy of the Scotsman, which, according to
-      a distinguished member of that race, finds its perfect expression in
-      taking the tube when you can afford a cab. But the gift of secrecy is
-      rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the sake of telling them. We spend our
-      secrets as Lamb's spendthrift spent his money&mdash;while they are fresh.
-      The joy of creating an emotion in other people is too much for us. We like
-      to surprise them, or shock them, or please them as the case may be, and we
-      give away the secret with which we have been entrusted with a liberal hand
-      and a solemn request &ldquo;to say nothing about it.&rdquo; We relish the luxury of
-      telling the secret, and leave the painful duty of keeping it to the other
-      fellow. We let the horse out and then solemnly demand that the stable door
-      shall be shut so that it shan't escape, I have done it myself&mdash;often.
-      I have no doubt that I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret
-      to reveal, but I shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely
-      selfish reasons, which will appear later. You may conceive me going about
-      choking with mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years
-      have I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can dine
-      wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the atmosphere
-      restful, and the prices moderate&mdash;in short, the happy mean between
-      the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the uncompromising
-      cheapness of Lockhart's. In those extremes I find no satisfaction.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its
-      ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to a
-      good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren't many
-      families that enjoyed their &ldquo;vittles&rdquo; more than her's did, and I can claim
-      the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that I count
-      good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I could join
-      very heartily in Peacock's chorus:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;How can a man, in his life of a span,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Do anything better than dine.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Give me a satisfactory' dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel
-      themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads the
-      landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who insisted
-      that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life. That, I think,
-      is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few things more
-      revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by taking emetics.
-      But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise for enjoying a good
-      dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good dinners. I see no
-      necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and a holy mind. There was
-      a saintly man once in this city&mdash;a famous man, too&mdash;who was
-      afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out to dinner, he
-      had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to enable him to
-      start even with the other guests. And it is on record that when the
-      ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with Cardinal
-      Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses that
-      hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season of
-      fasting, &ldquo;I fear,&rdquo; said one of them, &ldquo;that there is a lobster salad side
-      to the Cardinal.&rdquo; I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side too. A
-      hot day and a lobster salad&mdash;what happier conjunction can we look for
-      in a plaguey world?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, in making this confession, I am neither <i>gourmand</i> nor <i>gourmet</i>.
-      Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic
-      conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and
-      the great language of the <i>menu</i> does not stir my pulse. I do not ask
-      for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt
-      would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for
-      talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was
-      pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have for
-      supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as the
-      shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right
-      spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes&mdash;eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
-      smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke
-      approvingly of Sancho's choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way with
-      him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against his
-      rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with
-      conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the
-      matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to
-      follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart's desire at the
-      Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel when I
-      enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things. I stroke
-      the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and rises, purring
-      with dignity, under my caress. I say &ldquo;Good evening&rdquo; to the landlord who
-      greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once cordial and
-      restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of his hand. No
-      frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a neat-handed
-      Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress and white
-      cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility and aloofness
-      that establishes the perfect relationship&mdash;obliging, but not
-      familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The napery
-      makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a mirror,
-      and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced dish of
-      hors d'ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the modest
-      four-course table d'hôte begins, and when at the end you light your
-      cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only dined,
-      but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement, touched with
-      the subtle note of a personality.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall not
-      tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It may be
-      in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn, or it
-      may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you because I
-      sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it I shall shatter
-      the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the Mermaid and find its
-      old English note of kindly welcome and decorous moderation gone, and that
-      in its place there will be a noisy, bustling, popular restaurant with a
-      band, from which I shall flee. When it is &ldquo;discovered&rdquo; it will be lost, as
-      the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so I shall keep its secret. I only
-      purr it to the cat who arches her back and purrs understanding in
-      response. It is the bond of freemasonry between us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0046" id="linkimage-0046"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0142m.jpg" alt="0142m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0142.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0047" id="linkimage-0047"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0143m.jpg" alt="0143m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0143.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was leaning over
-      the rails of the upper deck idly watching the Chinese whom, to the number
-      of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre and were to disgorge at Halifax,
-      when the bugle sounded for lunch. A mistake, I thought, looking at my
-      watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon hour was one. Then I remembered. I
-      had not corrected my watch that morning by the ship's clock. In our
-      pursuit of yesterday across the Atlantic we had put on another
-      three-quarters of an hour. Already on this journey we had outdistanced
-      to-day by two and a half hours. By the time we reached Halifax we should
-      have gained perhaps six hours. In thought I followed the Chinamen
-      thundering across Canada to Vancouver, and thence onward across the
-      Pacific on the last stage of their voyage. And I realised that by the time
-      they reached home they would have caught yesterday up.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
-      this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
-      years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
-      thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always the
-      same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of it than
-      I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind as
-      insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
-      beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we were
-      overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by sea and
-      land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight across the
-      plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it was neither
-      yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a confusion of
-      all three.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
-      absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom&mdash;a parochial illusion
-      of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
-      axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
-      light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that they
-      were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
-      numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away on
-      the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length of
-      light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
-      meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
-      and dark&mdash;what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for
-      ever and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark&mdash;not many
-      days, but just one day and that always midday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
-      itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck of
-      dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A few
-      hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of dark, I
-      should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo sky&mdash;specks
-      whose strip of daylight was many times the length of ours, and whose year
-      would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the astronomers tell us that
-      Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years? Think of it&mdash;our
-      Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round a single solar year
-      of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and live to a green old
-      age according to our reckoning, and still never see the glory of
-      midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our ideas of Time
-      have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune&mdash;if, that is,
-      there be any dwellers on Neptune.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts of
-      other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this regal orb
-      above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and numbered
-      their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons by the
-      illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of other
-      systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to have any
-      fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the unthinkable
-      void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time: there was only
-      duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of fable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As I reached this depressing conclusion&mdash;not a novel or original one,
-      but always a rather cheerless one&mdash;a sort of orphaned feeling stole
-      over me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
-      from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
-      eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly in
-      the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a gay time
-      on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during yesterday's
-      storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of his comrades at
-      an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges before him, was
-      crying something that sounded like &ldquo;Al-lay! Al-lay!&rdquo; counting the money in
-      his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he doubted whether it was
-      all there, but because he liked the feel and the look of it. A sprightly
-      young rascal, dressed as they all were in a grotesque mixture of garments,
-      French and English and German, picked up on the battlefields of France,
-      where they had been working for three years, stole up behind the
-      orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me as he did so) snatched an
-      orange and bolted. There followed a roaring scrimmage on deck, in the
-      midst of which the orange-seller's coppers were sent flying along the
-      boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and scuffling, and from which the
-      author of the mischief emerged riotously happy and, lighting a cigarette,
-      flung himself down with an air of radiant good humour, in which he
-      enveloped me with a glance of his bold and merry eye.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
-      illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass, not
-      intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The experiences
-      were always associated with great physical weariness and the sense of the
-      endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the Dauphiné coming down
-      from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other experience in the Lake
-      District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a companion in the doorway
-      of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain. We had come to the end of
-      our days in the mountains, and now we were going back to Keswick, climbing
-      Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was robed in clouds, and the rain was
-      of that determined kind that admits of no hope. And so, after a long wait,
-      we decided that Helvellyn &ldquo;would not go,&rdquo; as the climber would say, and,
-      putting on our mackintoshes and shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for
-      Keswick by the lower slopes of the mountains&mdash;by the track that
-      skirts Great Dodd and descends by the moorlands into the Vale of St John.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung low
-      over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
-      booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
-      tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
-      struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to be
-      without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious loneliness
-      of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the late afternoon
-      we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the Vale of St John
-      and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the road. What with
-      battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the dripping mackintosh
-      and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked myself into that
-      passive mental state which is like a waking dream, in which your voice
-      sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your thoughts seem to play
-      irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering consciousness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember that
-      it is what Mr Chesterton calls &ldquo;a rolling road, a reeling road.&rdquo; It is
-      like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it is going
-      down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for Penrith,
-      then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that goal, only to
-      give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so on, and all the time
-      it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or to Penrith, but is sidling
-      crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road which is like the
-      whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of his signature, thus:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0048" id="linkimage-0048"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0148m.jpg" alt="0148m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0148.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw through
-      the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that fine
-      mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses that sustain
-      the southern face were visible. They looked like the outstretched fingers
-      of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds and clutching the
-      earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The image fell in with
-      the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the similitude out to my
-      companion as we paced along the muddy road.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and we
-      went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As we
-      did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds and
-      clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere, far
-      off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same mist
-      of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
-      gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been years
-      ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might have
-      been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was this
-      evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the impression
-      remained of something outside the confines of time. I had passed into a
-      static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished, and Time was
-      only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I had walked
-      through the shadow into the deeps.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when I
-      reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very earnestly
-      in order to discover the time of the trains for London next day. And the
-      recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings brought my
-      thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just below me, was
-      happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread, one of those
-      long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck from the shore
-      at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed along a rope
-      connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of the man as he
-      devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the brown crust
-      reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had gone for lunch
-      long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this time. I turned
-      hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch back
-      three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the fiction
-      of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0049" id="linkimage-0049"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0150m.jpg" alt="0150m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0150.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0050" id="linkimage-0050"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0151m.jpg" alt="0151m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0151.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      TWO DRINKS OF MILK
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he cabin lay a
-      hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between Sneam and
-      Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and out to the
-      open Atlantic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down
-      the rocks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to the
-      cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milk? Yes. Would we come in?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade of
-      the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother of the
-      girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and having
-      done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen floor out
-      into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and on a bench by
-      the ingle sat the third member of the family.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her
-      eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and
-      untroubled as a child's. She paused in her knitting to make room for me on
-      the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she played
-      the hostess.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you have travelled in Kerry you don't need to be told of the charm of
-      the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful
-      country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of
-      Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the look
-      of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a spring
-      morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and to know
-      them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of Kerry,
-      O'Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities of a
-      poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always warm with
-      the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted with
-      wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving pleasure to
-      others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every peasant you meet
-      is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted if you will stop to
-      talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be your guide. It is like
-      being back in the childhood of the world, among elemental things and an
-      ancient, unhasting people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess in
-      disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that a
-      duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of Sneam,
-      five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin and among
-      these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she had caught
-      something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out there through
-      the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of exiles had gone to
-      far lands. Some few had returned and some had been for ever silent. As I
-      sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle accents all the tale of
-      a stricken people and of a deserted land. There was no word of complaint&mdash;only
-      a cheerful acceptance of the decrees of Fate. There is the secret of the
-      fascination of the Kérry temperament&mdash;the happy sunlight playing
-      across the sorrow of things.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost
-      to the brim, and a couple of mugs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to
-      pay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sure, there's nothing to pay,&rdquo; said the old lady with just a touch of
-      pride in her sweet voice. &ldquo;There's not a cabin in Kerry where you'll not
-      be welcome to a drink of milk.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed
-      in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane, and
-      as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they added a
-      benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague M'Carty's
-      hotel&mdash;Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker, whose
-      rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits among
-      the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with
-      many-coloured flies&mdash;we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville
-      and heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take the
-      northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much better
-      made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before the
-      coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a day
-      of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the lake we
-      dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage&mdash;neat and
-      well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense of
-      plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark of a
-      dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged
-      interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and
-      leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before
-      us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt that
-      we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver affairs
-      than thirsty travelers to attend to.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back to
-      the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed suddenly
-      less friendly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two
-      glasses&mdash;a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of
-      feature. While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the
-      doorstep, looking away across the lake to where the noble form of
-      Schiehallion dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time
-      was money and talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty
-      haste.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What have we to pay, please?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sixpence.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked
-      something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant
-      memory.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0051" id="linkimage-0051"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0155m.jpg" alt="0155m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0155.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0052" id="linkimage-0052"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0156m.jpg" alt="0156m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0156.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was my fortune
-      the other evening to be at dinner with a large company of doctors. While
-      we were assembling I fell into conversation with an eminent physician,
-      and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked that we English seasoned our
-      dishes far too freely. We scattered salt and pepper and vinegar over our
-      food so recklessly that we destroyed the delicacy of our taste, and did
-      ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was especially unfriendly to the use
-      of salt. He would not admit even that it improved the savour of things. It
-      destroyed our sense of their natural flavour, and substituted a coarser
-      appeal to the palate. From the hygienic point of view, the habit was all
-      wrong. All the salts necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat,
-      and the use of salt independently is entirely harmful.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Take the egg, for example,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It contains in it all the elements
-      necessary for the growth of a chicken&mdash;salt among the rest. That is
-      sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article of food.
-      Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise its delicate
-      flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.&rdquo; And he concluded, as
-      we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example of the Japanese
-      in this matter. &ldquo;They,&rdquo; he said laughingly, &ldquo;only take salt when they want
-      to die.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
-      and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
-      applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
-      who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with great
-      energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we eat contain
-      the salt required by the human body. &ldquo;Not even the egg?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;No, not
-      even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our foods, and even if
-      the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw state they tend to lose
-      their character cooked.&rdquo; He admitted that that was an argument for eating
-      things <i>au naturel</i> more than is the practice. But he was firm in his
-      conviction that the separate use of salt is essential. &ldquo;And as for
-      flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw, with or without salt. What
-      comparison is there?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about the
-      Japanese), &ldquo;are there not races who do not use salt?&rdquo; &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; said
-      he, &ldquo;the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of salt is
-      supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of the prime
-      essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause or another, is
-      seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute exactness in the
-      mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of salt to eat with
-      their food they die.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening in
-      examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt I
-      should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the face
-      of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have quoted,
-      especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians. Yet I
-      daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the facts.
-      For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice, the
-      Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the world,
-      and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat their fish
-      in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would go far to
-      explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
-      the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about which
-      there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be a
-      commonplace thing like the use of salt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random&mdash;men whose
-      whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its requirements&mdash;whose
-      views on the subject were in violent antagonism. They approached their
-      subject from contrary angles and with contrary sets of facts, and the
-      truth they were in search of took a wholly different form for each.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
-      judicious manipulation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our air
-      service. He was very confident that we were &ldquo;simply out of it&mdash;that
-      was all, simply out of it.&rdquo; And he was full of facts on the subject. <b>I
-      don't like people who brim over with facts&mdash;who lead facts about, as
-      Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few people
-      so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His conclusions
-      are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot sort them out and
-      add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès called &ldquo;loose,
-      unstitched minds.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
-      facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember whether
-      the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her husband had
-      told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so bad as that,
-      but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact away in the
-      chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not infrequently,
-      that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something chipped off, and I
-      can never trust it until I have verified my references.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was that,
-      so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell you how
-      many English machines had failed to return on each day of the week, and
-      how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to descend. And
-      judging from his figures he was quite right. &ldquo;We were out of it&mdash;simply
-      out of it.&rdquo; Yet the truth is that while his facts were right, his
-      deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken account of some
-      facts, but had left other equally important facts out of consideration.
-      For example, through all this time the German airmen had been on the
-      defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen had taken great
-      risks for a great object. They had gone miles over the enemy's lines&mdash;as
-      much as fifty miles over&mdash;and had come back with priceless
-      information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but the whole
-      truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this time the most
-      victorious element of our Army.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are not
-      always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is often composed
-      of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to contradict each
-      other. Take the handkerchief incident in &ldquo;Othello.&rdquo; Poor Desdemona could
-      not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that the Moor saw.
-      Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello believed she had
-      given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio wipe his beard
-      with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the catastrophe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them in
-      real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
-      free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
-      report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
-      knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
-      knife discovered&mdash;also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of
-      pawntickets for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he
-      was a thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
-      his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
-      clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of the trousers
-      was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt uncomfortable. He
-      took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was doing so he saw a
-      steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a timid person he
-      furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches came on, and when he
-      had got his &ldquo;take&rdquo; he left to transcribe it, having forgotten all about
-      the knife. The rest followed as stated. The pawntickets, which seemed so
-      strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were of course not his at all. They
-      belonged to the owner of the suit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You remember that Browning in &ldquo;The Ring and the Book,&rdquo; tells the story of
-      the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before he
-      feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
-      annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
-      different aspects of one truth. &ldquo;Mostly,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;matters of any
-      consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself, I
-      am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
-      contradicted myself three times.&rdquo; I fancy it is this discovery of the
-      falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less cocksure
-      as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts that belong
-      to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that &ldquo;a lie that is only
-      half a truth is ever the blackest of lies&rdquo;; but he is wrong. It is the
-      fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter) which is the most
-      dangerous lie&mdash;for a fact seems so absolute, so incontrovertible.
-      Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts, their arrangement
-      and concealment. It was never better stated than by a famous business man
-      in an action for libel which I have referred to in another connection. He
-      was being examined about the visit of Government experts to his works, and
-      the instructions he gave to his manager. And this, as I remember it, was
-      the dialogue between counsel and witness:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you tell him to tell them the facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The whole facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;<i>Selected facts</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the midst
-      of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody bearing his
-      name.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to a
-      scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things, we
-      cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of politics
-      and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a speech in which
-      there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of which was a
-      colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is so easy to make
-      the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in the realm that lies
-      outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation is denounced as the
-      heresy of another. Justification by &ldquo;works&rdquo; is displaced by justification
-      by faith, and that in turn is superseded by justification by &ldquo;service&rdquo;
-       which is &ldquo;works&rdquo; in new terms. Which is truth and which error? Or is that
-      the real alternative? May they not be different facets of one truth. The
-      prism breaks up the sunlight into many different colours and facts are
-      only the broken lights of truth. In this perplexing world we must be
-      prepared to find the same truth demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die
-      because they take salt, and the fact that Indians die because they don't
-      take it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0053" id="linkimage-0053"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0163m.jpg" alt="0163m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0163.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0054" id="linkimage-0054"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0164m.jpg" alt="0164m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0164.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GREAT MEN
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was reading just
-      now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of him expressed by
-      Macaulay who declared him to be &ldquo;the greatest man since Milton.&rdquo; I paused
-      over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally enough to ask myself
-      who were the great Englishmen in history&mdash;for the sake of argument,
-      the six greatest. I found the question so exciting that I had reached the
-      end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time) almost before I had reached
-      the end of my list. I began by laying down my premises or principles. I
-      would not restrict the choice to men of action. The only grievance I have
-      against Plutarch is that he followed that course. His incomparable
-      &ldquo;Lives,&rdquo; would be still more satisfying, a still more priceless treasury
-      of the ancient world, if, among his crowd of statesmen and warriors, we
-      could make friends with Socrates and Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus,
-      with the men whose work survived them as well as with the men whose work
-      is a memory. And I rejected the blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I
-      would not have in my list a mere homicidal genius. My great man may have
-      been a great killer of his kind, but he must have some better claim to
-      inclusion than the fact that he had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On
-      the other hand, I would not exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to
-      be a bad man. Henry Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad
-      men. &ldquo;Greatness,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;consists in bringing all manner of mischief
-      upon mankind, and goodness in removing it from them.&rdquo; And it was to
-      satirise the traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific
-      satire &ldquo;The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,&rdquo; probably having in mind the
-      Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
-      traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad man.
-      I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that he was
-      a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful ogre, a
-      sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless, ruthless
-      jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent, merciless as
-      a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a sort of
-      mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought of nature.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
-      governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
-      mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was a
-      great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about Cæsar,
-      but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds down twenty
-      centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must have design. It
-      must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere accident, emotion or
-      effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured by its influence on the
-      current of the world, on its extension of the kingdom of the mind, on its
-      contribution to the riches of living. Applying tests like these, who are
-      our six greatest Englishmen? For our first choice there would be a
-      unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the greatest thing we have done. He is our
-      challenger in the fists of the world, and there is none to cross swords
-      with him. Like Sirius, he has a magnitude of his own. Take him away from
-      our heavens, conceive him never to have been born, and the imaginative
-      wealth of fife shrinks to a lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's
-      phrase, &ldquo;poor indeed.&rdquo; There is nothing English for which we would
-      exchange him. &ldquo;Indian Empire or no Indian Empire,&rdquo; we say with Carlyle,
-      &ldquo;we cannot do without our Shakespeare.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
-      indisputably to him who had
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;... a voice whose sound was like the sea.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
-      harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of the
-      sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
-      intangible, indestructible. With him stands his &ldquo;chief of men&rdquo;&mdash;the
-      &ldquo;great bad man&rdquo; of Burke&mdash;the one man of action in our annals capable
-      of measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
-      Bismarck in the realm of the spirit&mdash;the man at whose name the cheek
-      of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
-      death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
-      these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda) first
-      made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as the
-      bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning eternally
-      with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his soul to tatters,
-      and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding eloquence, and Burke,
-      the prose Milton, to whose deep well all statesmanship goes with its pail,
-      and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court in his brown wig, and Newton
-      plumbing the ultimate secrets of this amazing universe, and deep-browed
-      Darwin unravelling the mystery of life, and Wordsworth giving &ldquo;to weary
-      feet the gift of rest,&rdquo; and Dickens bringing with him a world of creative
-      splendour only less wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these
-      and a host of others aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip
-      him of all the legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name,
-      and he is still one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic,
-      enlightened man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first
-      great Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
-      quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be Roger&mdash;there
-      by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range of his
-      adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through which he
-      ploughed his lonely way to truth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a woman,
-      Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic &ldquo;lady of the lamp,&rdquo; but
-      as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the adventurer into
-      a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by a will of iron, a
-      terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful and creative woman
-      this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not because she is unworthy,
-      but because she must head a companion fist of great Englishwomen. I
-      hurriedly summon up two candidates from among our English saints&mdash;Sir
-      Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the intolerance (incredible to
-      modern ears) that could jest so diabolically at the martyrdom of the
-      &ldquo;heretic,&rdquo; Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his place as the most fragrant
-      flower of English culture, but if greatness be measured by achievement and
-      enduring influence he must yield place to the astonishing revivalist of
-      the eighteenth century who left a deeper mark upon the spiritual life of
-      England than any man in our history.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is my list&mdash;Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
-      Bacon, John Wesley&mdash;and anybody can make out another who cares and a
-      better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
-      unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is not
-      a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the kibe of
-      Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
-      contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher. If
-      the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness cannot
-      be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left out of any
-      list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature, we are poor
-      in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see the great
-      name of Turner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0055" id="linkimage-0055"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0169m.jpg" alt="0169m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0169.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0056" id="linkimage-0056"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0170m.jpg" alt="0170m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0170.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON SWEARING
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> young officer in
-      the flying service was describing to me the other day some of his recent
-      experiences in France. They were both amusing and sensational, though told
-      with that happy freedom from vanity and self-consciousness which is so
-      pleasant a feature of the British soldier of all ranks. The more he has
-      done and seen the less disposed he seems to regard himself as a hero. It
-      is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging is a sham currency. It is the base
-      coin with which the fraudulent pay their way. F. C. Selous was the
-      greatest big game hunter of modern times, but when he talked about his
-      adventures he gave the impression of a man who had only been out in the
-      back garden killing slugs. And Peary, who found the North Pole, writes as
-      modestly as if he had only found a new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr
-      Cook, who didn't find the North Pole and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who
-      does the boasting. And the man who talks most about patriotism is usually
-      the man who has least of that commodity, just as the man who talks most
-      about his honesty is rarely to be trusted with your silver spoons. A man
-      who really loves his country would no more brag about it than he would
-      brag about loving his mother.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to write of
-      him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
-      good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
-      seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It was
-      just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
-      convolvulus overgrows my garden. &ldquo;Hell&rdquo; was his favourite expletive, and
-      he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
-      scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
-      he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it as
-      a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear that
-      he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only secular
-      quality it possesses&mdash;the quality of emphasis. It is speech breaking
-      bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the dictionary and
-      the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord in music that in
-      shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music which is all discord
-      is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is deadly dull.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
-      emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
-      habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. &ldquo;When I have said
-      'Malaga,'&rdquo; says Plancus, in the &ldquo;Vicomte de Bragelonne,&rdquo; &ldquo;I am no longer a
-      man.&rdquo; He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his imprecations
-      for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils swell and his
-      eyes flash fire as he cries, &ldquo;Malaga.&rdquo; It is a good swear word. It has the
-      advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely what a swear word
-      should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying nothing. It should be
-      incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the passion that evokes it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If &ldquo;Malaga&rdquo; has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was that
-      defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. &ldquo;'Damns' have had
-      their day,&rdquo; he said, and when he swore he used the &ldquo;oath referential.&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Odds hilts and blades,&rdquo; he said, or &ldquo;Odds slanders and lies,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Odds
-      bottles and glasses.&rdquo; But when he sat down to write his challenge to
-      Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him. &ldquo;Do, Sir
-      Lucius, let me begin with a damme,&rdquo; he said. He had to give up artificial
-      swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to something which had
-      a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it is the idea of being
-      a little wicked that is one of the attractions of swearing. It is a
-      symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so. For in its origin
-      always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates spoke &ldquo;By the Gods,&rdquo;
-       he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest reverence he could
-      command. But the oaths of to-day are not the expression of piety, but of
-      violent passion, and the people who indulge in a certain familiar
-      expletive would not find half so much satisfaction in it if they felt
-      that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration of faith&mdash;&ldquo;By
-      our Lady.&rdquo; That is the way our ancestors used to swear, and we have
-      corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith and meaning.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of life
-      breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is the
-      prerogative of the soldier to be &ldquo;full of strange oaths.&rdquo; In this respect
-      Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used &ldquo;strange oaths.&rdquo; He
-      stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most industrious in
-      it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that have come down
-      to us which are not garnished with &ldquo;damns&rdquo; or &ldquo;By Gods.&rdquo; Hear him on the
-      morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to gossip Creevey&mdash;&ldquo;It
-      has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It
-      has been a damned nice thing&mdash;the nearest run thing you ever saw in
-      your life.&rdquo; Or when some foolish Court flunkey appeals to him to support
-      his claim to ride in the carriage with the young Queen on some public
-      occasion&mdash;&ldquo;Her Majesty can make you ride on the box or inside the
-      carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's dog.&rdquo; But in this he
-      followed not only the practice of soldiers in all times, but the
-      fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to have regarded
-      himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at the language of
-      the Prince Regent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,&rdquo; he remarks,
-      speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. &ldquo;Then he speaks and swears so like
-      old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the room with
-      him.&rdquo; This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices, but whose
-      recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It suggests also
-      that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of his own
-      comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and swore as
-      naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that other
-      famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy, as when,
-      speaking of Grant, he said, &ldquo;I'll tell you where he beats me, and where he
-      beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his
-      sight, but it scares me like Hell.&rdquo; Two centuries ago, according to Uncle
-      Toby, our men &ldquo;swore terribly in Flanders,&rdquo; and they are swearing terribly
-      there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time that the Flanders mud,
-      which has been watered for centuries by English blood, will ensanguine the
-      speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant young airman will talk a
-      good deal less about &ldquo;Hell&rdquo; when he escapes from it to a cleaner world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0057" id="linkimage-0057"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0174m.jpg" alt="0174m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0174.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0058" id="linkimage-0058"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0175m.jpg" alt="0175m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0175.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A HANSOM CAB
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> saw a surprising
-      spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a hansom cab. Not a
-      derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally see, with an
-      obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the box, crawling
-      along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has escaped from a
-      cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way back&mdash;no, but
-      a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting in the shafts
-      and tossing its head as though it were full of beans and importance, and a
-      slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as a sandboy as he flicked and
-      flourished his whip, and, still more astonishing, a real passenger, a
-      lady, inside the vehicle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the
-      driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of the
-      poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas of
-      the past&mdash;sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the
-      quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there
-      flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs, the
-      London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King Petrol,
-      when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and the
-      two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place then,
-      of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a
-      formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took
-      your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver, you
-      settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and the
-      bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins of that
-      &ldquo;orf horse,&rdquo; the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of the
-      police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse joke to
-      a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in the revelry. The
-      conductor would stroll up to him and continue a conversation that had
-      begun early in the morning and seemed to go on intermittently all day&mdash;a
-      conversation of that jolly sort in which, as Washington Irving says, the
-      jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside the
-      bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It was an
-      act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the top
-      alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes. And
-      even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been quite
-      above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The hansom was a
-      rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the thing for a lady to
-      be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested romance, mysteries,
-      elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of wickednesses. A staid,
-      respectable &ldquo;growler&rdquo; was much more fitting for so delicate an exotic as
-      Woman. If she began riding in hansoms alone anything might happen. She
-      might want to go to public dinners next&mdash;think of it!&mdash;she might
-      be wanting to ride a bicycle&mdash;horrors!&mdash;she might discover a
-      shameless taste for cigarettes, or demand a living wage, or University
-      degrees, or a vote, just for all the world as though she was the equal of
-      Man, the Magnificent....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and
-      challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to the
-      coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy, and
-      impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable, mighty, but
-      blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets, reeling from right
-      to left like a drunken giant, encountering the kerb-stone, skimming the
-      lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of boorish revolt, standing
-      obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the street or across the street
-      amidst the derision and rejoicing of those whose empire he threatened, and
-      who saw in these pranks the assurance of his ultimate failure. Memory went
-      back to the old One a.m. from the Law Courts, and to one night that sums
-      up for me the spirit of those days of the great transition....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to start
-      from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew his power.
-      He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along the Edgeware
-      Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men who wrote him
-      down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />=
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      (from Our Peking Correspondent)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
-      chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was &ldquo;full
-      up&rdquo; hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded in
-      with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen&mdash;yes,
-      cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the
-      One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only
-      cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end of
-      the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the tipsy
-      gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at Baker
-      Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is being swept
-      on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are exchanged, what
-      jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the top hat, under the
-      impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the floor&mdash;oh, then
-      the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy gentleman opens his
-      dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these revels soon are ended.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      First a shiver, and then a thrill,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Then something decidedly like a spill&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      O. W. Holmes,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      <i>The Deacon's Masterpiece</i> (DW)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      and we are left sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with the
-      clock over the shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the spirit of Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting
-      himself. He disapproves of the passengers having all the fun. Is he not a
-      humorist too? May he not be merry in the dawn of this May morning?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We take our fate like Englishmen, bravely, even merrily.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment. This is worth living
-      for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base betrayer of the
-      innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though it is two or
-      three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the morning! Who
-      cares?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Only the gentleman with the big bag in the corner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?&rdquo; he asks the conductor with tears in
-      his voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help the driver. They busy
-      themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn handles, they work
-      pumps, they probe here and thump there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They come out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They have
-      the cheerful philosophy of people who meddle with things that move&mdash;cab
-      drivers, bus-drivers, engine-drivers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      If, when looking well won't move thee.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      Looking ill prevail?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So they take a breather, light cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Meanwhile all the hansoms in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us,
-      like sharks upon the dead whale. Up they rattle from this side and that,
-      and every cabman flings a jibe as he passes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Look 'ere,&rdquo; says one, pulling up. &ldquo;Why don't yer take the genelmen where
-      they want to go? That's what I asks yer. Why&mdash;don't&mdash;yer&mdash;take&mdash;the&mdash;genelmen&mdash;where&mdash;they&mdash;want&mdash;to
-      go? It's only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't
-      want to go.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      For the cabman is like &ldquo;the wise thrush who sings his song twice over.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!&rdquo; cries another.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We can't 'elp larfin', yer know,&rdquo; says a third feelingly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, you keep on larfin',&rdquo; says the chauffeur looking up from the inside
-      of One a.m. &ldquo;It suits your style o' beauty.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      A mellow voice breaks out:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      We won't go home till morning,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Till daylight does appear.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen in comic chorus. Those
-      who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither sing nor whistle,
-      croak.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We sit inside patiently. We even joke too. All but the man with the big
-      bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his life-long enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He appeals again to the conductor, who laughs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back, puts his
-      head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and says:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We think better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is that
-      of the politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart. He is
-      like Dick Steele&mdash;&ldquo;when he was sober he was delightful; when he was
-      drunk he was irresistible.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;She won't go any more to-night,&rdquo; says the conductor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal away. All but
-      the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a problem
-      that looks insoluble.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Two of us jump into a hansom that still prowls around, the last of the
-      shoal of sharks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Drive up West End Lane.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Right, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's face, wreathed in smiles,
-      beams down on us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I see what was coming all the way from Baker Street,&rdquo; he savs. &ldquo;I see the
-      petrol was on fire.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yus,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Thought I should pick you up about 'ere.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No good, motors,&rdquo; he goes on, cheerfully. &ldquo;My opinion is they'll go out
-      as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the aristocracy are giving
-      'em up and goin' back to 'orses.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Hope they'll get better horses than this,&rdquo; for we are crawling painfully
-      up the tortuous reaches of West End Lane.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's overworked. 'E ain't earned more
-      than three bob to-night. That's jest what' e's earned. Three bob. It's the
-      cold weather, you know. That's what it is. It's the cold weather as makes
-      'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And 'e does go after all, even
-      if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't say of that there
-      motor-bus.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We had no reply to this thrust, and the lid dropped down with a sound of
-      quiet triumph.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And so home. And my dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge
-      Monster, reeking with strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious
-      laughter and standing for ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road with
-      the clock opposite pointing to a quarter to two, a rueful face in the
-      corner staring fixedly at a big bag and a tipsy gentleman in a tall hat
-      finding his way back to Baker Street in happy converse with a policeman.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Gone is the old London over which the shade of Mr Hansom presided like a
-      king. Gone is the &ldquo;orf horse&rdquo; with all its sins; gone is the rosy-cheeked
-      driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent whip and his tales of the
-      streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you your ticket, talked to
-      you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about the weather, the Boat Race,
-      or the latest clue to the latest mystery. We amble no more. We have
-      banished laughter and leisure from the streets, and the face of the
-      motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the symbol of the change. We have
-      passed into a breathless world, a world of wonderful mechanical
-      contrivances that have quickened the tempo of life and will soon have made
-      the horse as much a memory as the bow and arrow or the wherry that used to
-      be the principal vehicle of Elizabethan London. As I watched the hansom
-      bowling along Regent Street until it was lost in the swirl of motor-buses
-      and taxis I seemed to see in it the last straggler of an epoch passing
-      away into oblivion. I am glad it went so gallantly, and I am half sorry I
-      did not give the driver a parting cheer as he flicked his whip in the face
-      of the night.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0059" id="linkimage-0059"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0183m.jpg" alt="0183m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0183.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0060" id="linkimage-0060"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0184m.jpg" alt="0184m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0184.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON MANNERS
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t is always
-      surprising, if not always agreeable, <b>to see ourselves as others see us</b>.
-      The picture we present to others is never the picture we present to
-      ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally it is a much plainer
-      picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always a strange picture.
-      Just now we English are having our portrait painted by an American lady,
-      Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been appearing in the press. It is
-      not a flattering portrait, and it seems to have angered a good many people
-      who deny the truth of the likeness very passionately. The chief accusation
-      seems to be that we have no manners, are lacking in the civilities and
-      politenesses of life, and so on, and are inferior in these things to the
-      French, the Americans, and other peoples. It is not an uncommon charge,
-      and it comes from many quarters. It came to me the other day in a letter
-      from a correspondent, French or Belgian, who has been living in this
-      country during the war, and who wrote bitterly about the manners of the
-      English towards foreigners. In the course of his letter he quoted with
-      approval the following cruel remark of Jean Carrière, written, needless to
-      say, before the war:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal élevé du fait
-      qu'il manque de manières; il ignore encore la politesse, voilà tout.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the
-      whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have
-      enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken
-      up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and we
-      suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should be
-      told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At the
-      same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's warning about
-      the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty millions of us,
-      and we have some forty million different manners, and it is not easy to
-      get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will take this &ldquo;copy&rdquo; to
-      the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who preceded him was a
-      monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all civility; another is all
-      bad temper, and between the two extremes you will get every shade of good
-      and bad manners. And so through every phase of society.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the widest
-      differences of manner in different parts of the country. In Lancashire and
-      Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There is a deep-seated
-      distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the code of conduct
-      differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral town as the manner
-      of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But even here you will find
-      behind the general bearing infinite shades of difference that make your
-      generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more you know of any people the less
-      you feel able to sum them up in broad categories.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our
-      ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete
-      darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting&mdash;apropos of the
-      Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because of
-      the strangeness of his appearance&mdash;lamenting the deplorable manners
-      of the people. &ldquo;Lord!&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;to see the absurd nature of Englishmen
-      that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks strange.&rdquo;
-       Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him describing the
-      English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
-      earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. &ldquo;To mention but a single
-      attraction,&rdquo; he says in one of his letters, &ldquo;the English girls are
-      divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses. They
-      have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go anywhere on
-      a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive, they kiss
-      you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you return. Go where
-      you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if you had once tasted
-      how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish to spend your life
-      there.&rdquo; Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens a good deal changed
-      to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a cigarette.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing and
-      less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the saying of
-      O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good criticism. Our lack
-      of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but more probably it is
-      traceable not to a physical but to a social source. Unlike the Celtic and
-      the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have not the ease that comes
-      from the ingrained tradition of human equality. The French have that ease.
-      So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So have the Americans. But the
-      English are class conscious. The dead hand of feudalism is still heavy
-      upon our souls. If it were not, the degrading traffic in titles would long
-      since have been abolished as an insult to our intelligence. But we not
-      only tolerate it: we delight in this artificial scheme of relationship. It
-      is not human values, but social discriminations that count. And while
-      human values are cohesive in their effect, social discriminations are
-      separatist. They break society up into castes, and permeate it with the
-      twin vices of snobbery and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is
-      subdivided into infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious
-      restraints of a people uncertain of their social relationships create a
-      defensive manner which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true
-      root is a timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his
-      ground tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is
-      proud: it may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away
-      from this fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners
-      for independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from a
-      sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented to
-      keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression that
-      he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he had
-      more <i>abandon</i>. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical
-      politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the
-      spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which makes
-      the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably what
-      Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the impression
-      that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good manners that
-      they exist most where they do not exist at all&mdash;that is to say, where
-      conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told James Hogg that no
-      man who was content to be himself, without either diffidence or egotism,
-      would fail to be at home in any company, and I do not know a better recipe
-      for good manners.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      I was riding in a bus yesterday afternoon when I overheard a conversation
-      between a couple of smartly dressed young people&mdash;a youth and a
-      maiden&mdash;at the other end of the vehicle. It was not an amusing
-      conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about. Indeed, I
-      could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be about
-      anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which consist
-      chiefly of &ldquo;Awfullys&rdquo; and &ldquo;Reallys!&rdquo; and &ldquo;Don't-you-knows&rdquo; and tattle
-      about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and similar
-      common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter but because
-      of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the speakers were
-      alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of wind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to hear, while
-      others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not of approval.
-      They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved an air of being
-      unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of not being aware
-      that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact, their manner
-      indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings. They were
-      really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the bus. If they
-      had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in quite reasonable
-      tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly and defiantly to an
-      empty bus. They would have made no impression on an empty bus. But they
-      were happily sensible of making quite a marked impression on a full bus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it was not the impression they imagined. It was another impression
-      altogether. There are few more unpleasing and vulgar habits than that of
-      loud, aggressive conversation in public places. It is an impertinence to
-      inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who do not want to know about
-      them, and who may want to read or doze or think or look out of the window
-      at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The assumption behind
-      the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is an announcement to
-      the world that we are someone in particular and can talk as loudly as we
-      please whenever we please. It is a sort of social Prussianism that
-      presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by a superior egotism.
-      The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in the world is mistaken.
-      On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an inverted self-consciousness.
-      These young people were talking loudly, not because they were unconscious
-      of themselves in relation to their fellows, but because they were much too
-      conscious and were not content to be just quiet, ordinary people like the
-      rest of us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I hesitate to say that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not lived
-      abroad sufficiently to judge. But it is a common experience of those who
-      travel to find, as I have often found, their country humiliated by this
-      habit of aggressive bearing in public places. It is unlovely at home, but
-      it is much more offensive abroad, for then it is not only the person who
-      is brought into disrepute, but the country he (and not less frequently
-      she) is supposed to represent. We in the bus could afford to bear the
-      affliction of that young couple with tolerance and even amusement, for
-      they only hurt themselves. We could discount them. But the same bearing in
-      a foreign capital gives the impression that we are all like this, just as
-      the rather crude boasting of certain types of American grossly
-      misrepresent a people whose general conduct, as anyone who sees them at
-      home will agree, is unaffected, unpretentious, and good-natured.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, I suspect, is that every country sends abroad a
-      disproportionate number of its &ldquo;bounders.&rdquo; It is inevitable that it should
-      be so, for the people who can afford to travel are the people who have
-      made money, and while many admirable qualities may be involved in the
-      capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain coarse
-      assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got so
-      hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are better
-      than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot attune his
-      voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second generation, this
-      congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high school it is
-      apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the bus
-      yesterday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So far from being representative of the English, they are violently
-      unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take an
-      average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust the
-      sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted with
-      egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and
-      monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract attention
-      without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy mean
-      between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the overbearing
-      note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk of our
-      affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without desiring
-      to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without wishing to
-      be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we have achieved
-      that social ease which consists in the adjustment of a reasonable
-      confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the sensibilities of
-      others.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0061" id="linkimage-0061"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0192m.jpg" alt="0192m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0192.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0062" id="linkimage-0062"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0193m.jpg" alt="0193m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0193.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A FINE DAY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t's just like
-      summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have forgotten to say
-      it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it from the orchard
-      with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery. There are some
-      people of penurious emotions and speech, like the Drumtochty farmer in Ian
-      Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of this iteration. They would find
-      it wasteful and frivolous. They do not understand that we go on saying it
-      over and over again, like the birds, for the sheer joy of saying it.
-      Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice. There he goes skipping from
-      branch to branch and twig to twig, and after each skip he pauses to say,
-      &ldquo;It's just like summer,&rdquo; and from a neighbouring tree his mate twitters
-      confirmation in perfect time. I've listened to them for half an hour and
-      they've talked about nothing else.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great
-      baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the
-      paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully and
-      tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well aired
-      before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows his
-      score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has only
-      one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the world,
-      but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer, and not a
-      conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who seems never
-      to forget the listening world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
-      There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along the
-      turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football match, I
-      fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the cheerful
-      outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens and the
-      fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of hammering; from
-      the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor voice that comes up
-      from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I have not heard it for
-      four years or more; but it has been heard in many lands and by many rivers
-      from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would rather be singing in the
-      allotment with his young brother Sam (the leader of the trebles in the
-      village choir) than anywhere else in the vide world. &ldquo;Yes, I've been to
-      Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the 'Oly Land,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I don't care
-      if I never see the 'Oly Land again. Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far
-      as I'm concerned. This is good enough for me&mdash;that is, if there's a
-      place for a chap that wants to get married to live in.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at
-      her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. &ldquo;Well, this is all
-      right, ain't it, mother?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; says the old lady, &ldquo;it's just like summer.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And to think,&rdquo; continues the voice, &ldquo;that there was a thick layer o' snow
-      a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to come
-      yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar, and it
-      stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though it do seem
-      like it, don't it?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, it's just like summer,&rdquo; repeats the old lady tranquilly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
-      sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
-      like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we are
-      here. Weather in town is only an incident&mdash;a pleasurable incident or
-      a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella,
-      whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a
-      mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or outside.
-      It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your visit to the
-      theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for this reason the
-      incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as an acquaintance of
-      a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he is in a good humour
-      and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven. It is
-      politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual diversion. You
-      study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and watch the change
-      of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the mood of the public.
-      When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a fine day, or has been a
-      cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a conventional civility. It is
-      the formal opening of the discussion of weighty matters. It involves the
-      prospects of potatoes and the sowing of onions, the blossoms on the trees,
-      the effects of weather on the poultry and the state of the hives. I do not
-      suppose that there is a moment of his life when Jim is unconscious of the
-      weather or indifferent to it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not
-      care what happens to the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands
-      and secular interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is
-      a stem Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the
-      chapel in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always
-      trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi'
-      work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to
-      dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. &ldquo;I don't hold wi'
-      work on Sundays,&rdquo; he would repeat inflexibly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0063" id="linkimage-0063"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0197m.jpg" alt="0197m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0197.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other
-      end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the
-      weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call
-      her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward. It
-      is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants hens. If
-      the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an unerring instinct
-      to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin of feathers. The hard
-      frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes when everybody else's
-      escaped, and it was her hive that brought the &ldquo;Isle of Wight&rdquo; into our
-      midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds that the last was a
-      visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a death in the family&mdash;true,
-      it was only a second cousin, but it was &ldquo;in the family&rdquo;&mdash;and had
-      neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive. And of course they
-      died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow Walsh has no patience
-      with people who fly in the face of Providence in this way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is the most
-      unremittingly malevolent. It is either &ldquo;smarty hot&rdquo; or &ldquo;smarty cold.&rdquo; If
-      it isn't giving her a touch of &ldquo;brownchitis,&rdquo; or &ldquo;a blowy feeling all up
-      the back,&rdquo; or making her feel &ldquo;blubbed all over,&rdquo; it is dripping through
-      her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke,
-      or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary life. I
-      think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the hill-side
-      like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even smiles, but
-      his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the bottom he is a
-      terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country woman no end of
-      work, and makes her life a burden.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
-      When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that &ldquo;it is a
-      bit better to-day.&rdquo; This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays to
-      the weather. And we translate it for her into &ldquo;Yes, it's just like
-      summer.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
-      damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most part
-      the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees are
-      white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees which fill
-      the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note of an aerial
-      violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of his double bass
-      to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way from blossom to
-      blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is as full of the gossip of
-      summer as the peacock butterfly that comes flitting back across the
-      orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old Benjy, who saluted me over the
-      hedge just now with the remark that he didn't recall the like of this for
-      a matter o' seventy year. Yes, seventy year if 'twas a day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy years
-      ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks about
-      anything in the memory of this generation. &ldquo;I be nearer a 'underd,&rdquo; he
-      says, &ldquo;than seventy,&rdquo; by which I think he means that he is eighty-six. He
-      longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see no reason why he
-      shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old boy, still does a good
-      day's gardening and has come up the lane on this hot day at a nimble
-      speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to have made his coffin
-      and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from any morbid yearning
-      for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding him off, just as the
-      rest of us &ldquo;touch wood&rdquo; lest evil befall. &ldquo;It's just like summer,&rdquo; he
-      says.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty....&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0064" id="linkimage-0064"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0200m.jpg" alt="0200m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0200.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0065" id="linkimage-0065"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> see that Mr
-      Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to women very
-      seriously on the subject of smoking. &ldquo;Would you like to see your mother
-      smoke?&rdquo; asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he was addressing, and
-      Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face
-      of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed feelings on this
-      subject, and in order to find out what I really think I will write about
-      it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby. I do not want to
-      see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the baby. But neither do I
-      want to see father doing so. If father is smoking when he nurses the baby
-      he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs out his smoke. Do not let
-      us drag in the baby.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The real point is in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your
-      affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would
-      not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be
-      absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because he
-      smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of
-      disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of taste
-      which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is wasteful and
-      unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the habit regardless
-      of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that <i>women</i> must not smoke because
-      the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that <i>men</i> may. He would no
-      more say this than he would say that it is right for men to live in stuffy
-      rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right for men to get
-      drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of drunkenness there is
-      no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel that it is more tragic in
-      the case of the woman, but it is equally disgusting in both sexes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men is
-      vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up
-      morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women not
-      smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom been
-      otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle, for
-      example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he would have answered the
-      question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their pipes
-      together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and eternity, and no
-      one who has read his letters will doubt his love for her. There are no
-      such letters from son to mother in all literature. And of course Mr Hicks
-      knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be surprised to know
-      that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of some women who smoke,
-      and that he will be as cordial with them as with those who do not smoke.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet.... Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of a
-      bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to smoke.
-      And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these now not
-      infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I had been
-      smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If smoking is
-      an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the case of women
-      as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women smoking outdoors
-      while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an irrational fellow, said
-      I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I replied. We are all irrational
-      fellows. If we were brought to the judgment seat of pure reason how few of
-      us would escape the cells.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young
-      women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke
-      was a flag&mdash;the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got
-      perplexed again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women&mdash;this
-      universal claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous
-      fact of the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag.
-      Yet when I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it
-      myself), flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I
-      rejoice, I felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I
-      came to the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These
-      young women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men
-      smoked on the top of the bus they must smoke too&mdash;not perhaps because
-      they liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them
-      on an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge of
-      servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the symbols
-      of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of women, but
-      preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to their finer
-      perceptions and traditions.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But here my perplexity returned. It is not the fact of those young women
-      smoking that offends you, I said addressing myself. It is the fact of
-      their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you agree that the habit of
-      smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of women as of men, why
-      should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised in their case,
-      while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself are smoking at
-      this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged in defending the
-      propriety of women smoking, and at the same time mentally reprobating the
-      conduct of the young women who are smoking in front of you, not because
-      they are smoking, but because (like you) they are smoking in public. How
-      do you reconcile such confusions of mind?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the horns of
-      a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to the habit.
-      And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to defend differential
-      smoking conditions for men and women. If the main position was surrendered
-      no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked in public then women could
-      smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and cigars then women could smoke
-      pipes and cigars. And at the thought of women smoking pipes on the top of
-      buses, I realised that I had not yet found a path out of the absurd bog in
-      which I had become mentally involved.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then something happened which suggested another solution. The young women
-      rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was wafted
-      with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown their
-      cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy,
-      languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial
-      fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man's
-      tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt the
-      woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and wear
-      rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity. The mind
-      revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered and be-ringed.
-      Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their cheeks. But Disraeli
-      was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort of belated tale from
-      the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of men universally revolts
-      against paint, powder, and perfume. And asking myself why a habit, which
-      custom had made tolerable in the case of women, became grotesque and
-      offensive if imagined in connection with men, I saw a way out of my
-      puzzle. I dismissed the view that the difference of sex accounted for the
-      different emotions awakened. It was the habit itself which was
-      objectionable. Familiarity with it in the case of women had dulled our
-      perceptions to the reality. It was only when we conceived the habit in an
-      unusual connection&mdash;imagined men going about with painted and
-      powdered faces, with rings in their ears and heavy scents on their clothes&mdash;that
-      its essential vulgarity and uncleanness were freshly and intensely
-      presented to the mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And that, said I, is the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit in
-      the abstract which is vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in the
-      case of man has deadened our sense of the fact, but the adoption of the
-      habit by women, coupled with the fact that there is no logical
-      halting-place between the cigarette indoors and a pipe on the top of the
-      bus, gives us what the Americans call a new view-point. From that new
-      view-point we are bound to admit that there is much to be said against
-      tobacco and not much to be said for it&mdash;except, of course, that we
-      like it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk to
-      the men as well as to the women.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then perhaps we will see what can be done. For myself, I make no promise.
-      After forty, says Meredith, we are wedded to our habits. And I, alas, am
-      long past forty....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0066" id="linkimage-0066"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0207m.jpg" alt="0207m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0207.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0067" id="linkimage-0067"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0208m.jpg" alt="0208m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0208.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      DOWN TOWN
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>hrough the grey
-      mists that hang over the water in the late autumn afternoon there emerges
-      a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of a distant range of
-      mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with a precision that
-      suggests the work of man rather than the careless architecture of Nature
-      The mass is compact and isolated. It rises from the level of the water,
-      sheer on either side, in bold precipitous cliffs, broken by horizontal
-      lines, and dominated by one kingly, central peak that might be the
-      Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the spire of some cathedral
-      fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race. As the vessel from afar
-      moves slowly through the populous waters and between the vaguely defined
-      shores of the harbour, another shadow emerges ahead, rising out of the sea
-      in front of the mountain mass. It is a colossal statue, holding up a torch
-      to the open Atlantic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition. It turns
-      to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable windows. Even
-      the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of myriad windows. The
-      day begins to darken and a swift transformation takes place. Points of
-      light begin to shine from the windows like stars in the darkening
-      firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters with thousands of
-      tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy palace, glowing with
-      illuminations from the foundations to the topmost height of the giddy
-      precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in the scintillating pinnacle
-      of the slender cathedral spire. The first daylight impression was of
-      something as solid and enduring as the foundations of the earth; the
-      second, in the gathering twilight, is of something slight and fanciful,
-      of' towering proportions but infinitely fragile structure, a spectacle as
-      airy and dream-like as a tale from the &ldquo;Arabian Nights.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is &ldquo;down town.&rdquo; It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its
-      astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that
-      lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest
-      group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over the
-      tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable maze
-      of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion of the
-      London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its direction,
-      but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east and west,
-      crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to the Harlem
-      River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing island of
-      Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the noble Fifth
-      Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty buildings that
-      shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to gild the upper
-      storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many churches and the
-      gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving, on a sunny
-      afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you move in the
-      shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the air above. And
-      around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the architectural
-      glories of &ldquo;up town&rdquo; New York, the great hotels stand like mighty
-      fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great terminus. And
-      in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled to the
-      twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you are
-      summoned.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it is in &ldquo;down town,&rdquo; on the tip of the tongue that is put out to the
-      Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the stranger.
-      It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no doubt, that make
-      an equally striking appeal to the eye&mdash;Salzburg, Innsbruck,
-      Edinburgh, Tunis&mdash;but it is the appeal of nature supplemented by art.
-      Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not an
-      approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of
-      surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind,
-      that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous,
-      and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New
-      York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you land.
-      It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It ascends
-      its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation over the
-      Atlantic. &ldquo;Down town&rdquo; stands like a strong man on the shore of the ocean,
-      asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind these terrific
-      battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to the skies. Look at
-      this muscular development. And I am only the advance agent. I am only the
-      symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste of the power that heaves
-      and throbs through the veins of the giant that bestrides this continent
-      for three thousand miles, from his gateway to the Atlantic to his gateway,
-      to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this
-      terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from within,
-      stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway ends, a
-      street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned between
-      two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more' lofty than the
-      cross of St Paul's Cathedral&mdash;square towers, honeycombed with
-      thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying up in
-      lifts&mdash;called &ldquo;elevators&rdquo; for short&mdash;clicking at typewriters,
-      performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns at
-      the threshold of the giant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which he
-      rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon is
-      Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure in
-      the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the high
-      priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds are
-      shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on the kerbstone
-      of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its sovereigns wilting
-      away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you stand, in devout
-      respect before the modest threshold of the high priest a babel of strange
-      sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn towards it and come
-      suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange than anything
-      pictured by Hogarth&mdash;in the street a jostling mass of human beings,
-      fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like jockeys or
-      pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended high as if in
-      prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working with frantic symbols,
-      their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at a hundred windows in the
-      great buildings on either side of the street little groups of men and
-      women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob below. It is the outside
-      market of Mammon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
-      great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements
-      like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender and
-      beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle nearly
-      twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the temple of St
-      Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth acquired in his
-      sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most significant building in
-      America and the first turret to catch the noose of light that the dawn
-      flings daily over the Atlantic from the East. You enter its marble halls
-      and take an express train to the forty-ninth floor, flashing in your
-      journey past visions of crowded offices, tier after tier, offices of banks
-      and publishers and merchants and jewellers, like a great street,
-      Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skywards by
-      some violent geological &ldquo;fault.&rdquo; And at the forty-ninth floor you get out
-      and take another &ldquo;local&rdquo; train to the top, and from thence you look
-      giddily down, far down even upon the great precipices of the Grand Canon,
-      down to the streets where the moving throng you left a few minutes ago
-      looks like a colony of ants or black-beetles wandering uncertainly over
-      the pavement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
-      with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to be
-      large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
-      churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are
-      swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that loom
-      above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George Washington
-      still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the original union.
-      Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted world an inverted
-      civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the vision of the great
-      dome that seems to float in the heavens over the secular activities of
-      another city, still holding aloft, to however negligent and indifferent a
-      generation, the symbol of the supremacy of spiritual things. And you will
-      wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below you, in which the
-      temples of the ancient worship crouch at the porch of these Leviathan
-      temples of commerce, there is the unconscious expression of another
-      philosophy of life in which St Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to
-      the stars.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the scene
-      below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so near that
-      you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open Atlantic,
-      with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million a year, that
-      has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of hopes, past the
-      statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the harbour, to be
-      swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that lies behind you.
-      You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught in the arms of its
-      two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before you, with its overflow
-      of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream, and its overflow of Jersey City
-      on the far bank of the other. In the brilliant sunshine and the clear,
-      smokeless atmosphere the eye travels far over this incredible vista of
-      human activity. And beyond the vision of the eye, the mind carries the
-      thought onward to the great lakes and the seething cities by their shores,
-      and over the illimitable plains westward to sunny lands more remote than
-      Europe, but still obedient to the stars and stripes, and southward by the
-      great rivers to the tropic sea.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the far
-      horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings. They will
-      not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those horizons,
-      after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields of activity,
-      you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the contrary, they
-      will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense of power unlike
-      anything else the world has to offer&mdash;the power of immeasurable
-      resources, still only in the infancy of their development, of
-      inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the mind, of
-      a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one&mdash;one in a certain
-      fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident prime of
-      their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of the day before
-      them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its crudeness and
-      freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as to something avuncular
-      and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late afternoon, a little tired and
-      more than a little disillusioned and battered by the journey. For him the
-      light has left the morning hills, but here it still clothes those hills
-      with hope and spurs on to adventure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
-      his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
-      &ldquo;the goods.&rdquo; He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
-      power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the
-      inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the
-      tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and the
-      squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the
-      chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction
-      at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush,
-      and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism has
-      shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American interests,
-      and the &ldquo;100 per cent. American&rdquo; in every disguise of designing
-      self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything that is
-      significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not a moment when
-      the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the harbour, can feel
-      very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no longer lit to invite
-      the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the contrary, she turns her
-      back on America and warns the alien away. Her torch has become a
-      policeman's baton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
-      breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous
-      waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back upon
-      the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun floods the
-      land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near his setting,
-      but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his morning prime, so
-      vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of your first
-      impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud pinnacle that
-      looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the temple of primeval
-      gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And as you gaze you are
-      conscious of a great note of interrogation taking shape in the mind. Is
-      that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic expression of the soul of
-      America, or has this mighty power you are leaving another gospel for
-      mankind? And as the light fades and battlements and pinnacle merge into
-      the encompassing dark there sounds in the mind the echoes of an immortal
-      voice&mdash;&ldquo;Let us here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
-      died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
-      freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people
-      shall not perish from the earth!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell to
-      America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of
-      Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0068" id="linkimage-0068"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0217m.jpg" alt="0217m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0217.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0069" id="linkimage-0069"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0208m.jpg" alt="0208m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0208.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON KEYHOLE MORALS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">M</span>y neighbour at the
-      breakfast table complained that he had had a bad night. What with the gale
-      and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of the timbers of the ship and
-      the pair in the next cabin&mdash;especially the pair in the next cabin....
-      How they talked! It was two o'clock before they sank into silence. And
-      such revelations! He couldn't help overhearing them. He was alone in his
-      cabin, and what was he to do? He couldn't talk to himself to let them know
-      they were being overheard. And he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And,
-      in short, there was nothing for it but to overhear. And the things he
-      heard&mdash;well.... And with a gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he
-      left it to me to imagine the worst. I suggested that he might cure the
-      trouble by telling the steward to give the couple a hint that the next
-      cabin was occupied. He received the idea as a possible way out of a
-      painful and delicate situation. Strange, he said, it had not occurred to
-      him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very
-      important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man. It
-      would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper, and
-      there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are not to
-      be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper enough
-      when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not our public
-      hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only indicates the
-      kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We want the world's
-      good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company manners as we put
-      on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would put his ear to a
-      keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole behind him watching
-      him in the act. The true estimate of your character (and mine) depends on
-      what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole behind us. It depends,
-      not on whether you are chivalrous to some one else's wife in public, but
-      whether you are chivalrous to your own wife in private. The eminent judge
-      who, checking himself in a torrent of abuse of his partner at whist,
-      contritely observed, &ldquo;I beg your pardon, madam; I thought you were my
-      wife,&rdquo; did not improve matters. He only lifted the curtain of a rather
-      shabby private cabin. He white-washed himself publicly out of his dirty
-      private pail.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the
-      quiet and undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps you
-      have accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the pockets
-      bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental concern is
-      awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own son. It is
-      natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing and weighty
-      reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that all those
-      respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard young John's
-      step approaching. You know that this very reasonable display of paternal
-      interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying of which you would be
-      ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is miles off&mdash;perhaps
-      down in the city, perhaps far away in the country. You are left alone with
-      his letters and your own sense of decency. You can read the letters in
-      perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you can share them. Not a
-      soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled to know those secrets,
-      and young John may be benefited by your knowing them. What do you do in
-      these circumstances? The answer will provide you with a fairly reliable
-      tape measure for your own spiritual contents.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next Cabin.
-      We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of &ldquo;Le Diable
-      Boiteux,&rdquo; Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one house to
-      another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside, with very
-      surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the guise of a very
-      civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and offered to do the same
-      for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and lift with magic and
-      inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the mysteries and
-      privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should have the decency to
-      thank him and send him away. The amusement would be purchased at too high
-      a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm, but it would do me a lot
-      of harm. For, after all, the important thing is not that we should be
-      able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the whole world in the face, but
-      that we should be able to look ourselves in the face. And it is our
-      private standard of conduct and not our public standard of conduct which
-      gives or denies us that privilege. We are merely counterfeit coin if our
-      respect for the Eleventh Commandment only applies to being found out by
-      other people. It is being found out by ourselves that ought to hurt us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass a
-      tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never committed
-      a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or forged a cheque.
-      But these things are not evidence of good character. They may only mean
-      that I never had enough honest indignation to commit a murder, nor enough
-      courage to break into a house. They may only mean that I never needed to
-      forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may only mean that I am afraid of
-      the police. Respect for the law is a testimonial that will not go far in
-      the Valley of Jehosophat. The question that will be asked of me there is
-      not whether I picked my neighbour's lock, but whether I put my ear to his
-      keyhole; not whether I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but
-      whether I read his letters when his back was turned&mdash;in short, not
-      whether I had respect for the law, but whether I had respect for myself
-      and the sanctities that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is
-      what went on in my private cabin which will probably be my undoing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0070" id="linkimage-0070"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0222m.jpg" alt="0222m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0222.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0071" id="linkimage-0071"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0223m.jpg" alt="0223m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0223.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      FLEET STREET NO MORE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>o-day I am among
-      the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a lifetime and am a person
-      at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that is told, a rumour on the
-      wind; a memory of far-off things and battles long ago. At this hour I
-      fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm. There is the thunder of
-      machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above, the click-click-click of
-      the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph operators, the tinkling of
-      telephones, the ringing of bells for messengers who tarry, reporters
-      coming in with &ldquo;stories&rdquo; or without &ldquo;stories,&rdquo; leader-writers writing for
-      dear life and wondering whether they will beat the clock and what will
-      happen if they don't, night editors planning their pages as a shopman
-      dresses his shop window, sub-editors breasting the torrent of &ldquo;flimsies&rdquo;
-       that flows in from the ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and
-      the other. I hear the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit
-      might hear the murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as
-      a policeman must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the
-      Strand submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his
-      glory departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the
-      middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible
-      embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong
-      arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and the
-      waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a
-      personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could
-      stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the
-      street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to
-      the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety. His
-      cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of the Constitution,
-      and his truncheon was as indispensable as a field-marshal's baton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on
-      the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make a
-      pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk
-      across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers.
-      Even &ldquo;J. B.,&rdquo; who has never been known to pass a policeman without a
-      gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived
-      under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly
-      Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates or
-      in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished
-      magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free,
-      independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He
-      can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand, but
-      he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting, or
-      Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in the shop
-      windows, or turn into the &ldquo;pictures&rdquo; or go home to tea. He can light his
-      pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as he pleases.
-      He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a realm where the
-      clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes without stirring
-      his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will not care.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock and
-      take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous
-      thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me as my
-      own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life until I
-      have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have heard its
-      chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the swanking
-      swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its unceasing life
-      during every hour of the twenty-four&mdash;in the afternoon when the
-      pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are crossing
-      to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air is shrill
-      with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide of the day's
-      life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work, and the telegraph
-      boys flit from door to door with their tidings of the world's happenings;
-      in the small hours when the great lorries come thundering up the side
-      streets with their mountains of papers and rattle through the sleeping
-      city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag of morn in sovereign
-      state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral that looks down so
-      grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. &ldquo;I see it arl so plainly as I
-      saw et, long ago.&rdquo; I have worn its paving stones as industriously as
-      Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as one who had the run
-      of the estate and the freeman's right. I have known its <i>habitues</i> as
-      familiarly as if they had belonged to my own household, and its
-      multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have drunk the solemn toast
-      with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken counsel with the lawyers
-      in the Temple, and wandered in its green and cloistered calm in the hot
-      afternoons, and written thousands of leaders and millions of words on
-      this, that, and the other, wise words and foolish words, and words without
-      any particular quality at all, except that they filled up space, and have
-      had many friendships and fought many battles, winning some and losing
-      others, and have seen the generations go by, and the young fellows grow
-      into old fellows who scan a little severely the new race of ardent boys
-      that come along so gaily to the enchanted street and are doomed to grow
-      old and weary in its service also. And at the end it has come to be a
-      street of ghosts&mdash;a street of memories, with faces that I knew
-      lurking in its shadows and peopling its rooms and mingling with the moving
-      pageant that seems like a phantom too.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like
-      the Chambered Nautilus, I
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      ... seal up the idle door,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape at
-      its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no more.
-      No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual footsteps.
-      No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had always &ldquo;gone out
-      to supper, sir,&rdquo; or been called to the news-room or sent on an errand. No
-      more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous clock that ticked so much
-      faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will come down from above like
-      snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults of the world will boil in like
-      the roar of many waters, but I shall not hear them. For I have come into
-      the inheritance of leisure. Time, that has lorded it over me so long, is
-      henceforth my slave, and the future stretches before me like an infinite
-      green pasture in which I can wander till the sun sets. I shall let the
-      legions thunder by while I tend my bees and water my plants, and mark how
-      my celery grows and how the apples ripen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the
-      chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great
-      noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him a
-      tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his orchard
-      when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys, bearing an
-      urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in the
-      Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to their
-      plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water, took a
-      sponge <i>and washed out his ears.</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0072" id="linkimage-0072"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0228m.jpg" alt="0228m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0228.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0073" id="linkimage-0073"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0229m.jpg" alt="0229m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0229.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON WAKING UP
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>hen I awoke this
-      morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the valley and the beech woods
-      glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and heard the ducks clamouring for
-      their breakfast, and felt all the kindly intimacies of life coming back in
-      a flood for the new day, I felt, as the Americans say, &ldquo;good.&rdquo; Waking up
-      is always&mdash;given a clear conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy
-      faculty of sleep&mdash;a joyous experience. It has the pleasing excitement
-      with which the tuning up of the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the
-      symphony affects you. It is like starting out for a new adventure, or
-      coming into an unexpected inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling
-      suddenly upon some author whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes
-      to your heart like a brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden
-      and beautiful and full of promise.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is now
-      that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of
-      consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has
-      happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and
-      realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The
-      fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does not
-      diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into the
-      future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking to
-      each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over, that the
-      years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining and the
-      birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going forth to
-      their labour until the evening without fear and without hate. As the day
-      advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find it is very
-      much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment when you step
-      over the threshold of sleep into the living world the revelation is
-      simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed. The devil is dead.
-      The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the earth. You recall
-      the far different emotions of a few brief months ago when the morning sun
-      woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling of the birds seemed
-      pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the paper spoiled your
-      breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the Kaiser. Poor wretch, he
-      is waking, too, probably about this time and wondering what will happen to
-      him before nightfall, wondering where he will spend the miserable remnant
-      of his days, wondering whether his great ancestor's habit of carrying a
-      dose of poison was not after all a practice worth thinking about. He
-      wanted the whole, earth, and now he is discovering that he is entitled to
-      just six feet of it&mdash;the same as the lowliest peasant in his land.
-      &ldquo;The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests,&rdquo; but there is
-      neither hole nor nest where he will be welcome. There is not much joy for
-      him in waking to a new day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has &ldquo;murdered
-      Sleep,&rdquo; and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose a
-      crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to enter
-      the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease of life
-      after our present lease had run out and were told that we could nominate
-      our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor an earldom,
-      nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my childhood when I
-      thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin man, eternally
-      perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a basket on my head and
-      shouting &ldquo;Muffins,&rdquo; in the ears of a delighted populace. I loved muffins
-      and I loved bells, and here was a man who had those joys about him all day
-      long and every day. But now my ambitions are more restrained. I would no
-      more wish to be born a muffin man than a poet or an Archbishop. The first
-      gift I should ask would be something modest. It would be the faculty of
-      sleeping eight solid hours every night, and waking each morning with the
-      sense of unfathomable and illimitable content with which I opened my eyes
-      to the world to-day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to
-      their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put
-      eating first, &ldquo;for,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;there is no other pleasure that comes three
-      times a day and lasts an hour each time.&rdquo; But sleep lasts eight hours. It
-      fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it fills it up with
-      the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom of democracy. &ldquo;All equal
-      are within the church's gate,&rdquo; said George Herbert. It may have been so in
-      George Herbert's parish; but it is hardly so in most parishes. It is true
-      of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you enter its portals all discriminations
-      vanish, and Hodge and his master, the prince and the pauper, are alike
-      clothed in the royal purple and inherit the same golden realm. There is
-      more harmony and equality in life than wre are apt to admit. For a good
-      twenty-five years of our seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an
-      agreement that is simply wonderful.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What delight
-      is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing the
-      sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of the
-      birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or the
-      cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or (as
-      now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the day
-      will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as any that
-      have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there is eternal
-      renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best that is still
-      to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot stale nor
-      familiarity make tame.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note of
-      the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that all
-      must feel on this exultant morning&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Good morning, Life&mdash;and all
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Things glad and beautiful.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      My pockets nothing hold,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      But he that owns the gold,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      The Sun, is my great friend&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      His spending has no end.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the bells.
-      There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of
-      sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain
-      perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we can
-      hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall get
-      through it. We shall not &ldquo;get through it,&rdquo; of course, but speech is only
-      fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have had a
-      sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror of a
-      dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of
-      consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite
-      mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of
-      immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than
-      from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose love
-      and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this perplexity
-      the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of happy
-      awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not being. I
-      can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      To dream as I may,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      And awake when I will,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      With the song of the bird,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      And the sun on the hill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in which,
-      once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, &ldquo;Are you there, beloved?&rdquo;
-       and hear the reply, &ldquo;Yes, beloved, I am here,&rdquo; and with that sweet
-      assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The tenderness and
-      beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred Austin, whom some
-      one in a jest made Poet Laureate. &ldquo;For my part,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I should like
-      to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of another victory for the
-      British Empire.&rdquo; It would not be easy to invent a more perfect contrast
-      between the feeling of a poet and the simulated passion of a professional
-      patriot. He did not really think that, of course. He was simply a timid,
-      amiable little man who thought it was heroic and patriotic to think that.
-      He had so habituated his tiny talent to strutting about in the grotesque
-      disguise of a swashbuckler that it had lost all touch with the primal
-      emotions of poetry. Forgive me for intruding him upon the theme. The happy
-      awakenings of eternity must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings
-      and its vulgar patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to
-      sleep on.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0074" id="linkimage-0074"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0235m.jpg" alt="0235m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0235.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0075" id="linkimage-0075"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0236m.jpg" alt="0236m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0236.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON RE-READING
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> weekly paper has
-      been asking well-known people what books they re-read. The most pathetic
-      reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. &ldquo;I seldom
-      re-read now,&rdquo; says that unhappy man. &ldquo;Time is so short and literature so
-      vast and unexplored.&rdquo; What a desolating picture! It is like saying, &ldquo;I
-      never meet my old friends now. Time is so short and there are so many
-      strangers I have not yet shaken hands with.&rdquo; I see the poor man, hot and
-      breathless, scurrying over the &ldquo;vast and unexplored&rdquo; fields of literature,
-      shaking hands and saying, &ldquo;How d'ye do?&rdquo; to everybody he meets and
-      reaching the end of his journey, impoverished and pitiable, like the
-      peasant in Tolstoi's &ldquo;How much land does a man need?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with strangers.
-      I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North Pole and the
-      South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson said of the
-      Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should not like <i>to
-      go</i> to see them. And so with books. Time is so short that I have none
-      to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library. I could almost
-      say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is published I read
-      an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion, and a book has to
-      weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I embark on it. When it has
-      proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but meanwhile the old ships are
-      good enough for me. I know the captain and the crew, the fare I shall get
-      and the port I shall make and the companionship I shall have by the way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write&mdash;Boswell, &ldquo;The
-      Bible in Spain,&rdquo; Pepys, Horace, &ldquo;Elia,&rdquo; Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, &ldquo;Travels
-      with a Donkey,&rdquo; Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, &ldquo;The Early Life of
-      Charles James Fox,&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Under the Greenwood Tree,&rdquo; and so on. Do not call them books.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Camerado, this is no book.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Who touches this, touches a man,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      as Walt Whitman said of his own &ldquo;Leaves of Grass.&rdquo; They are not books.
-      They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on my
-      pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was worth making
-      the great adventure of life to find such company. Come revolutions and
-      bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace, gain or loss&mdash;these
-      friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes of the journey. The
-      friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are estranged, die, but these
-      friends of the spirit are not touched with mortality. They were not born
-      for death, no hungry generations tread them down, and with their immortal
-      wisdom and laughter they give us the password to the eternal. You can no
-      more exhaust them than you can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the
-      joyous melody of Mozart or Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or
-      any other thing of beauty. They are a part of ourselves, and through their
-      noble fellowship we are made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      ... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion
-      with these spirits.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old
-      friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever and
-      went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he sits in
-      his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale. It is a way
-      Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph captive. They
-      cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern flight without
-      thinking that they are going to breathe the air that Horace breathed, and
-      asking them to carry some such message as John Marshall's:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      Tell him, bird,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      One man at least seeks not admittance there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss the
-      figure of Horace&mdash;short and fat, according to Suetonius&mdash;in the
-      fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with equal
-      animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry. Meanwhile,
-      so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would say, is
-      imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading the books in
-      which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored tracts of the
-      desert to those who like deserts.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> correspondent
-      asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve Books that he
-      ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not know what he
-      had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs were, and even
-      with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for another. But I
-      compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed that for some
-      offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a desert island out in
-      the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for twelve months, or
-      perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a mitigation of the
-      penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve books of my own
-      choosing. On what principles should I set about so momentous a choice?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the first place I decided that they must be books of the inexhaustible
-      kind. Rowland Hill said that &ldquo;the love of God was like a generous roast of
-      beef&mdash;you could cut and come again.&rdquo; That must be the first quality
-      of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could go on reading and
-      re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in Borrow went on
-      reading &ldquo;Moll Flanders.&rdquo; If only her son had known that immortal book, she
-      said, he would never have got transported for life. That was the sort of
-      book I must have with me on my desert island. But my choice would be
-      different from that of the old apple-woman of Old London Bridge. I
-      dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the best of novels are
-      exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my bundle of books would be
-      complete before I had made a start with the essentials, for I should want
-      &ldquo;Tristram Shandy&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tom Jones,&rdquo; two or three of Scott's, Gogol's &ldquo;Dead
-      Souls,&rdquo; &ldquo;David Copperfield,&rdquo; &ldquo;Evan Harrington,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Brothers Karamazoff,&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Père Goriot,&rdquo; &ldquo;War and Peace,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Three Musketeers,&rdquo; all of Hardy's,
-      &ldquo;Treasure Island,&rdquo; &ldquo;Robinson Crusoe,&rdquo; &ldquo;Silas Marner,&rdquo; &ldquo;Don Quixote,&rdquo; the
-      &ldquo;Cloister and the Hearth,&rdquo; &ldquo;Esmond&rdquo;&mdash;no, no, it would never do to
-      include novels. They must be left behind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but these
-      had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not come in
-      the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale, so that I
-      can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have no doubt about
-      my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first among the
-      historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him by the
-      lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and understanding
-      that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf of twenty-three
-      centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and fro, as it were,
-      from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty drama of ancient
-      Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the same ambitions,
-      the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and the same heroes.
-      Yes, Thucydides of course.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is there
-      to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history and
-      philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come to the
-      story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned Mommsen, or
-      the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard choice. I shut my
-      eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well, I make no complaint. And
-      then I will have those three fat volumes of Motley's, &ldquo;Rise of the Dutch
-      Republic&rdquo; (4) put in my boat, please, and&mdash;yes, Carlyle's &ldquo;French
-      Revolution&rdquo; (5), which is history and drama and poetry and fiction all in
-      one. And, since I must take the story of my own land with me, just throw
-      in Green's &ldquo;Short History&rdquo; (6). It is lovable for its serene and gracious
-      temper as much as for its story.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the more
-      personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep the
-      fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course, there
-      is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition, for
-      there only is the real Samuel revealed &ldquo;wart and all&rdquo;). I should like to
-      take &ldquo;Elia&rdquo; and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit my
-      personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place must
-      be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that frank,
-      sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to these good
-      fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality of open-air
-      romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more I choose
-      indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a choice
-      between the &ldquo;Bible in Spain,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Romany Rye,&rdquo; &ldquo;Lavengro,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Wild
-      Wales.&rdquo; But I rejoice when I find that &ldquo;Lavengro&rdquo; (10) is in the boat.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could have
-      had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is
-      Wordsworth (11) <i>contra mundum</i>, I have no doubt. He is the man who
-      will &ldquo;soothe and heal and bless.&rdquo; My last selection shall be given to a
-      work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's
-      &ldquo;Voyages&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Voyage of the Beagle,&rdquo; and while I am balancing their
-      claims the &ldquo;Beagle&rdquo; (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library is
-      complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the Pacific.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0076" id="linkimage-0076"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0243m.jpg" alt="0243m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0243.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      FEBRUARY DAYS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he snow has gone
-      from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of setting, has got round to
-      the wood that crowns the hill on the other side of the valley. Soon it
-      will set on the slope of the hill and then down on the plain. Then we
-      shall know that spring has come. Two days ago a blackbird, from the
-      paddock below the orchard, added his golden baritone to the tenor of the
-      thrush who had been shouting good news from the beech tree across the road
-      for weeks past. I don't know why the thrush should glimpse the dawn of the
-      year before the blackbird, unless it is that his habit of choosing the
-      topmost branches of the tree gives him a better view of the world than
-      that which the golden-throated fellow gets on the lower branches that he
-      always affects. It may be the same habit of living in the top storey that
-      accounts for the early activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours,
-      but never so noisy as in these late February days, when they are breaking
-      up into families and quarrelling over their slatternly household
-      arrangements in the topmost branches of the elm trees. They are comic
-      ruffians who wash all their dirty linen in public, and seem almost as
-      disorderly and bad-tempered as the human family itself. If they had only a
-      little of our ingenuity in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my
-      friend the farmer to light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive
-      the female from the eggs and save his crops.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his
-      modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but he
-      is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden and the
-      pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is as
-      industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the
-      starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been
-      observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two
-      minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that
-      deserves encouragement&mdash;a bird that loves caterpillars and does not
-      love cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So
-      hang out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no
-      unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape the
-      general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been
-      agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below
-      the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting
-      industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with that
-      innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just in front of
-      you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of hide-and-seek. But not
-      now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in the best of us. Now he
-      reminds us that he too is a part of that nature which feeds so
-      relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing about in his own
-      erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that the coast is
-      clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his beak. He skips
-      away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper of the hive
-      comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops the great tit
-      and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in spite of his air
-      of innocence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the
-      starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months
-      hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's &ldquo;Oh,
-      that the Romans had only one neck!&rdquo; For then he will come out of the beech
-      woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive against my
-      cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an obscene
-      picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and the
-      stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I can be
-      just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not all bad
-      any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See him on
-      autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his forages in
-      the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in the sky that
-      are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud approaches like
-      a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting, changing formation,
-      breaking up into battalions, merging into columns, opening out on a wide
-      front, throwing out flanks and advance guards and rear guards, every
-      complication unravelled in perfect order, every movement as serene and
-      assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat of some invisible
-      conductor below&mdash;a very symphony of the air, in which motion merges
-      into music, until it seems that you are not watching a flight of birds,
-      but listening with the inner ear to great waves of soundless harmony. And
-      then, the overture over, down the cloud descends upon the fields, and the
-      farmers' pests vanish before the invasion. And if you will follow them
-      into the fields you will find infinite tiny holes that they have drilled
-      and from which they have extracted the lurking enemy of the drops, and you
-      will remember that it is to their beneficial activities that we owe the
-      extermination of the May beetle, whose devastations were so menacing a
-      generation ago. And after the flock has broken up and he has paired, and
-      the responsibilities of housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy
-      labours. When spring has come you can see him dart from his nest in the
-      hollow of the tree and make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field,
-      returning each time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other
-      succulent, but pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at
-      home. That acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted
-      eighteen such journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for
-      a fellow of such benignant spirit?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and
-      see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration.
-      Sufficient unto the day&mdash;&mdash; And to-day I will think only good of
-      the sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the
-      brave news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as
-      this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that
-      all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, &ldquo;according to
-      plan,&rdquo; and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score of hives
-      in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its perils. We
-      saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay on the
-      ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had come from a
-      neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there was no
-      admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he came.
-      Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness and
-      great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him
-      trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh,
-      these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the garden the news is coming up from below, borne by those unfailing
-      outriders of the spring, the snowdrop and the winter aconite. A modest
-      company; but in their pennons is the assurance of the many-coloured host
-      that is falling unseen into the vast pageant of summer and will fill the
-      woods with the trumpets of the harebell and the wild hyacinth, and make
-      the hedges burst into foam, and the orchard a glory of pink and white, and
-      the ditches heavy with the scent of the meadowsweet, and the fields golden
-      with harvest and the gardens a riot of luxuriant life. I said it was all
-      right, chirps little red waistcoat from the fence&mdash;all the winter
-      I've told you that there was a good time coming and now you see for
-      yourself. Look at those flowers. Ain't they real? The philosopher in the
-      red waistcoat is perfectly right. He has kept his end up all through the
-      winter, and has taken us into his fullest confidence. Formerly he never
-      came beyond the kitchen, but this winter when the snow was about he
-      advanced to the parlour where he pottered about like one of the family.
-      Now, however, with the great news outside and the earth full of good
-      things to pick up, he has no time to call.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save for
-      the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the
-      message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of the
-      spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the sunrise
-      is unlike the spirit of the sunset. It is the lusty breath of life coming
-      back to the dead earth, and making these February days the most thrilling
-      of the year. For in these expanding skies and tremors of life and
-      unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and hope, and
-      nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes that the joy
-      of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The cherry blossom
-      comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the spring with it,
-      and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent of the lime trees
-      and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days of birth when
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      &ldquo;Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      there is no hint of mortality and no reverted glance. The curtain is
-      rising and the pageant is all before us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0077" id="linkimage-0077"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0249m.jpg" alt="0249m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0249.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0078" id="linkimage-0078"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0250m.jpg" alt="0250m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0250.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>mong my letters
-      this morning was one requesting that if I were in favour of &ldquo;the
-      reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the Jewish people,&rdquo; I
-      should sign the enclosed declaration and return it in the envelope
-      (unstamped), also enclosed. I dislike unstamped envelopes. I also dislike
-      stamped envelopes. You can ignore an unstamped enveloped but a stamped
-      envelope compels you to write a letter, when perhaps you don't want to
-      write a letter. My objection to unstamped envelopes is that they show a
-      meagre spirit and a lack of confidence in you. They suggest that you are
-      regarded with suspicion as a person who will probably steam off the stamp
-      and use it to receipt a bill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I waived the objection, signed the declaration, stamped the envelope
-      and put it in the post. I did all this because I am a Zionist. I am so
-      keen a Zionist that I would use a whole bookful of stamps in the cause. I
-      am a Zionist, not on sentimental grounds, but on very practical grounds. I
-      want the Jews to have Palestine, so that the English may have England and
-      the Germans Germany and the Russians Russia. I want them to have a home of
-      their own so that the rest of us can have a home of our own. By this I do
-      not mean that I am an anti-Semite. I loathe Jew-baiting, and regard the
-      Jew-baiter as a very unlovely person. But I want the Jew to be able to
-      decide whether he is an alien or a citizen. I want him to shed the dualism
-      that makes him such an affliction to himself and to other people. I want
-      him to possess Palestine so that he may cease to want to possess the
-      earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am therefore fiercely on the side of the Zionist Jews, and fiercely
-      against their opponents. These people want to be Jews, but they do not
-      want Jewry. They do not want to be compelled to make a choice between
-      being Jews and being Englishmen or Americans, Germans or French. They want
-      the best of both worlds. We are not a nation, they say; we are Englishmen,
-      or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, or Russians, or
-      Japanese &ldquo;of the Jewish persuasion.&rdquo; We are a religious community like the
-      Catholics, or the Presbyterians, or the Unitarians, or the Plymouth
-      Brethren. Indeed! And what is your religion, pray? <i>It is the religion
-      of the Chosen People</i>. Great heavens! You deny that you are a nation,
-      and in the same breath claim that you are the Chosen Nation. The very
-      foundation of your religion is that Jehovah has picked you out from all
-      the races of men as his own. Over you his hand is spread in everlasting
-      protection. For you the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night; for
-      the rest of us the utter darkness of the breeds that have not the
-      signature of Jehovah. We cannot enter your kingdom by praying or fasting,
-      by bribe or entreaty. Every other nation is accessible to us on its own
-      conditions; every other religion is eager to welcome us, sends its
-      missionaries to us to implore us to come in. But you, the rejected of
-      nations, yourself reject all nations and forbid your sacraments to those
-      who are not bom of your household. You are the Chosen People, whose
-      religion is the nation and whose nationhood is religion.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Why, my dear sir, history offers no parallel to your astounding claim to
-      nationality&mdash;the claim that has held your race together through
-      nearly two thousand years of dispersion and wandering, of persecution and
-      pride, of servitude and supremacy&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Slaves in eternal Egypts, baking your strawless bricks;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      At ease in successive Zions, prating your politics.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All nations are afflicted with egoism. It is the national egoism of
-      Prussia that has just brought it to such catastrophic ruin. The Frenchman
-      entertains the firm conviction that civilisation ends at the French
-      frontier. Being a polite person, he does his best not to betray the
-      conviction to us, and sometimes almost succeeds. The Englishman, being
-      less sophisticated, does not try to conceal the fact that he has a similar
-      conviction. It does not occur to him that anyone can doubt his claim. He
-      knows that every foreigner would like to be an Englishman if he knew how.
-      The pride of the Spaniard is a legend, and you have only to see Arab
-      salute Arab to understand what a low person the European must seem in
-      their eyes. In short, national egoism is a folly which is pretty equally
-      distributed among all of us. But your national egoism is unlike any other
-      brand on earth. In the humility of Shylock is the pride of the most
-      arrogant racial aristocracy the world has ever seen. God appeared to you
-      in the burning bush and spoke to you in the thunders of Sinai, and set you
-      apart as his own exclusive household. And when one of your prophets
-      declared that all nations were one in the sight of God, you rejected his
-      gospel and slew the prophet. By comparison with you we are a humble
-      people. We know we are a mixed race and that we have no more divine origin&mdash;and
-      no less&mdash;than anybody else. Mr Kipling, it is true, has caught your
-      arrogant note:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      For the Lord our God Most High,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      He hath made the deep as dry,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But that is because Mr Kipling seems to be one of those who believe we are
-      one of the lost tribes of your Chosen race. I gather that is so from
-      another of his poems in which he cautions us against
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Such boastings as the Gentiles use
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      And lesser breeds without the law.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But Mr Kipling is only a curiosity among us. We are much more modest than
-      that. But you are like that. You are not only a nation. You are, except
-      the Chinese, the most isolated, the most tenacious, the most exclusive
-      nation in history. Other races have changed through the centuries beyond
-      recognition or have disappeared altogether. Where are the Persians of the
-      spacious days of Cyrus? Who finds in the Egyptians of to-day the spirit
-      and genius of the mighty people who built the Pyramids and created the art
-      of the Third Dynasty? What trace is there in the modern Cretans of the
-      imperial race whose seapower had become a legend before Homer sang? Can we
-      find in the Greeks of our time any reminiscence of the Athens of Pericles?
-      Or in the Romans any kinship with the sovereign people that conquered the
-      world from Parthia to Britain, and stamped it with the signature of its
-      civilisation as indelibly as it stamped it with its great highways? The
-      nations chase each other across the stage of time, and vanish as the
-      generations of men chase each other and vanish. You and the Chinese alone
-      seem indestructible. It is no extravagant fancy that foresees that when
-      the last fire is lit on this expiring planet it will be a Chinaman and a
-      Jew who will stretch their hands to its warmth, drink in the last breath
-      of air, and write the final epitaph of earth. No, it is too late by many a
-      thousand years to deny your nationhood, for it is the most enduring fact
-      in human records. And being a nation without a fatherland, you run like a
-      disturbing immiscible fluid through the blood of all the nations. You need
-      a home for your own peace and for the world's peace. I am going to try and
-      help you to get one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0079" id="linkimage-0079"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0254m.jpg" alt="0254m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0254.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0080" id="linkimage-0080"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> think, on the
-      whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good display of moral
-      fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen (and admired) I propose
-      to let them off in public. When I awoke in the morning I made a good
-      resolution.... At this point, if I am not mistaken, I observe a slight
-      shudder on your part, madam. &ldquo;How Victorian!&rdquo; I think I hear you remark.
-      You compel me, madam, to digress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year's resolutions
-      nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we
-      elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No
-      one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian
-      England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This
-      querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like the
-      scorn of youth for its elders.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I
-      should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as it is
-      to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the
-      Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as
-      we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren will be
-      as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of yesterday.
-      The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered poison gas, and
-      have invented submarines and guns that will kill a churchful of people
-      seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding the Nineteenth Century
-      as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good things as well as very bad
-      things about our old Victorian England. It did not go to the Ritz to dance
-      in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz did not exist, and the modern hotel
-      life had not been invented. It used to go instead to the watch-night
-      service, and it was not above making good resolutions, which for the most
-      part, no doubt, it promptly proceeded to break.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of
-      watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I had
-      my way I would be as &ldquo;merry&rdquo; as Pepys, if in a different fashion. &ldquo;Merry&rdquo;
-       is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that merriment
-      is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a mere spasm,
-      whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy of life. But
-      the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other, and an occasional
-      burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for anybody&mdash;even for
-      an Archbishop&mdash;especially for an Archbishop. The trouble with an
-      Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take himself too
-      seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad for him. He
-      needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally that his virtue is
-      not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary humanity. At least once
-      a year he should indulge in a certain liveliness, wear the cap and bells,
-      dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe, not too publicly, but just publicly
-      enough so that there should be nothing furtive about it. If not done on
-      the village green it might at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and
-      chronicled in the local newspapers. &ldquo;Last evening His Grace the Archbishop
-      attended the servants' ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the
-      chief scullery-maid.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0081" id="linkimage-0081"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0257m.jpg" alt="0257m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0257.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its
-      good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you &ldquo;A Merry Christmas
-      and a Happy New Year.&rdquo; Nowadays the formula is &ldquo;A Happy Christmas and a
-      Prosperous New Year.&rdquo; It is a priggish, sophisticated change&mdash;a sort
-      of shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being &ldquo;merry.&rdquo;
-       There isn't. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a Merry
-      Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a Happy
-      New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making
-      good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that virtue is
-      a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride Victorian
-      England because it went to watch-night services it is not because I think
-      there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is because, in the
-      words of the old song, I think &ldquo;It is good to be merry <i>and</i> wise.&rdquo; I
-      like a festival of foolishness and I like good resolutions, too. Why
-      shouldn't I? Lewis Carrol's gift for mathematics was not less admirable
-      because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at doing sums in his head.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution.
-      The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New
-      Year's morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is that
-      you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn't call you an intolerant
-      fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow. Perhaps to put
-      the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous reaction to events is a
-      little too immediate. I don't want to be unpleasant, but I think you see
-      what I mean. Do not suppose that I am asking you to be a cold-blooded,
-      calculating person. God forbid. But it would do you no harm to wear a
-      snaffle bar and a tightish rein&mdash;or, as we used to say in our
-      Victorian England, to &ldquo;count ten.&rdquo; I accepted the criticism with approval.
-      For though we do not like to hear of our failings from other people, that
-      does not mean that we are unconscious of them. The more conscious we are
-      of them, the less we like to hear of them from others and the more we hear
-      of them from ourselves. So I said &ldquo;Agreed. We will adopt 'Second thoughts'
-      as our New Year policy and begin the campaign at once.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And then came my letters&mdash;nice letters and nasty letters and
-      indifferent letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say,
-      &ldquo;raised the waters.&rdquo; No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters
-      which anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I
-      might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting
-      assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of
-      writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different. As
-      I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding
-      expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I
-      said &ldquo;Second thoughts,&rdquo; and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as
-      the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect to
-      dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old
-      imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to have
-      a periodical brush with one's habits, even if one knows one is pretty sure
-      to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a reminder that we
-      are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of the imperfections of
-      others. And that, I think, is the case for our old Victorian habit of New
-      Year's Day commandments.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite <i>pianissimo</i> and
-      nice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0082" id="linkimage-0082"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0261m.jpg" alt="0261m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0261.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A GRECIAN PROFILE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> see that the
-      ghouls have descended upon George Meredith, and are desecrating his
-      remains. They have learned from the life of him just published that he did
-      not get on well with his father, or his eldest son, and that he did not
-      attend his first wife's funeral. Above all, he was a snob. He was ashamed
-      of the tailoring business from which he sprang, concealed the fact that he
-      was bom at Portsmouth, and generally turned his Grecian profile to the
-      world and left it to be assumed that his pedigree was wrapped in mystery
-      and magnificence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay it is all true. Many of us have an indifferent record at home
-      and most of us like to turn our Grecian profiles to the world, if we have
-      Grecian profiles. We are like the girl in Hardy's story who always managed
-      to walk on the right side of her lover, because she fancied that the left
-      side of her face was her strong point. The most distinguished and, I
-      think, the noblest American of our time always turns his profile to the
-      camera&mdash;and a beautiful profile it is&mdash;for reasons quite obvious
-      and quite pardonable to those who have seen the birth-mark that disfigures
-      the other cheek. I suspect that I do not myself object to being caught
-      unaware in favourable attitudes or pleasing situations that dispose the
-      observer to agreeable impressions. And, indeed, why should I (or you) be
-      ashamed to give-a pleasant thrill to anybody if it is in our power. If we
-      pretend we are above these human frailties, what is the meaning of the
-      pains we take about choosing a hat, or about the cut of a coat, or the
-      colour of a cloth for the new suit? Why do we so seldom find pleasure in a
-      photograph of ourselves&mdash;so seldom feel that it does justice to that
-      benignant and Olympian ideal of ourselves which we cherish secretly in our
-      hearts? I should have to admit, if I went into the confession box, that I
-      had never seen a photograph of myself that had satisfied me. And I fancy
-      you would do the same if you were honest. We may pretend to ourselves that
-      it is only abstract beauty or absolute truth that we are concerned about,
-      but we know better. We are thinking of our Grecian profile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is no doubt regrettable to find that great men are so often afflicted
-      with little weaknesses. There are some people who delight in pillorying
-      the immortals and shying dead cats and rotten eggs at them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They enjoy the discovery that no one is better than he should be. It gives
-      them a comfortable feeling to discover that the austere outside of the
-      lord Angelo conceals the libertine. If you praise Caesar they will remind
-      you that after dinner he took emetics; if Brutus, they will say he made an
-      idol of his public virtue. They like to remember that Lamb was not quite
-      the St Charles he is represented to be, but took far too much wine at
-      dinner and dosed beautifully, but alcoholically, afterwards, as you may
-      read in De Quincey. They like to recall that Scott was something of a
-      snob, and put the wine-glass that the Prince Regent had used at dinner in
-      his pocket, sitting down on it afterwards in a moment of happy
-      forgetfulness. In short, they go about like Alcibiades mutilating the
-      statues of Hermes (if he was indeed the culprit), and will leave us
-      nothing in human nature that we can entirely reverence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I suppose they are right enough on the facts. Considering what
-      multitudinous persons we are it would be a miracle if, when we button up
-      ourselves in the morning we did not button up some individual of
-      unpleasant propensities, whom we pretend we do not know. I have never been
-      interested in my pedigree. I am sure it is a very ancient one, and I leave
-      it at that. But I once made a calculation&mdash;based on the elementary
-      fact that I had two parents and they had each two parents, and so on&mdash;and
-      came to the conclusion that about the time of the Norman Conquest my
-      ancestors were much more numerous than the population then inhabiting this
-      island. I am aware that this proves rather too much&mdash;that it is an
-      example of the fact that you can prove anything by statistics, including
-      the impossible. But the truth remains that I am the temporary embodiment
-      of a very large number of people&mdash;of millions of millions of people,
-      if you trace me back to my ancestors who used to sharpen flints some six
-      hundred thousand years ago. It would be singular if in such a crowd there
-      were not some ne'er-do-wells jostling about among the nice, reputable
-      persons who, I flatter myself, constitute my Parliamentary majority.
-      Sometimes I fancy that, in a snap election taken at a moment of public
-      excitement within myself, the ne'er-do-wells get on top. These accidents
-      will happen, and the best I can hope is that the general trend of policy
-      in the multitudinous kingdom that I carry under my hat is in the hands of
-      the decent people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And that is the best we can expect from anybody&mdash;the great as well as
-      the least. If we demand of the supreme man that he shall be a perfect
-      whole we shall have no supreme man&mdash;only a plaster saint. Certainly
-      we shall have no great literature. Shakespeare did not sit aloof like a
-      perfect god imagining the world of imperfect creatures that he created.
-      The world was within him and he was only the vehicle of his enormous
-      ancestry and of the tumultuous life that they reproduced in the theatre of
-      his mind. In him was the mirth of a roystering Falstaff of long ago, the
-      calculating devilry of some Warwickshire Iago, the pity of Hubert, the
-      perplexity of some village Hamlet, the swagger of Ancient Pistol, the
-      bucolic simplicity of Cousin Silence, the mingled nobleness and baseness
-      of Macbeth, the agony of Lear, the sweetness of many a maiden who walked
-      by Avon's banks in ancient days and lived again in the Portias and
-      Rosalinds of his mind. All these people dwelt in Shakespeare. They were
-      the ghosts of his ancestors. He was, like the rest of us, not a man, but
-      multitudes of men. He created all these people because he was all these
-      people, contained in a larger measure than any man who ever lived all the
-      attributes, good and bad, of humanity. Each character was a peep into the
-      gallery of his ancestors. Meredith, himself, recognised the ancestral
-      source of creative power. When Lady Butcher asked him to explain his
-      insight into the character of women he replied, &ldquo;It is the spirit of my
-      mother in me.&rdquo; It was indeed the spirit of many mothers working in and
-      through him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it
-      so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never more
-      difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along the Embankment
-      last evening with a friend&mdash;a man known alike for his learning and
-      character&mdash;when he turned to me and said, &ldquo;I will never have a hero
-      again.&rdquo; We had been speaking of the causes of the catastrophe of Paris,
-      and his remark referred especially to his disappointment with President
-      Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair to the President. He did not make
-      allowance for the devil's broth of intrigue and ambitions into which the
-      President was plunged on this side of the Atlantic. But, leaving that
-      point aside, his remark expressed a very common feeling. There has been a
-      calamitous slump in heroes. They have fallen into as much disrepute as
-      kings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the
-      fabulous offspring of comfortable times&mdash;supermen reigning on Olympus
-      and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the storm
-      and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy and prove
-      that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they are discovered
-      to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind, feeble folk like
-      you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as helpless as any of us.
-      Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and their feet have come down
-      from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of clay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of the
-      Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron
-      expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      I want a hero: an uncommon want,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      When every year and month sends forth a new one.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The age discovers he is not the true one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that &ldquo;no man is a
-      hero to his valet.&rdquo; To be a hero you must be remote in time or
-      circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and
-      fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities and
-      angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is privileged
-      to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the tricks you
-      have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a faithful
-      secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture he gives of
-      Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome loathing for
-      that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name thunders down
-      the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his contemporaries. It
-      was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom he had just appointed to
-      the choicest command in his gift, who went to Caesar's house on that March
-      morning, two thousand years ago, to bring him to the slaughter.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men I
-      should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely than
-      anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance in secondary
-      things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and tenderness with
-      resolution and strength, he stands alone in history. But even he was not a
-      hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too near&mdash;near enough to
-      note his frailties, for he was human, too near to realise the grand and
-      significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was not until he was dead
-      that the world realised what a leader had fallen in Israel. Motley thanked
-      heaven, as for something unusual, that he had been privileged to
-      appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed him to men. Stanton
-      fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end, and it was only when
-      life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur of the force that had
-      been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. &ldquo;There lies the most perfect
-      ruler of men the world has ever seen,&rdquo; he said, as he stood with other
-      colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had breathed his last. But the
-      point here is that, sublime though the sum of the man was, his heroic
-      profile had its abundant human warts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of
-      reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It
-      will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have made
-      the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not find
-      them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are these the
-      men&mdash;these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards&mdash;the
-      demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the
-      microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than
-      demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and then
-      you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto
-      Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless
-      picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its
-      arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion
-      to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is a
-      painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never
-      will be such a being. The best of us is woven of &ldquo;mingled yarn, good and
-      ill together.&rdquo; And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and the
-      ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he &ldquo;contained
-      multitudes&rdquo; too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful
-      for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects of
-      that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0083" id="linkimage-0083"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0269m.jpg" alt="0269m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0269.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0084" id="linkimage-0084"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0270m.jpg" alt="0270m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0270.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON TAKING A HOLIDAY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> hope the two
-      ladies from the country who have been writing to the newspapers to know
-      what sights they ought to see in London during their Easter holiday will
-      have a nice time. I hope they will enjoy the tube and have fine weather
-      for the Monument, and whisper to each other successfully in the whispering
-      gallery of St Paul's, and see the dungeons at the Tower and the seats of
-      the mighty at Westminster, and return home with a harvest of joyful
-      memories. But I can promise them that there is one sight they will not
-      see. They will not see me. Their idea of a holiday is London. My idea of a
-      holiday is forgetting there is such a place as London.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not that I dislike London. I should like to see it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have long promised myself that I would see it. Some day, I have said, I
-      will surely have a look at this place. It is a shame, I have said, to have
-      lived in it so long and never to have seen it. I suppose I am not much
-      worse than other Londoners. Do you, sir, who have been taking the morning
-      bus from Balham for heaven knows how many years&mdash;do you, when you are
-      walking down Fleet Street, stand still with a shock of delight as the dome
-      of St Paul's and its cross of gold burst on your astonished sight? Do you
-      go on a fine afternoon and take your stand on Waterloo Bridge to see that
-      wondrous river façade that stretches with its cloud-capped towers and
-      gorgeous palaces from Westminster to St Paul's? Do you know the spot where
-      Charles was executed, or the church where there are the best Grinling
-      Gibbons carvings? Did you ever go into Somerset House to see the will of
-      William Shakespeare, or&mdash;in short, did you ever see London? Did you
-      ever see it, not with your eyes merely, hut with your mind, with the sense
-      of revelation, of surprise, of discovery? Did you ever see it as those two
-      ladies from the country will see it this Easter as they pass breathlessly
-      from wonder to wonder? Of course not. You need a holiday in London as I
-      do. You need to set out with young Tom (aged ten) on a voyage of discovery
-      and see all the sights of this astonishing city as though you had come to
-      it from a far country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That is how I hope to visit it&mdash;some day. But not this Easter, not
-      when I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the
-      cherry blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the
-      chestnut tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long
-      and the April meadows are &ldquo;smoored wi' new grass,&rdquo; as they say in the
-      Yorkshire dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at
-      the magic casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn
-      to the fringe of Dartmoor and let loose&mdash;shall it be from Okehampton
-      or Bovey Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? what matter the gate by which we
-      enter the sanctuary?&mdash;let loose, I say, into the vast spaces of earth
-      and sky where the moorland streams sing their ancient runes over the
-      boulders and the great tors stand out like castles of the gods against the
-      horizon and the Easter sun dances, as the legend has it, overhead and
-      founders gloriously in the night beyond Plymouth Sound.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or, perhaps, ladies, if you come from the North, I may pass you unawares,
-      and just about the time when you are cracking your breakfast egg in the
-      boarding house at Russell Square&mdash;heavens, Russell Square!&mdash;and
-      discussing whether you shall first go down the deepest lift or up the
-      highest tower, or stand before the august ugliness of Buckingham Palace,
-      or see the largest station or the smallest church, I shall be stepping out
-      from Keswick, by the lapping waters of Derwent water, hailing the old
-      familiar mountains as they loom into sight, looking down again&mdash;think
-      of it!&mdash;into the' Jaws of Borrowdale, having a snack at Rosthwaite,
-      and then, hey for Styehead! up, up ever the rough mountain track, with the
-      buzzard circling with slow flapping wings about the mountain flanks, with
-      glorious Great Gable for my companion on the right hand and no less
-      glorious Scafell for my companion on the left hand, and at the rocky turn
-      in the track&mdash;lo! the great amphitheatre of Wasdale, the last
-      Sanctuary of lakeland.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And at this point, ladies, you may as you crane your neck to see the Duke
-      of York at the top of his column&mdash;wondering all the while who the
-      deuce the fellow was that he should stand so high&mdash;you may, I say, if
-      you like, conceive me standing at the top of the pass, taking my hat from
-      my head and pronouncing a terrific curse on the vandals who would
-      desecrate the last temple of solitude by driving a road over this fastness
-      of the mountains in order that the gross tribe of motorists may come with
-      their hoots and their odours, their hurry and vulgarity, and chase the
-      spirit of the mountains away from us for ever.... And then by the screes
-      of Great Gable to the hollow among the mountains. Or perchance, I may turn
-      by Sprinkling Tam and see the Pikes of Langdale come into view and stumble
-      down Rossett Ghyll and so by the green pastures of Langdale to Grasmere.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In short, ladies, I may be found in many places. But I shall not tell you
-      where. I am not quite sure that I could tell you where at this moment, for
-      I am like a fellow who has come into great riches and is doubtful how he
-      can squander them most gloriously. But, I repeat, ladies, that you will
-      not find me in London. I leave London to you. May you enjoy it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0085" id="linkimage-0085"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      UNDER THE SYCAMORE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>n odd question was
-      put to me the other day which I think I may venture to pass on to a wider
-      circle. It was this: What is the best dish that life has set before you?
-      At first blush it seems an easy question to answer. It was answered gaily
-      enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked what was the best thing that
-      had ever happened to him. &ldquo;The best thing that ever happened to me was to
-      be born,&rdquo; he replied. But that is not an answer: it is an evasion. It
-      belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether life is worth living. Life may
-      be worth living or not worth living on balance, but in either case we can
-      still say what was the thing in it that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a
-      dinner on the whole and yet make an exception of the trout, or the braised
-      ham and spinach or the dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and
-      still admit that he has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift
-      and many more, have cursed the day you were born and still remember many
-      pleasant things that have happened to you&mdash;falling in love, making
-      friends, climbing mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs,
-      watching the sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You
-      may write off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush
-      outside. It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very
-      sad heart who has never had anything to thank his stars for.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it grows
-      difficult on reflection.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily
-      answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over
-      and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things
-      that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long
-      sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and
-      agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree&mdash;sycamore or
-      chestnut for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because
-      their generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade&mdash;to sit, I
-      say, and think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball
-      which the Blessèd Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven
-      near by, sees &ldquo;spinning like a midge&rdquo; below.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and asked
-      us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play to which
-      we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped away so
-      quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we should make
-      now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will be there)
-      will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer. That glorious
-      contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool million&mdash;come
-      now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair to remember your
-      journey by. You will have to think of something better than that as the
-      splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to confess to a very
-      complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser pleasures seemed so
-      important, you will not like to admit, even to yourself, that your most
-      rapturous memory of earth centres round the grillroom at the Savoy. You
-      will probably find that the things best worth remembering are the things
-      you rejected.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose pleasures
-      were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of life, after
-      all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers in money, and
-      traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those occupations to
-      hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon under that
-      sycamore tree&mdash;which of them, now that it is all over, will have most
-      joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one and a
-      gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the earth as
-      a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the mountains,
-      and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and where season
-      followed season with a processional glory that never grew dim. And Mozart
-      will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and Turner as a panorama
-      of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect, with what delight they
-      will look back on the great moments of life&mdash;Columbus seeing the new
-      world dawning on his vision, Copernicus feeling the sublime architecture
-      of the universe taking shape in his mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal
-      mystery of the human frame, Darwin thrilling with the birth pangs of the
-      immense secret that he wrung from Nature. These men will be able to answer
-      the question grandly. The banquet they had on earth will bear talking
-      about even in Heaven.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the
-      scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will, I
-      fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and
-      humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we won
-      the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or shook
-      hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our name in
-      the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament. It will
-      be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human comradeship we
-      had on the journey&mdash;the friendships of the spirit, whether made in
-      the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or art. We shall
-      remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its affections&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The fates some recompense have sent&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Thrice blessed are the things that last,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The things that are more excellent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0086" id="linkimage-0086"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0278m.jpg" alt="0278m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0278.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0087" id="linkimage-0087"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0279m.jpg" alt="0279m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0279.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> met an old
-      gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with whom I have a
-      slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he asked me whether I
-      remembered Walker of <i>The Daily News</i>. No, said I, he was before my
-      time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the 'seventies.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Before that,&rdquo; said the old gentleman. &ldquo;Must have been in the 'sixties.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Probably,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Did you know him in the 'sixties?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh, I knew him before then,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, warming to his
-      subject. &ldquo;I knew him in the 'forties.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman
-      enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Heavens!&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;the 'forties!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a better
-      view across the ages. &ldquo;No.... It must have been in the 'thirties.... Yes,
-      it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school together in the 'thirties.
-      We called him Sawney Walker.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I had
-      paid him the one compliment that appealed to him&mdash;the compliment of
-      astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety
-      not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked &ldquo;well
-      set&rdquo; for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance
-      as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his hundred
-      at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement was mixed
-      with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent vanity is the
-      last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last infirmity that
-      humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that rages around Dean
-      Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the angels. I want to
-      feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are moving upwards in the
-      scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round and round and biting our
-      tail. I think the case for the ascent of man is stronger than the Dean
-      admits. A creature that has emerged from the primordial slime and evolved
-      a moral law has progressed a good way. It is not unreasonable to think
-      that he has a future. Give him time&mdash;and it may be that the world is
-      still only in its rebellious childhood&mdash;and he will go far.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a
-      time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant
-      and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first
-      knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We are
-      vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of his
-      acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all the
-      year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes at
-      the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots and his
-      cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of mine who,
-      in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing boots to the
-      children at a London school, heard one day a little child pattering behind
-      her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of the beneficiaries
-      &ldquo;keeping up&rdquo; with her. She turned and recognised the wearer. &ldquo;So you've
-      got your new boots on, Mary?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said little Mary grandly.
-      &ldquo;Don't they squeak beautiful, mum.&rdquo; And though, as we grow older, we cease
-      to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we find other material to
-      keep the flame of vanity alive. &ldquo;What for should I ride in a carriage if
-      the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?&rdquo; said the Fifer, putting his
-      head out of the window. He spoke for all of us. We are all a little like
-      that. I confess that I cannot ride in a motor-car that whizzes past other
-      motor-cars without an absurd and irrational vanity. I despise the emotion,
-      but it is there in spite of me. And I remember that when I was young I
-      could hardly free-wheel down a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior
-      to the man who was grinding his way up with heavings and perspiration. I
-      have no shame in making these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that
-      you, sir (or madam), will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite
-      audible echo of yourself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we are vain
-      of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our neighbours as
-      we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our neighbours. We are
-      like the old maltster in &ldquo;Far from the Madding Crowd,&rdquo; when Henery Fray
-      claimed to be &ldquo;a strange old piece, goodmen.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;A strange old piece, ye say!&rdquo; interposed the maltster in a querulous
-      voice. &ldquo;Ye be no old man worth naming&mdash;no old man at all. Yer teeth
-      bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
-      bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis a
-      poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore&mdash;a
-      boast weak as water.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences
-      when the maltster had to be pacified.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Weak as water, yes,&rdquo; said Jan Coggan. &ldquo;Malter, we feel ye to be a
-      wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; said Joseph Poorgrass. &ldquo;Ye be a very rare old spectacle, malter,
-      and we all respect ye for that gift.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in being
-      &ldquo;a very rare old spectacle.&rdquo; We count the reigns we've lived in and exalt
-      the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes at midnight.
-      Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite early, as in the
-      case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of Cicero who was only
-      in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as an old man and wrote
-      his &ldquo;De Senectute,&rdquo; exalting the pleasures of old age. In the eyes of the
-      maltster he would never have been an old man worth naming, for he was only
-      sixty-four when he was murdered. I have noticed in my own case of late a
-      growing tendency to flourish my antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure
-      in recalling the 'seventies to those who can remember, say, only the
-      'nineties, that my fine old friend in the lane had in talking to me about
-      the 'thirties. I met two nice boys the other day at a country house, and
-      they were full, as boys ought to be, of the subject of the cricket. And
-      when they found I was worth talking to on that high theme, they submitted
-      their ideal team to me for approval, and I launched out about the giants
-      that lived in the days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds
-      of &ldquo;W. G.&rdquo; and Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G.
-      Steel, and many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their
-      stature did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those
-      memories as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I
-      shall be proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning
-      nurse. She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope
-      and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our
-      toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant vanity
-      we are soothed to sleep.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0088" id="linkimage-0088"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0284m.jpg" alt="0284m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0284.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0089" id="linkimage-0089"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0285m.jpg" alt="0285m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0285.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON SIGHTING LAND
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was in the midst
-      of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me to my feet with a
-      leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a doughty fellow, who
-      wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and had trained it to stand
-      up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of interrogation. &ldquo;I offer you a
-      draw,&rdquo; I said with a regal wave of the hand, as though I was offering him
-      Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or something substantial like that.
-      &ldquo;Accepted,&rdquo; he cried with a gesture no less reckless and comprehensive.
-      And then we bolted for the top deck. For the cry we had heard was &ldquo;Land in
-      sight!&rdquo; And if there are three more comfortable words to hear when you
-      have been tossing about on the ocean for a week or two, I do not know
-      them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the Atlantic
-      is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely facetious
-      when he said he was &ldquo;disappointed with the Atlantic.&rdquo; But now I am
-      disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way I knew
-      it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order to know
-      what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until he was a
-      middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to his conception
-      of the sea because &ldquo;we have in us the glance of the universe.&rdquo; But though
-      the actual experience of the ocean adds little to the broad imaginative
-      conception of it formed by the mind, we are not prepared for the effect of
-      sameness, still less for the sense of smallness. It is as though we are
-      sitting day after day in the geometrical centre of a very round table-top.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are told
-      that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before yesterday
-      and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility to the
-      fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured by and
-      here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is perfectly
-      flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn by
-      compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have &ldquo;a drop
-      into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.&rdquo; You conceive
-      yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth which hangs
-      over the sides.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its
-      appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue cloth,
-      with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption of
-      transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey cloth;
-      sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth and
-      tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the table,
-      and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth flinging
-      itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an
-      incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion
-      and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under the
-      impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment suspended
-      in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like a wrestler
-      fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning, every joint
-      creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful strain. A gleam of
-      sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching the clouds of spray
-      turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling ship with the glamour
-      of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there is nothing but the
-      raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler in their midst, and
-      far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the horizon, as if it were a
-      pencil of white flame, to a spectral and unearthly beauty.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are moveless
-      in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our magic carpet
-      (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or Europe, as the
-      case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we are standing still
-      for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers progress to the mind.
-      The circle we looked out on last night is indistinguishable from the
-      circle we look out on this morning. Even the sky and cloud effects are
-      lost on this flat contracted stage, with its hard horizon and its thwarted
-      vision. There is a curious absence of the sense of distance, even of
-      distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as abruptly as the sea at that
-      severely drawn circumference and there is no vague merging of the seen
-      into the unseen, which alone gives the imagination room for flight. To
-      live in this world is to be imprisoned in a double sense&mdash;in the
-      physical sense that Johnson had in mind in his famous retort, and in the
-      emotional sense that I have attempted to describe. In my growing list of
-      undesirable occupations&mdash;sewermen, lift-men, stokers,
-      tram-conductors, and so on&mdash;I shall henceforth include ships'
-      stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being shot like a shuttle
-      in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New York and back from New
-      York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the ill-humour of the ocean and
-      to play the sick nurse to a never-ending mob of strangers, is as dreary a
-      part as one could be cast for. I would rather navigate a barge on the
-      Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet,
-      on second thoughts, they have their joys. They hear, every fortnight or
-      so, that thrilling cry, &ldquo;Land in sight!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and
-      however familiar it may be.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example.
-      Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the
-      first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some
-      unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively,
-      comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment
-      seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination.
-      Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the monotonous
-      rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with the emotion of
-      the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of the sea. Such a
-      cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three hundred years
-      ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of that immortal
-      little company of the <i>Mayflower</i> caught sight of the land where,
-      they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down through the
-      centuries that cry of &ldquo;Land in sight!&rdquo; has been sounded in the ears of
-      generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to the new land
-      of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see that land
-      shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great drama of the
-      ages.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English eyes
-      as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this sunny
-      morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the sight there
-      is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself heaving with a
-      hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders. I have a fleeting
-      vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling down there amid a
-      glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to sea, and standing
-      on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home to the Ark that is
-      for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is a
-      rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his hills
-      hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager comes from,
-      whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic from the Cape,
-      or round the Cape from Australia, or through the Mediterranean from India,
-      this is the first glimpse of the homeland that greets him, carrying his
-      mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the journey's end. And that
-      vision links him up with the great pageant of history. Drake, sailing in
-      from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and knew he was once more in his
-      Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck beside me with a wisp of hair,
-      curled and questioning, on his baldish forehead, and I mark the shine in
-      his eyes....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0090" id="linkimage-0090"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0291m.jpg" alt="0291m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0291.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0091" id="linkimage-0091"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0294m.jpg" alt="0294m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0294.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <div style="height: 6em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-
-<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47429 ***</div>
-  </body>
-</html>
+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      Windfalls, by By Alfred George Gardiner
+    </title>
+    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .indent5   { margin-left: 5%;}
+    .indent10  { margin-left: 10%;}
+    .indent15  { margin-left: 15%;}
+    .indent20  { margin-left: 20%;}
+    .indent30  { margin-left: 30%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {position: absolute; right: 1%; font-size: 0.6em;
+                font-variant: normal; font-style: normal;
+                text-align: right; background-color: #FFFACD;
+                border: 1px solid; padding: 0.3em;text-indent: 0em;}
+    .side      { float: left; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
+               border-left: dashed thin; text-align: left;
+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
+    p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
+    span.dropcap         { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 }
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+<body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47429 ***</div>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      WINDFALLS
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Alfred George Gardiner
+</h2>
+<h3>
+(Alpha of the Plough)
+    </h3>
+
+<h3>Illustrations by Clive Gardiner
+</h3>
+    <h4>
+      J. M. Dent &amp; Sons, Ltd.
+    </h4>
+    <h5>
+      1920
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0002m.jpg" alt="0002m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0002.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0008m.jpg" alt="0008m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0008.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0009m.jpg" alt="0009m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0009.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I think this book belongs to you because, if it can be said to be about
+      anything in particular&mdash;which it cannot&mdash;it is, in spite of its
+      delusive title, about bees, and as I cannot dedicate it to them, I offer
+      it to those who love them most.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0015m.jpg" alt="0015m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0015.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> JEMIMA </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> ON BEING IDLE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> ON HABITS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> IN DEFENCE OF WASPS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> ON PILLAR ROCK </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> TWO VOICES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> ON BEING TIDY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> AN EPISODE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> ON POSSESSION </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> ON BORES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> A LOST SWARM </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> YOUNG AMERICA </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> ON GREAT REPLIES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> ON HEREFORD BEACON </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> CHUM </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> ON MATCHES AND THINGS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> ON BEING REMEMBERED </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> ON DINING </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> TWO DRINKS OF MILK </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> ON GREAT MEN </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> ON SWEARING </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> ON A HANSOM CAB </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> ON MANNERS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> ON A FINE DAY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> DOWN TOWN </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> ON KEYHOLE MORALS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> FLEET STREET NO MORE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> ON WAKING UP </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> ON RE-READING </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> FEBRUARY DAYS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> ON A GRECIAN PROFILE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> ON TAKING A HOLIDAY </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> UNDER THE SYCAMORE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> ON SIGHTING LAND </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a> <br /><br /><a
+      name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0013m.jpg" alt="0013m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0013.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      PREFACE
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>n offering a third
+      basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is hoped that the fruit will
+      not be found to have deteriorated. If that is the case, I shall hold
+      myself free to take another look under the trees at my leisure. But I
+      fancy the three baskets will complete the garnering. The old orchard from
+      which the fruit has been so largely gathered is passing from me, and the
+      new orchard to which I go has not yet matured. Perhaps in the course of
+      years it will furnish material for a collection of autumn leaves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0021m.jpg" alt="0021m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0021.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      JEMIMA
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> took a garden
+      fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes. When Jemima saw me
+      crossing the orchard with a fork he called a committee meeting, or rather
+      a general assembly, and after some joyous discussion it was decided <i>nem.
+      con</i>. that the thing was worth looking into. Forthwith, the whole
+      family of Indian runners lined up in single file, and led by Jemima
+      followed faithfully in my track towards the artichoke bed, with a gabble
+      of merry noises. Jemima was first into the breach. He always is...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But before I proceed it is necessary to explain. You will have observed
+      that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless,
+      you said, &ldquo;How careless of the printer. Once might be forgiven; but twice&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+       Dear madam' (or sir), the printer is on this occasion blameless. It seems
+      incredible, but it's so. The truth is that Jemima was the victim of an
+      accident at the christening ceremony. He was one of a brood who, as they
+      came like little balls of yellow fluff out of the shell, received names of
+      appropriate ambiguity&mdash;all except Jemima. There were Lob and Lop, Two
+      Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?, Greedy and Baby, and so on. Every
+      name as safe as the bank, equal to all contingencies&mdash;except Jemima.
+      What reckless impulse led us to call him Jemima I forget. But regardless
+      of his name, he grew up into a handsome drake&mdash;a proud and gaudy
+      fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you call him so long as you call
+      him to the Diet of Worms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And here he is, surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble, gobble,
+      and crowd in on me so that I have to scare them off in order to drive in
+      the fork. Jemima keeps his eye on the fork as a good batsman keeps his eye
+      on the ball. The flash of a fork appeals to him like the sound of a
+      trumpet to the warhorse. He will lead his battalion through fire and water
+      in pursuit of it. He knows that a fork has some mystical connection with
+      worms, and doubtless regards it as a beneficent deity. The others are
+      content to grub in the new-turned soil, but he, with his larger reasoning
+      power, knows that the fork produces the worms and that the way to get the
+      fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the way he watches it I
+      rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the fork. Look at him now. He
+      cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating fork, expecting to see large,
+      squirming worms dropping from it, and Greedy nips in under his nose and
+      gobbles a waggling beauty. My excellent friend, I say, addressing Jemima,
+      you know both too much and too little. If you had known a little more you
+      would have had that worm; if you had known a little less you would have
+      had that worm. Let me commend to you the words of the poet:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      A little learning is a dangerous thing:
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I've known many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too
+      much but don't know enough. Now Greedy&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But clear off all of you. What ho! there.... The scales!... Here is a
+      bumper root.... Jemima realises that something unusual has happened,
+      assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with great animation. It
+      is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners such agreeable
+      companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian runners about.
+      Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the orchard without an
+      idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in a perpetual gossip. The
+      world is full of such a number of things that they hardly ever leave off
+      talking, and though they all talk together they are so amiable about it
+      that it makes you feel cheerful to hear them.... But here are the
+      scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do you say to that,
+      Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am
+      enveloped once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful
+      risks in his attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be
+      ungracious to complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it, I
+      said, but you are feasting to-day in order that others may feast tomorrow.
+      You devour the worm, and a larger and more cunning animal will devour you.
+      He cocks up his head and fixes me with that beady eye that gleams with
+      such artless yet searching intelligence.... You are right, Jemima. That,
+      as you observe, is only half the tale. You eat the worm, and the large,
+      cunning animal eats you, but&mdash;yes, Jemima, the crude fact has to be
+      faced that the worm takes up the tale again where Man the Mighty leaves
+      off:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent30">
+      His heart is builded
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      For pride, for potency, infinity,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      Arrased with purple like the house of kings,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      <i>To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm</i>
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      <i>Statelily lodge...</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I accept your reminder, Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like you,
+      am only a link in the chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries, who creates
+      to devour and devours to create. I thank you, Jemima. And driving in the
+      fork and turning up the soil I seized a large fat worm. I present you with
+      this, Jemima, I said, as a mark of my esteem...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0025m.jpg" alt="0025m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0025.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON BEING IDLE
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> have long
+      laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person. It is an
+      entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in conversation, I
+      do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am idle, in fact, to
+      prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art of defence is attack. I
+      defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a verdict of not guilty by
+      the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm you by laying down my
+      arms. &ldquo;Ah, ah,&rdquo; I expect you to say. &ldquo;Ah, ah, you an idle person. Well,
+      that is good.&rdquo; And if you do not say it I at least give myself the
+      pleasure of believing that you think it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things about
+      ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about us. We
+      say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way some
+      people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their early
+      decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as remote as
+      it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating the sorrow it
+      will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be missed. We all
+      like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember a nice old
+      gentleman whose favourite topic was &ldquo;When I am gone.&rdquo; One day he was
+      telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee, what would
+      happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up cheerfully and
+      said, &ldquo;When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at the funeral?&rdquo; It was
+      a devastating question, and it was observed that afterwards the old
+      gentleman never discussed his latter end with his formidable grandchild.
+      He made it too painfully literal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were to
+      express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad as the
+      old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and I daresay
+      I should take care not to lay myself open again to such <i>gaucherie</i>.
+      But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling self-deception.
+      I can speak the plain truth about &ldquo;Alpha of the Plough&rdquo; without asking for
+      any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how he suffers. And I
+      say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was never more satisfied
+      of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has been engaged in the
+      agreeable task of dodging his duty to <i>The Star</i>.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It began quite early this morning&mdash;for you cannot help being about
+      quite early now that the clock has been put forward&mdash;or is it back?&mdash;for
+      summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and there
+      at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved to write
+      an article <i>en plein air</i>, as Corot used to paint his pictures&mdash;an
+      article that would simply carry the intoxication of this May morning into
+      Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare carolling with larks, and
+      make it green with the green and dappled wonder of the beech woods. But
+      first of all he had to saturate himself with the sunshine. You cannot give
+      out sunshine until you have taken it in. That, said he, is plain to the
+      meanest understanding. So he took it in. He just lay on his back and
+      looked at the clouds sailing serenely in the blue. They were well worth
+      looking at&mdash;large, fat, lazy, clouds that drifted along silently and
+      dreamily, like vast bales of wool being wafted from one star to another.
+      He looked at them &ldquo;long and long&rdquo; as Walt Whitman used to say. How that
+      loafer of genius, he said, would have loved to lie and look at those
+      woolly clouds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
+      another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not have a
+      picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began enumerating
+      the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the wings of the
+      west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could hear if one gave
+      one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin whisper of the breeze
+      in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of the woodland behind, the
+      dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech near by, the boom of a
+      bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of the meadow pipit rising
+      from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo sailing up the valley, the
+      clatter of magpies on the hillside, the &ldquo;spink-spink&rdquo; of the chaffinch,
+      the whirr of a tractor in a distant field, the crowing of a far-off cock,
+      the bark of a sheep dog, the ring of a hammer reverberating from a remote
+      clearing in the beech woods, the voices of children who were gathering
+      violets and bluebells in the wooded hollow on the other side of the hill.
+      All these and many other things he heard, still lying on his back and
+      looking at the heavenly bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him;
+      their billowy softness invited to slumber....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
+      Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and the
+      best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the blossoms
+      falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you preaching
+      the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He would catch
+      something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did not lie about
+      on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds. To them, life was
+      real, life was earnest. They were always &ldquo;up and doing.&rdquo; It was true that
+      there were the drones, impostors who make ten times the buzz of the
+      workers, and would have you believe they do all the work because they make
+      most of the noise. But the example of these lazy fellows he would ignore.
+      Under the cherry tree he would labour like the honey bee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came out
+      to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives alone,
+      but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put on a veil
+      and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time flies when you
+      are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do and see. You
+      always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure that she is
+      there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took more time
+      than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one of the
+      hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other hives,
+      and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was visible. The
+      frames were turned over industriously without reward. At last, on the
+      floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found. This deepened
+      the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason, rejected her
+      sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne appeared and
+      given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last the new queen
+      was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of her subjects. She
+      had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped notice when the brood
+      frames were put in and, according to the merciless law of the hive, had
+      slain her senior. All this took time, and before he had finished, the
+      cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard announced another
+      interruption of his task.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
+      of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article about
+      how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one virtue. It
+      exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0030m.jpg" alt="0030m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0030.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0031m.jpg" alt="0031m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0031.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON HABITS
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> sat down to write
+      an article this morning, but found I could make no progress. There was
+      grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels refused to revolve. I was
+      writing with a pen&mdash;a new fountain pen that someone had been good
+      enough to send me, in commemoration of an anniversary, my interest in
+      which is now very slight, but of which one or two well-meaning friends are
+      still in the habit of reminding me. It was an excellent pen, broad and
+      free in its paces, and capable of a most satisfying flourish. It was a
+      pen, you would have said, that could have written an article about
+      anything. You had only to fill it with ink and give it its head, and it
+      would gallop away to its journey's end without a pause. That is how I felt
+      about it when I sat down. But instead of galloping, the thing was as
+      obstinate as a mule. I could get no more speed out of it than Stevenson
+      could get out of his donkey in the Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried
+      the bastinado, equally without effect on my Modestine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
+      practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without my
+      using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
+      there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
+      thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
+      extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
+      bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a whole
+      forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to me what
+      his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke of Cambridge,
+      or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to Jackson or&mdash;in
+      short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my hand, seat me
+      before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as they say of the
+      children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an eight-day clock.
+      I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten. But the magic wand
+      must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen in my hand, and the whole
+      complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an atmosphere of strangeness. The
+      pen kept intruding between me and my thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the
+      touch. It seemed to write a foreign language in which nothing pleased me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
+      better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
+      of his school days. &ldquo;There was,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a boy in my class at school who
+      stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant him. Day
+      came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would; till at
+      length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always fumbled
+      with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
+      waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in an
+      evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know the
+      success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was again
+      questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not to be
+      found. In his distress he looked down for it&mdash;it was to be seen no
+      more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
+      place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was the
+      author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him smote me as
+      I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some reparation;
+      but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance
+      with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior office in one of
+      the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe he is dead, he took
+      early to drinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
+      regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
+      and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come. to
+      grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits, so long
+      as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little more than
+      bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take away our
+      habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about. We could
+      not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life. They enable
+      us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we had to give
+      fresh and original thought to them each time, would make existence an
+      impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our commonplace
+      activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more leisure we
+      command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but not so large
+      as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up your own hat
+      and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long time it was my
+      practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant hook and to take
+      no note of the place. When I sought them I found it absurdly difficult to
+      find them in the midst of so many similar hats and coats. Memory did not
+      help me, for memory refused to burden itself with such trumpery things,
+      and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering forlornly and vacuously
+      between the rows and rows of clothes in search of my own garments
+      murmuring, &ldquo;Where <i>did</i> I put my hat?&rdquo; Then one day a brilliant
+      inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on a certain
+      peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to it. It needed
+      a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked like a charm. I
+      can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding them. I go to them
+      as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to its mark. It is one of
+      the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
+      ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally break
+      them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ them,
+      without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once saw Mr
+      Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial breach of
+      habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of Trinity
+      House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House. It is his
+      custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the most
+      comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms about in
+      a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief and the body in
+      repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no lapels, and when the
+      hands went up in search of them they wandered about pathetically like a
+      couple of children who had lost their parents on Blackpool sands. They
+      fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung to each other in a
+      visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed the search for the lost
+      lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with the glasses on the table,
+      sought again for the lapels, did everything but take refuge in the pockets
+      of the trousers. It was a characteristic omission. Mr Balfour is too
+      practised a speaker to come to disaster as the boy in Scott's story did;
+      but his discomfiture was apparent. He struggled manfully through his
+      speech, but all the time it was obvious that he was at a loss what to do
+      with his hands, having no lapels on which to hang them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out a
+      pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit, ticked
+      away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I hope)
+      pardonable result.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0036m.jpg" alt="0036m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0036.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IN DEFENCE OF WASPS
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t is time, I
+      think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He is no saint, but he
+      is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been unusually prolific this
+      summer, and agitated correspondents have been busy writing to the
+      newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how by holding your breath
+      you may miraculously prevent him stinging you. Now the point about the
+      wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He is, in spite of his military
+      uniform and his formidable weapon, not a bad fellow, and if you leave him
+      alone he will leave you alone. He is a nuisance of course. He likes jam
+      and honey; but then I am bound to confess that I like jam and honey too,
+      and I daresay those correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam
+      and honey. We shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like
+      jam and honey. But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the
+      plate, and he is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no
+      doubt. He is an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously
+      helpless condition from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness
+      for beer. In the language of America, he is a &ldquo;wet.&rdquo; He cannot resist
+      beer, and having rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully
+      tight and staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that
+      he won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
+      Belloc&mdash;not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so
+      waspishly about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about
+      beer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty beer
+      bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets out. He is
+      indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings. He is
+      excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody and nothing,
+      and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of things; but a
+      wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin that he is, and
+      will never have the sense to walk out the way he went in. And on your
+      plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You can descend on
+      him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight for anything above
+      him, and no sense of looking upward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
+      fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
+      glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
+      familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
+      the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he cuts
+      a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
+      poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its time
+      in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night during
+      its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and for future
+      generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow stripes just
+      lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank you. Let us
+      eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow&mdash;&mdash;. He runs
+      through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time in
+      August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving only
+      the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of 20,000 or
+      so next summer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
+      you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
+      it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet he
+      could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than the bee,
+      for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel competent to
+      speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for I've been living
+      in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the orchard, with an
+      estimated population of a quarter of a million bees and tens of thousands
+      of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never deliberately attacked
+      by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around me I flee for shelter.
+      There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp, the bee's hatred is
+      personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some obscure reason, and is
+      always ready to die for the satisfaction of its anger. And it dies very
+      profusely. The expert, who has been taking sections from the hives, showed
+      me her hat just now. It had nineteen stings in it, planted in as neatly as
+      thorns in a bicycle tyre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
+      him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
+      nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
+      devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked, and I
+      like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little joint,
+      usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real virtue, and
+      this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean fellow, and
+      is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of that supreme
+      abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is very cunning.
+      I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He got the blow fly
+      down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed off one of the
+      creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape, and then with a
+      huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away. And I confess he
+      carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a whole generation
+      of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
+      help a fellow in distress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to one
+      that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was continued
+      for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to stroke gently
+      the injured wings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
+      who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
+      carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp as
+      an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
+      sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to kill
+      her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
+      preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we wish
+      ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for their
+      enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0012" id="linkimage-0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0040m.jpg" alt="0040m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0040.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0041m.jpg" alt="0041m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0041.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON PILLAR ROCK
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>hose, we are told,
+      who have heard the East a-calling &ldquo;never heed naught else.&rdquo; Perhaps it is
+      so; but they can never have heard the call of Lakeland at New Year. They
+      can never have scrambled up the screes of the Great Gable on winter days
+      to try a fall with the Arrow Head and the Needle, the Chimney and Kern
+      Knotts Crack; never have seen the mighty Pillar Rock beckoning them from
+      the top of Black Sail Pass, nor the inn lights far down in the valley
+      calling them back from the mountains when night has fallen; never have sat
+      round the inn fire and talked of the jolly perils of the day, or played
+      chess with the landlord&mdash;and been beaten&mdash;or gone to bed with
+      the refrain of the climbers' chorus still challenging the roar of the wind
+      outside&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      Come, let us tie the rope, the rope, the rope,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Come, let us link it round, round, round.
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      And he that will not climb to-day
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Why&mdash;leave him on the ground, the ground, the ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you have done these things you will not make much of the call of the
+      temple bells and the palm trees and the spicy garlic smells&mdash;least of
+      all at New Year. You will hear instead the call of the Pillar Rock and the
+      chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your oldest clothes and wind the
+      rope around you&mdash;singing meanwhile &ldquo;the rope, the rope,&rdquo;&mdash;and
+      take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will step out at
+      that gateway of the enchanted land&mdash;Keswick. Keswick! Wastdale!...
+      Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to whom they
+      open the magic casements at a breath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And at Keswick you call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go to
+      Keswick without calling on George Abraham. You might as well go to
+      Wastdale Head without calling on the Pillar Rock. And George tells you
+      that of course he will be over at Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will
+      climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle with you on New Year's Day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave adieus, and are soon jolting
+      down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where every object is an old
+      friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the Bowder Stone and
+      there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow of Cat Bells.
+      (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and picking wimberries and
+      waking the echoes of Grisedale.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the
+      billowy summits of Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky
+      sentinels of the valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name.
+      Perhaps you jump down at Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to
+      Rosthwaite and lunch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street is a myth
+      and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of the sanctuary and
+      the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling your rucksack on your
+      back and your rope over your shoulder and set out on the three hours'
+      tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is dark when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and these
+      December days are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by the
+      landlord and landlady&mdash;heirs of Auld Will Ritson&mdash;and in the
+      flagged entrance you see coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of
+      climbers' boots&mdash;boots that make the heart sing to look upon, boots
+      that have struck music out of many a rocky breast, boots whose missing
+      nails has each a story of its own. You put your own among them, don your
+      slippers, and plunge among your old companions of the rocks with jolly
+      greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it is&mdash;a master
+      from a school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a young
+      clergyman, a barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham,
+      and so on. But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and
+      the eternal boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who shall tell of the days and nights that follow?&mdash;of the songs that
+      are sung, and the &ldquo;traverses&rdquo; that are made round the billiard room and
+      the barn, of the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous
+      climb, of the letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and the
+      departures for the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich with new
+      memories, you all foregather again&mdash;save only, perhaps, the jolly
+      lawyer and his fellows who have lost their way back from Scafell, and for
+      whom you are about to send out a search party when they turn up out of the
+      darkness with new material for fireside tales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's Day&mdash;clear and
+      bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost in the air.
+      In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up ropes, putting on
+      putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for boots (the boots
+      are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing nails). We separate
+      at the threshold&mdash;this group for the Great Gable, that for Scafell,
+      ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock. It is a two and
+      a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and as daylight is short
+      there is no time to waste. We follow the water course up the valley,
+      splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice, cross the stream where
+      the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount the steep ascent of Black
+      Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down lonely Ennerdale, where,
+      springing from the flank of the Pillar mountain, is the great Rock we have
+      come to challenge. It stands like a tower, gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600
+      feet from its northern base to its summit, split on the south side by
+      Jordan Gap that divides the High Man or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser
+      rock.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have been overtaken by another party of three from the inn&mdash;one in
+      a white jersey which, for reasons that will appear, I shall always
+      remember. Together we follow the High Level Traverse, the track that leads
+      round the flank of the mountain to the top of Walker's Gully, the grim
+      descent to the valley, loved by the climber for the perils to which it
+      invites him. Here wre lunch and here we separate. We, unambitious (having
+      three passengers in our party of five), are climbing the East face by the
+      Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending by the New West route, one
+      of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here; theirs is from the other
+      side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I wish to speak, but of
+      theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will find the Slab and Notch
+      route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it is held in little esteem.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With five on the rope, however, our progress is slow, and it is two
+      o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring and triumphant, and
+      stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar Rock, where the wind
+      blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over half the peaks of
+      Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in the book that lies
+      under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on the West face for
+      signs of our late companions. The sound of their voices comes up from
+      below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a glimpse of their forms.
+      &ldquo;They're going to be late,&rdquo; says George Abraham&mdash;the discoverer of
+      the New West&mdash;and then he indicates the closing stages of the climb
+      and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the most thrilling
+      escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock&mdash;two men falling,
+      and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of those three,
+      two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the next year on the
+      Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and turn cheerfully to
+      descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route which ends on the slope
+      of the mountain near to the starting point of the New West route.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in the East sheds no
+      light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are quite distinct,
+      coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the directions and
+      distinguish the speakers. &ldquo;Can't understand why those lads are cutting it
+      so fine,&rdquo; says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace down cracks and
+      grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and safety. And now we
+      look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one thing is visible&mdash;a
+      figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at full stretch. There it
+      hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the rocks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0047m.jpg" alt="0047m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0047.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      The party, then, are only just making the traverse from the chimney to the
+      right, the most difficult manoeuvre of the climb&mdash;a manoeuvre in
+      which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain stationary while his
+      fellows pass him. &ldquo;This is bad,&rdquo; says George Abraham and he prepares for a
+      possible emergency. &ldquo;Are you in difficulties? Shall we wait?&rdquo; he cries.
+      &ldquo;Yes, wait.&rdquo; The words rebound from the cliff in the still air like
+      stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white jersey, still
+      moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every word they speak
+      echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board. You hear the
+      iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds on the ringing
+      wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if both feet are
+      dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a hold. I fancy one
+      or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look at each other in
+      silent comment. And all the time the figure in white, now growing dim, is
+      impaled on the face of the darkness, and the voices come down to us in
+      brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon is sailing into the
+      clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery &ldquo;All right&rdquo;
+       drops down from above. The difficult operation is over, the scattered
+      rocks are reached and nothing remains but the final slabs, which in the
+      absence of ice offer no great difficulty. Their descent by the easy Jordan
+      route will be quick. We turn to go with the comment that it is perhaps
+      more sensational to watch a climb than to do one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then we plunge over the debris behind Pisgah, climb up the Great Doup,
+      where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we reach the friendly fence that
+      has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down to the top of Black Sail
+      Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours later we have
+      rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one to
+      his office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem
+      prosaic and ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say
+      only the word &ldquo;Wastdale&rdquo; to them and you shall awake its echoes; then you
+      shall see their faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable things.
+      They are no longer men of the world; they are spirits of the mountains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0049m.jpg" alt="0049m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0049.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0050m.jpg" alt="0050m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0050.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      TWO VOICES
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">Y</span>es,&rdquo; said the man
+      with the big voice, &ldquo;I've seen it coming for years. Years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you?&rdquo; said the man with the timid voice. He had taken his seat on
+      the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of the tube strike
+      that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, years,&rdquo; said big voice, crowding as much modesty into the admission
+      as possible. &ldquo;I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long way off. Suppose
+      I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit psychic.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning of the
+      word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George&mdash;that's the man that up
+      to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and property and
+      things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.' Why, his
+      speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's it's come
+      back. I always said it would. I said we should pay for it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you, though?&rdquo; observed timid voice&mdash;not questioningly, but as an
+      assurance that he was listening attentively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for years&mdash;years, I did.
+      And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in no time. In the
+      first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000 aeroplanes and
+      train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what I said. But
+      was it done?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; said timid voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why, but
+      there it is. I'm not much at the platform business&mdash;tub-thumping, I
+      call it&mdash;but for seeing things far off&mdash;well, I'm a bit psychic,
+      you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said timid voice, mournfully, &ldquo;it's a pity some of those talking
+      fellows are not psychic, too.&rdquo; He'd got the word firmly now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Them psychic!&rdquo; said big voice, with scorn. &ldquo;We know what they are. You
+      see that Miss Asquith is marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word, he'll
+      turn out to be a German, that's what he'll turn out to be. It's German
+      money all round. Same with these strikes. There's German money behind
+      them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shouldn't wonder at all,&rdquo; said timid voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;I've a way of seeing things. The same in the
+      Boer War. I saw that coming for years.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you, indeed?&rdquo; said timid voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to some of my friends. There it was
+      in black and white. They said it was wonderful how it all turned out&mdash;two
+      years, I said, 250 millions of money, and 20,000 casualties. That's what I
+      said, and that's what it was. I said the Boers would win, and I claim they
+      did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave them all they asked for.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were about right,&rdquo; assented timid voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round his
+      finger&mdash;that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his finger.
+      Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building a
+      fleet as big as ours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never did like that man,&rdquo; said timid voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the armistice
+      means. They've escaped&mdash;and just when we'd got them down.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a shame,&rdquo; said timid voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This war ought to have gone on longer,&rdquo; continued big voice. &ldquo;My opinion
+      is that the world wanted thinning out. People are too crowded. That's what
+      they are&mdash;they're too crowded.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I agree there,&rdquo; said timid voice. &ldquo;We wanted thinning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It ought to have
+      gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should like to know
+      his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says <i>John Bull</i>, and
+      that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a case
+      down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building society&mdash;regular
+      chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building society went
+      smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't like those goody-goody people,&rdquo; said timid voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what that
+      man knew. 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women players,' he
+      said. Strordinary how he knew things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wonderful,&rdquo; said timid voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's never been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare
+      knew&mdash;not one-half.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No doubt about it,&rdquo; said timid voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I consider that William Shakespeare was the most psychic man that ever
+      lived. I don't suppose there was ever such a long-sighted man before <i>or</i>
+      since. He could see through anything. He'd have seen through Wilson and
+      he'd have seen this war didn't stop before the job was done. It's a pity
+      we haven't a William Shakespeare now. Lloyd George and Asquith are not in
+      it with him. They're simply duds beside William Shakespeare. Couldn't hold
+      a candle to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Seems to me,&rdquo; said timid voice, &ldquo;that there's nobody, as you might say,
+      worth anything to-day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;We've gone right off. There used to be men. Old
+      Dizzy, he was a man. So was Joseph Chamberlain. He was right about Tariff
+      Reform. I saw it years before he did. Free Trade I said was all right
+      years ago, when we were manufacturing for the world. But it's out of date.
+      I saw it was out of date long before Joseph Chamberlain. It's the result
+      of being long-sighted. I said to my father, 'If we stick to Free Trade
+      this country is done.' That's what I said, and it's true. We <i>are</i>
+      done. Look at these strikes. We stick to things too long. I believe in
+      looking ahead. When I was in America before the war they wouldn't believe
+      I came from England. Wouldn't believe it. 'But the English are so slow,'
+      they said, 'and you&mdash;why you want to be getting on in front of us.'
+      That's my way. I look ahead and don't stand still.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's the best way too,&rdquo; said timid voice. &ldquo;We want more of it. We're too
+      slow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And so on. When I came to the end of my journey I rose so that the light
+      of a lamp shone on the speakers as I passed. They were both well-dressed,
+      ordinary-looking men. If I had passed them in the street I should have
+      said they were intelligent men of the well-to-do business class. I have
+      set down their conversation, which I could not help overhearing, and which
+      was carried on by the big voice in a tone meant for publication, as
+      exactly as I can recall it. There was a good deal more of it, all of the
+      same character. You will laugh at it, or weep over it, according to your
+      humour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0055m.jpg" alt="0055m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0055.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON BEING TIDY
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>ny careful
+      observer of my habits would know that I am on the eve of an adventure&mdash;a
+      holiday, or a bankruptcy, or a fire, or a voluntary liquidation (whatever
+      that may be), or an elopement, or a duel, or a conspiracy, or&mdash;in
+      short, of something out of the normal, something romantic or dangerous,
+      pleasurable or painful, interrupting the calm current of my affairs. Being
+      the end of July, he would probably say: That fellow is on the brink of the
+      holiday fever. He has all the symptoms of the epidemic. Observe his
+      negligent, abstracted manner. Notice his slackness about business&mdash;how
+      he just comes and looks in and goes out as though he were a visitor paying
+      a call, or a person who had been left a fortune and didn't care twopence
+      what happened. Observe his clothes, how they are burgeoning into
+      unaccustomed gaiety, even levity. Is not his hat set on at just a shade of
+      a sporting angle? Does not his stick twirl with a hint of irresponsible
+      emotions? Is there not the glint of far horizons in his eye? Did you not
+      hear him humming as he came up the stairs? Yes, assuredly the fellow is
+      going for a holiday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Your suspicions would be confirmed when you found me ransacking my private
+      room and clearing up my desk. The news that I am clearing up my desk has
+      been an annual sensation for years. I remember a colleague of mine once
+      coming in and finding me engaged in that spectacular feat. His face fell
+      with apprehension. His voice faltered. &ldquo;I hope you are not leaving us,&rdquo; he
+      said. He, poor fellow, could not think of anything else that could account
+      for so unusual an operation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For I am one of those people who treat their desks with respect. We do not
+      believe in worrying them about their contents. We do not bully them into
+      disclosing their secrets. We stuff the drawers full of papers and
+      documents, and leave them to mellow and ripen. And when the drawers are
+      full we pile up other papers and documents on either side of us; and the
+      higher the pile gets the more comfortable and cosy we feel. We would not
+      disturb them for worlds. Why should we set our sleeping dogs barking at us
+      when they are willing to go on sleeping if we leave them alone? And
+      consider the show they make. No one coming to see us can fail to be
+      impressed by such piles of documents. They realise how busy we are. They
+      understand that we have no time for idle talk. They see that we have all
+      these papers to dispose of&mdash;otherwise, why are they there? They get
+      their business done and go away quickly, and spread the news of what
+      tremendous fellows we are for work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am told by one who worked with him, that old Lord Strathcona knew the
+      trick quite well, and used it unblushingly. When a visitor was announced
+      he tumbled his papers about in imposing confusion and was discovered
+      breasting the mighty ocean of his labours, his chin resolutely out of the
+      water. But he was a supreme artist in this form of amiable imposture. On
+      one occasion he was entertained at a great public dinner in a provincial
+      city. In the midst of the proceedings a portly flunkey was observed
+      carrying a huge envelope, with seals and trappings, on a salver. For whom
+      was this momentous document intended? Ah, he has paused behind the grand
+      old man with the wonderful snowy head. It is for him. The company looks on
+      in respectful silence. Even here this astonishing old man cannot escape
+      the cares of office. As he takes the envelope his neighbour at the table
+      looks at the address. It was in Strathcona's own hand-writing!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we of the rank and file are not dishevelled by artifice, like this
+      great man. It is a natural gift. And do not suppose that our disorder
+      makes us unhappy. We like it. We follow our vocation, as Falstaff says.
+      Some people are born tidy and some are born untidy. We were bom untidy,
+      and if good people, taking pity on us, try to make us tidy we get lost. It
+      was so with George Crabbe. He lived in magnificent disorder, papers and
+      books and letters all over the floor, piled on every chair, surging up to
+      the ceiling. Once, in his absence, his niece tidied up for him. When he
+      came back he found himself like a stranger in a strange land. He did not
+      know his way about in this desolation of tidiness, and he promptly
+      restored the familiar disorder, so that he could find things. It sounds
+      absurd, of course, but we people with a genius for untidiness must always
+      seem absurd to the tidy people. They cannot understand that there is a
+      method in our muddle, an order in our disorder, secret paths through the
+      wilderness known only to our feet, that, in short, we are rather like cats
+      whose perceptions become more acute the darker it gets. It is not true
+      that we never find things. We often find things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And consider the joy of finding things you don't hope to find. You, sir,
+      sitting at your spotless desk, with your ordered and labelled shelves
+      about you, and your files and your letter-racks, and your card indexes and
+      your cross references, and your this, that, and the other&mdash;what do
+      you know of the delights of which I speak? You do not come suddenly and
+      ecstatically upon the thing you seek. You do not know the shock of
+      delighted discovery. You do not shout &ldquo;Eureka,&rdquo; and summon your family
+      around you to rejoice in the miracle that has happened. No star swims into
+      your ken out of the void. You cannot be said to find things at all, for
+      you never lose them, and things must be lost before they can be truly
+      found. The father of the Prodigal had to lose his son before he could
+      experience the joy that has become an immortal legend of the world. It is
+      we who lose things, not you, sir, who never find them, who know the Feast
+      of the Fatted Calf.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is not a plea for untidiness. I am no hot gospeller of disorder. I
+      only seek to make the best, of a bad job, and to show that we untidy
+      fellows are not without a case, have our romantic compensations, moments
+      of giddy exaltation unknown to those who are endowed with the pedestrian
+      and profitable virtue of tidiness. That is all. I would have the
+      pedestrian virtue if I could. In other days, before I had given up hope of
+      reforming myself, and when I used to make good resolutions as piously as
+      my neighbours, I had many a spasm of tidiness. I looked with envy on my
+      friend Higginson, who was a miracle of order, could put his hand on
+      anything he wanted in the dark, kept his documents and his files and
+      records like regiments of soldiers obedient to call, knew what he had
+      written on 4th March 1894, and what he had said on 10th January 1901, and
+      had a desk that simply perspired with tidiness. And in a spirit of
+      emulation I bought a roll-top desk. I believed that tidiness was a
+      purchasable commodity. You went to a furniture dealer and bought a large
+      roll-top desk, and when it came home the genius of order came home with
+      it. The bigger the desk, the more intricate its devices, the larger was
+      the measure of order bestowed on you. My desk was of the first magnitude.
+      It had an inconceivable wealth of drawers and pigeon-holes. It was a desk
+      of many mansions. And I labelled them all, and gave them all separate jobs
+      to perform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then I sat back and looked the future boldly in the face. Now, said I,
+      the victory is won. Chaos and old night are banished. Order reigns in
+      Warsaw. I have but to open a drawer and every secret I seek will leap
+      magically to light. My articles will write themselves, for every reference
+      will come to my call, obedient as Ariel to the bidding of Prospero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      &ldquo;Approach, my Ariel; come,&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shall say, and from some remote fastness the obedient spirit will appear
+      with&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      &ldquo;All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      To swim, to dive into the sea, to ride
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      On the curl'd clouds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I shall know where Aunt Jane's letters are, and where my bills are, and my
+      cuttings about this, that, and the other, and my diaries and notebooks,
+      and the time-table and the street guide. I shall never be short of a match
+      or a spare pair of spectacles, or a pencil, or&mdash;in short, life will
+      henceforth be an easy amble to old age. For a week it worked like a charm.
+      Then the demon of disorder took possession of the beast. It devoured
+      everything and yielded up nothing. Into its soundless deeps my merchandise
+      sank to oblivion. And I seemed to sink with it. It was not a desk, but a
+      tomb. One day I got a man to take it away to a second-hand shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since then I have given up being tidy. I have realised that the quality of
+      order is not purchasable at furniture shops, is not a quality of external
+      things, but an indwelling spirit, a frame of mind, a habit that perhaps
+      may be acquired but cannot be bought.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have a smaller desk with fewer drawers, all of them nicely choked up
+      with the litter of the past. Once a year I have a gaol delivery of the
+      incarcerated. The ghosts come out into the daylight, and I face them
+      unflinching and unafraid. They file past, pointing minatory fingers at me
+      as they go into the waste-paper basket. They file past now. But I do not
+      care a dump; for to-morrow I shall seek fresh woods and pastures new.
+      To-morrow the ghosts of that old untidy desk will have no terrors for my
+      emancipated spirit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0061m.jpg" alt="0061m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0061.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0062m.jpg" alt="0062m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0062.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      AN EPISODE
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e were talking of
+      the distinction between madness and sanity when one of the company said
+      that we were all potential madmen, just as every gambler was a potential
+      suicide, or just as every hero was a potential coward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I mean,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that the difference between the sane and the insane is
+      not that the sane man never has mad thoughts. He has, but he recognises
+      them as mad, and keeps his hand on the rein of action. He thinks them, and
+      dismisses them. It is so with the saint and the sinner. The saint is not
+      exempt from evil thoughts, but he knows they are evil, is master of
+      himself, and puts them away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I speak with experience,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;for the potential madman in me
+      once nearly got the upper hand. I won, but it was a near thing, and if I
+      had gone down in that struggle I should have been branded for all time as
+      a criminal lunatic, and very properly put away in some place of safety.
+      Yet I suppose no one ever suspected me of lunacy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell us about it,&rdquo; we said in chorus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was one evening in New York,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I had had a very exhausting
+      time, and was no doubt mentally tired. I had taken tea with two friends at
+      the Belmont Hotel, and as we found we were all disengaged that evening we
+      agreed to spend it together at the Hippodrome, where a revue, winding up
+      with a great spectacle that had thrilled New York, was being presented.
+      When we went to the box office we found that we could not get three seats
+      together, so we separated, my friends going to the floor of the house and
+      I to the dress circle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are familiar with the place you will know its enormous dimensions
+      and the vastness of the stage. When I took my seat next but one to one of
+      the gangways the house was crowded and the performance had begun. It was
+      trivial and ordinary enough, but it kept me amused, and between the acts I
+      went out to see the New Yorkers taking 'soft' drinks in the promenades. I
+      did not join them in that mild indulgence, nor did I speak to anyone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After the interval before the concluding spectacle I did not return to my
+      seat until the curtain was up. The transformation hit me like a blow. The
+      huge stage had been converted into a lake, and behind the lake through
+      filmy draperies there was the suggestion of a world in flames. I passed to
+      my seat and sat down. I turned from the blinding glow of the conflagration
+      in front and cast my eye over the sea of faces that filled the great
+      theatre from floor to ceiling. 'Heavens! if there were a fire in this
+      place,' I thought. At that thought the word 'Fire' blazed in my brain like
+      a furnace. 'What if some madman cried Fire?' flashed through my mind, and
+      then '<i>What if I cried Fire?</i>'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At that hideous suggestion, the demon word that suffused my brain leapt
+      like a shrieking maniac within me and screamed and fought for utterance. I
+      felt it boiling in my throat, I felt it on my tongue. I felt myself to be
+      two persons engaged in a deadly grapple&mdash;a sane person struggling to
+      keep his feet against the mad rush of an insane monster. I clenched my
+      teeth. So long as I kept my teeth tight&mdash;tight&mdash;tight the raging
+      madman would fling himself at the bars in vain. But could I keep up the
+      struggle till he fell exhausted? I gripped the arms of my seat. I felt
+      beads of perspiration breaking out on my right brow. How singular that in
+      moments of strain the moisture always broke out at that spot. I could
+      notice these things with a curious sense of detachment as if there were a
+      third person within me watching the frenzied conflict. And still that
+      titanic impulse lay on my tongue and hammered madly at my clenched teeth.
+      Should I go out? That would look odd, and be an ignominious surrender. I
+      must fight this folly down honestly and not run away from it. If I had a
+      book I would try to read. If I had a friend beside me I would talk. But
+      both these expedients were denied me. Should I turn to my unknown
+      neighbour and break the spell with an inconsequent remark or a request for
+      his programme? I looked at him out of the tail of my eye. He was a
+      youngish man, in evening dress, and sitting alone as I was. But his eyes
+      were fixed intently on the stage. He was obviously gripped by the
+      spectacle. Had I spoken to him earlier in the evening the course would
+      have been simple; but to break the ice in the midst of this tense silence
+      was impossible. Moreover, I had a programme on my knees and what was there
+      to say?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I turned my eyes from the stage. What was going on there I could not
+      tell. It was a blinding blur of Fire that seemed to infuriate the monster
+      within me. I looked round at the house. I looked up at the ceiling and
+      marked its gilded ornaments. I turned and gazed intensely at the occupants
+      of the boxes, trying to turn the current of my mind into speculations
+      about their dress, their faces, their characters. But the tyrant was too
+      strong to be overthrown by such conscious effort. I looked up at the
+      gallery; I looked down at the pit; I tried to busy my thoughts with
+      calculations about the numbers present, the amount of money in the house,
+      the cost of running the establishment&mdash;anything. In vain. I leaned
+      back in my seat, my teeth still clenched, my hands still gripping the arms
+      of the chair. How still the house was! How enthralled it seemed!... I was
+      conscious that people about me were noticing my restless inattention. If
+      they knew the truth.... If they could see the raging torment that was
+      battering at my teeth.... Would it never go? How long would this wild
+      impulse burn on my tongue? Was there no distraction that would
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      Cleanse the stuffed bosom of this perilous stuff
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      That feeds upon the brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I recalled the reply&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      Therein the patient must minister to himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How fantastic it seemed. Here was that cool observer within me quoting
+      poetry over my own delirium without being able to allay it. What a mystery
+      was the brain that could become the theatre of such wild drama. I turned
+      my glance to the orchestra. Ah, what was that they were playing?... Yes,
+      it was a passage from Dvorak's American Symphony. How familiar it was! My
+      mind incontinently leapt to a remote scene, I saw a well-lit room and
+      children round the hearth and a figure at the piano....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was as though the madman within me had fallen stone dead. I looked at
+      the stage coolly, and observed that someone was diving into the lake from
+      a trapeze that seemed a hundred feet high. The glare was still behind, but
+      I knew it for a sham glare. What a fool I had been.... But what a hideous
+      time I had had.... And what a close shave.... I took out my handkerchief
+      and drew it across my forehead.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0066m.jpg" alt="0066m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0066.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0067m.jpg" alt="0067m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0067.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      ON SUPERSTITIONS
+    </h3>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was inevitable
+      that the fact that a murder has taken place at a house with the number 13
+      in a street, the letters of whose name number 13, would not pass
+      unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that have been committed, I
+      suppose we should find that as many have taken place at No. 6 or No. 7, or
+      any other number you choose, as at No. 13&mdash;that the law of averages
+      is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But this consideration does not
+      prevent the world remarking on the fact when No. 13 has its turn. Not that
+      the world believes there is anything in the superstition. It is quite sure
+      it is a mere childish folly, of course. Few of us would refuse to take a
+      house because its number was 13, or decline an invitation to dinner
+      because there were to be 13 at table. But most of us would be just a shade
+      happier if that desirable residence were numbered 11, and not any the less
+      pleased with the dinner if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept
+      him away. We would not confess this little weakness to each other. We
+      might even refuse to admit it to ourselves, but it is there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are numerous
+      streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which there is no
+      house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a bed in a
+      hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though it has
+      worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations of a
+      discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house, and
+      into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of a
+      bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession to
+      the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery is a
+      matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow on the
+      mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat recovery.
+      Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers in the sick
+      bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of a certain state of
+      mind in the patient. There are few more curious revelations in that moving
+      record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences during the war, than the case
+      of the man who died of a pimple on his nose. He had been hideously
+      mutilated in battle and was brought into hospital a sheer wreck; but he
+      was slowly patched up and seemed to have been saved when a pimple appeared
+      on his nose. It was nothing in itself, but it was enough to produce a
+      mental state that checked the flickering return of life. It assumed a
+      fantastic importance in the mind of the patient who, having survived the
+      heavy blows of fate, died of something less than a pin prick. It is not
+      difficult to understand that so fragile a hold of life might yield to the
+      sudden discovery that you were lying in No. 13 bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
+      wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of all
+      the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that I
+      constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have associated
+      the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had anything but the
+      most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved a bus, and as free
+      from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I would not change its
+      number if I had the power to do so. But there are other circumstances of
+      which I should find it less easy to clear myself of suspicion under cross
+      examination. I never see a ladder against a house side without feeling
+      that it is advisable to walk round it rather than under it. I say to
+      myself that this is not homage to a foolish superstition, but a duty to my
+      family. One must think of one's family. The fellow at the top of the
+      ladder may drop anything. He may even drop himself. He may have had too
+      much to drink. He may be a victim of epileptic fits, and epileptic fits,
+      as everyone knows, come on at the most unseasonable times and places. It
+      is a mere measure of ordinary safety to walk round the ladder. No man is
+      justified in inviting danger in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle
+      fancy. Moreover, probably that fancy has its roots in the common-sense
+      fact that a man on a ladder does occasionally drop things. No doubt many
+      of our superstitions have these commonplace and sensible origins. I
+      imagine, for example, that the Jewish objection to pork as unclean on
+      religious grounds is only due to the fact that in Eastern climates it is
+      unclean on physical grounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather glad
+      that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing so. Even
+      if&mdash;conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to myself&mdash;I
+      walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not done so as a
+      kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have challenged it
+      rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way of dodging the
+      absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the ladder. This is not easy.
+      In the same way I am sensible of a certain satisfaction when I see the new
+      moon in the open rather than through glass, and over my right shoulder
+      rather than my left. I would not for any consideration arrange these
+      things consciously; but if they happen so I fancy I am better pleased than
+      if they do not. And on these occasions I have even caught my hand&mdash;which
+      chanced to be in my pocket at the time&mdash;turning over money, a little
+      surreptitiously I thought, but still undeniably turning it. Hands have
+      habits of their own and one can't always be watching them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover in
+      ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a creed
+      outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the laws of
+      the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
+      superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and man
+      seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
+      neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of their
+      hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
+      inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
+      misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon of
+      life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of battles
+      being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more relation to
+      the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When Pompey was
+      afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as prætor he shouted to the
+      Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election postponed, for
+      the Romans would never transact business after it had thundered. Alexander
+      surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took counsel with them as a
+      modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers. Even so great a man as
+      Cæsar and so modern and enlightened a man as Cicero left their fate to
+      augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were right and sometimes they were
+      wrong, but whether right or wrong they were equally meaningless. Cicero
+      lost his life by trusting to the wisdom of crows. When he was in flight
+      from Antony and Cæsar Augustus he put to sea and might have escaped. But
+      some crows chanced to circle round his vessel, and he took the
+      circumstance to be unfavourable to his action, returned to shore and was
+      murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece consulted the omens and the
+      oracles where the farmer to-day is only careful of his manures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should have liked to have seen Cæsar and I should have liked to have
+      heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later day and
+      who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the better end
+      of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad. We do not
+      know much more of the Power that
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Turns the handle of this idle show
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      than our forefathers did, but at least we have escaped the grotesque
+      shadows that enveloped them. We do not look for divine guidance in the
+      entrails of animals or the flight of crows, and the House of Commons does
+      not adjourn at a clap of thunder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0072m.jpg" alt="0072m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0072.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0073m.jpg" alt="0073m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0073.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON POSSESSION
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> met a lady the
+      other day who had travelled much and seen much, and who talked with great
+      vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one peculiarity about her.
+      If I happened to say that I too had been, let us say, to Tangier, her
+      interest in Tangier immediately faded away and she switched the
+      conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not been, and where
+      therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about the Honble. Ulick
+      de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had the honour of meeting
+      that eminent personage. And so with books and curiosities, places and
+      things&mdash;she was only interested in them so long as they were her
+      exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and when she ceased to
+      possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have Tangier all to herself
+      she did not want it at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
+      people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
+      not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
+      exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
+      countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else in
+      the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching that
+      appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he was getting
+      something that no one else had got, and when he found that someone else
+      had got it its value ceased to exist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything in
+      the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
+      material thing. I do not own&mdash;to take an example&mdash;that wonderful
+      picture by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his
+      grandchild. I have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own
+      room I could not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for
+      years. It is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries
+      of the mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have
+      read, and beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it
+      whenever I like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the
+      painter saw in the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the
+      bottle nose as he stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long
+      centuries ago. The pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may
+      share this spiritual ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine,
+      or the shade of a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or
+      the song of the lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is
+      common to all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
+      woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of solitude
+      which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient Britons
+      hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense a certain
+      noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether he has seen
+      these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the little hamlet
+      know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them for a perpetual
+      playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but we could not have a
+      richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on every tree. For the
+      pleasure of things is not in their possession but in their use.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised long
+      ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who scurried
+      through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to say that
+      they had done something that other people had not done. Even so great a
+      man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive possession.
+      De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at the mountains,
+      he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene, whereupon
+      Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone else to
+      praise <i>his</i> mountains. He was the high priest of nature, and had
+      something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of revelation, and
+      anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence, except through him,
+      was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
+      possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and Bernard
+      Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy of the free
+      human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of communism. On this
+      point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's doctrine and pointed out
+      that the State is not a mere individual, but a body composed of dissimilar
+      parts whose unity is to be drawn &ldquo;ex dissimilium hominum consensu.&rdquo; I am
+      as sensitive as anyone about my title to my personal possessions. I
+      dislike having my umbrella stolen or my pocket picked, and if I found a
+      burglar on my premises I am sure I shouldn't be able to imitate the
+      romantic example of the good bishop in &ldquo;Les Misérables.&rdquo; When I found the
+      other day that some young fruit trees I had left in my orchard for
+      planting had been removed in the night I was sensible of a very
+      commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean Valjean was I shouldn't have
+      asked him to come and take some more trees. I should have invited him to
+      return what he had removed or submit to consequences that follow in such
+      circumstances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
+      necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
+      society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who ventured
+      to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or two hence.
+      Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control and the range
+      of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If mankind finds that
+      it can live more conveniently and more happily without private property it
+      will do so. In spite of the Decalogue private property is only a human
+      arrangement, and no reasonable observer of the operation of the
+      arrangement will pretend that it executes justice unfailingly in the
+      affairs of men. But because the idea of private property has been
+      permitted to override with its selfishness the common good of humanity, it
+      does not follow that there are not limits within which that idea can
+      function for the general convenience and advantage. The remedy is not in
+      abolishing it altogether, but in subordinating it to the idea of equal
+      justice and community of purpose. It will, reasonably understood, deny me
+      the right to call the coal measures, which were laid with the foundations
+      of the earth, my private property or to lay waste a countryside for deer
+      forests, but it will still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of
+      ownership. And the more true the equation of private and public rights is,
+      the more secure shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and
+      common interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the
+      grotesque and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of
+      private property which to some minds make the idea of private property
+      itself inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea
+      of private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
+      the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger of
+      attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard without
+      any apprehensions as to their safety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
+      ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
+      things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment. I
+      do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
+      experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
+      mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. &ldquo;I do not
+      know how it is,&rdquo; said a very rich man in my hearing, &ldquo;but when I am in
+      London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I want to
+      be in London.&rdquo; He was not wanting to escape from London or the country,
+      but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions and was
+      bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher &ldquo;his hands were full but his
+      soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world.&rdquo; There was wisdom
+      as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that &ldquo;he who was born first
+      has the greatest number of old clothes.&rdquo; It is not a bad rule for the
+      pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage to those
+      who take a pride in its abundance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0078m.jpg" alt="0078m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0078.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0079m.jpg" alt="0079m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0079.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON BORES
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was talking in
+      the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat blunt manner when
+      Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and began:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I think America is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; &ldquo;Now, do you mind giving
+      us two minutes?&rdquo; broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom,
+      unabashed and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group.
+      Poor Blossom! I had almost said &ldquo;Dear Blossom.&rdquo; For he is really an
+      excellent fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that
+      he is a bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable
+      company. You feel that you could love Blossom if he would only keep away.
+      If you heard of his death you would be genuinely grieved and would send a
+      wreath to his grave and a nice letter of condolence to his wife and
+      numerous children.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is only absence that makes the heart grow fond of Blossom. When he
+      appears all your affection for him withers. You hope that he will not see
+      you. You shrink to your smallest dimensions. You talk with an air of
+      intense privacy. You keep your face averted. You wonder whether the back
+      of your head is easily distinguishable among so many heads. All in vain.
+      He approacheth with the remorselessness of fate. He putteth his hand upon
+      your shoulder. He remarketh with the air of one that bringeth new new's
+      and good news&mdash;&ldquo;Well, I think that America is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+       And then he taketh a chair and thou lookest at the clock and wonderest how
+      soon thou canst decently remember another engagement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Blossom is the bore courageous. He descends on the choicest company
+      without fear or parley. Out, sword, and at 'em, is his motto. He advances
+      with a firm voice and a confident air, as of one who knows he is welcome
+      everywhere and has only to choose his company. He will have nothing but
+      the best, and as he enters the room you may see his eye roving from table
+      to table, not in search of the glad eye of recognition, but of the most
+      select companionship, and having marked down his prey he goes forward
+      boldly to the attack. Salutes the circle with easy familiarity, draw's up
+      his chair with assured and masterful authority, and plunges into the
+      stream of talk with the heavy impact of a walrus or hippopotamus taking a
+      bath. The company around him melts away, but he is not dismayed. Left
+      alone with a circle of empty chairs, he riseth like a giant refreshed,
+      casteth his eye abroad, noteth another group that whetteth his appetite
+      for good fellowship, moveth towards it with bold and resolute front. You
+      may see him put to flight as many as three circles inside an hour, and
+      retire at the end, not because he is beaten, but because there is nothing
+      left worth crossing swords with. &ldquo;A very good club to-night,&rdquo; he says to
+      Mrs B. as he puts on his slippers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not so Trip. He is the bore circumspect. He proceeds by sap and mine where
+      Blossom charges the battlements sword in hand. He enters timidly as one
+      who hopes that he will be unobserved. He goes to the table and examines
+      the newspapers, takes one and seats himself alone. But not so much alone
+      that he is entirely out of the range of those fellows in the corner who
+      keep up such a cut-and-thrust of wit. Perchance one of them may catch his
+      eye and open the circle to him. He readeth his paper sedulously, but his
+      glance passeth incontinently outside the margin or over the top of the
+      page to the coveted group. No responsive eye meets his. He moveth just a
+      thought nearer along the sofa by the wall. Now he is well within hearing.
+      Now he is almost of the company itself. But still unseen&mdash;noticeably
+      unseen. He puts down his paper, not ostentatiously but furtively. He
+      listens openly to the conversation, as one who has been enmeshed in it
+      unconsciously, accidentally, almost unwillingly, for was he not absorbed
+      in his paper until this conversation disturbed him? And now it would be
+      almost uncivil not to listen. He waits for a convenient opening and then
+      gently insinuates a remark like one venturing on untried ice. And the ice
+      breaks and the circle melts. For Trip, too, is a bore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember in those wonderful submarine pictures of the brothers
+      Williamson, which we saw in London some time ago, a strange fish at whose
+      approach all the other fish turned tail. It was not, I think, that they
+      feared him, nor that he was less presentable in appearance than any other
+      fish, but simply that there was something about him that made them
+      remember things. I forget what his name was, or whether he even had a
+      name. But his calling was obvious. He was the Club Bore. He was the fish
+      who sent the other fish about their business. I thought of Blossom as I
+      saw that lonely creature whisking through the water in search of some
+      friendly ear into which he could remark&mdash;&ldquo;Well, I think that America
+      is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; or words to that effect. I thought how superior
+      an animal is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish
+      did. He hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn
+      lamb. He looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth
+      even to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his
+      feelings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of
+      sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists
+      on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but this
+      is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. And the humour must not be
+      that counterfeit currency which consists in the retailing of borrowed
+      stories. &ldquo;Of all bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang, and Heaven
+      in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate its species,&rdquo; says De
+      Quincey, &ldquo;the most insufferable is the teller of good stories.&rdquo; It is an
+      over hard saying, subject to exceptions; but it contains the essential
+      truth, for the humour of good company must be an authentic emanation of
+      personality and not a borrowed tale. It is no discredit to be a bore. Very
+      great men have been bores! I fancy that Macaulay, with all his
+      transcendent gifts, was a bore. My head aches even at the thought of an
+      evening spent in the midst of the terrific torrent of facts and
+      certainties that poured from that brilliant and amiable man. I find myself
+      in agreement for once with Melbourne who wished that he was &ldquo;as cocksure
+      of one thing as Macaulay was of everything.&rdquo; There is pretty clear
+      evidence that Wordsworth was a bore and that Coleridge was a bore, and I
+      am sure Bob Southey must have been an intolerable bore. And Neckar's
+      daughter was fortunate to escape Gibbon for he was assuredly a prince of
+      bores. He took pains to leave posterity in no doubt on the point. He wrote
+      his &ldquo;Autobiography&rdquo; which, as a wit observed, showed that &ldquo;he did not know
+      the difference between himself and the Roman Empire. He has related his
+      'progressions from London to Bariton and from Bariton to London' in the
+      same monotonous, majestic periods that he recorded the fall of states and
+      empires.&rdquo; Yes, an indubitable bore. Yet these were all admirable men and
+      even great men. Let not therefore the Blossoms and the Trips be
+      discomfited. It may be that it is not they who are not fit company for us,
+      but we who are not fit company for them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0084m.jpg" alt="0084m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0084.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0027" id="linkimage-0027"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0085m.jpg" alt="0085m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0085.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A LOST SWARM
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e were busy with
+      the impossible hen when the alarm came. The impossible hen is sitting on a
+      dozen eggs in the shed, and, like the boy on the burning deck, obstinately
+      refuses to leave the post of duty. A sense of duty is an excellent thing,
+      but even a sense of duty can be carried to excess, and this hen's sense of
+      duty is simply a disease. She is so fiercely attached to her task that she
+      cannot think of eating, and resents any attempt to make her eat as a
+      personal affront or a malignant plot against her impending family. Lest
+      she should die at her post, a victim to a misguided hunger strike, we were
+      engaged in the delicate process of substituting a more reasonable hen, and
+      it was at this moment that a shout from the orchard announced that No. 5
+      was swarming.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had
+      been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells
+      visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around
+      the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the
+      thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more
+      exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You pass
+      it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched
+      within. The next, the whole colony roars out like a cataract, envelops the
+      hive in a cloud of living dust until the queen has emerged and gives
+      direction to the masses that slowly cohere around her as she settles on
+      some branch. The excitement is contagious. It is a call to adventure with
+      the unknown, an adventure sharpened by the threat of loss and tense with
+      the instancy of action. They have the start. It is your wit against their
+      impulse, your strategy against their momentum. The cloud thins and expands
+      as it moves away from the hive and you are puzzled to know whither the
+      main stream is moving in these ever widening folds of motion. The first
+      indeterminate signs of direction to-day were towards the beech woods
+      behind the cottage, but with the aid of a syringe we put up a barrage of
+      water in that direction, and headed them off towards a row of chestnuts
+      and limes at the end of the paddock beyond the orchard. A swift encircling
+      move, armed with syringe and pail, brought them again under the improvised
+      rainstorm. They concluded that it was not such a fine day as they had
+      thought after all, and that they had better take shelter at once, and to
+      our entire content the mass settled in a great blob on a conveniently low
+      bough of a chestnut tree. Then, by the aid of a ladder and patient
+      coaxing, the blob was safely transferred to a skep, and carried off
+      triumphantly to the orchard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0028" id="linkimage-0028"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0089m.jpg" alt="0089m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0089.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      And now, but for the war, all would have been well. For, but for the war,
+      there would have been a comfortable home in which the adventurers could
+      have taken up their new quarters. But hives are as hard to come by in
+      these days as petrol or matches, or butter or cheese, or most of the other
+      common things of life. We had ransacked England for hives and the
+      neighbourhood for wood with which to make hives; but neither could be had,
+      though promises were plenty, and here was the beginning of the swarms of
+      May, each of them worth a load of hay according to the adage, and never a
+      hive to welcome them with. Perhaps to-morrow something would arrive, if
+      not from Gloucester, then from Surrey. If only the creatures would make
+      themselves at home in the skep for a day or two....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But no. For two hours or so all seemed well. Then perhaps they found the
+      skep too hot, perhaps they detected the odour of previous tenants, perhaps&mdash;but
+      who can read the thoughts of these inscrutable creatures? Suddenly the
+      skep was enveloped in a cyclone of bees, and again the orchard sang with
+      the exciting song of the wings. For a moment the cloud seemed to hover
+      over an apple tree near by, and once more the syringe was at work
+      insisting, in spite of the sunshine, that it was a dreadfully wet day on
+      which to be about, and that a dry skep, even though pervaded by the smell
+      of other bees, had points worth considering. In vain. This time they had
+      made up their minds. It may be that news had come to them, from one of the
+      couriers sent out to prospect for fresh quarters, of a suitable home
+      elsewhere, perhaps a deserted hive, perhaps a snug hollow in some porch or
+      in the bole of an ancient tree. Whatever the goal, the decision was final.
+      One moment the cloud was about us; the air was filled with the
+      high-pitched roar of thirty thousand pair of wings. The next moment the
+      cloud had gone&mdash;gone sailing high over the trees in the paddock and
+      out across the valley. We burst through the paddock fence into the
+      cornfield beyond; but we might as well have chased the wind. Our first
+      load of hay had taken wings and gone beyond recovery. For an hour or two
+      there circled round the deserted skep a few hundred odd bees who had
+      apparently been out when the second decision to migrate was taken, and
+      found themselves homeless and queenless. I saw some of them try to enter
+      other hives, but they were promptly ejected as foreigners by the sentries
+      who keep the porch and admit none who do not carry the authentic odour of
+      the hive. Perhaps the forlorn creatures got back to No. 5, and the young
+      colony left in possession of that tenement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full of hope,
+      for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's bench under the
+      pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and plane, and before
+      nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And it never rains
+      but it pours&mdash;here is a telegram telling us of three hives on the
+      way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We will harvest our
+      loads of hay before they take wing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0029" id="linkimage-0029"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0090m.jpg" alt="0090m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0090.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0030" id="linkimage-0030"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0091m.jpg" alt="0091m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0091.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      YOUNG AMERICA
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>f you want to
+      understand America,&rdquo; said my host, &ldquo;come and see her young barbarians at
+      play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at Princeton. It will be a great
+      game. Come and see it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured victory
+      in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but consider the
+      record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was as much ahead of
+      Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of Cambridge on the
+      river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It was like a Derby
+      Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the great hall of that
+      magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated men and women, wearing
+      the favours of the rival colleges&mdash;yellow for Princeton and red for
+      Harvard&mdash;passed through the gateways to the platform, filling train
+      after train, that dipped under the Hudson and, coming out into the
+      sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered away with its jolly
+      load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country, through historic
+      Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off towers of Princeton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges, such
+      a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
+      &ldquo;how-d'ye-do's&rdquo; and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
+      times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
+      haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured in
+      the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some terrific
+      memorial of antiquity&mdash;seen from without a mighty circular wall of
+      masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval, or
+      rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the level of
+      the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand spectators&mdash;on
+      this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side, with the sunlight
+      full upon them, the yellows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
+      playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings&mdash;-for this American
+      game is much more complicated than English Rugger&mdash;its goal-posts and
+      its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
+      minute record of the game.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
+      there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
+      music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
+      like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
+      horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
+      opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
+      Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
+      greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war. Three
+      flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They shout
+      through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line, they wave
+      their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with that leap
+      there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of cheers
+      roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
+      demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of a
+      tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey&mdash;the growl rising
+      to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell, roar
+      for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of us,
+      and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their limbs
+      we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I cannot
+      hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off with the
+      battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand lusty pairs
+      of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid, we rise like
+      one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our cheer-leaders,
+      gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad dervishes, we shout
+      back the song of &ldquo;Har-vard! Har-vard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into the
+      field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson, that in
+      the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and helmeted so
+      that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic muscular
+      development and horrific visage. At their entrance the megaphones opposite
+      are heard again, and the enemy host rises and repeats its wonderful cheer
+      and tiger growl. We rise and heave the challenge back. And now the teams
+      are in position, the front lines, with the ball between, crouching on the
+      ground for the spring. In the silence that has suddenly fallen on the
+      scene, one hears short, sharp cries of numbers. &ldquo;Five!&rdquo; &ldquo;Eleven!&rdquo; &ldquo;Three!&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;Six!&rdquo; &ldquo;Ten!&rdquo; like the rattle of musketry. Then&mdash;crash! The front
+      lines have leapt on each other. There is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs
+      and bodies. The swirl clears and men are seen lying about all over the
+      line as though a shell had burst in their midst, while away to the right a
+      man with the ball is brought down with a crash to the ground by another,
+      who leaps at him like a projectile that completes its trajectory at his
+      ankles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
+      thrilling minutes&mdash;which, with intervals and stoppages for the
+      attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours&mdash;how the
+      battle surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the
+      tension of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how
+      Harvard scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm
+      of victory, how Princeton drew level&mdash;a cyclone from the other side!&mdash;and
+      forged ahead&mdash;another cyclone&mdash;how man after man went down like
+      an ox, was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how
+      another brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last
+      hardly a man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every
+      convenient interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we
+      jumped up and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how
+      the match ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of
+      victory that is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters&mdash;all
+      this is recorded in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives
+      in my mind as a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous &ldquo;rag&rdquo; in which young and
+      old, gravity and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly
+      confounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what did you think of it?&rdquo; asked my host as we rattled back to New
+      York in the darkness that night. &ldquo;I think it has helped me to understand
+      America,&rdquo; I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
+      explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0031" id="linkimage-0031"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0095m.jpg" alt="0095m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0095.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0032" id="linkimage-0032"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0096m.jpg" alt="0096m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0096.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON GREAT REPLIES
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>t a dinner table
+      the other night, the talk turned upon a certain politician whose cynical
+      traffic in principles and loyalties has eclipsed even the record of
+      Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one defender, an amiable and rather
+      portentous gentleman who did not so much talk as lecture, and whose habit
+      of looking up abstractedly and fixedly at some invisible altitude gave him
+      the impression of communing with the Almighty. He was profuse in his
+      admissions and apologies, but he wound up triumphantly with the remark:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So was Madame de Pompadour,&rdquo; said a voice from the other side of the
+      table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
+      replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician with
+      a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of democracy who,
+      like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things for ambition and
+      power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through the dull, solemn man
+      on the other side of the table like a rapier. There was no reply. There
+      was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash of lightning. It
+      revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift, searching intelligence,
+      equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that went with deadly certainty
+      to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed on the whole landscape of
+      discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that gave it larger significance
+      and range.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour and
+      finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
+      absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and personality.
+      There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning phrase that has
+      leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental things. I do not
+      know much about the military genius or the deeds of Augureau, but I know
+      the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon about the celebration
+      at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial ambitions of the First Consul.
+      Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought of the ceremony. &ldquo;Oh, it was very
+      fine,&rdquo; replied the general; &ldquo;there was nothing wanting, <i>except the
+      million of men who have perished in pulling down what you are setting up</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
+      the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
+      make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
+      bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
+      him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian,
+      a poor peasant's son&mdash;a miserable friar of a country town&mdash;was
+      prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
+      Christendom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; said the Cardinal at last to him, &ldquo;do you think the Pope cares for
+      the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger than
+      all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend <i>you&mdash;you</i>,
+      a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you be then&mdash;where
+      will you be then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then, as now,&rdquo; replied Luther. &ldquo;Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
+      God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
+      venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
+      century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man&mdash;one of
+      the profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
+      country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
+      brilliant author of the papers on &ldquo;The Crisis,&rdquo; that kept the flame of the
+      rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of the
+      United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the Bastille
+      for presentation to Washington. The true character of this great
+      Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had discoursed
+      &ldquo;On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.&rdquo; And Paine answered,
+      &ldquo;God did not make rich and poor. God made male and female and gave the
+      earth for their inheritance."</b>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
+      this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
+      to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
+      Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
+      boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
+      remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo;
+       said the President. &ldquo;Then whose boots do they black?&rdquo; There was the same
+      mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
+      inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. &ldquo;I do not know,
+      madam,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
+      when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
+      dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
+      disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
+      using his department to further his ambitions. &ldquo;Raymond,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you
+      were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
+      is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving the
+      horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he rushed
+      across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely keep pace
+      with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an enormous chin fly
+      fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother asked me what I did
+      that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse bitten in that way.
+      'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him go!' Now, if Mr Chase
+      has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm not going to knock it
+      off, if it will only make his department <i>go!</i>&rdquo; If one were asked to
+      name the most famous answer in history, one might, not unreasonably, give
+      the palm to a woman&mdash;a poor woman, too, who has been dust for three
+      thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke six words that
+      gave her immortality. They have been recalled on thousands of occasions
+      and in all lands, but never more memorably than by John Bright when he was
+      speaking of the hesitation with which he accepted cabinet office: &ldquo;I
+      should have preferred much,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to have remained in the common rank
+      of citizenship in which heretofore I have lived. There is a passage in the
+      Old Testament that has often struck me as being one of great beauty. Many
+      of you will recollect that the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very
+      hospitably entertained by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make
+      her some amends, and he called her to him and asked her what there was he
+      should do for her. 'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to
+      the captain of the host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the
+      Shunamite woman returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the
+      prophet's offer, 'I dwell among mine own people.'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
+      point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
+      babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if by magic,
+      from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the spiritual, from
+      the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty replies, are another
+      matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp tongue and a quick mind. But
+      great replies are not dependent on wit or cleverness. If they were Cicero
+      would have made many, whereas he never made one. His repartees are perfect
+      of their kind, but they belong to the debating club and the law court.
+      They raise a laugh and score a point, but they are summer lightnings. The
+      great reply does not come from witty minds, but from rare and profound
+      souls. The brilliant adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that
+      reply of Augereau than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it
+      because with all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a
+      great part on the world's stage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0033" id="linkimage-0033"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0101m.jpg" alt="0101m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0101.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0034" id="linkimage-0034"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0102m.jpg" alt="0102m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0102.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> went recently to
+      an industrial town in the North on some business, and while there had
+      occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and engines and machinery
+      of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers and engines and machinery of
+      all sorts, and I did my best to appear interested and understanding. But I
+      was neither one nor the other. I was only bored. Boilers and engines, I
+      know, are important things. Compared with a boiler, the finest lyric that
+      was ever written is only a perfume on the gale. There is a practical
+      downrightness about a boiler that makes &ldquo;Drink to me only with thine
+      eyes,&rdquo; or &ldquo;O mistress mine, where are you roaming?&rdquo; or even &ldquo;Twelfth
+      Night&rdquo; itself, a mere idle frivolity. All you can say in favour of
+      &ldquo;Twelfth Night,&rdquo; from the strictly business point of view, is that it
+      doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank heaven for that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
+      never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought to
+      be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How, for
+      example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of a
+      boiler? How&mdash;and this was still more important&mdash;how could I hope
+      to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
+      gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
+      great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it as
+      much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
+      discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no bowels
+      of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the symbol of
+      brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional values. In
+      Dante's &ldquo;Inferno&rdquo; each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted to give him
+      the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room for me, and
+      there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever among wheels and
+      pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying amidst the thud and din
+      of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily &ldquo;waste&rdquo; to catch those perfumes
+      on the gale, those frivolous rhythms to which I had devoted so much of
+      that life' which should be &ldquo;real and earnest&rdquo; and occupied with serious
+      things like boilers. And so it came about that as my friend talked I
+      spiritually wilted away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
+      learned and articulate boiler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
+      boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
+      inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a &ldquo;b&rdquo; in
+      boilers and a &ldquo;b&rdquo; in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect was
+      miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit. The
+      light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if I were
+      a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved brother.
+      Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come, I must see
+      his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could whisk us to his
+      house in the suburbs, and there in a great room, surrounded with hundreds
+      of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from the ends of the earth,
+      butterflies from the forests of Brazil and butterflies from the plains of
+      India, and butterflies from the veldt of South Africa and butterflies from
+      the bush of Australia, all arranged in the foliage natural to their
+      habitat to show how their scheme of coloration conformed to their setting.
+      Some of them had their wings folded back and were indistinguishable from
+      the leaves among which they lay. And as my friend, with growing
+      excitement, revealed his treasure, he talked of his adventures in the
+      pursuit of them, and of the law of natural selection and all its bearing
+      upon the mystery of life, its survivals and its failures. This hobby of
+      his was, in short, the key of his world. The boiler house was the prison
+      where he did time. At the magic word &ldquo;butterflies&rdquo; the prison door opened,
+      and out he sailed on the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the
+      mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
+      something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a ship
+      without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair that most
+      of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the end of the
+      journey without ever having found a path and a sense of direction. But a
+      hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial a thing, but it
+      supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm outside the mere
+      routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it will lead. You may
+      begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in continents. You may
+      collect coins, and find that the history of man is written on them. You
+      may begin with bees, and end with the science of life. Ruskin began with
+      pictures and found they led to economics and everything else. For as every
+      road was said to lead to Rome, so every hobby leads out into the universe,
+      and supplies us with a compass for the adventure. It saves us from the
+      humiliation of being merely smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in
+      general, for the world is too full of things to permit us to be anything
+      else, but one field of intensive culture will give even our smattering a
+      respectable foundation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who knows
+      even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might be when
+      he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not know them
+      and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of measurement
+      which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters. He will have,
+      above all, an attachment to life which will make him at home in the world.
+      Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged into this bewildering
+      whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of circumstance. We have in us
+      the genius of speculation, but the further our speculations penetrate the
+      profounder becomes the mystery that baffles us. We are caught in the toils
+      of affections that crumble to dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither
+      like grass, beaten about by storms that shatter our stoutest battlements
+      like spray blown upon the wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little
+      more than dreams within a dream&mdash;or as Carlyle puts it, &ldquo;exhalations
+      that are and then are not.&rdquo; And we share the poet's sense of exile&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      In this house with starry dome,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      Shall I never be at home?
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Never wholly at my ease?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
+      stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
+      hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
+      that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
+      without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
+      find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come and
+      go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always renewed.
+      Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with Horace or
+      Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the sense of the
+      mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden of the mind,
+      self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of intractible
+      circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the spirit and
+      endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman in &ldquo;Romany Rye,&rdquo;
+       you will remember, found his deliverance in studying Chinese. His
+      bereavement had left him without God and without hope in the world,
+      without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the things that
+      reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly before him,
+      when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and he thought he
+      heard a voice say, &ldquo;The marks! the marks! cling to the marks! or&mdash;&mdash;-&rdquo;
+       And from this beginning&mdash;but the story is too fruity, too rich with
+      the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book down, turn to the
+      episode, and thank me for sending you again into the enchanted Borrovian
+      realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in books. It is enough
+      for the purpose here to recall this perfect example of the healing power
+      of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little world of our own where we
+      can be at ease, and from whose warmth and friendliness we can look out on
+      the vast conundrum without expecting an answer or being much troubled
+      because we do not get one. It was a hobby that poor Pascal needed to allay
+      that horror of the universe which he expressed in the desolating phrase,
+      &ldquo;Le silence étemel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.&rdquo; For on the wings of
+      the butterfly one can not only outrange the boiler, but can adventure into
+      the infinite in the spirit of happy and confident adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0035" id="linkimage-0035"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0108m.jpg" alt="0108m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0108.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0036" id="linkimage-0036"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0109m.jpg" alt="0109m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0109.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON HEREFORD BEACON
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">J</span>enny Lind sleeps
+      in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she died is four miles
+      away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble range of the Malverns
+      that marches north and south from Worcester beacon to Gloucester beacon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way up from
+      Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its descent into
+      the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
+      range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the deep
+      trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as this, the
+      Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman legions.
+      Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural ramparts; but
+      the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the work to&mdash;&mdash;.
+      But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell his own story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
+      conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
+      the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
+      slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of the
+      district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up the steep
+      road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the Cotswolds,
+      Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and the other
+      features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the road,
+      Hereford beacon came in view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Killed?&rdquo; said I, a little stunned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
+      from about here you know, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he wasn't
+      killed at all. He died in his bed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
+      captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
+      sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard tell
+      as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but the
+      capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
+      Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must be
+      fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;He blowed
+      away Little Malvern Church down yonder.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
+      visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
+      ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of Piers
+      Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Left the tower standing he did, sir,&rdquo; pursued the historian. &ldquo;Now, why
+      should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought us
+      to Wynd's Point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an old
+      gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the little
+      arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out on the
+      beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently declined to
+      go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred to disturb. It was
+      the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and singer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of a
+      vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
+      roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
+      chalet, &ldquo;the golden cage,&rdquo; of the singer fronting the drawing-room bowered
+      in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter pictures
+      of saints, that hang upon the walls&mdash;all speak with mute eloquence of
+      the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres, whose life was an
+      anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet simplicity of her name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you leave the stage?&rdquo; asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
+      like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
+      surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for the
+      sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for charity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because,&rdquo; she said, touching the Bible, &ldquo;it left me so little time for
+      this, and&rdquo; (looking at the sunset) &ldquo;none for that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
+      cuckoo&mdash;his voice failing slightly in these hot June days&mdash;wakes
+      you in the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the
+      shadows lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
+      against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
+      deepening gloom of the vast plain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
+      unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the road,
+      with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the broom to
+      the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come out on the
+      path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the green summits that
+      march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of Worcester beacon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon to
+      Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these ten
+      miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled at your
+      feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of exhilaration
+      that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It is a cheerful
+      solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of the twin shout
+      of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and look out over
+      half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills, Birmingham
+      stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where southward the
+      shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the imagination away with
+      Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you may see our rough island
+      story traced in characters of city, hill, and plain. These grass-grown
+      trenches, where to-day the young lambs are grazing, take us back to the
+      dawn of things and the beginnings of that ancient tragedy of the Celtic
+      race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see
+      Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of the Roses, of &ldquo;false, fleeting,
+      perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the field at Tewkesbury,&rdquo; and of
+      Ancient Pistol, whose &ldquo;wits were thick as Tewkesbury mustard.&rdquo; There is
+      the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and far away Edgehill carries the
+      mind forward to the beginning of that great struggle for a free England
+      which finished yonder at Worcester, where the clash of arms was heard for
+      the last time in our land and where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword
+      for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to cast
+      its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the wide
+      plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing here
+      through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to Oxford
+      and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are coming
+      up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom. Now is
+      the moment to turn westward, where
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Bleeds upon the road to Wales.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun, and in
+      the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the far battlements
+      of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of alabaster, and in the
+      woods of the castle that clothe these western slopes a pheasant rends the
+      golden silence with the startled noise and flurry of its flight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
+      the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
+      suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and a
+      late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through the
+      twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great sycamore
+      by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads of insects
+      has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an unfaltering
+      bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all save a pied
+      wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its graceful tail by the
+      rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come those intimate murmurs of
+      the birds, half chatter, half song, that close the day. Even these grow
+      few and faint until the silence is unbroken.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0037" id="linkimage-0037"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0115m.jpg" alt="0115m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0115.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0038" id="linkimage-0038"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0116m.jpg" alt="0116m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0116.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHUM
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>hen I turned the
+      key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a familiar sound. It was
+      the &ldquo;thump, thump, thump,&rdquo; of a tail on the floor at the foot of the
+      stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place was vacant. Chum had gone,
+      and he would not return. I knew that the veterinary must have called,
+      pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him away, and that I should hear
+      no more his &ldquo;welcome home!&rdquo; at midnight. No matter what the labours of the
+      day had been or how profound his sleep, he never failed to give me a cheer
+      with the stump of his tail and to blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him
+      &ldquo;Good dog&rdquo; and a pat on the head. Then with a huge sigh of content he
+      would lapse back into slumber, satisfied that the last duty of the day was
+      done, and that all was well with the world for the night. Now he has
+      lapsed into sleep altogether.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will pay
+      my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and in
+      any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that I
+      enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he enjoyed
+      my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom he went,
+      and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to go with,
+      unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person. It was not
+      that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned after a longish
+      absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would leap round and
+      round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent her to the
+      floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's schoolmaster
+      who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and explained that &ldquo;he
+      didn't know his own strength.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and I was
+      the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the woodlands,
+      and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his reddish-brown
+      coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan, and his head
+      down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there was more than a
+      hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was precisely no one
+      ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up. His fine liquid brown
+      eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but he had a nobler head
+      than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain of the Irish terrier in
+      him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat was all his own. And all
+      his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and his genius for friendship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he was
+      reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had been
+      sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
+      grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin, and
+      he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
+      schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
+      eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
+      something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
+      when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
+      abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
+      ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
+      You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about his
+      affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to the
+      forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled to any
+      good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and watchful,
+      his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury and pity for
+      the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the qualities of a
+      rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into an unspeakable
+      abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your voice and all the
+      world was young and full of singing birds again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
+      that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
+      For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or his
+      colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more than a
+      little of the spirit of the flunkey. &ldquo;A man's a man, for a' that,&rdquo; was not
+      his creed. He discriminated between the people who came to the front door
+      and the people who came to the side door. To the former he was
+      systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly hostile. &ldquo;The poor in a
+      loomp is bad,&rdquo; was his fixed principle, and any one carrying a basket,
+      wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was <i>ipso facto</i> suspect. He
+      held, in short, to the servile philosophy of clothes as firmly as any
+      waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair. Familiarity never altered
+      his convictions. No amount of correction affected his stubborn dislike of
+      postmen. They offended him in many ways. They wore uniforms; they came,
+      nevertheless, to the front door; they knocked with a challenging violence
+      that revolted his sense of propriety. In the end, the burden of their
+      insults was too much for him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of
+      trousers. Perhaps that incident was not unconnected with his passing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
+      Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in leaping
+      a stile&mdash;he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow&mdash;or
+      had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
+      latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
+      for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted. But
+      whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all the
+      veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to the revels
+      in his native woods&mdash;for he had come to us as a pup from a cottage in
+      the heart of the woodland country&mdash;no longer made him tense as a
+      drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and left
+      his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the hill
+      to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into the
+      house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to be
+      forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a place
+      he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream of the
+      happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there waiting to
+      scour the woods with me as of old.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0039" id="linkimage-0039"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0120m.jpg" alt="0120m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0120.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0040" id="linkimage-0040"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0121m.jpg" alt="0121m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0121.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON MATCHES AND THINGS
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> had an agreeable
+      assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I went-into a tea-shop and
+      sat down. There were several young waitresses by the counter engaged in
+      animated conversation. They eyed me with that cold aloofness which is the
+      ritual of the order, and which, I take it, is intended to convey to you
+      the fact that they are princesses in disguise who only serve in shops for
+      a pastime. When I had taken out my watch twice with an appearance of
+      ostentatious urgency, one of the princesses came towards me, took my order
+      (looking meanwhile out of the window to remind me that she was not really
+      aware of me, but only happened to be there by chance), and moved
+      languorously away. When she returned she brought tea&mdash;and sugar. In
+      that moment her disdain was transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel
+      who under the disguise of indifference went about scattering benedictions
+      among her customers and assuring them that the spring had come back to the
+      earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future became
+      suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine) had passed
+      magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be sweetened
+      thrice a day by honest sugar.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised how
+      I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my friends
+      through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump person, but
+      in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the spoon and
+      stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer did the spoon
+      seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere survival of an
+      antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the back of your coat.
+      It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the tea-table. To stir your
+      tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It keeps tune with your thoughts
+      if you are alone, and it keeps time with your tongue if you are talking.
+      It helps out the argument, fills up the gaps, provides the animated
+      commentary on your discourse. There are people I shall always remember in
+      the attitude of standing, cup in hand, and stirring, stirring, stirring as
+      the current of talk flowed on. Such a one was that fine old tea-drinker,
+      Prince Kropotkin&mdash;rest his gentle soul if he indeed be among the
+      slain.... With what universal benevolence his patriarchal face used to
+      gleam as he stood stirring and talking, talking and stirring, with the
+      hurry of his teeming thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
+      for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
+      little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
+      of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
+      solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
+      with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon the
+      grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all the
+      pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious than you
+      had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days knitting up your
+      severed friendships with things. You slip into the National Gallery just
+      to see what old favourites have come up from the darkness of the cellars.
+      You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in the great moon that shines
+      again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that chimes gives you a pleasant
+      emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds like the salutation of an old
+      friend who had been given up as lost. And matches.... There was a time
+      when I thought nothing of a match. I would strike a match as thoughtlessly
+      as I would breathe. And for the same reason, that matches were as
+      plentiful as air. I would strike a match and let the wind puff it out;
+      another and let it burn out before using it, simply because I was too busy
+      talking or listening or thinking or doing nothing. I would try to light a
+      pipe in a gale of wind on a mountain top, crouching behind a boulder,
+      getting inside my hat, lying on the ground under my coat, and wasting
+      matches by the dozen. I would get rid of a box of matches a day, and not
+      care a dump. The world was simply choked with matches, and it was almost a
+      duty to go on striking them to make room for the rest. You could get a
+      dozen boxes for a penny or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see
+      great bags of matches with boxes bursting out at the top, and simply
+      asking to be taken. If by some accident you found yourself without a box
+      in your pocket you asked the stranger for a light as confidently as you
+      would ask him for the time o' day. You were asking for something that cost
+      him nothing except a commonplace civility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
+      Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
+      away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, &ldquo;No; we haven't any.&rdquo; They
+      simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
+      smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the habit
+      and just go on in their sleep. &ldquo;Oh, you funny people,&rdquo; they seem to say,
+      dreamily. &ldquo;Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach you that
+      there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years and years;
+      never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let the other fools
+      follow on.&rdquo; And you go away, feeling much as though you had been caught
+      trying to pass a bad half-crown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, &ldquo;Can you oblige me
+      with a light, sir?&rdquo; You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or a
+      pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
+      wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
+      fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting to
+      pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket, preparing
+      to have &ldquo;After you, sir,&rdquo; on your lips at the exact moment when he has lit
+      his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out the precious flame.
+      Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps the fellow is only
+      waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting for what the other
+      hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which I
+      can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips I know
+      that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that excellent
+      fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine, and I have
+      had more lights from him in these days than from any other man on earth. I
+      never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it quite boldly,
+      fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me&mdash;but not so often, not
+      nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If&mdash;having borrowed
+      a little too recklessly from him of late&mdash;I go into his room and
+      begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the Peace
+      Conference, or things like that&mdash;is he deceived? Not at all. He knows
+      that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has one left
+      it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his pipe because he
+      knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man Higginson is. I
+      cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
+      tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
+      authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
+      before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
+      welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
+      Lords and the Oval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning, Your
+      young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is sailing
+      home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds instead of
+      khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters who are
+      strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on historic
+      battlefields and now ask you whether you will have &ldquo;thick or clear,&rdquo; with
+      the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your galley proof is
+      brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you look at with a
+      shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he is that pale,
+      thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago, and who in the
+      interval has been fighting in many lands near and far, in France and
+      Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing the burnished
+      livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a stoutish fellow
+      who turns out to be the old professional released from Germany after long
+      months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one &ldquo;of the lucky ones;
+      nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and lived with the
+      farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir, nothing to
+      complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men and
+      things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those who
+      will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound of Big
+      Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we enter the
+      new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the stimulus of the
+      princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the credit side of
+      things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We have left the deathly
+      solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the moraine is rough and
+      toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we can hear the pleasant
+      tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old pastures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0041" id="linkimage-0041"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0127m.jpg" alt="0127m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0127.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0042" id="linkimage-0042"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0128m.jpg" alt="0128m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0128.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON BEING REMEMBERED
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>s I lay on the
+      hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods watching the
+      harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows chasing each other
+      across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were looking down with me.
+      For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an old school book is scored
+      with the names of generations of scholars. Near by are the earthworks of
+      the ancient Britons, and on the face of the hill is a great white horse
+      carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those white marks, that look like sheep
+      feeding on the green hill-side, are reminders of the great war. How long
+      ago it seems since the recruits from the valley used to come up here to
+      learn the art of trench-digging, leaving these memorials behind them
+      before they marched away to whatever fate awaited them! All over the
+      hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit by merry parties on happy
+      holidays. One scorched and blackened area, more spacious than the rest,
+      marks the spot where the beacon fire was lit to celebrate the signing of
+      Peace. And on the boles of the beech trees are initials carved deep in the
+      bark&mdash;some linked like those of lovers, some freshly cut, some old
+      and covered with lichen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and
+      school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is as
+      ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school desks
+      of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of the
+      schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted them.
+      There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood or
+      scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled. And the
+      joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found pleasure in
+      whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice white ceiling above
+      me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's hankering for a
+      charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies. But at the back of
+      it all, the explanation of those initials on the boles of the beeches is a
+      desire for some sort of immortality&mdash;terrestrial if not celestial.
+      Even the least of us would like to be remembered, and so we carve our
+      names on tree trunks and tombstones to remind later generations that we
+      too once passed this way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great. One of
+      the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will trumpet
+      its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries to take care
+      that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's &ldquo;Exegi monumentum ære
+      perennius&rdquo; is one of many confident assertions that he knew he would be
+      among the immortals. &ldquo;I have raised a monument,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;more enduring
+      than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings; a monument which shall
+      not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by the rage of the north wind,
+      nor by the countless years and the flight of ages.&rdquo; The same magnificent
+      confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud declaration&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had
+      written a song of a sparrow&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      Of which I sang one song that will not die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was &ldquo;writ in water,&rdquo; but behind
+      the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for immortality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable confidence.
+      &ldquo;I'll be more respected,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a hundred years after I am dead than I
+      am at present;&rdquo; and even John Knox had his eye on an earthly as well as a
+      heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus. &ldquo;Theologians there will always
+      be in abundance,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;the like of me comes but once in centuries.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
+      their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
+      conceit on the subject. &ldquo;What I write,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is not written on slate
+      and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of years can
+      efface it.&rdquo; And again, &ldquo;I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be
+      well-lighted, the guests few and select.&rdquo; A proud fellow, if ever there
+      was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le Brun-Pindare,
+      cherished his dream of immortality. &ldquo;I do not die,&rdquo; he said grandly; &ldquo;<i>I
+      quit the time</i>.&rdquo; And beside this we may put Victor Hugo's rather
+      truculent, &ldquo;It is time my name ceased to fill the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
+      that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. &ldquo;Do you suppose,&rdquo; he
+      said, &ldquo;to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
+      should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
+      service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
+      Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
+      toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has ever
+      looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life, then at
+      last it would begin to live.&rdquo; The context, it is true, suggests that a
+      celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a terrestrial; but
+      earthly glory was never far from his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject is one
+      of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in books. I
+      must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable terms. In the
+      preface to his &ldquo;Account of Corsica&rdquo; he says:&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <i>For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
+      ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine
+      literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish
+      a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a
+      respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having the
+      character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. (</i>Oh, you
+      rogue!<i>) To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day
+      is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a
+      perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural
+      disposition an easy play (&rdquo;</i>You were drunk last night, you dog<i>&ldquo;),
+      and yet indulge the pride of superior genius when he considers that by
+      those who know him only as an author he never ceases to be respected. Such
+      an author in his hours of gloom and discontent may have the consolation to
+      think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers,
+      and such an author may cherish the hope of being remembered after death,
+      which has been a great object of the noblest minds in all ages.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition. Most
+      of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of Gray's
+      depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the &ldquo;dull cold ear of
+      death.&rdquo; In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy and
+      immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of &ldquo;Alpha of
+      the Plough&rdquo; an agreeable fancy something like this. In the year two
+      thousand&mdash;or it may be three thousand&mdash;yes, let us do the thing
+      handsomely and not stint the centuries&mdash;in the year three thousand
+      and ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and
+      the Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe
+      for democracy&mdash;at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer
+      who has been swished that morning from the British Isles across the
+      Atlantic to the Patagonian capital&mdash;swished, I need hardly remark,
+      being the expression used to describe the method of flight which consists
+      in being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made to
+      complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be desired&mdash;bursts
+      in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered by him in the
+      course of some daring investigations of the famous subterranean passages
+      of the ancient British capital&mdash;those passages which have so long
+      perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the Patagonian savants,
+      some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers, and some that they
+      were the roadways of a people who had become so afflicted with photophobia
+      that they had to build their cities underground. The trophy is a book by
+      one &ldquo;Alpha of the Plough.&rdquo; It creates an enormous sensation. It is put
+      under a glass case in the Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is
+      translated into every Patagonian dialect. It is read in schools. It is
+      referred to in pulpits. It is discussed in learned societies. Its author,
+      dimly descried across the ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0043" id="linkimage-0043"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0134m.jpg" alt="0134m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0134.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
+      celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
+      assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
+      marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha&mdash;a gentleman with a flowing
+      beard and a dome-like brow&mdash;that overlooks the market-place, and
+      places wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of
+      bells and a salvo of artillery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you, my
+      dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in the
+      New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved for most,
+      even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world to-day. And
+      yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who writes has the
+      best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox, who among the
+      statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But Wordsworth and
+      Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb, even
+      second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the temple
+      of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military feats of
+      Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza of the
+      poem in which he poured out his creed&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      He either fears his fate too much,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Or his deserts are small.
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      That dares not put it to the touch
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      To win or lose it all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship with
+      Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he befriended
+      a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the name of his
+      benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of Ægina is full
+      of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would like to be
+      remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went to Pindar
+      and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his praise.
+      Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. &ldquo;Why, for so much
+      money,&rdquo; said Pytheas, &ldquo;I can erect a statue of bronze in the temple.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very likely.&rdquo; On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And
+      now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the statues
+      of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples
+      themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the ode
+      of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer paths
+      to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of the Earl
+      of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of Shakespeare
+      live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their dedication. But
+      one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise you to go and give
+      Mr &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; £200 and a commission to send your name
+      echoing down the corridors of time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; (you
+      will fill in the blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them.
+      It would be safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a
+      rose, or an overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can
+      confer a modest immortality. They have done so for many. A certain
+      Maréchal Neil is wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which
+      is as enviable a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr
+      Mackintosh is talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of
+      rain, and even Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his
+      battles. It would not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone
+      will be thought of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just
+      as Archimedes is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the
+      healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps
+      one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of
+      forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike, and
+      we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as if the
+      world babbles about us for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0044" id="linkimage-0044"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0137m.jpg" alt="0137m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0137.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0045" id="linkimage-0045"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0138m.jpg" alt="0138m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0138.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON DINING
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>here are people
+      who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can hoard it not for the
+      sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy, for the satisfaction of
+      feeling that they have got something locked up that they could spend if
+      they chose without being any the poorer and that other people would enjoy
+      knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending what they can afford to spend.
+      It is a pleasure akin to the economy of the Scotsman, which, according to
+      a distinguished member of that race, finds its perfect expression in
+      taking the tube when you can afford a cab. But the gift of secrecy is
+      rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the sake of telling them. We spend our
+      secrets as Lamb's spendthrift spent his money&mdash;while they are fresh.
+      The joy of creating an emotion in other people is too much for us. We like
+      to surprise them, or shock them, or please them as the case may be, and we
+      give away the secret with which we have been entrusted with a liberal hand
+      and a solemn request &ldquo;to say nothing about it.&rdquo; We relish the luxury of
+      telling the secret, and leave the painful duty of keeping it to the other
+      fellow. We let the horse out and then solemnly demand that the stable door
+      shall be shut so that it shan't escape, I have done it myself&mdash;often.
+      I have no doubt that I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret
+      to reveal, but I shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely
+      selfish reasons, which will appear later. You may conceive me going about
+      choking with mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years
+      have I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can dine
+      wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the atmosphere
+      restful, and the prices moderate&mdash;in short, the happy mean between
+      the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the uncompromising
+      cheapness of Lockhart's. In those extremes I find no satisfaction.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its
+      ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to a
+      good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren't many
+      families that enjoyed their &ldquo;vittles&rdquo; more than her's did, and I can claim
+      the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that I count
+      good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I could join
+      very heartily in Peacock's chorus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      &ldquo;How can a man, in his life of a span,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Do anything better than dine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Give me a satisfactory' dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel
+      themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads the
+      landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who insisted
+      that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life. That, I think,
+      is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few things more
+      revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by taking emetics.
+      But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise for enjoying a good
+      dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good dinners. I see no
+      necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and a holy mind. There was
+      a saintly man once in this city&mdash;a famous man, too&mdash;who was
+      afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out to dinner, he
+      had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to enable him to
+      start even with the other guests. And it is on record that when the
+      ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with Cardinal
+      Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses that
+      hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season of
+      fasting, &ldquo;I fear,&rdquo; said one of them, &ldquo;that there is a lobster salad side
+      to the Cardinal.&rdquo; I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side too. A
+      hot day and a lobster salad&mdash;what happier conjunction can we look for
+      in a plaguey world?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, in making this confession, I am neither <i>gourmand</i> nor <i>gourmet</i>.
+      Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic
+      conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and
+      the great language of the <i>menu</i> does not stir my pulse. I do not ask
+      for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt
+      would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for
+      talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was
+      pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have for
+      supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as the
+      shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right
+      spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes&mdash;eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
+      smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke
+      approvingly of Sancho's choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way with
+      him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against his
+      rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with
+      conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the
+      matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to
+      follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart's desire at the
+      Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel when I
+      enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things. I stroke
+      the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and rises, purring
+      with dignity, under my caress. I say &ldquo;Good evening&rdquo; to the landlord who
+      greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once cordial and
+      restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of his hand. No
+      frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a neat-handed
+      Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress and white
+      cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility and aloofness
+      that establishes the perfect relationship&mdash;obliging, but not
+      familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The napery
+      makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a mirror,
+      and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced dish of
+      hors d'ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the modest
+      four-course table d'hôte begins, and when at the end you light your
+      cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only dined,
+      but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement, touched with
+      the subtle note of a personality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall not
+      tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It may be
+      in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn, or it
+      may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you because I
+      sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it I shall shatter
+      the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the Mermaid and find its
+      old English note of kindly welcome and decorous moderation gone, and that
+      in its place there will be a noisy, bustling, popular restaurant with a
+      band, from which I shall flee. When it is &ldquo;discovered&rdquo; it will be lost, as
+      the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so I shall keep its secret. I only
+      purr it to the cat who arches her back and purrs understanding in
+      response. It is the bond of freemasonry between us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0046" id="linkimage-0046"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0142m.jpg" alt="0142m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0142.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0047" id="linkimage-0047"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0143m.jpg" alt="0143m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0143.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was leaning over
+      the rails of the upper deck idly watching the Chinese whom, to the number
+      of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre and were to disgorge at Halifax,
+      when the bugle sounded for lunch. A mistake, I thought, looking at my
+      watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon hour was one. Then I remembered. I
+      had not corrected my watch that morning by the ship's clock. In our
+      pursuit of yesterday across the Atlantic we had put on another
+      three-quarters of an hour. Already on this journey we had outdistanced
+      to-day by two and a half hours. By the time we reached Halifax we should
+      have gained perhaps six hours. In thought I followed the Chinamen
+      thundering across Canada to Vancouver, and thence onward across the
+      Pacific on the last stage of their voyage. And I realised that by the time
+      they reached home they would have caught yesterday up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
+      this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
+      years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
+      thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always the
+      same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of it than
+      I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind as
+      insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
+      beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we were
+      overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by sea and
+      land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight across the
+      plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it was neither
+      yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a confusion of
+      all three.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
+      absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom&mdash;a parochial illusion
+      of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
+      axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
+      light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that they
+      were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
+      numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away on
+      the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length of
+      light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
+      meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
+      and dark&mdash;what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for
+      ever and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark&mdash;not many
+      days, but just one day and that always midday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
+      itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck of
+      dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A few
+      hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of dark, I
+      should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo sky&mdash;specks
+      whose strip of daylight was many times the length of ours, and whose year
+      would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the astronomers tell us that
+      Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years? Think of it&mdash;our
+      Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round a single solar year
+      of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and live to a green old
+      age according to our reckoning, and still never see the glory of
+      midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our ideas of Time
+      have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune&mdash;if, that is,
+      there be any dwellers on Neptune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts of
+      other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this regal orb
+      above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and numbered
+      their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons by the
+      illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of other
+      systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to have any
+      fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the unthinkable
+      void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time: there was only
+      duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of fable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I reached this depressing conclusion&mdash;not a novel or original one,
+      but always a rather cheerless one&mdash;a sort of orphaned feeling stole
+      over me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
+      from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
+      eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly in
+      the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a gay time
+      on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during yesterday's
+      storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of his comrades at
+      an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges before him, was
+      crying something that sounded like &ldquo;Al-lay! Al-lay!&rdquo; counting the money in
+      his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he doubted whether it was
+      all there, but because he liked the feel and the look of it. A sprightly
+      young rascal, dressed as they all were in a grotesque mixture of garments,
+      French and English and German, picked up on the battlefields of France,
+      where they had been working for three years, stole up behind the
+      orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me as he did so) snatched an
+      orange and bolted. There followed a roaring scrimmage on deck, in the
+      midst of which the orange-seller's coppers were sent flying along the
+      boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and scuffling, and from which the
+      author of the mischief emerged riotously happy and, lighting a cigarette,
+      flung himself down with an air of radiant good humour, in which he
+      enveloped me with a glance of his bold and merry eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
+      illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass, not
+      intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The experiences
+      were always associated with great physical weariness and the sense of the
+      endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the Dauphiné coming down
+      from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other experience in the Lake
+      District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a companion in the doorway
+      of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain. We had come to the end of
+      our days in the mountains, and now we were going back to Keswick, climbing
+      Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was robed in clouds, and the rain was
+      of that determined kind that admits of no hope. And so, after a long wait,
+      we decided that Helvellyn &ldquo;would not go,&rdquo; as the climber would say, and,
+      putting on our mackintoshes and shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for
+      Keswick by the lower slopes of the mountains&mdash;by the track that
+      skirts Great Dodd and descends by the moorlands into the Vale of St John.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung low
+      over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
+      booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
+      tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
+      struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to be
+      without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious loneliness
+      of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the late afternoon
+      we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the Vale of St John
+      and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the road. What with
+      battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the dripping mackintosh
+      and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked myself into that
+      passive mental state which is like a waking dream, in which your voice
+      sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your thoughts seem to play
+      irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember that
+      it is what Mr Chesterton calls &ldquo;a rolling road, a reeling road.&rdquo; It is
+      like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it is going
+      down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for Penrith,
+      then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that goal, only to
+      give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so on, and all the time
+      it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or to Penrith, but is sidling
+      crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road which is like the
+      whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of his signature, thus:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0048" id="linkimage-0048"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0148m.jpg" alt="0148m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0148.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw through
+      the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that fine
+      mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses that sustain
+      the southern face were visible. They looked like the outstretched fingers
+      of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds and clutching the
+      earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The image fell in with
+      the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the similitude out to my
+      companion as we paced along the muddy road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and we
+      went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As we
+      did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds and
+      clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere, far
+      off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same mist
+      of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
+      gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been years
+      ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might have
+      been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was this
+      evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the impression
+      remained of something outside the confines of time. I had passed into a
+      static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished, and Time was
+      only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I had walked
+      through the shadow into the deeps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when I
+      reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very earnestly
+      in order to discover the time of the trains for London next day. And the
+      recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings brought my
+      thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just below me, was
+      happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread, one of those
+      long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck from the shore
+      at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed along a rope
+      connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of the man as he
+      devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the brown crust
+      reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had gone for lunch
+      long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this time. I turned
+      hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch back
+      three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the fiction
+      of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0049" id="linkimage-0049"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0150m.jpg" alt="0150m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0150.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0050" id="linkimage-0050"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0151m.jpg" alt="0151m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0151.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      TWO DRINKS OF MILK
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he cabin lay a
+      hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between Sneam and
+      Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and out to the
+      open Atlantic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down
+      the rocks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to the
+      cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Milk? Yes. Would we come in?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade of
+      the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother of the
+      girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and having
+      done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen floor out
+      into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and on a bench by
+      the ingle sat the third member of the family.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her
+      eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and
+      untroubled as a child's. She paused in her knitting to make room for me on
+      the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she played
+      the hostess.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you have travelled in Kerry you don't need to be told of the charm of
+      the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful
+      country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of
+      Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the look
+      of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a spring
+      morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and to know
+      them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of Kerry,
+      O'Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities of a
+      poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always warm with
+      the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted with
+      wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving pleasure to
+      others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every peasant you meet
+      is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted if you will stop to
+      talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be your guide. It is like
+      being back in the childhood of the world, among elemental things and an
+      ancient, unhasting people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess in
+      disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that a
+      duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of Sneam,
+      five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin and among
+      these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she had caught
+      something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out there through
+      the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of exiles had gone to
+      far lands. Some few had returned and some had been for ever silent. As I
+      sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle accents all the tale of
+      a stricken people and of a deserted land. There was no word of complaint&mdash;only
+      a cheerful acceptance of the decrees of Fate. There is the secret of the
+      fascination of the Kérry temperament&mdash;the happy sunlight playing
+      across the sorrow of things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost
+      to the brim, and a couple of mugs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to
+      pay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sure, there's nothing to pay,&rdquo; said the old lady with just a touch of
+      pride in her sweet voice. &ldquo;There's not a cabin in Kerry where you'll not
+      be welcome to a drink of milk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed
+      in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane, and
+      as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they added a
+      benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague M'Carty's
+      hotel&mdash;Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker, whose
+      rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits among
+      the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with
+      many-coloured flies&mdash;we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville
+      and heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take the
+      northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much better
+      made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before the
+      coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a day
+      of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the lake we
+      dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage&mdash;neat and
+      well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense of
+      plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark of a
+      dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged
+      interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and
+      leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before
+      us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt that
+      we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver affairs
+      than thirsty travelers to attend to.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back to
+      the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed suddenly
+      less friendly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two
+      glasses&mdash;a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of
+      feature. While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the
+      doorstep, looking away across the lake to where the noble form of
+      Schiehallion dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time
+      was money and talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty
+      haste.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What have we to pay, please?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Sixpence.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked
+      something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant
+      memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0051" id="linkimage-0051"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0155m.jpg" alt="0155m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0155.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0052" id="linkimage-0052"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0156m.jpg" alt="0156m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0156.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was my fortune
+      the other evening to be at dinner with a large company of doctors. While
+      we were assembling I fell into conversation with an eminent physician,
+      and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked that we English seasoned our
+      dishes far too freely. We scattered salt and pepper and vinegar over our
+      food so recklessly that we destroyed the delicacy of our taste, and did
+      ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was especially unfriendly to the use
+      of salt. He would not admit even that it improved the savour of things. It
+      destroyed our sense of their natural flavour, and substituted a coarser
+      appeal to the palate. From the hygienic point of view, the habit was all
+      wrong. All the salts necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat,
+      and the use of salt independently is entirely harmful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take the egg, for example,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It contains in it all the elements
+      necessary for the growth of a chicken&mdash;salt among the rest. That is
+      sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article of food.
+      Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise its delicate
+      flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.&rdquo; And he concluded, as
+      we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example of the Japanese
+      in this matter. &ldquo;They,&rdquo; he said laughingly, &ldquo;only take salt when they want
+      to die.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
+      and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
+      applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
+      who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with great
+      energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we eat contain
+      the salt required by the human body. &ldquo;Not even the egg?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;No, not
+      even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our foods, and even if
+      the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw state they tend to lose
+      their character cooked.&rdquo; He admitted that that was an argument for eating
+      things <i>au naturel</i> more than is the practice. But he was firm in his
+      conviction that the separate use of salt is essential. &ldquo;And as for
+      flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw, with or without salt. What
+      comparison is there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about the
+      Japanese), &ldquo;are there not races who do not use salt?&rdquo; &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; said
+      he, &ldquo;the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of salt is
+      supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of the prime
+      essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause or another, is
+      seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute exactness in the
+      mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of salt to eat with
+      their food they die.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening in
+      examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt I
+      should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the face
+      of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have quoted,
+      especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians. Yet I
+      daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the facts.
+      For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice, the
+      Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the world,
+      and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat their fish
+      in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would go far to
+      explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
+      the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about which
+      there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be a
+      commonplace thing like the use of salt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random&mdash;men whose
+      whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its requirements&mdash;whose
+      views on the subject were in violent antagonism. They approached their
+      subject from contrary angles and with contrary sets of facts, and the
+      truth they were in search of took a wholly different form for each.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
+      judicious manipulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our air
+      service. He was very confident that we were &ldquo;simply out of it&mdash;that
+      was all, simply out of it.&rdquo; And he was full of facts on the subject. <b>I
+      don't like people who brim over with facts&mdash;who lead facts about, as
+      Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few people
+      so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His conclusions
+      are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot sort them out and
+      add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès called &ldquo;loose,
+      unstitched minds.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
+      facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember whether
+      the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her husband had
+      told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so bad as that,
+      but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact away in the
+      chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not infrequently,
+      that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something chipped off, and I
+      can never trust it until I have verified my references.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was that,
+      so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell you how
+      many English machines had failed to return on each day of the week, and
+      how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to descend. And
+      judging from his figures he was quite right. &ldquo;We were out of it&mdash;simply
+      out of it.&rdquo; Yet the truth is that while his facts were right, his
+      deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken account of some
+      facts, but had left other equally important facts out of consideration.
+      For example, through all this time the German airmen had been on the
+      defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen had taken great
+      risks for a great object. They had gone miles over the enemy's lines&mdash;as
+      much as fifty miles over&mdash;and had come back with priceless
+      information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but the whole
+      truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this time the most
+      victorious element of our Army.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are not
+      always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is often composed
+      of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to contradict each
+      other. Take the handkerchief incident in &ldquo;Othello.&rdquo; Poor Desdemona could
+      not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that the Moor saw.
+      Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello believed she had
+      given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio wipe his beard
+      with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the catastrophe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them in
+      real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
+      free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
+      report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
+      knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
+      knife discovered&mdash;also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of
+      pawntickets for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he
+      was a thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
+      his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
+      clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of the trousers
+      was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt uncomfortable. He
+      took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was doing so he saw a
+      steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a timid person he
+      furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches came on, and when he
+      had got his &ldquo;take&rdquo; he left to transcribe it, having forgotten all about
+      the knife. The rest followed as stated. The pawntickets, which seemed so
+      strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were of course not his at all. They
+      belonged to the owner of the suit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You remember that Browning in &ldquo;The Ring and the Book,&rdquo; tells the story of
+      the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before he
+      feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
+      annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
+      different aspects of one truth. &ldquo;Mostly,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;matters of any
+      consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself, I
+      am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
+      contradicted myself three times.&rdquo; I fancy it is this discovery of the
+      falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less cocksure
+      as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts that belong
+      to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that &ldquo;a lie that is only
+      half a truth is ever the blackest of lies&rdquo;; but he is wrong. It is the
+      fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter) which is the most
+      dangerous lie&mdash;for a fact seems so absolute, so incontrovertible.
+      Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts, their arrangement
+      and concealment. It was never better stated than by a famous business man
+      in an action for libel which I have referred to in another connection. He
+      was being examined about the visit of Government experts to his works, and
+      the instructions he gave to his manager. And this, as I remember it, was
+      the dialogue between counsel and witness:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you tell him to tell them the facts?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The whole facts?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What facts?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;<i>Selected facts</i>.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the midst
+      of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody bearing his
+      name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to a
+      scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things, we
+      cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of politics
+      and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a speech in which
+      there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of which was a
+      colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is so easy to make
+      the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in the realm that lies
+      outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation is denounced as the
+      heresy of another. Justification by &ldquo;works&rdquo; is displaced by justification
+      by faith, and that in turn is superseded by justification by &ldquo;service&rdquo;
+       which is &ldquo;works&rdquo; in new terms. Which is truth and which error? Or is that
+      the real alternative? May they not be different facets of one truth. The
+      prism breaks up the sunlight into many different colours and facts are
+      only the broken lights of truth. In this perplexing world we must be
+      prepared to find the same truth demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die
+      because they take salt, and the fact that Indians die because they don't
+      take it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0053" id="linkimage-0053"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0163m.jpg" alt="0163m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0163.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0054" id="linkimage-0054"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0164m.jpg" alt="0164m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0164.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON GREAT MEN
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was reading just
+      now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of him expressed by
+      Macaulay who declared him to be &ldquo;the greatest man since Milton.&rdquo; I paused
+      over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally enough to ask myself
+      who were the great Englishmen in history&mdash;for the sake of argument,
+      the six greatest. I found the question so exciting that I had reached the
+      end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time) almost before I had reached
+      the end of my list. I began by laying down my premises or principles. I
+      would not restrict the choice to men of action. The only grievance I have
+      against Plutarch is that he followed that course. His incomparable
+      &ldquo;Lives,&rdquo; would be still more satisfying, a still more priceless treasury
+      of the ancient world, if, among his crowd of statesmen and warriors, we
+      could make friends with Socrates and Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus,
+      with the men whose work survived them as well as with the men whose work
+      is a memory. And I rejected the blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I
+      would not have in my list a mere homicidal genius. My great man may have
+      been a great killer of his kind, but he must have some better claim to
+      inclusion than the fact that he had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On
+      the other hand, I would not exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to
+      be a bad man. Henry Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad
+      men. &ldquo;Greatness,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;consists in bringing all manner of mischief
+      upon mankind, and goodness in removing it from them.&rdquo; And it was to
+      satirise the traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific
+      satire &ldquo;The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,&rdquo; probably having in mind the
+      Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
+      traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad man.
+      I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that he was
+      a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful ogre, a
+      sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless, ruthless
+      jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent, merciless as
+      a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a sort of
+      mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought of nature.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
+      governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
+      mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was a
+      great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about Cæsar,
+      but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds down twenty
+      centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must have design. It
+      must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere accident, emotion or
+      effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured by its influence on the
+      current of the world, on its extension of the kingdom of the mind, on its
+      contribution to the riches of living. Applying tests like these, who are
+      our six greatest Englishmen? For our first choice there would be a
+      unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the greatest thing we have done. He is our
+      challenger in the fists of the world, and there is none to cross swords
+      with him. Like Sirius, he has a magnitude of his own. Take him away from
+      our heavens, conceive him never to have been born, and the imaginative
+      wealth of fife shrinks to a lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's
+      phrase, &ldquo;poor indeed.&rdquo; There is nothing English for which we would
+      exchange him. &ldquo;Indian Empire or no Indian Empire,&rdquo; we say with Carlyle,
+      &ldquo;we cannot do without our Shakespeare.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
+      indisputably to him who had
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      &ldquo;... a voice whose sound was like the sea.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
+      harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of the
+      sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
+      intangible, indestructible. With him stands his &ldquo;chief of men&rdquo;&mdash;the
+      &ldquo;great bad man&rdquo; of Burke&mdash;the one man of action in our annals capable
+      of measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
+      Bismarck in the realm of the spirit&mdash;the man at whose name the cheek
+      of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
+      death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
+      these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda) first
+      made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as the
+      bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning eternally
+      with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his soul to tatters,
+      and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding eloquence, and Burke,
+      the prose Milton, to whose deep well all statesmanship goes with its pail,
+      and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court in his brown wig, and Newton
+      plumbing the ultimate secrets of this amazing universe, and deep-browed
+      Darwin unravelling the mystery of life, and Wordsworth giving &ldquo;to weary
+      feet the gift of rest,&rdquo; and Dickens bringing with him a world of creative
+      splendour only less wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these
+      and a host of others aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip
+      him of all the legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name,
+      and he is still one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic,
+      enlightened man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first
+      great Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
+      quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be Roger&mdash;there
+      by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range of his
+      adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through which he
+      ploughed his lonely way to truth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a woman,
+      Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic &ldquo;lady of the lamp,&rdquo; but
+      as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the adventurer into
+      a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by a will of iron, a
+      terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful and creative woman
+      this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not because she is unworthy,
+      but because she must head a companion fist of great Englishwomen. I
+      hurriedly summon up two candidates from among our English saints&mdash;Sir
+      Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the intolerance (incredible to
+      modern ears) that could jest so diabolically at the martyrdom of the
+      &ldquo;heretic,&rdquo; Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his place as the most fragrant
+      flower of English culture, but if greatness be measured by achievement and
+      enduring influence he must yield place to the astonishing revivalist of
+      the eighteenth century who left a deeper mark upon the spiritual life of
+      England than any man in our history.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is my list&mdash;Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
+      Bacon, John Wesley&mdash;and anybody can make out another who cares and a
+      better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
+      unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is not
+      a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the kibe of
+      Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
+      contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher. If
+      the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness cannot
+      be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left out of any
+      list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature, we are poor
+      in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see the great
+      name of Turner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0055" id="linkimage-0055"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0169m.jpg" alt="0169m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0169.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0056" id="linkimage-0056"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0170m.jpg" alt="0170m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0170.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON SWEARING
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> young officer in
+      the flying service was describing to me the other day some of his recent
+      experiences in France. They were both amusing and sensational, though told
+      with that happy freedom from vanity and self-consciousness which is so
+      pleasant a feature of the British soldier of all ranks. The more he has
+      done and seen the less disposed he seems to regard himself as a hero. It
+      is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging is a sham currency. It is the base
+      coin with which the fraudulent pay their way. F. C. Selous was the
+      greatest big game hunter of modern times, but when he talked about his
+      adventures he gave the impression of a man who had only been out in the
+      back garden killing slugs. And Peary, who found the North Pole, writes as
+      modestly as if he had only found a new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr
+      Cook, who didn't find the North Pole and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who
+      does the boasting. And the man who talks most about patriotism is usually
+      the man who has least of that commodity, just as the man who talks most
+      about his honesty is rarely to be trusted with your silver spoons. A man
+      who really loves his country would no more brag about it than he would
+      brag about loving his mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to write of
+      him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
+      good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
+      seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It was
+      just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
+      convolvulus overgrows my garden. &ldquo;Hell&rdquo; was his favourite expletive, and
+      he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
+      scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
+      he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it as
+      a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear that
+      he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only secular
+      quality it possesses&mdash;the quality of emphasis. It is speech breaking
+      bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the dictionary and
+      the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord in music that in
+      shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music which is all discord
+      is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is deadly dull.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
+      emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
+      habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. &ldquo;When I have said
+      'Malaga,'&rdquo; says Plancus, in the &ldquo;Vicomte de Bragelonne,&rdquo; &ldquo;I am no longer a
+      man.&rdquo; He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his imprecations
+      for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils swell and his
+      eyes flash fire as he cries, &ldquo;Malaga.&rdquo; It is a good swear word. It has the
+      advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely what a swear word
+      should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying nothing. It should be
+      incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the passion that evokes it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If &ldquo;Malaga&rdquo; has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was that
+      defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. &ldquo;'Damns' have had
+      their day,&rdquo; he said, and when he swore he used the &ldquo;oath referential.&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;Odds hilts and blades,&rdquo; he said, or &ldquo;Odds slanders and lies,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Odds
+      bottles and glasses.&rdquo; But when he sat down to write his challenge to
+      Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him. &ldquo;Do, Sir
+      Lucius, let me begin with a damme,&rdquo; he said. He had to give up artificial
+      swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to something which had
+      a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it is the idea of being
+      a little wicked that is one of the attractions of swearing. It is a
+      symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so. For in its origin
+      always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates spoke &ldquo;By the Gods,&rdquo;
+       he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest reverence he could
+      command. But the oaths of to-day are not the expression of piety, but of
+      violent passion, and the people who indulge in a certain familiar
+      expletive would not find half so much satisfaction in it if they felt
+      that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration of faith&mdash;&ldquo;By
+      our Lady.&rdquo; That is the way our ancestors used to swear, and we have
+      corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith and meaning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of life
+      breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is the
+      prerogative of the soldier to be &ldquo;full of strange oaths.&rdquo; In this respect
+      Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used &ldquo;strange oaths.&rdquo; He
+      stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most industrious in
+      it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that have come down
+      to us which are not garnished with &ldquo;damns&rdquo; or &ldquo;By Gods.&rdquo; Hear him on the
+      morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to gossip Creevey&mdash;&ldquo;It
+      has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It
+      has been a damned nice thing&mdash;the nearest run thing you ever saw in
+      your life.&rdquo; Or when some foolish Court flunkey appeals to him to support
+      his claim to ride in the carriage with the young Queen on some public
+      occasion&mdash;&ldquo;Her Majesty can make you ride on the box or inside the
+      carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's dog.&rdquo; But in this he
+      followed not only the practice of soldiers in all times, but the
+      fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to have regarded
+      himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at the language of
+      the Prince Regent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,&rdquo; he remarks,
+      speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. &ldquo;Then he speaks and swears so like
+      old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the room with
+      him.&rdquo; This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices, but whose
+      recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It suggests also
+      that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of his own
+      comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and swore as
+      naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that other
+      famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy, as when,
+      speaking of Grant, he said, &ldquo;I'll tell you where he beats me, and where he
+      beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his
+      sight, but it scares me like Hell.&rdquo; Two centuries ago, according to Uncle
+      Toby, our men &ldquo;swore terribly in Flanders,&rdquo; and they are swearing terribly
+      there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time that the Flanders mud,
+      which has been watered for centuries by English blood, will ensanguine the
+      speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant young airman will talk a
+      good deal less about &ldquo;Hell&rdquo; when he escapes from it to a cleaner world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0057" id="linkimage-0057"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0174m.jpg" alt="0174m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0174.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0058" id="linkimage-0058"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0175m.jpg" alt="0175m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0175.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON A HANSOM CAB
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> saw a surprising
+      spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a hansom cab. Not a
+      derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally see, with an
+      obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the box, crawling
+      along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has escaped from a
+      cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way back&mdash;no, but
+      a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting in the shafts
+      and tossing its head as though it were full of beans and importance, and a
+      slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as a sandboy as he flicked and
+      flourished his whip, and, still more astonishing, a real passenger, a
+      lady, inside the vehicle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the
+      driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of the
+      poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas of
+      the past&mdash;sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the
+      quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there
+      flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs, the
+      London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King Petrol,
+      when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and the
+      two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place then,
+      of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a
+      formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took
+      your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver, you
+      settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and the
+      bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins of that
+      &ldquo;orf horse,&rdquo; the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of the
+      police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse joke to
+      a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in the revelry. The
+      conductor would stroll up to him and continue a conversation that had
+      begun early in the morning and seemed to go on intermittently all day&mdash;a
+      conversation of that jolly sort in which, as Washington Irving says, the
+      jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside the
+      bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It was an
+      act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the top
+      alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes. And
+      even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been quite
+      above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The hansom was a
+      rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the thing for a lady to
+      be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested romance, mysteries,
+      elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of wickednesses. A staid,
+      respectable &ldquo;growler&rdquo; was much more fitting for so delicate an exotic as
+      Woman. If she began riding in hansoms alone anything might happen. She
+      might want to go to public dinners next&mdash;think of it!&mdash;she might
+      be wanting to ride a bicycle&mdash;horrors!&mdash;she might discover a
+      shameless taste for cigarettes, or demand a living wage, or University
+      degrees, or a vote, just for all the world as though she was the equal of
+      Man, the Magnificent....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and
+      challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to the
+      coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy, and
+      impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable, mighty, but
+      blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets, reeling from right
+      to left like a drunken giant, encountering the kerb-stone, skimming the
+      lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of boorish revolt, standing
+      obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the street or across the street
+      amidst the derision and rejoicing of those whose empire he threatened, and
+      who saw in these pranks the assurance of his ultimate failure. Memory went
+      back to the old One a.m. from the Law Courts, and to one night that sums
+      up for me the spirit of those days of the great transition....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to start
+      from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew his power.
+      He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along the Edgeware
+      Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men who wrote him
+      down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />=
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      (from Our Peking Correspondent)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
+      chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was &ldquo;full
+      up&rdquo; hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded in
+      with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen&mdash;yes,
+      cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the
+      One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only
+      cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end of
+      the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the tipsy
+      gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at Baker
+      Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is being swept
+      on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are exchanged, what
+      jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the top hat, under the
+      impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the floor&mdash;oh, then
+      the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy gentleman opens his
+      dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these revels soon are ended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      First a shiver, and then a thrill,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Then something decidedly like a spill&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent30">
+      O. W. Holmes,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent30">
+      <i>The Deacon's Masterpiece</i> (DW)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      and we are left sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with the
+      clock over the shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the spirit of Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting
+      himself. He disapproves of the passengers having all the fun. Is he not a
+      humorist too? May he not be merry in the dawn of this May morning?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We take our fate like Englishmen, bravely, even merrily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment. This is worth living
+      for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base betrayer of the
+      innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though it is two or
+      three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the morning! Who
+      cares?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only the gentleman with the big bag in the corner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?&rdquo; he asks the conductor with tears in
+      his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help the driver. They busy
+      themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn handles, they work
+      pumps, they probe here and thump there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They come out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They have
+      the cheerful philosophy of people who meddle with things that move&mdash;cab
+      drivers, bus-drivers, engine-drivers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      If, when looking well won't move thee.
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent30">
+      Looking ill prevail?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So they take a breather, light cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile all the hansoms in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us,
+      like sharks upon the dead whale. Up they rattle from this side and that,
+      and every cabman flings a jibe as he passes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look 'ere,&rdquo; says one, pulling up. &ldquo;Why don't yer take the genelmen where
+      they want to go? That's what I asks yer. Why&mdash;don't&mdash;yer&mdash;take&mdash;the&mdash;genelmen&mdash;where&mdash;they&mdash;want&mdash;to
+      go? It's only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't
+      want to go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the cabman is like &ldquo;the wise thrush who sings his song twice over.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!&rdquo; cries another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can't 'elp larfin', yer know,&rdquo; says a third feelingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, you keep on larfin',&rdquo; says the chauffeur looking up from the inside
+      of One a.m. &ldquo;It suits your style o' beauty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A mellow voice breaks out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      We won't go home till morning,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Till daylight does appear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen in comic chorus. Those
+      who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither sing nor whistle,
+      croak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We sit inside patiently. We even joke too. All but the man with the big
+      bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his life-long enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He appeals again to the conductor, who laughs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back, puts his
+      head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and says:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We think better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is that
+      of the politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart. He is
+      like Dick Steele&mdash;&ldquo;when he was sober he was delightful; when he was
+      drunk he was irresistible.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She won't go any more to-night,&rdquo; says the conductor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal away. All but
+      the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a problem
+      that looks insoluble.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Two of us jump into a hansom that still prowls around, the last of the
+      shoal of sharks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Drive up West End Lane.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Right, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's face, wreathed in smiles,
+      beams down on us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see what was coming all the way from Baker Street,&rdquo; he savs. &ldquo;I see the
+      petrol was on fire.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yus,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Thought I should pick you up about 'ere.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No good, motors,&rdquo; he goes on, cheerfully. &ldquo;My opinion is they'll go out
+      as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the aristocracy are giving
+      'em up and goin' back to 'orses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hope they'll get better horses than this,&rdquo; for we are crawling painfully
+      up the tortuous reaches of West End Lane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's overworked. 'E ain't earned more
+      than three bob to-night. That's jest what' e's earned. Three bob. It's the
+      cold weather, you know. That's what it is. It's the cold weather as makes
+      'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And 'e does go after all, even
+      if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't say of that there
+      motor-bus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      We had no reply to this thrust, and the lid dropped down with a sound of
+      quiet triumph.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so home. And my dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge
+      Monster, reeking with strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious
+      laughter and standing for ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road with
+      the clock opposite pointing to a quarter to two, a rueful face in the
+      corner staring fixedly at a big bag and a tipsy gentleman in a tall hat
+      finding his way back to Baker Street in happy converse with a policeman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gone is the old London over which the shade of Mr Hansom presided like a
+      king. Gone is the &ldquo;orf horse&rdquo; with all its sins; gone is the rosy-cheeked
+      driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent whip and his tales of the
+      streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you your ticket, talked to
+      you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about the weather, the Boat Race,
+      or the latest clue to the latest mystery. We amble no more. We have
+      banished laughter and leisure from the streets, and the face of the
+      motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the symbol of the change. We have
+      passed into a breathless world, a world of wonderful mechanical
+      contrivances that have quickened the tempo of life and will soon have made
+      the horse as much a memory as the bow and arrow or the wherry that used to
+      be the principal vehicle of Elizabethan London. As I watched the hansom
+      bowling along Regent Street until it was lost in the swirl of motor-buses
+      and taxis I seemed to see in it the last straggler of an epoch passing
+      away into oblivion. I am glad it went so gallantly, and I am half sorry I
+      did not give the driver a parting cheer as he flicked his whip in the face
+      of the night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0059" id="linkimage-0059"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0183m.jpg" alt="0183m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0183.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0060" id="linkimage-0060"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0184m.jpg" alt="0184m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0184.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON MANNERS
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t is always
+      surprising, if not always agreeable, <b>to see ourselves as others see us</b>.
+      The picture we present to others is never the picture we present to
+      ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally it is a much plainer
+      picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always a strange picture.
+      Just now we English are having our portrait painted by an American lady,
+      Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been appearing in the press. It is
+      not a flattering portrait, and it seems to have angered a good many people
+      who deny the truth of the likeness very passionately. The chief accusation
+      seems to be that we have no manners, are lacking in the civilities and
+      politenesses of life, and so on, and are inferior in these things to the
+      French, the Americans, and other peoples. It is not an uncommon charge,
+      and it comes from many quarters. It came to me the other day in a letter
+      from a correspondent, French or Belgian, who has been living in this
+      country during the war, and who wrote bitterly about the manners of the
+      English towards foreigners. In the course of his letter he quoted with
+      approval the following cruel remark of Jean Carrière, written, needless to
+      say, before the war:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal élevé du fait
+      qu'il manque de manières; il ignore encore la politesse, voilà tout.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the
+      whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have
+      enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken
+      up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and we
+      suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should be
+      told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At the
+      same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's warning about
+      the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty millions of us,
+      and we have some forty million different manners, and it is not easy to
+      get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will take this &ldquo;copy&rdquo; to
+      the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who preceded him was a
+      monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all civility; another is all
+      bad temper, and between the two extremes you will get every shade of good
+      and bad manners. And so through every phase of society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the widest
+      differences of manner in different parts of the country. In Lancashire and
+      Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There is a deep-seated
+      distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the code of conduct
+      differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral town as the manner
+      of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But even here you will find
+      behind the general bearing infinite shades of difference that make your
+      generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more you know of any people the less
+      you feel able to sum them up in broad categories.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our
+      ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete
+      darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting&mdash;apropos of the
+      Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because of
+      the strangeness of his appearance&mdash;lamenting the deplorable manners
+      of the people. &ldquo;Lord!&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;to see the absurd nature of Englishmen
+      that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks strange.&rdquo;
+       Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him describing the
+      English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
+      earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. &ldquo;To mention but a single
+      attraction,&rdquo; he says in one of his letters, &ldquo;the English girls are
+      divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses. They
+      have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go anywhere on
+      a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive, they kiss
+      you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you return. Go where
+      you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if you had once tasted
+      how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish to spend your life
+      there.&rdquo; Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens a good deal changed
+      to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing and
+      less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the saying of
+      O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good criticism. Our lack
+      of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but more probably it is
+      traceable not to a physical but to a social source. Unlike the Celtic and
+      the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have not the ease that comes
+      from the ingrained tradition of human equality. The French have that ease.
+      So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So have the Americans. But the
+      English are class conscious. The dead hand of feudalism is still heavy
+      upon our souls. If it were not, the degrading traffic in titles would long
+      since have been abolished as an insult to our intelligence. But we not
+      only tolerate it: we delight in this artificial scheme of relationship. It
+      is not human values, but social discriminations that count. And while
+      human values are cohesive in their effect, social discriminations are
+      separatist. They break society up into castes, and permeate it with the
+      twin vices of snobbery and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is
+      subdivided into infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious
+      restraints of a people uncertain of their social relationships create a
+      defensive manner which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true
+      root is a timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his
+      ground tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is
+      proud: it may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away
+      from this fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners
+      for independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from a
+      sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented to
+      keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression that
+      he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he had
+      more <i>abandon</i>. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical
+      politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the
+      spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which makes
+      the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably what
+      Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the impression
+      that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good manners that
+      they exist most where they do not exist at all&mdash;that is to say, where
+      conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told James Hogg that no
+      man who was content to be himself, without either diffidence or egotism,
+      would fail to be at home in any company, and I do not know a better recipe
+      for good manners.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I was riding in a bus yesterday afternoon when I overheard a conversation
+      between a couple of smartly dressed young people&mdash;a youth and a
+      maiden&mdash;at the other end of the vehicle. It was not an amusing
+      conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about. Indeed, I
+      could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be about
+      anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which consist
+      chiefly of &ldquo;Awfullys&rdquo; and &ldquo;Reallys!&rdquo; and &ldquo;Don't-you-knows&rdquo; and tattle
+      about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and similar
+      common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter but because
+      of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the speakers were
+      alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of wind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to hear, while
+      others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not of approval.
+      They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved an air of being
+      unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of not being aware
+      that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact, their manner
+      indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings. They were
+      really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the bus. If they
+      had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in quite reasonable
+      tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly and defiantly to an
+      empty bus. They would have made no impression on an empty bus. But they
+      were happily sensible of making quite a marked impression on a full bus.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not the impression they imagined. It was another impression
+      altogether. There are few more unpleasing and vulgar habits than that of
+      loud, aggressive conversation in public places. It is an impertinence to
+      inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who do not want to know about
+      them, and who may want to read or doze or think or look out of the window
+      at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The assumption behind
+      the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is an announcement to
+      the world that we are someone in particular and can talk as loudly as we
+      please whenever we please. It is a sort of social Prussianism that
+      presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by a superior egotism.
+      The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in the world is mistaken.
+      On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an inverted self-consciousness.
+      These young people were talking loudly, not because they were unconscious
+      of themselves in relation to their fellows, but because they were much too
+      conscious and were not content to be just quiet, ordinary people like the
+      rest of us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I hesitate to say that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not lived
+      abroad sufficiently to judge. But it is a common experience of those who
+      travel to find, as I have often found, their country humiliated by this
+      habit of aggressive bearing in public places. It is unlovely at home, but
+      it is much more offensive abroad, for then it is not only the person who
+      is brought into disrepute, but the country he (and not less frequently
+      she) is supposed to represent. We in the bus could afford to bear the
+      affliction of that young couple with tolerance and even amusement, for
+      they only hurt themselves. We could discount them. But the same bearing in
+      a foreign capital gives the impression that we are all like this, just as
+      the rather crude boasting of certain types of American grossly
+      misrepresent a people whose general conduct, as anyone who sees them at
+      home will agree, is unaffected, unpretentious, and good-natured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth, I suspect, is that every country sends abroad a
+      disproportionate number of its &ldquo;bounders.&rdquo; It is inevitable that it should
+      be so, for the people who can afford to travel are the people who have
+      made money, and while many admirable qualities may be involved in the
+      capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain coarse
+      assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got so
+      hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are better
+      than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot attune his
+      voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second generation, this
+      congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high school it is
+      apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the bus
+      yesterday.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So far from being representative of the English, they are violently
+      unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take an
+      average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust the
+      sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted with
+      egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and
+      monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract attention
+      without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy mean
+      between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the overbearing
+      note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk of our
+      affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without desiring
+      to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without wishing to
+      be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we have achieved
+      that social ease which consists in the adjustment of a reasonable
+      confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the sensibilities of
+      others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0061" id="linkimage-0061"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0192m.jpg" alt="0192m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0192.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0062" id="linkimage-0062"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0193m.jpg" alt="0193m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0193.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON A FINE DAY
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t's just like
+      summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have forgotten to say
+      it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it from the orchard
+      with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery. There are some
+      people of penurious emotions and speech, like the Drumtochty farmer in Ian
+      Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of this iteration. They would find
+      it wasteful and frivolous. They do not understand that we go on saying it
+      over and over again, like the birds, for the sheer joy of saying it.
+      Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice. There he goes skipping from
+      branch to branch and twig to twig, and after each skip he pauses to say,
+      &ldquo;It's just like summer,&rdquo; and from a neighbouring tree his mate twitters
+      confirmation in perfect time. I've listened to them for half an hour and
+      they've talked about nothing else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great
+      baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the
+      paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully and
+      tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well aired
+      before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows his
+      score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has only
+      one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the world,
+      but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer, and not a
+      conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who seems never
+      to forget the listening world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
+      There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along the
+      turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football match, I
+      fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the cheerful
+      outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens and the
+      fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of hammering; from
+      the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor voice that comes up
+      from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I have not heard it for
+      four years or more; but it has been heard in many lands and by many rivers
+      from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would rather be singing in the
+      allotment with his young brother Sam (the leader of the trebles in the
+      village choir) than anywhere else in the vide world. &ldquo;Yes, I've been to
+      Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the 'Oly Land,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I don't care
+      if I never see the 'Oly Land again. Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far
+      as I'm concerned. This is good enough for me&mdash;that is, if there's a
+      place for a chap that wants to get married to live in.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at
+      her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. &ldquo;Well, this is all
+      right, ain't it, mother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; says the old lady, &ldquo;it's just like summer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And to think,&rdquo; continues the voice, &ldquo;that there was a thick layer o' snow
+      a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to come
+      yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar, and it
+      stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though it do seem
+      like it, don't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, it's just like summer,&rdquo; repeats the old lady tranquilly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
+      sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
+      like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we are
+      here. Weather in town is only an incident&mdash;a pleasurable incident or
+      a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella,
+      whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a
+      mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or outside.
+      It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your visit to the
+      theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for this reason the
+      incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as an acquaintance of
+      a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he is in a good humour
+      and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven. It is
+      politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual diversion. You
+      study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and watch the change
+      of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the mood of the public.
+      When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a fine day, or has been a
+      cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a conventional civility. It is
+      the formal opening of the discussion of weighty matters. It involves the
+      prospects of potatoes and the sowing of onions, the blossoms on the trees,
+      the effects of weather on the poultry and the state of the hives. I do not
+      suppose that there is a moment of his life when Jim is unconscious of the
+      weather or indifferent to it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not
+      care what happens to the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands
+      and secular interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is
+      a stem Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the
+      chapel in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always
+      trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi'
+      work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to
+      dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. &ldquo;I don't hold wi'
+      work on Sundays,&rdquo; he would repeat inflexibly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0063" id="linkimage-0063"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0197m.jpg" alt="0197m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0197.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other
+      end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the
+      weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call
+      her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward. It
+      is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants hens. If
+      the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an unerring instinct
+      to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin of feathers. The hard
+      frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes when everybody else's
+      escaped, and it was her hive that brought the &ldquo;Isle of Wight&rdquo; into our
+      midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds that the last was a
+      visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a death in the family&mdash;true,
+      it was only a second cousin, but it was &ldquo;in the family&rdquo;&mdash;and had
+      neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive. And of course they
+      died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow Walsh has no patience
+      with people who fly in the face of Providence in this way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is the most
+      unremittingly malevolent. It is either &ldquo;smarty hot&rdquo; or &ldquo;smarty cold.&rdquo; If
+      it isn't giving her a touch of &ldquo;brownchitis,&rdquo; or &ldquo;a blowy feeling all up
+      the back,&rdquo; or making her feel &ldquo;blubbed all over,&rdquo; it is dripping through
+      her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke,
+      or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary life. I
+      think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the hill-side
+      like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even smiles, but
+      his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the bottom he is a
+      terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country woman no end of
+      work, and makes her life a burden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
+      When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that &ldquo;it is a
+      bit better to-day.&rdquo; This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays to
+      the weather. And we translate it for her into &ldquo;Yes, it's just like
+      summer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
+      damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most part
+      the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees are
+      white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees which fill
+      the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note of an aerial
+      violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of his double bass
+      to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way from blossom to
+      blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is as full of the gossip of
+      summer as the peacock butterfly that comes flitting back across the
+      orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old Benjy, who saluted me over the
+      hedge just now with the remark that he didn't recall the like of this for
+      a matter o' seventy year. Yes, seventy year if 'twas a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy years
+      ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks about
+      anything in the memory of this generation. &ldquo;I be nearer a 'underd,&rdquo; he
+      says, &ldquo;than seventy,&rdquo; by which I think he means that he is eighty-six. He
+      longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see no reason why he
+      shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old boy, still does a good
+      day's gardening and has come up the lane on this hot day at a nimble
+      speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to have made his coffin
+      and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from any morbid yearning
+      for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding him off, just as the
+      rest of us &ldquo;touch wood&rdquo; lest evil befall. &ldquo;It's just like summer,&rdquo; he
+      says.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0064" id="linkimage-0064"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0200m.jpg" alt="0200m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0200.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0065" id="linkimage-0065"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> see that Mr
+      Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to women very
+      seriously on the subject of smoking. &ldquo;Would you like to see your mother
+      smoke?&rdquo; asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he was addressing, and
+      Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face
+      of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed feelings on this
+      subject, and in order to find out what I really think I will write about
+      it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby. I do not want to
+      see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the baby. But neither do I
+      want to see father doing so. If father is smoking when he nurses the baby
+      he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs out his smoke. Do not let
+      us drag in the baby.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The real point is in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your
+      affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would
+      not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be
+      absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because he
+      smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of
+      disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of taste
+      which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is wasteful and
+      unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the habit regardless
+      of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that <i>women</i> must not smoke because
+      the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that <i>men</i> may. He would no
+      more say this than he would say that it is right for men to live in stuffy
+      rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right for men to get
+      drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of drunkenness there is
+      no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel that it is more tragic in
+      the case of the woman, but it is equally disgusting in both sexes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men is
+      vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up
+      morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women not
+      smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom been
+      otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle, for
+      example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he would have answered the
+      question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their pipes
+      together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and eternity, and no
+      one who has read his letters will doubt his love for her. There are no
+      such letters from son to mother in all literature. And of course Mr Hicks
+      knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be surprised to know
+      that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of some women who smoke,
+      and that he will be as cordial with them as with those who do not smoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet.... Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of a
+      bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to smoke.
+      And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these now not
+      infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I had been
+      smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If smoking is
+      an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the case of women
+      as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women smoking outdoors
+      while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an irrational fellow, said
+      I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I replied. We are all irrational
+      fellows. If we were brought to the judgment seat of pure reason how few of
+      us would escape the cells.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young
+      women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke
+      was a flag&mdash;the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got
+      perplexed again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women&mdash;this
+      universal claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous
+      fact of the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag.
+      Yet when I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it
+      myself), flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I
+      rejoice, I felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I
+      came to the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These
+      young women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men
+      smoked on the top of the bus they must smoke too&mdash;not perhaps because
+      they liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them
+      on an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge of
+      servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the symbols
+      of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of women, but
+      preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to their finer
+      perceptions and traditions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here my perplexity returned. It is not the fact of those young women
+      smoking that offends you, I said addressing myself. It is the fact of
+      their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you agree that the habit of
+      smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of women as of men, why
+      should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised in their case,
+      while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself are smoking at
+      this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged in defending the
+      propriety of women smoking, and at the same time mentally reprobating the
+      conduct of the young women who are smoking in front of you, not because
+      they are smoking, but because (like you) they are smoking in public. How
+      do you reconcile such confusions of mind?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the horns of
+      a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to the habit.
+      And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to defend differential
+      smoking conditions for men and women. If the main position was surrendered
+      no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked in public then women could
+      smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and cigars then women could smoke
+      pipes and cigars. And at the thought of women smoking pipes on the top of
+      buses, I realised that I had not yet found a path out of the absurd bog in
+      which I had become mentally involved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then something happened which suggested another solution. The young women
+      rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was wafted
+      with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown their
+      cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy,
+      languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial
+      fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man's
+      tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt the
+      woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and wear
+      rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity. The mind
+      revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered and be-ringed.
+      Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their cheeks. But Disraeli
+      was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort of belated tale from
+      the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of men universally revolts
+      against paint, powder, and perfume. And asking myself why a habit, which
+      custom had made tolerable in the case of women, became grotesque and
+      offensive if imagined in connection with men, I saw a way out of my
+      puzzle. I dismissed the view that the difference of sex accounted for the
+      different emotions awakened. It was the habit itself which was
+      objectionable. Familiarity with it in the case of women had dulled our
+      perceptions to the reality. It was only when we conceived the habit in an
+      unusual connection&mdash;imagined men going about with painted and
+      powdered faces, with rings in their ears and heavy scents on their clothes&mdash;that
+      its essential vulgarity and uncleanness were freshly and intensely
+      presented to the mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that, said I, is the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit in
+      the abstract which is vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in the
+      case of man has deadened our sense of the fact, but the adoption of the
+      habit by women, coupled with the fact that there is no logical
+      halting-place between the cigarette indoors and a pipe on the top of the
+      bus, gives us what the Americans call a new view-point. From that new
+      view-point we are bound to admit that there is much to be said against
+      tobacco and not much to be said for it&mdash;except, of course, that we
+      like it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk to
+      the men as well as to the women.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then perhaps we will see what can be done. For myself, I make no promise.
+      After forty, says Meredith, we are wedded to our habits. And I, alas, am
+      long past forty....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0066" id="linkimage-0066"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0207m.jpg" alt="0207m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0207.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0067" id="linkimage-0067"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0208m.jpg" alt="0208m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0208.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      DOWN TOWN
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>hrough the grey
+      mists that hang over the water in the late autumn afternoon there emerges
+      a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of a distant range of
+      mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with a precision that
+      suggests the work of man rather than the careless architecture of Nature
+      The mass is compact and isolated. It rises from the level of the water,
+      sheer on either side, in bold precipitous cliffs, broken by horizontal
+      lines, and dominated by one kingly, central peak that might be the
+      Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the spire of some cathedral
+      fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race. As the vessel from afar
+      moves slowly through the populous waters and between the vaguely defined
+      shores of the harbour, another shadow emerges ahead, rising out of the sea
+      in front of the mountain mass. It is a colossal statue, holding up a torch
+      to the open Atlantic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition. It turns
+      to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable windows. Even
+      the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of myriad windows. The
+      day begins to darken and a swift transformation takes place. Points of
+      light begin to shine from the windows like stars in the darkening
+      firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters with thousands of
+      tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy palace, glowing with
+      illuminations from the foundations to the topmost height of the giddy
+      precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in the scintillating pinnacle
+      of the slender cathedral spire. The first daylight impression was of
+      something as solid and enduring as the foundations of the earth; the
+      second, in the gathering twilight, is of something slight and fanciful,
+      of' towering proportions but infinitely fragile structure, a spectacle as
+      airy and dream-like as a tale from the &ldquo;Arabian Nights.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is &ldquo;down town.&rdquo; It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its
+      astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that
+      lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest
+      group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over the
+      tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable maze
+      of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion of the
+      London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its direction,
+      but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east and west,
+      crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to the Harlem
+      River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing island of
+      Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the noble Fifth
+      Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty buildings that
+      shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to gild the upper
+      storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many churches and the
+      gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving, on a sunny
+      afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you move in the
+      shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the air above. And
+      around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the architectural
+      glories of &ldquo;up town&rdquo; New York, the great hotels stand like mighty
+      fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great terminus. And
+      in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled to the
+      twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you are
+      summoned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it is in &ldquo;down town,&rdquo; on the tip of the tongue that is put out to the
+      Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the stranger.
+      It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no doubt, that make
+      an equally striking appeal to the eye&mdash;Salzburg, Innsbruck,
+      Edinburgh, Tunis&mdash;but it is the appeal of nature supplemented by art.
+      Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not an
+      approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of
+      surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind,
+      that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous,
+      and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New
+      York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you land.
+      It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It ascends
+      its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation over the
+      Atlantic. &ldquo;Down town&rdquo; stands like a strong man on the shore of the ocean,
+      asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind these terrific
+      battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to the skies. Look at
+      this muscular development. And I am only the advance agent. I am only the
+      symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste of the power that heaves
+      and throbs through the veins of the giant that bestrides this continent
+      for three thousand miles, from his gateway to the Atlantic to his gateway,
+      to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this
+      terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from within,
+      stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway ends, a
+      street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned between
+      two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more' lofty than the
+      cross of St Paul's Cathedral&mdash;square towers, honeycombed with
+      thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying up in
+      lifts&mdash;called &ldquo;elevators&rdquo; for short&mdash;clicking at typewriters,
+      performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns at
+      the threshold of the giant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which he
+      rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon is
+      Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure in
+      the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the high
+      priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds are
+      shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on the kerbstone
+      of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its sovereigns wilting
+      away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you stand, in devout
+      respect before the modest threshold of the high priest a babel of strange
+      sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn towards it and come
+      suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange than anything
+      pictured by Hogarth&mdash;in the street a jostling mass of human beings,
+      fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like jockeys or
+      pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended high as if in
+      prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working with frantic symbols,
+      their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at a hundred windows in the
+      great buildings on either side of the street little groups of men and
+      women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob below. It is the outside
+      market of Mammon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
+      great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements
+      like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender and
+      beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle nearly
+      twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the temple of St
+      Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth acquired in his
+      sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most significant building in
+      America and the first turret to catch the noose of light that the dawn
+      flings daily over the Atlantic from the East. You enter its marble halls
+      and take an express train to the forty-ninth floor, flashing in your
+      journey past visions of crowded offices, tier after tier, offices of banks
+      and publishers and merchants and jewellers, like a great street,
+      Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skywards by
+      some violent geological &ldquo;fault.&rdquo; And at the forty-ninth floor you get out
+      and take another &ldquo;local&rdquo; train to the top, and from thence you look
+      giddily down, far down even upon the great precipices of the Grand Canon,
+      down to the streets where the moving throng you left a few minutes ago
+      looks like a colony of ants or black-beetles wandering uncertainly over
+      the pavement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
+      with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to be
+      large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
+      churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are
+      swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that loom
+      above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George Washington
+      still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the original union.
+      Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted world an inverted
+      civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the vision of the great
+      dome that seems to float in the heavens over the secular activities of
+      another city, still holding aloft, to however negligent and indifferent a
+      generation, the symbol of the supremacy of spiritual things. And you will
+      wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below you, in which the
+      temples of the ancient worship crouch at the porch of these Leviathan
+      temples of commerce, there is the unconscious expression of another
+      philosophy of life in which St Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to
+      the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the scene
+      below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so near that
+      you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open Atlantic,
+      with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million a year, that
+      has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of hopes, past the
+      statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the harbour, to be
+      swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that lies behind you.
+      You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught in the arms of its
+      two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before you, with its overflow
+      of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream, and its overflow of Jersey City
+      on the far bank of the other. In the brilliant sunshine and the clear,
+      smokeless atmosphere the eye travels far over this incredible vista of
+      human activity. And beyond the vision of the eye, the mind carries the
+      thought onward to the great lakes and the seething cities by their shores,
+      and over the illimitable plains westward to sunny lands more remote than
+      Europe, but still obedient to the stars and stripes, and southward by the
+      great rivers to the tropic sea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the far
+      horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings. They will
+      not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those horizons,
+      after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields of activity,
+      you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the contrary, they
+      will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense of power unlike
+      anything else the world has to offer&mdash;the power of immeasurable
+      resources, still only in the infancy of their development, of
+      inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the mind, of
+      a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one&mdash;one in a certain
+      fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident prime of
+      their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of the day before
+      them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its crudeness and
+      freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as to something avuncular
+      and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late afternoon, a little tired and
+      more than a little disillusioned and battered by the journey. For him the
+      light has left the morning hills, but here it still clothes those hills
+      with hope and spurs on to adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
+      his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
+      &ldquo;the goods.&rdquo; He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
+      power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the
+      inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the
+      tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and the
+      squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the
+      chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction
+      at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush,
+      and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism has
+      shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American interests,
+      and the &ldquo;100 per cent. American&rdquo; in every disguise of designing
+      self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything that is
+      significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not a moment when
+      the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the harbour, can feel
+      very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no longer lit to invite
+      the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the contrary, she turns her
+      back on America and warns the alien away. Her torch has become a
+      policeman's baton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
+      breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous
+      waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back upon
+      the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun floods the
+      land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near his setting,
+      but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his morning prime, so
+      vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of your first
+      impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud pinnacle that
+      looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the temple of primeval
+      gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And as you gaze you are
+      conscious of a great note of interrogation taking shape in the mind. Is
+      that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic expression of the soul of
+      America, or has this mighty power you are leaving another gospel for
+      mankind? And as the light fades and battlements and pinnacle merge into
+      the encompassing dark there sounds in the mind the echoes of an immortal
+      voice&mdash;&ldquo;Let us here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
+      died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
+      freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people
+      shall not perish from the earth!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell to
+      America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of
+      Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0068" id="linkimage-0068"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0217m.jpg" alt="0217m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0217.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0069" id="linkimage-0069"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0208m.jpg" alt="0208m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0208.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON KEYHOLE MORALS
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">M</span>y neighbour at the
+      breakfast table complained that he had had a bad night. What with the gale
+      and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of the timbers of the ship and
+      the pair in the next cabin&mdash;especially the pair in the next cabin....
+      How they talked! It was two o'clock before they sank into silence. And
+      such revelations! He couldn't help overhearing them. He was alone in his
+      cabin, and what was he to do? He couldn't talk to himself to let them know
+      they were being overheard. And he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And,
+      in short, there was nothing for it but to overhear. And the things he
+      heard&mdash;well.... And with a gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he
+      left it to me to imagine the worst. I suggested that he might cure the
+      trouble by telling the steward to give the couple a hint that the next
+      cabin was occupied. He received the idea as a possible way out of a
+      painful and delicate situation. Strange, he said, it had not occurred to
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very
+      important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man. It
+      would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper, and
+      there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are not to
+      be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper enough
+      when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not our public
+      hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only indicates the
+      kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We want the world's
+      good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company manners as we put
+      on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would put his ear to a
+      keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole behind him watching
+      him in the act. The true estimate of your character (and mine) depends on
+      what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole behind us. It depends,
+      not on whether you are chivalrous to some one else's wife in public, but
+      whether you are chivalrous to your own wife in private. The eminent judge
+      who, checking himself in a torrent of abuse of his partner at whist,
+      contritely observed, &ldquo;I beg your pardon, madam; I thought you were my
+      wife,&rdquo; did not improve matters. He only lifted the curtain of a rather
+      shabby private cabin. He white-washed himself publicly out of his dirty
+      private pail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the
+      quiet and undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps you
+      have accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the pockets
+      bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental concern is
+      awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own son. It is
+      natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing and weighty
+      reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that all those
+      respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard young John's
+      step approaching. You know that this very reasonable display of paternal
+      interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying of which you would be
+      ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is miles off&mdash;perhaps
+      down in the city, perhaps far away in the country. You are left alone with
+      his letters and your own sense of decency. You can read the letters in
+      perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you can share them. Not a
+      soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled to know those secrets,
+      and young John may be benefited by your knowing them. What do you do in
+      these circumstances? The answer will provide you with a fairly reliable
+      tape measure for your own spiritual contents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next Cabin.
+      We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of &ldquo;Le Diable
+      Boiteux,&rdquo; Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one house to
+      another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside, with very
+      surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the guise of a very
+      civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and offered to do the same
+      for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and lift with magic and
+      inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the mysteries and
+      privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should have the decency to
+      thank him and send him away. The amusement would be purchased at too high
+      a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm, but it would do me a lot
+      of harm. For, after all, the important thing is not that we should be
+      able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the whole world in the face, but
+      that we should be able to look ourselves in the face. And it is our
+      private standard of conduct and not our public standard of conduct which
+      gives or denies us that privilege. We are merely counterfeit coin if our
+      respect for the Eleventh Commandment only applies to being found out by
+      other people. It is being found out by ourselves that ought to hurt us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass a
+      tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never committed
+      a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or forged a cheque.
+      But these things are not evidence of good character. They may only mean
+      that I never had enough honest indignation to commit a murder, nor enough
+      courage to break into a house. They may only mean that I never needed to
+      forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may only mean that I am afraid of
+      the police. Respect for the law is a testimonial that will not go far in
+      the Valley of Jehosophat. The question that will be asked of me there is
+      not whether I picked my neighbour's lock, but whether I put my ear to his
+      keyhole; not whether I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but
+      whether I read his letters when his back was turned&mdash;in short, not
+      whether I had respect for the law, but whether I had respect for myself
+      and the sanctities that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is
+      what went on in my private cabin which will probably be my undoing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0070" id="linkimage-0070"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0222m.jpg" alt="0222m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0222.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0071" id="linkimage-0071"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0223m.jpg" alt="0223m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0223.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      FLEET STREET NO MORE
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>o-day I am among
+      the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a lifetime and am a person
+      at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that is told, a rumour on the
+      wind; a memory of far-off things and battles long ago. At this hour I
+      fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm. There is the thunder of
+      machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above, the click-click-click of
+      the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph operators, the tinkling of
+      telephones, the ringing of bells for messengers who tarry, reporters
+      coming in with &ldquo;stories&rdquo; or without &ldquo;stories,&rdquo; leader-writers writing for
+      dear life and wondering whether they will beat the clock and what will
+      happen if they don't, night editors planning their pages as a shopman
+      dresses his shop window, sub-editors breasting the torrent of &ldquo;flimsies&rdquo;
+       that flows in from the ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and
+      the other. I hear the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit
+      might hear the murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as
+      a policeman must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the
+      Strand submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his
+      glory departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the
+      middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible
+      embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong
+      arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and the
+      waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a
+      personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could
+      stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the
+      street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to
+      the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety. His
+      cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of the Constitution,
+      and his truncheon was as indispensable as a field-marshal's baton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on
+      the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make a
+      pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk
+      across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers.
+      Even &ldquo;J. B.,&rdquo; who has never been known to pass a policeman without a
+      gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived
+      under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly
+      Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates or
+      in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished
+      magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free,
+      independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He
+      can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand, but
+      he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting, or
+      Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in the shop
+      windows, or turn into the &ldquo;pictures&rdquo; or go home to tea. He can light his
+      pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as he pleases.
+      He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a realm where the
+      clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes without stirring
+      his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will not care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock and
+      take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous
+      thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me as my
+      own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life until I
+      have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have heard its
+      chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the swanking
+      swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its unceasing life
+      during every hour of the twenty-four&mdash;in the afternoon when the
+      pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are crossing
+      to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air is shrill
+      with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide of the day's
+      life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work, and the telegraph
+      boys flit from door to door with their tidings of the world's happenings;
+      in the small hours when the great lorries come thundering up the side
+      streets with their mountains of papers and rattle through the sleeping
+      city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag of morn in sovereign
+      state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral that looks down so
+      grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. &ldquo;I see it arl so plainly as I
+      saw et, long ago.&rdquo; I have worn its paving stones as industriously as
+      Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as one who had the run
+      of the estate and the freeman's right. I have known its <i>habitues</i> as
+      familiarly as if they had belonged to my own household, and its
+      multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have drunk the solemn toast
+      with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken counsel with the lawyers
+      in the Temple, and wandered in its green and cloistered calm in the hot
+      afternoons, and written thousands of leaders and millions of words on
+      this, that, and the other, wise words and foolish words, and words without
+      any particular quality at all, except that they filled up space, and have
+      had many friendships and fought many battles, winning some and losing
+      others, and have seen the generations go by, and the young fellows grow
+      into old fellows who scan a little severely the new race of ardent boys
+      that come along so gaily to the enchanted street and are doomed to grow
+      old and weary in its service also. And at the end it has come to be a
+      street of ghosts&mdash;a street of memories, with faces that I knew
+      lurking in its shadows and peopling its rooms and mingling with the moving
+      pageant that seems like a phantom too.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like
+      the Chambered Nautilus, I
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      ... seal up the idle door,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape at
+      its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no more.
+      No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual footsteps.
+      No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had always &ldquo;gone out
+      to supper, sir,&rdquo; or been called to the news-room or sent on an errand. No
+      more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous clock that ticked so much
+      faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will come down from above like
+      snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults of the world will boil in like
+      the roar of many waters, but I shall not hear them. For I have come into
+      the inheritance of leisure. Time, that has lorded it over me so long, is
+      henceforth my slave, and the future stretches before me like an infinite
+      green pasture in which I can wander till the sun sets. I shall let the
+      legions thunder by while I tend my bees and water my plants, and mark how
+      my celery grows and how the apples ripen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the
+      chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great
+      noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him a
+      tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his orchard
+      when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys, bearing an
+      urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in the
+      Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to their
+      plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water, took a
+      sponge <i>and washed out his ears.</i>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0072" id="linkimage-0072"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0228m.jpg" alt="0228m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0228.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0073" id="linkimage-0073"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0229m.jpg" alt="0229m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0229.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON WAKING UP
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>hen I awoke this
+      morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the valley and the beech woods
+      glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and heard the ducks clamouring for
+      their breakfast, and felt all the kindly intimacies of life coming back in
+      a flood for the new day, I felt, as the Americans say, &ldquo;good.&rdquo; Waking up
+      is always&mdash;given a clear conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy
+      faculty of sleep&mdash;a joyous experience. It has the pleasing excitement
+      with which the tuning up of the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the
+      symphony affects you. It is like starting out for a new adventure, or
+      coming into an unexpected inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling
+      suddenly upon some author whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes
+      to your heart like a brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden
+      and beautiful and full of promise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is now
+      that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of
+      consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has
+      happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and
+      realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The
+      fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does not
+      diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into the
+      future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking to
+      each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over, that the
+      years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining and the
+      birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going forth to
+      their labour until the evening without fear and without hate. As the day
+      advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find it is very
+      much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment when you step
+      over the threshold of sleep into the living world the revelation is
+      simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed. The devil is dead.
+      The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the earth. You recall
+      the far different emotions of a few brief months ago when the morning sun
+      woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling of the birds seemed
+      pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the paper spoiled your
+      breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the Kaiser. Poor wretch, he
+      is waking, too, probably about this time and wondering what will happen to
+      him before nightfall, wondering where he will spend the miserable remnant
+      of his days, wondering whether his great ancestor's habit of carrying a
+      dose of poison was not after all a practice worth thinking about. He
+      wanted the whole, earth, and now he is discovering that he is entitled to
+      just six feet of it&mdash;the same as the lowliest peasant in his land.
+      &ldquo;The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests,&rdquo; but there is
+      neither hole nor nest where he will be welcome. There is not much joy for
+      him in waking to a new day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has &ldquo;murdered
+      Sleep,&rdquo; and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose a
+      crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to enter
+      the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease of life
+      after our present lease had run out and were told that we could nominate
+      our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor an earldom,
+      nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my childhood when I
+      thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin man, eternally
+      perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a basket on my head and
+      shouting &ldquo;Muffins,&rdquo; in the ears of a delighted populace. I loved muffins
+      and I loved bells, and here was a man who had those joys about him all day
+      long and every day. But now my ambitions are more restrained. I would no
+      more wish to be born a muffin man than a poet or an Archbishop. The first
+      gift I should ask would be something modest. It would be the faculty of
+      sleeping eight solid hours every night, and waking each morning with the
+      sense of unfathomable and illimitable content with which I opened my eyes
+      to the world to-day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to
+      their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put
+      eating first, &ldquo;for,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;there is no other pleasure that comes three
+      times a day and lasts an hour each time.&rdquo; But sleep lasts eight hours. It
+      fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it fills it up with
+      the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom of democracy. &ldquo;All equal
+      are within the church's gate,&rdquo; said George Herbert. It may have been so in
+      George Herbert's parish; but it is hardly so in most parishes. It is true
+      of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you enter its portals all discriminations
+      vanish, and Hodge and his master, the prince and the pauper, are alike
+      clothed in the royal purple and inherit the same golden realm. There is
+      more harmony and equality in life than wre are apt to admit. For a good
+      twenty-five years of our seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an
+      agreement that is simply wonderful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What delight
+      is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing the
+      sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of the
+      birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or the
+      cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or (as
+      now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the day
+      will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as any that
+      have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there is eternal
+      renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best that is still
+      to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot stale nor
+      familiarity make tame.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note of
+      the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that all
+      must feel on this exultant morning&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Good morning, Life&mdash;and all
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Things glad and beautiful.
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      My pockets nothing hold,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      But he that owns the gold,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      The Sun, is my great friend&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      His spending has no end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the bells.
+      There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of
+      sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain
+      perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we can
+      hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall get
+      through it. We shall not &ldquo;get through it,&rdquo; of course, but speech is only
+      fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have had a
+      sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror of a
+      dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of
+      consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite
+      mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of
+      immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than
+      from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose love
+      and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this perplexity
+      the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of happy
+      awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not being. I
+      can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      To dream as I may,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent30">
+      And awake when I will,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      With the song of the bird,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent30">
+      And the sun on the hill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in which,
+      once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, &ldquo;Are you there, beloved?&rdquo;
+       and hear the reply, &ldquo;Yes, beloved, I am here,&rdquo; and with that sweet
+      assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The tenderness and
+      beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred Austin, whom some
+      one in a jest made Poet Laureate. &ldquo;For my part,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I should like
+      to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of another victory for the
+      British Empire.&rdquo; It would not be easy to invent a more perfect contrast
+      between the feeling of a poet and the simulated passion of a professional
+      patriot. He did not really think that, of course. He was simply a timid,
+      amiable little man who thought it was heroic and patriotic to think that.
+      He had so habituated his tiny talent to strutting about in the grotesque
+      disguise of a swashbuckler that it had lost all touch with the primal
+      emotions of poetry. Forgive me for intruding him upon the theme. The happy
+      awakenings of eternity must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings
+      and its vulgar patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to
+      sleep on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0074" id="linkimage-0074"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0235m.jpg" alt="0235m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0235.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0075" id="linkimage-0075"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0236m.jpg" alt="0236m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0236.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON RE-READING
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> weekly paper has
+      been asking well-known people what books they re-read. The most pathetic
+      reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. &ldquo;I seldom
+      re-read now,&rdquo; says that unhappy man. &ldquo;Time is so short and literature so
+      vast and unexplored.&rdquo; What a desolating picture! It is like saying, &ldquo;I
+      never meet my old friends now. Time is so short and there are so many
+      strangers I have not yet shaken hands with.&rdquo; I see the poor man, hot and
+      breathless, scurrying over the &ldquo;vast and unexplored&rdquo; fields of literature,
+      shaking hands and saying, &ldquo;How d'ye do?&rdquo; to everybody he meets and
+      reaching the end of his journey, impoverished and pitiable, like the
+      peasant in Tolstoi's &ldquo;How much land does a man need?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with strangers.
+      I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North Pole and the
+      South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson said of the
+      Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should not like <i>to
+      go</i> to see them. And so with books. Time is so short that I have none
+      to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library. I could almost
+      say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is published I read
+      an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion, and a book has to
+      weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I embark on it. When it has
+      proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but meanwhile the old ships are
+      good enough for me. I know the captain and the crew, the fare I shall get
+      and the port I shall make and the companionship I shall have by the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write&mdash;Boswell, &ldquo;The
+      Bible in Spain,&rdquo; Pepys, Horace, &ldquo;Elia,&rdquo; Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, &ldquo;Travels
+      with a Donkey,&rdquo; Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, &ldquo;The Early Life of
+      Charles James Fox,&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Under the Greenwood Tree,&rdquo; and so on. Do not call them books.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Camerado, this is no book.
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Who touches this, touches a man,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      as Walt Whitman said of his own &ldquo;Leaves of Grass.&rdquo; They are not books.
+      They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on my
+      pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was worth making
+      the great adventure of life to find such company. Come revolutions and
+      bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace, gain or loss&mdash;these
+      friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes of the journey. The
+      friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are estranged, die, but these
+      friends of the spirit are not touched with mortality. They were not born
+      for death, no hungry generations tread them down, and with their immortal
+      wisdom and laughter they give us the password to the eternal. You can no
+      more exhaust them than you can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the
+      joyous melody of Mozart or Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or
+      any other thing of beauty. They are a part of ourselves, and through their
+      noble fellowship we are made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      ... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion
+      with these spirits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old
+      friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever and
+      went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he sits in
+      his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale. It is a way
+      Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph captive. They
+      cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern flight without
+      thinking that they are going to breathe the air that Horace breathed, and
+      asking them to carry some such message as John Marshall's:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent30">
+      Tell him, bird,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      One man at least seeks not admittance there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss the
+      figure of Horace&mdash;short and fat, according to Suetonius&mdash;in the
+      fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with equal
+      animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry. Meanwhile,
+      so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would say, is
+      imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading the books in
+      which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored tracts of the
+      desert to those who like deserts.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> correspondent
+      asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve Books that he
+      ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not know what he
+      had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs were, and even
+      with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for another. But I
+      compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed that for some
+      offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a desert island out in
+      the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for twelve months, or
+      perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a mitigation of the
+      penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve books of my own
+      choosing. On what principles should I set about so momentous a choice?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place I decided that they must be books of the inexhaustible
+      kind. Rowland Hill said that &ldquo;the love of God was like a generous roast of
+      beef&mdash;you could cut and come again.&rdquo; That must be the first quality
+      of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could go on reading and
+      re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in Borrow went on
+      reading &ldquo;Moll Flanders.&rdquo; If only her son had known that immortal book, she
+      said, he would never have got transported for life. That was the sort of
+      book I must have with me on my desert island. But my choice would be
+      different from that of the old apple-woman of Old London Bridge. I
+      dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the best of novels are
+      exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my bundle of books would be
+      complete before I had made a start with the essentials, for I should want
+      &ldquo;Tristram Shandy&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tom Jones,&rdquo; two or three of Scott's, Gogol's &ldquo;Dead
+      Souls,&rdquo; &ldquo;David Copperfield,&rdquo; &ldquo;Evan Harrington,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Brothers Karamazoff,&rdquo;
+       &ldquo;Père Goriot,&rdquo; &ldquo;War and Peace,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Three Musketeers,&rdquo; all of Hardy's,
+      &ldquo;Treasure Island,&rdquo; &ldquo;Robinson Crusoe,&rdquo; &ldquo;Silas Marner,&rdquo; &ldquo;Don Quixote,&rdquo; the
+      &ldquo;Cloister and the Hearth,&rdquo; &ldquo;Esmond&rdquo;&mdash;no, no, it would never do to
+      include novels. They must be left behind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but these
+      had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not come in
+      the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale, so that I
+      can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have no doubt about
+      my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first among the
+      historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him by the
+      lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and understanding
+      that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf of twenty-three
+      centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and fro, as it were,
+      from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty drama of ancient
+      Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the same ambitions,
+      the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and the same heroes.
+      Yes, Thucydides of course.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is there
+      to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history and
+      philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come to the
+      story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned Mommsen, or
+      the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard choice. I shut my
+      eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well, I make no complaint. And
+      then I will have those three fat volumes of Motley's, &ldquo;Rise of the Dutch
+      Republic&rdquo; (4) put in my boat, please, and&mdash;yes, Carlyle's &ldquo;French
+      Revolution&rdquo; (5), which is history and drama and poetry and fiction all in
+      one. And, since I must take the story of my own land with me, just throw
+      in Green's &ldquo;Short History&rdquo; (6). It is lovable for its serene and gracious
+      temper as much as for its story.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the more
+      personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep the
+      fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course, there
+      is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition, for
+      there only is the real Samuel revealed &ldquo;wart and all&rdquo;). I should like to
+      take &ldquo;Elia&rdquo; and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit my
+      personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place must
+      be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that frank,
+      sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to these good
+      fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality of open-air
+      romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more I choose
+      indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a choice
+      between the &ldquo;Bible in Spain,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Romany Rye,&rdquo; &ldquo;Lavengro,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Wild
+      Wales.&rdquo; But I rejoice when I find that &ldquo;Lavengro&rdquo; (10) is in the boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could have
+      had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is
+      Wordsworth (11) <i>contra mundum</i>, I have no doubt. He is the man who
+      will &ldquo;soothe and heal and bless.&rdquo; My last selection shall be given to a
+      work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's
+      &ldquo;Voyages&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Voyage of the Beagle,&rdquo; and while I am balancing their
+      claims the &ldquo;Beagle&rdquo; (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library is
+      complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the Pacific.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0076" id="linkimage-0076"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0243m.jpg" alt="0243m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0243.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      FEBRUARY DAYS
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he snow has gone
+      from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of setting, has got round to
+      the wood that crowns the hill on the other side of the valley. Soon it
+      will set on the slope of the hill and then down on the plain. Then we
+      shall know that spring has come. Two days ago a blackbird, from the
+      paddock below the orchard, added his golden baritone to the tenor of the
+      thrush who had been shouting good news from the beech tree across the road
+      for weeks past. I don't know why the thrush should glimpse the dawn of the
+      year before the blackbird, unless it is that his habit of choosing the
+      topmost branches of the tree gives him a better view of the world than
+      that which the golden-throated fellow gets on the lower branches that he
+      always affects. It may be the same habit of living in the top storey that
+      accounts for the early activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours,
+      but never so noisy as in these late February days, when they are breaking
+      up into families and quarrelling over their slatternly household
+      arrangements in the topmost branches of the elm trees. They are comic
+      ruffians who wash all their dirty linen in public, and seem almost as
+      disorderly and bad-tempered as the human family itself. If they had only a
+      little of our ingenuity in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my
+      friend the farmer to light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive
+      the female from the eggs and save his crops.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his
+      modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but he
+      is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden and the
+      pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is as
+      industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the
+      starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been
+      observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two
+      minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that
+      deserves encouragement&mdash;a bird that loves caterpillars and does not
+      love cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So
+      hang out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no
+      unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape the
+      general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been
+      agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below
+      the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting
+      industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with that
+      innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just in front of
+      you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of hide-and-seek. But not
+      now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in the best of us. Now he
+      reminds us that he too is a part of that nature which feeds so
+      relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing about in his own
+      erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that the coast is
+      clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his beak. He skips
+      away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper of the hive
+      comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops the great tit
+      and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in spite of his air
+      of innocence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the
+      starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months
+      hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's &ldquo;Oh,
+      that the Romans had only one neck!&rdquo; For then he will come out of the beech
+      woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive against my
+      cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an obscene
+      picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and the
+      stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I can be
+      just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not all bad
+      any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See him on
+      autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his forages in
+      the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in the sky that
+      are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud approaches like
+      a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting, changing formation,
+      breaking up into battalions, merging into columns, opening out on a wide
+      front, throwing out flanks and advance guards and rear guards, every
+      complication unravelled in perfect order, every movement as serene and
+      assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat of some invisible
+      conductor below&mdash;a very symphony of the air, in which motion merges
+      into music, until it seems that you are not watching a flight of birds,
+      but listening with the inner ear to great waves of soundless harmony. And
+      then, the overture over, down the cloud descends upon the fields, and the
+      farmers' pests vanish before the invasion. And if you will follow them
+      into the fields you will find infinite tiny holes that they have drilled
+      and from which they have extracted the lurking enemy of the drops, and you
+      will remember that it is to their beneficial activities that we owe the
+      extermination of the May beetle, whose devastations were so menacing a
+      generation ago. And after the flock has broken up and he has paired, and
+      the responsibilities of housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy
+      labours. When spring has come you can see him dart from his nest in the
+      hollow of the tree and make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field,
+      returning each time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other
+      succulent, but pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at
+      home. That acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted
+      eighteen such journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for
+      a fellow of such benignant spirit?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and
+      see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration.
+      Sufficient unto the day&mdash;&mdash; And to-day I will think only good of
+      the sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the
+      brave news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as
+      this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that
+      all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, &ldquo;according to
+      plan,&rdquo; and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score of hives
+      in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its perils. We
+      saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay on the
+      ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had come from a
+      neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there was no
+      admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he came.
+      Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness and
+      great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him
+      trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh,
+      these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the garden the news is coming up from below, borne by those unfailing
+      outriders of the spring, the snowdrop and the winter aconite. A modest
+      company; but in their pennons is the assurance of the many-coloured host
+      that is falling unseen into the vast pageant of summer and will fill the
+      woods with the trumpets of the harebell and the wild hyacinth, and make
+      the hedges burst into foam, and the orchard a glory of pink and white, and
+      the ditches heavy with the scent of the meadowsweet, and the fields golden
+      with harvest and the gardens a riot of luxuriant life. I said it was all
+      right, chirps little red waistcoat from the fence&mdash;all the winter
+      I've told you that there was a good time coming and now you see for
+      yourself. Look at those flowers. Ain't they real? The philosopher in the
+      red waistcoat is perfectly right. He has kept his end up all through the
+      winter, and has taken us into his fullest confidence. Formerly he never
+      came beyond the kitchen, but this winter when the snow was about he
+      advanced to the parlour where he pottered about like one of the family.
+      Now, however, with the great news outside and the earth full of good
+      things to pick up, he has no time to call.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save for
+      the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the
+      message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of the
+      spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the sunrise
+      is unlike the spirit of the sunset. It is the lusty breath of life coming
+      back to the dead earth, and making these February days the most thrilling
+      of the year. For in these expanding skies and tremors of life and
+      unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and hope, and
+      nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes that the joy
+      of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The cherry blossom
+      comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the spring with it,
+      and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent of the lime trees
+      and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days of birth when
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      &ldquo;Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      there is no hint of mortality and no reverted glance. The curtain is
+      rising and the pageant is all before us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0077" id="linkimage-0077"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0249m.jpg" alt="0249m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0249.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0078" id="linkimage-0078"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0250m.jpg" alt="0250m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0250.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>mong my letters
+      this morning was one requesting that if I were in favour of &ldquo;the
+      reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the Jewish people,&rdquo; I
+      should sign the enclosed declaration and return it in the envelope
+      (unstamped), also enclosed. I dislike unstamped envelopes. I also dislike
+      stamped envelopes. You can ignore an unstamped enveloped but a stamped
+      envelope compels you to write a letter, when perhaps you don't want to
+      write a letter. My objection to unstamped envelopes is that they show a
+      meagre spirit and a lack of confidence in you. They suggest that you are
+      regarded with suspicion as a person who will probably steam off the stamp
+      and use it to receipt a bill.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I waived the objection, signed the declaration, stamped the envelope
+      and put it in the post. I did all this because I am a Zionist. I am so
+      keen a Zionist that I would use a whole bookful of stamps in the cause. I
+      am a Zionist, not on sentimental grounds, but on very practical grounds. I
+      want the Jews to have Palestine, so that the English may have England and
+      the Germans Germany and the Russians Russia. I want them to have a home of
+      their own so that the rest of us can have a home of our own. By this I do
+      not mean that I am an anti-Semite. I loathe Jew-baiting, and regard the
+      Jew-baiter as a very unlovely person. But I want the Jew to be able to
+      decide whether he is an alien or a citizen. I want him to shed the dualism
+      that makes him such an affliction to himself and to other people. I want
+      him to possess Palestine so that he may cease to want to possess the
+      earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am therefore fiercely on the side of the Zionist Jews, and fiercely
+      against their opponents. These people want to be Jews, but they do not
+      want Jewry. They do not want to be compelled to make a choice between
+      being Jews and being Englishmen or Americans, Germans or French. They want
+      the best of both worlds. We are not a nation, they say; we are Englishmen,
+      or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, or Russians, or
+      Japanese &ldquo;of the Jewish persuasion.&rdquo; We are a religious community like the
+      Catholics, or the Presbyterians, or the Unitarians, or the Plymouth
+      Brethren. Indeed! And what is your religion, pray? <i>It is the religion
+      of the Chosen People</i>. Great heavens! You deny that you are a nation,
+      and in the same breath claim that you are the Chosen Nation. The very
+      foundation of your religion is that Jehovah has picked you out from all
+      the races of men as his own. Over you his hand is spread in everlasting
+      protection. For you the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night; for
+      the rest of us the utter darkness of the breeds that have not the
+      signature of Jehovah. We cannot enter your kingdom by praying or fasting,
+      by bribe or entreaty. Every other nation is accessible to us on its own
+      conditions; every other religion is eager to welcome us, sends its
+      missionaries to us to implore us to come in. But you, the rejected of
+      nations, yourself reject all nations and forbid your sacraments to those
+      who are not bom of your household. You are the Chosen People, whose
+      religion is the nation and whose nationhood is religion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why, my dear sir, history offers no parallel to your astounding claim to
+      nationality&mdash;the claim that has held your race together through
+      nearly two thousand years of dispersion and wandering, of persecution and
+      pride, of servitude and supremacy&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      Slaves in eternal Egypts, baking your strawless bricks;
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      At ease in successive Zions, prating your politics.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All nations are afflicted with egoism. It is the national egoism of
+      Prussia that has just brought it to such catastrophic ruin. The Frenchman
+      entertains the firm conviction that civilisation ends at the French
+      frontier. Being a polite person, he does his best not to betray the
+      conviction to us, and sometimes almost succeeds. The Englishman, being
+      less sophisticated, does not try to conceal the fact that he has a similar
+      conviction. It does not occur to him that anyone can doubt his claim. He
+      knows that every foreigner would like to be an Englishman if he knew how.
+      The pride of the Spaniard is a legend, and you have only to see Arab
+      salute Arab to understand what a low person the European must seem in
+      their eyes. In short, national egoism is a folly which is pretty equally
+      distributed among all of us. But your national egoism is unlike any other
+      brand on earth. In the humility of Shylock is the pride of the most
+      arrogant racial aristocracy the world has ever seen. God appeared to you
+      in the burning bush and spoke to you in the thunders of Sinai, and set you
+      apart as his own exclusive household. And when one of your prophets
+      declared that all nations were one in the sight of God, you rejected his
+      gospel and slew the prophet. By comparison with you we are a humble
+      people. We know we are a mixed race and that we have no more divine origin&mdash;and
+      no less&mdash;than anybody else. Mr Kipling, it is true, has caught your
+      arrogant note:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      For the Lord our God Most High,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      He hath made the deep as dry,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that is because Mr Kipling seems to be one of those who believe we are
+      one of the lost tribes of your Chosen race. I gather that is so from
+      another of his poems in which he cautions us against
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      Such boastings as the Gentiles use
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent20">
+      And lesser breeds without the law.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Mr Kipling is only a curiosity among us. We are much more modest than
+      that. But you are like that. You are not only a nation. You are, except
+      the Chinese, the most isolated, the most tenacious, the most exclusive
+      nation in history. Other races have changed through the centuries beyond
+      recognition or have disappeared altogether. Where are the Persians of the
+      spacious days of Cyrus? Who finds in the Egyptians of to-day the spirit
+      and genius of the mighty people who built the Pyramids and created the art
+      of the Third Dynasty? What trace is there in the modern Cretans of the
+      imperial race whose seapower had become a legend before Homer sang? Can we
+      find in the Greeks of our time any reminiscence of the Athens of Pericles?
+      Or in the Romans any kinship with the sovereign people that conquered the
+      world from Parthia to Britain, and stamped it with the signature of its
+      civilisation as indelibly as it stamped it with its great highways? The
+      nations chase each other across the stage of time, and vanish as the
+      generations of men chase each other and vanish. You and the Chinese alone
+      seem indestructible. It is no extravagant fancy that foresees that when
+      the last fire is lit on this expiring planet it will be a Chinaman and a
+      Jew who will stretch their hands to its warmth, drink in the last breath
+      of air, and write the final epitaph of earth. No, it is too late by many a
+      thousand years to deny your nationhood, for it is the most enduring fact
+      in human records. And being a nation without a fatherland, you run like a
+      disturbing immiscible fluid through the blood of all the nations. You need
+      a home for your own peace and for the world's peace. I am going to try and
+      help you to get one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0079" id="linkimage-0079"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0254m.jpg" alt="0254m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0254.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0080" id="linkimage-0080"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> think, on the
+      whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good display of moral
+      fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen (and admired) I propose
+      to let them off in public. When I awoke in the morning I made a good
+      resolution.... At this point, if I am not mistaken, I observe a slight
+      shudder on your part, madam. &ldquo;How Victorian!&rdquo; I think I hear you remark.
+      You compel me, madam, to digress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year's resolutions
+      nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we
+      elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No
+      one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian
+      England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This
+      querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like the
+      scorn of youth for its elders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I
+      should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as it is
+      to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the
+      Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as
+      we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren will be
+      as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of yesterday.
+      The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered poison gas, and
+      have invented submarines and guns that will kill a churchful of people
+      seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding the Nineteenth Century
+      as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good things as well as very bad
+      things about our old Victorian England. It did not go to the Ritz to dance
+      in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz did not exist, and the modern hotel
+      life had not been invented. It used to go instead to the watch-night
+      service, and it was not above making good resolutions, which for the most
+      part, no doubt, it promptly proceeded to break.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of
+      watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I had
+      my way I would be as &ldquo;merry&rdquo; as Pepys, if in a different fashion. &ldquo;Merry&rdquo;
+       is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that merriment
+      is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a mere spasm,
+      whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy of life. But
+      the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other, and an occasional
+      burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for anybody&mdash;even for
+      an Archbishop&mdash;especially for an Archbishop. The trouble with an
+      Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take himself too
+      seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad for him. He
+      needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally that his virtue is
+      not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary humanity. At least once
+      a year he should indulge in a certain liveliness, wear the cap and bells,
+      dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe, not too publicly, but just publicly
+      enough so that there should be nothing furtive about it. If not done on
+      the village green it might at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and
+      chronicled in the local newspapers. &ldquo;Last evening His Grace the Archbishop
+      attended the servants' ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the
+      chief scullery-maid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0081" id="linkimage-0081"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0257m.jpg" alt="0257m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0257.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its
+      good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you &ldquo;A Merry Christmas
+      and a Happy New Year.&rdquo; Nowadays the formula is &ldquo;A Happy Christmas and a
+      Prosperous New Year.&rdquo; It is a priggish, sophisticated change&mdash;a sort
+      of shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being &ldquo;merry.&rdquo;
+       There isn't. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a Merry
+      Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a Happy
+      New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making
+      good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that virtue is
+      a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride Victorian
+      England because it went to watch-night services it is not because I think
+      there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is because, in the
+      words of the old song, I think &ldquo;It is good to be merry <i>and</i> wise.&rdquo; I
+      like a festival of foolishness and I like good resolutions, too. Why
+      shouldn't I? Lewis Carrol's gift for mathematics was not less admirable
+      because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at doing sums in his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution.
+      The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New
+      Year's morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is that
+      you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn't call you an intolerant
+      fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow. Perhaps to put
+      the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous reaction to events is a
+      little too immediate. I don't want to be unpleasant, but I think you see
+      what I mean. Do not suppose that I am asking you to be a cold-blooded,
+      calculating person. God forbid. But it would do you no harm to wear a
+      snaffle bar and a tightish rein&mdash;or, as we used to say in our
+      Victorian England, to &ldquo;count ten.&rdquo; I accepted the criticism with approval.
+      For though we do not like to hear of our failings from other people, that
+      does not mean that we are unconscious of them. The more conscious we are
+      of them, the less we like to hear of them from others and the more we hear
+      of them from ourselves. So I said &ldquo;Agreed. We will adopt 'Second thoughts'
+      as our New Year policy and begin the campaign at once.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then came my letters&mdash;nice letters and nasty letters and
+      indifferent letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say,
+      &ldquo;raised the waters.&rdquo; No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters
+      which anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I
+      might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting
+      assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of
+      writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different. As
+      I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding
+      expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I
+      said &ldquo;Second thoughts,&rdquo; and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as
+      the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect to
+      dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old
+      imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to have
+      a periodical brush with one's habits, even if one knows one is pretty sure
+      to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a reminder that we
+      are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of the imperfections of
+      others. And that, I think, is the case for our old Victorian habit of New
+      Year's Day commandments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite <i>pianissimo</i> and
+      nice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0082" id="linkimage-0082"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0261m.jpg" alt="0261m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0261.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON A GRECIAN PROFILE
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> see that the
+      ghouls have descended upon George Meredith, and are desecrating his
+      remains. They have learned from the life of him just published that he did
+      not get on well with his father, or his eldest son, and that he did not
+      attend his first wife's funeral. Above all, he was a snob. He was ashamed
+      of the tailoring business from which he sprang, concealed the fact that he
+      was bom at Portsmouth, and generally turned his Grecian profile to the
+      world and left it to be assumed that his pedigree was wrapped in mystery
+      and magnificence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I daresay it is all true. Many of us have an indifferent record at home
+      and most of us like to turn our Grecian profiles to the world, if we have
+      Grecian profiles. We are like the girl in Hardy's story who always managed
+      to walk on the right side of her lover, because she fancied that the left
+      side of her face was her strong point. The most distinguished and, I
+      think, the noblest American of our time always turns his profile to the
+      camera&mdash;and a beautiful profile it is&mdash;for reasons quite obvious
+      and quite pardonable to those who have seen the birth-mark that disfigures
+      the other cheek. I suspect that I do not myself object to being caught
+      unaware in favourable attitudes or pleasing situations that dispose the
+      observer to agreeable impressions. And, indeed, why should I (or you) be
+      ashamed to give-a pleasant thrill to anybody if it is in our power. If we
+      pretend we are above these human frailties, what is the meaning of the
+      pains we take about choosing a hat, or about the cut of a coat, or the
+      colour of a cloth for the new suit? Why do we so seldom find pleasure in a
+      photograph of ourselves&mdash;so seldom feel that it does justice to that
+      benignant and Olympian ideal of ourselves which we cherish secretly in our
+      hearts? I should have to admit, if I went into the confession box, that I
+      had never seen a photograph of myself that had satisfied me. And I fancy
+      you would do the same if you were honest. We may pretend to ourselves that
+      it is only abstract beauty or absolute truth that we are concerned about,
+      but we know better. We are thinking of our Grecian profile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is no doubt regrettable to find that great men are so often afflicted
+      with little weaknesses. There are some people who delight in pillorying
+      the immortals and shying dead cats and rotten eggs at them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They enjoy the discovery that no one is better than he should be. It gives
+      them a comfortable feeling to discover that the austere outside of the
+      lord Angelo conceals the libertine. If you praise Caesar they will remind
+      you that after dinner he took emetics; if Brutus, they will say he made an
+      idol of his public virtue. They like to remember that Lamb was not quite
+      the St Charles he is represented to be, but took far too much wine at
+      dinner and dosed beautifully, but alcoholically, afterwards, as you may
+      read in De Quincey. They like to recall that Scott was something of a
+      snob, and put the wine-glass that the Prince Regent had used at dinner in
+      his pocket, sitting down on it afterwards in a moment of happy
+      forgetfulness. In short, they go about like Alcibiades mutilating the
+      statues of Hermes (if he was indeed the culprit), and will leave us
+      nothing in human nature that we can entirely reverence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I suppose they are right enough on the facts. Considering what
+      multitudinous persons we are it would be a miracle if, when we button up
+      ourselves in the morning we did not button up some individual of
+      unpleasant propensities, whom we pretend we do not know. I have never been
+      interested in my pedigree. I am sure it is a very ancient one, and I leave
+      it at that. But I once made a calculation&mdash;based on the elementary
+      fact that I had two parents and they had each two parents, and so on&mdash;and
+      came to the conclusion that about the time of the Norman Conquest my
+      ancestors were much more numerous than the population then inhabiting this
+      island. I am aware that this proves rather too much&mdash;that it is an
+      example of the fact that you can prove anything by statistics, including
+      the impossible. But the truth remains that I am the temporary embodiment
+      of a very large number of people&mdash;of millions of millions of people,
+      if you trace me back to my ancestors who used to sharpen flints some six
+      hundred thousand years ago. It would be singular if in such a crowd there
+      were not some ne'er-do-wells jostling about among the nice, reputable
+      persons who, I flatter myself, constitute my Parliamentary majority.
+      Sometimes I fancy that, in a snap election taken at a moment of public
+      excitement within myself, the ne'er-do-wells get on top. These accidents
+      will happen, and the best I can hope is that the general trend of policy
+      in the multitudinous kingdom that I carry under my hat is in the hands of
+      the decent people.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And that is the best we can expect from anybody&mdash;the great as well as
+      the least. If we demand of the supreme man that he shall be a perfect
+      whole we shall have no supreme man&mdash;only a plaster saint. Certainly
+      we shall have no great literature. Shakespeare did not sit aloof like a
+      perfect god imagining the world of imperfect creatures that he created.
+      The world was within him and he was only the vehicle of his enormous
+      ancestry and of the tumultuous life that they reproduced in the theatre of
+      his mind. In him was the mirth of a roystering Falstaff of long ago, the
+      calculating devilry of some Warwickshire Iago, the pity of Hubert, the
+      perplexity of some village Hamlet, the swagger of Ancient Pistol, the
+      bucolic simplicity of Cousin Silence, the mingled nobleness and baseness
+      of Macbeth, the agony of Lear, the sweetness of many a maiden who walked
+      by Avon's banks in ancient days and lived again in the Portias and
+      Rosalinds of his mind. All these people dwelt in Shakespeare. They were
+      the ghosts of his ancestors. He was, like the rest of us, not a man, but
+      multitudes of men. He created all these people because he was all these
+      people, contained in a larger measure than any man who ever lived all the
+      attributes, good and bad, of humanity. Each character was a peep into the
+      gallery of his ancestors. Meredith, himself, recognised the ancestral
+      source of creative power. When Lady Butcher asked him to explain his
+      insight into the character of women he replied, &ldquo;It is the spirit of my
+      mother in me.&rdquo; It was indeed the spirit of many mothers working in and
+      through him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it
+      so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never more
+      difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along the Embankment
+      last evening with a friend&mdash;a man known alike for his learning and
+      character&mdash;when he turned to me and said, &ldquo;I will never have a hero
+      again.&rdquo; We had been speaking of the causes of the catastrophe of Paris,
+      and his remark referred especially to his disappointment with President
+      Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair to the President. He did not make
+      allowance for the devil's broth of intrigue and ambitions into which the
+      President was plunged on this side of the Atlantic. But, leaving that
+      point aside, his remark expressed a very common feeling. There has been a
+      calamitous slump in heroes. They have fallen into as much disrepute as
+      kings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the
+      fabulous offspring of comfortable times&mdash;supermen reigning on Olympus
+      and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the storm
+      and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy and prove
+      that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they are discovered
+      to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind, feeble folk like
+      you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as helpless as any of us.
+      Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and their feet have come down
+      from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of clay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of the
+      Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron
+      expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      I want a hero: an uncommon want,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      When every year and month sends forth a new one.
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent10">
+      Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      The age discovers he is not the true one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that &ldquo;no man is a
+      hero to his valet.&rdquo; To be a hero you must be remote in time or
+      circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and
+      fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities and
+      angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is privileged
+      to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the tricks you
+      have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a faithful
+      secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture he gives of
+      Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome loathing for
+      that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name thunders down
+      the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his contemporaries. It
+      was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom he had just appointed to
+      the choicest command in his gift, who went to Caesar's house on that March
+      morning, two thousand years ago, to bring him to the slaughter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men I
+      should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely than
+      anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance in secondary
+      things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and tenderness with
+      resolution and strength, he stands alone in history. But even he was not a
+      hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too near&mdash;near enough to
+      note his frailties, for he was human, too near to realise the grand and
+      significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was not until he was dead
+      that the world realised what a leader had fallen in Israel. Motley thanked
+      heaven, as for something unusual, that he had been privileged to
+      appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed him to men. Stanton
+      fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end, and it was only when
+      life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur of the force that had
+      been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. &ldquo;There lies the most perfect
+      ruler of men the world has ever seen,&rdquo; he said, as he stood with other
+      colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had breathed his last. But the
+      point here is that, sublime though the sum of the man was, his heroic
+      profile had its abundant human warts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of
+      reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It
+      will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have made
+      the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not find
+      them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are these the
+      men&mdash;these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards&mdash;the
+      demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the
+      microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than
+      demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and then
+      you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto
+      Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless
+      picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its
+      arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion
+      to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is a
+      painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never
+      will be such a being. The best of us is woven of &ldquo;mingled yarn, good and
+      ill together.&rdquo; And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and the
+      ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he &ldquo;contained
+      multitudes&rdquo; too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful
+      for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects of
+      that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0083" id="linkimage-0083"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0269m.jpg" alt="0269m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0269.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0084" id="linkimage-0084"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0270m.jpg" alt="0270m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0270.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON TAKING A HOLIDAY
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> hope the two
+      ladies from the country who have been writing to the newspapers to know
+      what sights they ought to see in London during their Easter holiday will
+      have a nice time. I hope they will enjoy the tube and have fine weather
+      for the Monument, and whisper to each other successfully in the whispering
+      gallery of St Paul's, and see the dungeons at the Tower and the seats of
+      the mighty at Westminster, and return home with a harvest of joyful
+      memories. But I can promise them that there is one sight they will not
+      see. They will not see me. Their idea of a holiday is London. My idea of a
+      holiday is forgetting there is such a place as London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that I dislike London. I should like to see it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have long promised myself that I would see it. Some day, I have said, I
+      will surely have a look at this place. It is a shame, I have said, to have
+      lived in it so long and never to have seen it. I suppose I am not much
+      worse than other Londoners. Do you, sir, who have been taking the morning
+      bus from Balham for heaven knows how many years&mdash;do you, when you are
+      walking down Fleet Street, stand still with a shock of delight as the dome
+      of St Paul's and its cross of gold burst on your astonished sight? Do you
+      go on a fine afternoon and take your stand on Waterloo Bridge to see that
+      wondrous river façade that stretches with its cloud-capped towers and
+      gorgeous palaces from Westminster to St Paul's? Do you know the spot where
+      Charles was executed, or the church where there are the best Grinling
+      Gibbons carvings? Did you ever go into Somerset House to see the will of
+      William Shakespeare, or&mdash;in short, did you ever see London? Did you
+      ever see it, not with your eyes merely, hut with your mind, with the sense
+      of revelation, of surprise, of discovery? Did you ever see it as those two
+      ladies from the country will see it this Easter as they pass breathlessly
+      from wonder to wonder? Of course not. You need a holiday in London as I
+      do. You need to set out with young Tom (aged ten) on a voyage of discovery
+      and see all the sights of this astonishing city as though you had come to
+      it from a far country.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That is how I hope to visit it&mdash;some day. But not this Easter, not
+      when I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the
+      cherry blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the
+      chestnut tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long
+      and the April meadows are &ldquo;smoored wi' new grass,&rdquo; as they say in the
+      Yorkshire dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at
+      the magic casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn
+      to the fringe of Dartmoor and let loose&mdash;shall it be from Okehampton
+      or Bovey Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? what matter the gate by which we
+      enter the sanctuary?&mdash;let loose, I say, into the vast spaces of earth
+      and sky where the moorland streams sing their ancient runes over the
+      boulders and the great tors stand out like castles of the gods against the
+      horizon and the Easter sun dances, as the legend has it, overhead and
+      founders gloriously in the night beyond Plymouth Sound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Or, perhaps, ladies, if you come from the North, I may pass you unawares,
+      and just about the time when you are cracking your breakfast egg in the
+      boarding house at Russell Square&mdash;heavens, Russell Square!&mdash;and
+      discussing whether you shall first go down the deepest lift or up the
+      highest tower, or stand before the august ugliness of Buckingham Palace,
+      or see the largest station or the smallest church, I shall be stepping out
+      from Keswick, by the lapping waters of Derwent water, hailing the old
+      familiar mountains as they loom into sight, looking down again&mdash;think
+      of it!&mdash;into the' Jaws of Borrowdale, having a snack at Rosthwaite,
+      and then, hey for Styehead! up, up ever the rough mountain track, with the
+      buzzard circling with slow flapping wings about the mountain flanks, with
+      glorious Great Gable for my companion on the right hand and no less
+      glorious Scafell for my companion on the left hand, and at the rocky turn
+      in the track&mdash;lo! the great amphitheatre of Wasdale, the last
+      Sanctuary of lakeland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And at this point, ladies, you may as you crane your neck to see the Duke
+      of York at the top of his column&mdash;wondering all the while who the
+      deuce the fellow was that he should stand so high&mdash;you may, I say, if
+      you like, conceive me standing at the top of the pass, taking my hat from
+      my head and pronouncing a terrific curse on the vandals who would
+      desecrate the last temple of solitude by driving a road over this fastness
+      of the mountains in order that the gross tribe of motorists may come with
+      their hoots and their odours, their hurry and vulgarity, and chase the
+      spirit of the mountains away from us for ever.... And then by the screes
+      of Great Gable to the hollow among the mountains. Or perchance, I may turn
+      by Sprinkling Tam and see the Pikes of Langdale come into view and stumble
+      down Rossett Ghyll and so by the green pastures of Langdale to Grasmere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In short, ladies, I may be found in many places. But I shall not tell you
+      where. I am not quite sure that I could tell you where at this moment, for
+      I am like a fellow who has come into great riches and is doubtful how he
+      can squander them most gloriously. But, I repeat, ladies, that you will
+      not find me in London. I leave London to you. May you enjoy it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0085" id="linkimage-0085"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      UNDER THE SYCAMORE
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>n odd question was
+      put to me the other day which I think I may venture to pass on to a wider
+      circle. It was this: What is the best dish that life has set before you?
+      At first blush it seems an easy question to answer. It was answered gaily
+      enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked what was the best thing that
+      had ever happened to him. &ldquo;The best thing that ever happened to me was to
+      be born,&rdquo; he replied. But that is not an answer: it is an evasion. It
+      belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether life is worth living. Life may
+      be worth living or not worth living on balance, but in either case we can
+      still say what was the thing in it that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a
+      dinner on the whole and yet make an exception of the trout, or the braised
+      ham and spinach or the dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and
+      still admit that he has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift
+      and many more, have cursed the day you were born and still remember many
+      pleasant things that have happened to you&mdash;falling in love, making
+      friends, climbing mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs,
+      watching the sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You
+      may write off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush
+      outside. It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very
+      sad heart who has never had anything to thank his stars for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it grows
+      difficult on reflection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily
+      answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over
+      and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things
+      that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long
+      sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and
+      agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree&mdash;sycamore or
+      chestnut for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because
+      their generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade&mdash;to sit, I
+      say, and think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball
+      which the Blessèd Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven
+      near by, sees &ldquo;spinning like a midge&rdquo; below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and asked
+      us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play to which
+      we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped away so
+      quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we should make
+      now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will be there)
+      will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer. That glorious
+      contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool million&mdash;come
+      now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair to remember your
+      journey by. You will have to think of something better than that as the
+      splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to confess to a very
+      complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser pleasures seemed so
+      important, you will not like to admit, even to yourself, that your most
+      rapturous memory of earth centres round the grillroom at the Savoy. You
+      will probably find that the things best worth remembering are the things
+      you rejected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose pleasures
+      were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of life, after
+      all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers in money, and
+      traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those occupations to
+      hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon under that
+      sycamore tree&mdash;which of them, now that it is all over, will have most
+      joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one and a
+      gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the earth as
+      a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the mountains,
+      and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and where season
+      followed season with a processional glory that never grew dim. And Mozart
+      will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and Turner as a panorama
+      of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect, with what delight they
+      will look back on the great moments of life&mdash;Columbus seeing the new
+      world dawning on his vision, Copernicus feeling the sublime architecture
+      of the universe taking shape in his mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal
+      mystery of the human frame, Darwin thrilling with the birth pangs of the
+      immense secret that he wrung from Nature. These men will be able to answer
+      the question grandly. The banquet they had on earth will bear talking
+      about even in Heaven.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the
+      scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will, I
+      fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and
+      humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we won
+      the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or shook
+      hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our name in
+      the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament. It will
+      be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human comradeship we
+      had on the journey&mdash;the friendships of the spirit, whether made in
+      the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or art. We shall
+      remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its affections&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      The fates some recompense have sent&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      Thrice blessed are the things that last,
+    </p>
+    <p class="indent15">
+      The things that are more excellent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0086" id="linkimage-0086"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0278m.jpg" alt="0278m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0278.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0087" id="linkimage-0087"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0279m.jpg" alt="0279m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0279.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> met an old
+      gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with whom I have a
+      slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he asked me whether I
+      remembered Walker of <i>The Daily News</i>. No, said I, he was before my
+      time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the 'seventies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before that,&rdquo; said the old gentleman. &ldquo;Must have been in the 'sixties.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Probably,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Did you know him in the 'sixties?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, I knew him before then,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, warming to his
+      subject. &ldquo;I knew him in the 'forties.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman
+      enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Heavens!&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;the 'forties!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a better
+      view across the ages. &ldquo;No.... It must have been in the 'thirties.... Yes,
+      it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school together in the 'thirties.
+      We called him Sawney Walker.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I had
+      paid him the one compliment that appealed to him&mdash;the compliment of
+      astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety
+      not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked &ldquo;well
+      set&rdquo; for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance
+      as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his hundred
+      at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement was mixed
+      with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent vanity is the
+      last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last infirmity that
+      humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that rages around Dean
+      Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the angels. I want to
+      feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are moving upwards in the
+      scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round and round and biting our
+      tail. I think the case for the ascent of man is stronger than the Dean
+      admits. A creature that has emerged from the primordial slime and evolved
+      a moral law has progressed a good way. It is not unreasonable to think
+      that he has a future. Give him time&mdash;and it may be that the world is
+      still only in its rebellious childhood&mdash;and he will go far.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a
+      time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant
+      and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first
+      knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We are
+      vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of his
+      acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all the
+      year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes at
+      the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots and his
+      cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of mine who,
+      in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing boots to the
+      children at a London school, heard one day a little child pattering behind
+      her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of the beneficiaries
+      &ldquo;keeping up&rdquo; with her. She turned and recognised the wearer. &ldquo;So you've
+      got your new boots on, Mary?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said little Mary grandly.
+      &ldquo;Don't they squeak beautiful, mum.&rdquo; And though, as we grow older, we cease
+      to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we find other material to
+      keep the flame of vanity alive. &ldquo;What for should I ride in a carriage if
+      the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?&rdquo; said the Fifer, putting his
+      head out of the window. He spoke for all of us. We are all a little like
+      that. I confess that I cannot ride in a motor-car that whizzes past other
+      motor-cars without an absurd and irrational vanity. I despise the emotion,
+      but it is there in spite of me. And I remember that when I was young I
+      could hardly free-wheel down a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior
+      to the man who was grinding his way up with heavings and perspiration. I
+      have no shame in making these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that
+      you, sir (or madam), will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite
+      audible echo of yourself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we are vain
+      of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our neighbours as
+      we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our neighbours. We are
+      like the old maltster in &ldquo;Far from the Madding Crowd,&rdquo; when Henery Fray
+      claimed to be &ldquo;a strange old piece, goodmen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A strange old piece, ye say!&rdquo; interposed the maltster in a querulous
+      voice. &ldquo;Ye be no old man worth naming&mdash;no old man at all. Yer teeth
+      bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
+      bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis a
+      poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore&mdash;a
+      boast weak as water.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences
+      when the maltster had to be pacified.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Weak as water, yes,&rdquo; said Jan Coggan. &ldquo;Malter, we feel ye to be a
+      wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; said Joseph Poorgrass. &ldquo;Ye be a very rare old spectacle, malter,
+      and we all respect ye for that gift.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in being
+      &ldquo;a very rare old spectacle.&rdquo; We count the reigns we've lived in and exalt
+      the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes at midnight.
+      Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite early, as in the
+      case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of Cicero who was only
+      in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as an old man and wrote
+      his &ldquo;De Senectute,&rdquo; exalting the pleasures of old age. In the eyes of the
+      maltster he would never have been an old man worth naming, for he was only
+      sixty-four when he was murdered. I have noticed in my own case of late a
+      growing tendency to flourish my antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure
+      in recalling the 'seventies to those who can remember, say, only the
+      'nineties, that my fine old friend in the lane had in talking to me about
+      the 'thirties. I met two nice boys the other day at a country house, and
+      they were full, as boys ought to be, of the subject of the cricket. And
+      when they found I was worth talking to on that high theme, they submitted
+      their ideal team to me for approval, and I launched out about the giants
+      that lived in the days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds
+      of &ldquo;W. G.&rdquo; and Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G.
+      Steel, and many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their
+      stature did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those
+      memories as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I
+      shall be proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning
+      nurse. She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope
+      and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our
+      toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant vanity
+      we are soothed to sleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0088" id="linkimage-0088"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0284m.jpg" alt="0284m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0284.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0089" id="linkimage-0089"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0285m.jpg" alt="0285m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0285.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON SIGHTING LAND
+    </h2>
+    <p class="pfirst">
+      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was in the midst
+      of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me to my feet with a
+      leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a doughty fellow, who
+      wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and had trained it to stand
+      up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of interrogation. &ldquo;I offer you a
+      draw,&rdquo; I said with a regal wave of the hand, as though I was offering him
+      Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or something substantial like that.
+      &ldquo;Accepted,&rdquo; he cried with a gesture no less reckless and comprehensive.
+      And then we bolted for the top deck. For the cry we had heard was &ldquo;Land in
+      sight!&rdquo; And if there are three more comfortable words to hear when you
+      have been tossing about on the ocean for a week or two, I do not know
+      them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the Atlantic
+      is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely facetious
+      when he said he was &ldquo;disappointed with the Atlantic.&rdquo; But now I am
+      disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way I knew
+      it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order to know
+      what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until he was a
+      middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to his conception
+      of the sea because &ldquo;we have in us the glance of the universe.&rdquo; But though
+      the actual experience of the ocean adds little to the broad imaginative
+      conception of it formed by the mind, we are not prepared for the effect of
+      sameness, still less for the sense of smallness. It is as though we are
+      sitting day after day in the geometrical centre of a very round table-top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are told
+      that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before yesterday
+      and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility to the
+      fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured by and
+      here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is perfectly
+      flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn by
+      compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have &ldquo;a drop
+      into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.&rdquo; You conceive
+      yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth which hangs
+      over the sides.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its
+      appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue cloth,
+      with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption of
+      transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey cloth;
+      sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth and
+      tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the table,
+      and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth flinging
+      itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an
+      incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion
+      and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under the
+      impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment suspended
+      in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like a wrestler
+      fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning, every joint
+      creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful strain. A gleam of
+      sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching the clouds of spray
+      turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling ship with the glamour
+      of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there is nothing but the
+      raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler in their midst, and
+      far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the horizon, as if it were a
+      pencil of white flame, to a spectral and unearthly beauty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are moveless
+      in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our magic carpet
+      (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or Europe, as the
+      case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we are standing still
+      for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers progress to the mind.
+      The circle we looked out on last night is indistinguishable from the
+      circle we look out on this morning. Even the sky and cloud effects are
+      lost on this flat contracted stage, with its hard horizon and its thwarted
+      vision. There is a curious absence of the sense of distance, even of
+      distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as abruptly as the sea at that
+      severely drawn circumference and there is no vague merging of the seen
+      into the unseen, which alone gives the imagination room for flight. To
+      live in this world is to be imprisoned in a double sense&mdash;in the
+      physical sense that Johnson had in mind in his famous retort, and in the
+      emotional sense that I have attempted to describe. In my growing list of
+      undesirable occupations&mdash;sewermen, lift-men, stokers,
+      tram-conductors, and so on&mdash;I shall henceforth include ships'
+      stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being shot like a shuttle
+      in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New York and back from New
+      York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the ill-humour of the ocean and
+      to play the sick nurse to a never-ending mob of strangers, is as dreary a
+      part as one could be cast for. I would rather navigate a barge on the
+      Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet,
+      on second thoughts, they have their joys. They hear, every fortnight or
+      so, that thrilling cry, &ldquo;Land in sight!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and
+      however familiar it may be.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example.
+      Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the
+      first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some
+      unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively,
+      comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment
+      seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination.
+      Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the monotonous
+      rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with the emotion of
+      the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of the sea. Such a
+      cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three hundred years
+      ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of that immortal
+      little company of the <i>Mayflower</i> caught sight of the land where,
+      they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down through the
+      centuries that cry of &ldquo;Land in sight!&rdquo; has been sounded in the ears of
+      generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to the new land
+      of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see that land
+      shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great drama of the
+      ages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English eyes
+      as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this sunny
+      morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the sight there
+      is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself heaving with a
+      hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders. I have a fleeting
+      vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling down there amid a
+      glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to sea, and standing
+      on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home to the Ark that is
+      for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is a
+      rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his hills
+      hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager comes from,
+      whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic from the Cape,
+      or round the Cape from Australia, or through the Mediterranean from India,
+      this is the first glimpse of the homeland that greets him, carrying his
+      mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the journey's end. And that
+      vision links him up with the great pageant of history. Drake, sailing in
+      from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and knew he was once more in his
+      Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck beside me with a wisp of hair,
+      curled and questioning, on his baldish forehead, and I mark the shine in
+      his eyes....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0090" id="linkimage-0090"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
+      <img src="images/0291m.jpg" alt="0291m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0291.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0091" id="linkimage-0091"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/0294m.jpg" alt="0294m " width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/0294.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
+    </h5>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+<div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 47429 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0001.jpg b/47429-h/images/0001.jpg
index 71b1857..71b1857 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0001.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0001.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0002.jpg b/47429-h/images/0002.jpg
index e54c016..e54c016 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0002.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0002.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0002m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0002m.jpg
index 8fb333e..8fb333e 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0002m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0002m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0003.jpg b/47429-h/images/0003.jpg
index c48ab91..c48ab91 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0003.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0003.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0003m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0003m.jpg
index 50902b9..50902b9 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0003m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0003m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0008.jpg b/47429-h/images/0008.jpg
index d8577c5..d8577c5 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0008.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0008.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0008m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0008m.jpg
index 0b4e00c..0b4e00c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0008m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0008m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0009.jpg b/47429-h/images/0009.jpg
index 78bbd3c..78bbd3c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0009.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0009.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0009m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0009m.jpg
index b84369a..b84369a 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0009m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0009m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0013.jpg b/47429-h/images/0013.jpg
index be463e3..be463e3 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0013.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0013.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0013m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0013m.jpg
index 6dbda94..6dbda94 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0013m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0013m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0015.jpg b/47429-h/images/0015.jpg
index 7373f59..7373f59 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0015.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0015.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0015m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0015m.jpg
index 57061e8..57061e8 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0015m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0015m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0017.jpg b/47429-h/images/0017.jpg
index f49cbc5..f49cbc5 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0017.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0017.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0017m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0017m.jpg
index 16ca92d..16ca92d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0017m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0017m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0021.jpg b/47429-h/images/0021.jpg
index 55155dc..55155dc 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0021.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0021.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0021m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0021m.jpg
index 67bf87f..67bf87f 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0021m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0021m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0025.jpg b/47429-h/images/0025.jpg
index 8a65342..8a65342 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0025.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0025.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0025m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0025m.jpg
index 6cb96e1..6cb96e1 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0025m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0025m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0030.jpg b/47429-h/images/0030.jpg
index fc4fa52..fc4fa52 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0030.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0030.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0030m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0030m.jpg
index 1aefbbb..1aefbbb 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0030m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0030m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0031.jpg b/47429-h/images/0031.jpg
index 4b73b04..4b73b04 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0031.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0031.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0031m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0031m.jpg
index 47d8f19..47d8f19 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0031m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0031m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0036.jpg b/47429-h/images/0036.jpg
index 2230a60..2230a60 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0036.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0036.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0036m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0036m.jpg
index 8ee8d2a..8ee8d2a 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0036m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0036m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0040.jpg b/47429-h/images/0040.jpg
index 3e44c11..3e44c11 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0040.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0040.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0040m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0040m.jpg
index 4f5e90a..4f5e90a 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0040m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0040m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0041.jpg b/47429-h/images/0041.jpg
index 1c61cae..1c61cae 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0041.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0041.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0041m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0041m.jpg
index 9d08df8..9d08df8 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0041m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0041m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0047.jpg b/47429-h/images/0047.jpg
index 20e9ae1..20e9ae1 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0047.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0047.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0047m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0047m.jpg
index e28b3f6..e28b3f6 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0047m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0047m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0049.jpg b/47429-h/images/0049.jpg
index 8b00e47..8b00e47 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0049.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0049.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0049m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0049m.jpg
index 69e30c9..69e30c9 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0049m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0049m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0050.jpg b/47429-h/images/0050.jpg
index 42c2054..42c2054 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0050.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0050.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0050m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0050m.jpg
index 8d83f34..8d83f34 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0050m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0050m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0055.jpg b/47429-h/images/0055.jpg
index 96b6ab7..96b6ab7 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0055.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0055.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0055m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0055m.jpg
index 4c5cc8d..4c5cc8d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0055m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0055m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0061.jpg b/47429-h/images/0061.jpg
index adb0440..adb0440 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0061.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0061.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0061m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0061m.jpg
index 9df6081..9df6081 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0061m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0061m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0062.jpg b/47429-h/images/0062.jpg
index a7fa705..a7fa705 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0062.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0062.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0062m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0062m.jpg
index 4d53fb3..4d53fb3 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0062m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0062m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0066.jpg b/47429-h/images/0066.jpg
index 81c1a22..81c1a22 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0066.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0066.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0066m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0066m.jpg
index a572f00..a572f00 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0066m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0066m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0067.jpg b/47429-h/images/0067.jpg
index a0b6d03..a0b6d03 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0067.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0067.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0067m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0067m.jpg
index cc572c3..cc572c3 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0067m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0067m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0072.jpg b/47429-h/images/0072.jpg
index cd41436..cd41436 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0072.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0072.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0072m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0072m.jpg
index 668d18d..668d18d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0072m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0072m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0073.jpg b/47429-h/images/0073.jpg
index d388371..d388371 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0073.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0073.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0073m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0073m.jpg
index 4890503..4890503 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0073m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0073m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0078.jpg b/47429-h/images/0078.jpg
index c01940d..c01940d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0078.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0078.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0078m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0078m.jpg
index 8f3e9ae..8f3e9ae 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0078m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0078m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0079.jpg b/47429-h/images/0079.jpg
index 757ef31..757ef31 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0079.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0079.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0079m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0079m.jpg
index 77d6d2b..77d6d2b 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0079m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0079m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0084.jpg b/47429-h/images/0084.jpg
index 55414ec..55414ec 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0084.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0084.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0084m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0084m.jpg
index 545f5e0..545f5e0 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0084m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0084m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0085.jpg b/47429-h/images/0085.jpg
index 5ce8a2f..5ce8a2f 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0085.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0085.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0085m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0085m.jpg
index 18a09a5..18a09a5 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0085m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0085m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0089.jpg b/47429-h/images/0089.jpg
index f4fce23..f4fce23 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0089.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0089.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0089m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0089m.jpg
index 0a3c835..0a3c835 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0089m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0089m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0090.jpg b/47429-h/images/0090.jpg
index 7409a11..7409a11 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0090.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0090.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0090m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0090m.jpg
index d46bf18..d46bf18 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0090m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0090m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0091.jpg b/47429-h/images/0091.jpg
index 34497e4..34497e4 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0091.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0091.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0091m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0091m.jpg
index 08e9061..08e9061 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0091m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0091m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0095.jpg b/47429-h/images/0095.jpg
index bd739ab..bd739ab 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0095.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0095.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0095m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0095m.jpg
index 34c4fb3..34c4fb3 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0095m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0095m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0096.jpg b/47429-h/images/0096.jpg
index 43a0bbc..43a0bbc 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0096.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0096.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0096m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0096m.jpg
index ee0c2b4..ee0c2b4 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0096m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0096m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0101.jpg b/47429-h/images/0101.jpg
index e535c8f..e535c8f 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0101.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0101.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0101m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0101m.jpg
index f2b574d..f2b574d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0101m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0101m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0102.jpg b/47429-h/images/0102.jpg
index 196e0d1..196e0d1 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0102.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0102.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0102m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0102m.jpg
index 91bc307..91bc307 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0102m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0102m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0108.jpg b/47429-h/images/0108.jpg
index 47d15c3..47d15c3 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0108.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0108.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0108m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0108m.jpg
index c8ef298..c8ef298 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0108m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0108m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0109.jpg b/47429-h/images/0109.jpg
index 0d98201..0d98201 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0109.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0109.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0109m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0109m.jpg
index 20cf8e9..20cf8e9 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0109m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0109m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0115.jpg b/47429-h/images/0115.jpg
index c2c9178..c2c9178 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0115.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0115.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0115m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0115m.jpg
index 0c0f4a5..0c0f4a5 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0115m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0115m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0116.jpg b/47429-h/images/0116.jpg
index 846e8b8..846e8b8 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0116.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0116.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0116m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0116m.jpg
index 5e1ffff..5e1ffff 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0116m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0116m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0120.jpg b/47429-h/images/0120.jpg
index a64fe27..a64fe27 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0120.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0120.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0120m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0120m.jpg
index f29e176..f29e176 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0120m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0120m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0121.jpg b/47429-h/images/0121.jpg
index 0f68fd5..0f68fd5 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0121.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0121.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0121m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0121m.jpg
index 80de712..80de712 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0121m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0121m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0127.jpg b/47429-h/images/0127.jpg
index c8ab594..c8ab594 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0127.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0127.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0127m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0127m.jpg
index beef4f2..beef4f2 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0127m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0127m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0128.jpg b/47429-h/images/0128.jpg
index 46a5d50..46a5d50 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0128.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0128.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0128m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0128m.jpg
index f512531..f512531 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0128m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0128m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0134.jpg b/47429-h/images/0134.jpg
index 8ec6903..8ec6903 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0134.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0134.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0134m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0134m.jpg
index 9f69d17..9f69d17 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0134m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0134m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0137.jpg b/47429-h/images/0137.jpg
index 438e377..438e377 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0137.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0137.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0137m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0137m.jpg
index a66a594..a66a594 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0137m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0137m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0138.jpg b/47429-h/images/0138.jpg
index ca53a2c..ca53a2c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0138.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0138.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0138m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0138m.jpg
index 170c30a..170c30a 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0138m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0138m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0142.jpg b/47429-h/images/0142.jpg
index e736aef..e736aef 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0142.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0142.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0142m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0142m.jpg
index 3bb2e7c..3bb2e7c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0142m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0142m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0143.jpg b/47429-h/images/0143.jpg
index b34a2b2..b34a2b2 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0143.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0143.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0143m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0143m.jpg
index 1acee2c..1acee2c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0143m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0143m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0148.jpg b/47429-h/images/0148.jpg
index 118ce69..118ce69 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0148.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0148.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0148m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0148m.jpg
index 7cf5d56..7cf5d56 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0148m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0148m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0150.jpg b/47429-h/images/0150.jpg
index 313dffd..313dffd 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0150.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0150.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0150m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0150m.jpg
index 5eba042..5eba042 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0150m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0150m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0151.jpg b/47429-h/images/0151.jpg
index c3412e4..c3412e4 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0151.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0151.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0151m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0151m.jpg
index 34bb338..34bb338 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0151m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0151m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0155.jpg b/47429-h/images/0155.jpg
index 69a07c5..69a07c5 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0155.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0155.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0155m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0155m.jpg
index 3ee0d25..3ee0d25 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0155m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0155m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0156.jpg b/47429-h/images/0156.jpg
index 5c03774..5c03774 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0156.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0156.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0156m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0156m.jpg
index b1c8c20..b1c8c20 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0156m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0156m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0163.jpg b/47429-h/images/0163.jpg
index bf070dd..bf070dd 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0163.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0163.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0163m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0163m.jpg
index 6bae771..6bae771 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0163m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0163m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0164.jpg b/47429-h/images/0164.jpg
index 9d62f81..9d62f81 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0164.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0164.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0164m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0164m.jpg
index c3462b5..c3462b5 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0164m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0164m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0169.jpg b/47429-h/images/0169.jpg
index 1cfb615..1cfb615 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0169.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0169.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0169m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0169m.jpg
index 175c2e8..175c2e8 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0169m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0169m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0170.jpg b/47429-h/images/0170.jpg
index 0cbe5c8..0cbe5c8 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0170.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0170.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0170m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0170m.jpg
index a8fbff7..a8fbff7 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0170m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0170m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0174.jpg b/47429-h/images/0174.jpg
index cd3a1d0..cd3a1d0 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0174.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0174.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0174m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0174m.jpg
index 3b23194..3b23194 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0174m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0174m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0175.jpg b/47429-h/images/0175.jpg
index eab1b3a..eab1b3a 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0175.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0175.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0175m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0175m.jpg
index b2ae499..b2ae499 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0175m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0175m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0183.jpg b/47429-h/images/0183.jpg
index aa57e31..aa57e31 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0183.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0183.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0183m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0183m.jpg
index e376964..e376964 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0183m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0183m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0184.jpg b/47429-h/images/0184.jpg
index 29c0631..29c0631 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0184.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0184.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0184m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0184m.jpg
index 15ea04d..15ea04d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0184m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0184m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0192.jpg b/47429-h/images/0192.jpg
index 7704436..7704436 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0192.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0192.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0192m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0192m.jpg
index c1f4c3b..c1f4c3b 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0192m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0192m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0193.jpg b/47429-h/images/0193.jpg
index 8b6f78d..8b6f78d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0193.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0193.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0193m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0193m.jpg
index 05c794d..05c794d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0193m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0193m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0197.jpg b/47429-h/images/0197.jpg
index ed44e53..ed44e53 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0197.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0197.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0197m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0197m.jpg
index 42bb733..42bb733 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0197m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0197m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0200.jpg b/47429-h/images/0200.jpg
index 4874313..4874313 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0200.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0200.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0200m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0200m.jpg
index 29737b4..29737b4 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0200m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0200m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0201.jpg b/47429-h/images/0201.jpg
index b6c25c1..b6c25c1 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0201.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0201.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0201m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0201m.jpg
index 646182d..646182d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0201m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0201m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0207.jpg b/47429-h/images/0207.jpg
index d7ff672..d7ff672 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0207.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0207.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0207m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0207m.jpg
index 18b523d..18b523d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0207m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0207m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0208.jpg b/47429-h/images/0208.jpg
index 230fd3d..230fd3d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0208.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0208.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0208m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0208m.jpg
index 12dae4c..12dae4c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0208m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0208m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0217.jpg b/47429-h/images/0217.jpg
index 00122a0..00122a0 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0217.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0217.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0217m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0217m.jpg
index 6c7260c..6c7260c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0217m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0217m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0218.jpg b/47429-h/images/0218.jpg
index d3b0d30..d3b0d30 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0218.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0218.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0218m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0218m.jpg
index 12bc6c7..12bc6c7 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0218m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0218m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0222.jpg b/47429-h/images/0222.jpg
index 5e3bc38..5e3bc38 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0222.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0222.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0222m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0222m.jpg
index 626a0f3..626a0f3 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0222m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0222m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0223.jpg b/47429-h/images/0223.jpg
index 662cbe5..662cbe5 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0223.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0223.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0223m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0223m.jpg
index 9f3388b..9f3388b 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0223m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0223m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0228.jpg b/47429-h/images/0228.jpg
index 42fc900..42fc900 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0228.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0228.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0228m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0228m.jpg
index 56a9e2b..56a9e2b 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0228m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0228m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0229.jpg b/47429-h/images/0229.jpg
index b8e50ee..b8e50ee 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0229.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0229.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0229m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0229m.jpg
index 8505827..8505827 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0229m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0229m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0235.jpg b/47429-h/images/0235.jpg
index 5f30f8b..5f30f8b 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0235.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0235.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0235m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0235m.jpg
index c13525c..c13525c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0235m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0235m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0236.jpg b/47429-h/images/0236.jpg
index 7a2a34b..7a2a34b 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0236.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0236.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0236m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0236m.jpg
index 62fb04e..62fb04e 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0236m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0236m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0243.jpg b/47429-h/images/0243.jpg
index e4d4588..e4d4588 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0243.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0243.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0243m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0243m.jpg
index d15a718..d15a718 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0243m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0243m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0249.jpg b/47429-h/images/0249.jpg
index 415c896..415c896 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0249.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0249.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0249m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0249m.jpg
index aec5155..aec5155 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0249m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0249m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0250.jpg b/47429-h/images/0250.jpg
index 3d92688..3d92688 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0250.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0250.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0250m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0250m.jpg
index 8d9268c..8d9268c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0250m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0250m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0254.jpg b/47429-h/images/0254.jpg
index e5a8c9e..e5a8c9e 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0254.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0254.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0254m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0254m.jpg
index 673ae1a..673ae1a 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0254m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0254m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0255.jpg b/47429-h/images/0255.jpg
index 891527c..891527c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0255.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0255.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0255m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0255m.jpg
index 599d9ba..599d9ba 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0255m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0255m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0257.jpg b/47429-h/images/0257.jpg
index a5bb2bf..a5bb2bf 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0257.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0257.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0257m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0257m.jpg
index 540e71c..540e71c 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0257m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0257m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0261.jpg b/47429-h/images/0261.jpg
index 7a6f9e1..7a6f9e1 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0261.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0261.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0261m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0261m.jpg
index b573eea..b573eea 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0261m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0261m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0269.jpg b/47429-h/images/0269.jpg
index d35fe63..d35fe63 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0269.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0269.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0269m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0269m.jpg
index 18af5d1..18af5d1 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0269m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0269m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0270.jpg b/47429-h/images/0270.jpg
index 3d58e5f..3d58e5f 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0270.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0270.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0270m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0270m.jpg
index 6c65ce9..6c65ce9 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0270m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0270m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0274.jpg b/47429-h/images/0274.jpg
index 84640f3..84640f3 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0274.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0274.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0274m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0274m.jpg
index 8bfdaae..8bfdaae 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0274m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0274m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0278.jpg b/47429-h/images/0278.jpg
index 379fb17..379fb17 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0278.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0278.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0278m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0278m.jpg
index dbff3e2..dbff3e2 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0278m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0278m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0279.jpg b/47429-h/images/0279.jpg
index 1a65808..1a65808 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0279.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0279.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0279m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0279m.jpg
index e4941d1..e4941d1 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0279m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0279m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0284.jpg b/47429-h/images/0284.jpg
index 2c8acd5..2c8acd5 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0284.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0284.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0284m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0284m.jpg
index 4c66792..4c66792 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0284m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0284m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0285.jpg b/47429-h/images/0285.jpg
index 590594e..590594e 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0285.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0285.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0285m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0285m.jpg
index be2477d..be2477d 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0285m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0285m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0291.jpg b/47429-h/images/0291.jpg
index 7c79e00..7c79e00 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0291.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0291.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0291m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0291m.jpg
index 4dd3061..4dd3061 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0291m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0291m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0294.jpg b/47429-h/images/0294.jpg
index 1a02f5f..1a02f5f 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0294.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0294.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0294m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0294m.jpg
index 863dcc0..863dcc0 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0294m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0294m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0295.jpg b/47429-h/images/0295.jpg
index a7ef2df..a7ef2df 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0295.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0295.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/0295m.jpg b/47429-h/images/0295m.jpg
index a1a4588..a1a4588 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/0295m.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/0295m.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-h/images/cover.jpg b/47429-h/images/cover.jpg
index 1b30100..1b30100 100644
--- a/47429/47429-h/images/cover.jpg
+++ b/47429-h/images/cover.jpg
diff --git a/47429/47429-0.zip b/47429/47429-0.zip
deleted file mode 100644
index 00d9eb1..0000000
--- a/47429/47429-0.zip
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/47429-h.zip b/47429/47429-h.zip
deleted file mode 100644
index 97ba3fa..0000000
--- a/47429/47429-h.zip
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-0.txt b/47429/old/47429-0.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index 71357e8..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-0.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,6707 +0,0 @@
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Windfalls
-
-Author: (AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-Illustrator: Clive Gardiner
-
-Release Date: November 22, 2014 [EBook #47429]
-Last Updated: March 15, 2018
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-WINDFALLS
-
-By Alfred George Gardiner
-
-(Alpha of the Plough)
-
-Illustrations by Clive Gardiner
-
-J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
-
-1920
-
-
-[Illustration: 0002]
-
-[Illustration: 0008]
-
-[Illustration: 0009]
-
-
-TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS
-
-I think this book belongs to you because, if it can be said to be about
-anything in particular--which it cannot--it is, in spite of its delusive
-title, about bees, and as I cannot dedicate it to them, I offer it to
-those who love them most.
-
-[Illustration: 0013]
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-|In offering a third basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is
-hoped that the fruit will not be found to have deteriorated. If that is
-the case, I shall hold myself free to take another look under the
-trees at my leisure. But I fancy the three baskets will complete the
-garnering. The old orchard from which the fruit has been so largely
-gathered is passing from me, and the new orchard to which I go has not
-yet matured. Perhaps in the course of years it will furnish material for
-a collection of autumn leaves.
-
-[Illustration: 0015]
-
-[Illustration: 0021]
-
-
-
-
-JEMIMA
-
-|I took a garden fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes.
-When Jemima saw me crossing the orchard with a fork he called a
-committee meeting, or rather a general assembly, and after some joyous
-discussion it was decided _nem. con_. that the thing was worth looking
-into. Forthwith, the whole family of Indian runners lined up in single
-file, and led by Jemima followed faithfully in my track towards the
-artichoke bed, with a gabble of merry noises. Jemima was first into the
-breach. He always is...
-
-But before I proceed it is necessary to explain. You will have observed
-that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless,
-you said, “How careless of the printer. Once might be forgiven; but
-twice----” Dear madam' (or sir), the printer is on this occasion
-blameless. It seems incredible, but it's so. The truth is that Jemima
-was the victim of an accident at the christening ceremony. He was one of
-a brood who, as they came like little balls of yellow fluff out of the
-shell, received names of appropriate ambiguity--all except Jemima. There
-were Lob and Lop, Two Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?, Greedy
-and Baby, and so on. Every name as safe as the bank, equal to all
-contingencies--except Jemima. What reckless impulse led us to call him
-Jemima I forget. But regardless of his name, he grew up into a handsome
-drake--a proud and gaudy fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you call
-him so long as you call him to the Diet of Worms.
-
-And here he is, surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble,
-gobble, and crowd in on me so that I have to scare them off in order to
-drive in the fork. Jemima keeps his eye on the fork as a good batsman
-keeps his eye on the ball. The flash of a fork appeals to him like the
-sound of a trumpet to the warhorse. He will lead his battalion through
-fire and water in pursuit of it. He knows that a fork has some mystical
-connection with worms, and doubtless regards it as a beneficent deity.
-The others are content to grub in the new-turned soil, but he, with his
-larger reasoning power, knows that the fork produces the worms and that
-the way to get the fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the way
-he watches it I rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the fork.
-Look at him now. He cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating fork,
-expecting to see large, squirming worms dropping from it, and Greedy
-nips in under his nose and gobbles a waggling beauty. My excellent
-friend, I say, addressing Jemima, you know both too much and too little.
-If you had known a little more you would have had that worm; if you had
-known a little less you would have had that worm. Let me commend to you
-the words of the poet:
-
-               A little learning is a dangerous thing:
-
-               Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
-
-I've known many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too
-much but don't know enough. Now Greedy----
-
-But clear off all of you. What ho! there.... The scales!... Here is a
-bumper root.... Jemima realises that something unusual has happened,
-assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with great animation. It
-is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners such agreeable
-companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian runners
-about. Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the orchard
-without an idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in a
-perpetual gossip. The world is full of such a number of things that they
-hardly ever leave off talking, and though they all talk together they
-are so amiable about it that it makes you feel cheerful to hear them....
-But here are the scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do you
-say to that, Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.
-
-The idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am
-enveloped once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful
-risks in his attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be
-ungracious to complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it,
-I said, but you are feasting to-day in order that others may feast
-tomorrow. You devour the worm, and a larger and more cunning animal will
-devour you. He cocks up his head and fixes me with that beady eye that
-gleams with such artless yet searching intelligence.... You are right,
-Jemima. That, as you observe, is only half the tale. You eat the worm,
-and the large, cunning animal eats you, but--yes, Jemima, the crude
-fact has to be faced that the worm takes up the tale again where Man the
-Mighty leaves off:
-
-                        His heart is builded
-
-               For pride, for potency, infinity,
-
-               All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
-
-               Arrased with purple like the house of kings,
-
-               _To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm_
-
-               _Statelily lodge..._
-
-I accept your reminder, Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like
-you, am only a link in the chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries,
-who creates to devour and devours to create. I thank you, Jemima. And
-driving in the fork and turning up the soil I seized a large fat worm. I
-present you with this, Jemima, I said, as a mark of my esteem...
-
-[Illustration: 0024]
-
-[Illustration: 0025]
-
-
-
-
-ON BEING IDLE
-
-|I have long laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person.
-It is an entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in
-conversation, I do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am
-idle, in fact, to prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art
-of defence is attack. I defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a
-verdict of not guilty by the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm
-you by laying down my arms. “Ah, ah,” I expect you to say. “Ah, ah, you
-an idle person. Well, that is good.” And if you do not say it I at least
-give myself the pleasure of believing that you think it.
-
-This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things
-about ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about
-us. We say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way
-some people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their
-early decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as
-remote as it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating
-the sorrow it will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be
-missed. We all like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember
-a nice old gentleman whose favourite topic was “When I am gone.” One day
-he was telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee,
-what would happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up
-cheerfully and said, “When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at
-the funeral?” It was a devastating question, and it was observed that
-afterwards the old gentleman never discussed his latter end with his
-formidable grandchild. He made it too painfully literal.
-
-And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were
-to express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad
-as the old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and
-I daresay I should take care not to lay myself open again to such
-_gaucherie_. But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling
-self-deception. I can speak the plain truth about “Alpha of the Plough”
- without asking for any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how
-he suffers. And I say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was
-never more satisfied of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has
-been engaged in the agreeable task of dodging his duty to _The Star_.
-
-It began quite early this morning--for you cannot help being about
-quite early now that the clock has been put forward--or is it back?--for
-summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and
-there at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved
-to write an article _en plein air_, as Corot used to paint his
-pictures--an article that would simply carry the intoxication of
-this May morning into Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare
-carolling with larks, and make it green with the green and dappled
-wonder of the beech woods. But first of all he had to saturate himself
-with the sunshine. You cannot give out sunshine until you have taken it
-in. That, said he, is plain to the meanest understanding. So he took it
-in. He just lay on his back and looked at the clouds sailing serenely in
-the blue. They were well worth looking at--large, fat, lazy, clouds
-that drifted along silently and dreamily, like vast bales of wool being
-wafted from one star to another. He looked at them “long and long” as
-Walt Whitman used to say. How that loafer of genius, he said, would have
-loved to lie and look at those woolly clouds.
-
-And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
-another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not
-have a picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began
-enumerating the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the
-wings of the west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could
-hear if one gave one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin
-whisper of the breeze in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of
-the woodland behind, the dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech
-near by, the boom of a bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of
-the meadow pipit rising from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo
-sailing up the valley, the clatter of magpies on the hillside, the
-“spink-spink” of the chaffinch, the whirr of a tractor in a distant
-field, the crowing of a far-off cock, the bark of a sheep dog, the ring
-of a hammer reverberating from a remote clearing in the beech woods,
-the voices of children who were gathering violets and bluebells in the
-wooded hollow on the other side of the hill. All these and many other
-things he heard, still lying on his back and looking at the heavenly
-bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him; their billowy softness
-invited to slumber....
-
-When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
-Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and
-the best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the
-blossoms falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you
-preaching the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He
-would catch something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did
-not lie about on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds.
-To them, life was real, life was earnest. They were always “up and
-doing.” It was true that there were the drones, impostors who make ten
-times the buzz of the workers, and would have you believe they do all
-the work because they make most of the noise. But the example of these
-lazy fellows he would ignore. Under the cherry tree he would labour like
-the honey bee.
-
-But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came
-out to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives
-alone, but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put
-on a veil and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time
-flies when you are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do
-and see. You always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure
-that she is there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took
-more time than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one
-of the hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other
-hives, and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was
-visible. The frames were turned over industriously without reward. At
-last, on the floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found.
-This deepened the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason,
-rejected her sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne
-appeared and given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last
-the new queen was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of
-her subjects. She had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped
-notice when the brood frames were put in and, according to the merciless
-law of the hive, had slain her senior. All this took time, and before
-he had finished, the cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard
-announced another interruption of his task.
-
-And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
-of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article
-about how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one
-virtue. It exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.
-
-[Illustration: 0030]
-
-[Illustration: 0031]
-
-
-
-
-ON HABITS
-
-|I sat down to write an article this morning, but found I could make
-no progress. There was grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels
-refused to revolve. I was writing with a pen--a new fountain pen
-that someone had been good enough to send me, in commemoration of an
-anniversary, my interest in which is now very slight, but of which one
-or two well-meaning friends are still in the habit of reminding me. It
-was an excellent pen, broad and free in its paces, and capable of a most
-satisfying flourish. It was a pen, you would have said, that could have
-written an article about anything. You had only to fill it with ink and
-give it its head, and it would gallop away to its journey's end without
-a pause. That is how I felt about it when I sat down. But instead of
-galloping, the thing was as obstinate as a mule. I could get no more
-speed out of it than Stevenson could get out of his donkey in the
-Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried the bastinado, equally without
-effect on my Modestine.
-
-Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
-practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without
-my using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
-there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
-thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
-extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
-bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a
-whole forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to
-me what his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke
-of Cambridge, or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to
-Jackson or--in short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my
-hand, seat me before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as
-they say of the children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an
-eight-day clock. I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten.
-But the magic wand must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen
-in my hand, and the whole complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an
-atmosphere of strangeness. The pen kept intruding between me and my
-thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the touch. It seemed to write a foreign
-language in which nothing pleased me.
-
-This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
-better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
-of his school days. “There was,” he said, “a boy in my class at school
-who stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant
-him. Day came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would;
-till at length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always
-fumbled with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
-waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in
-an evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know
-the success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was
-again questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not
-to be found. In his distress he looked down for it--it was to be seen no
-more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
-place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was
-the author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him
-smote me as I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some
-reparation; but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed
-my acquaintance with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior
-office in one of the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe
-he is dead, he took early to drinking.”
-
-It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
-regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
-and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come.
-to grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits,
-so long as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little
-more than bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take
-away our habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about.
-We could not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life.
-They enable us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we
-had to give fresh and original thought to them each time, would make
-existence an impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our
-commonplace activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more
-leisure we command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but
-not so large as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up
-your own hat and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long
-time it was my practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant
-hook and to take no note of the place. When I sought them I found it
-absurdly difficult to find them in the midst of so many similar hats and
-coats. Memory did not help me, for memory refused to burden itself with
-such trumpery things, and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering
-forlornly and vacuously between the rows and rows of clothes in search
-of my own garments murmuring, “Where _did_ I put my hat?” Then one day a
-brilliant inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on
-a certain peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to
-it. It needed a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked
-like a charm. I can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding
-them. I go to them as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to
-its mark. It is one of the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
-
-But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
-ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally
-break them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ
-them, without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once
-saw Mr Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial
-breach of habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of
-Trinity House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House.
-It is his custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the
-most comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms
-about in a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief
-and the body in repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no
-lapels, and when the hands went up in search of them they wandered about
-pathetically like a couple of children who had lost their parents on
-Blackpool sands. They fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung
-to each other in a visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed
-the search for the lost lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with
-the glasses on the table, sought again for the lapels, did everything
-but take refuge in the pockets of the trousers. It was a characteristic
-omission. Mr Balfour is too practised a speaker to come to disaster as
-the boy in Scott's story did; but his discomfiture was apparent. He
-struggled manfully through his speech, but all the time it was obvious
-that he was at a loss what to do with his hands, having no lapels on
-which to hang them.
-
-I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out
-a pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit,
-ticked away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I
-hope) pardonable result.
-
-[Illustration: 0036]
-
-
-
-
-IN DEFENCE OF WASPS
-
-|It is time, I think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He
-is no saint, but he is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been
-unusually prolific this summer, and agitated correspondents have been
-busy writing to the newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how
-by holding your breath you may miraculously prevent him stinging you.
-Now the point about the wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He
-is, in spite of his military uniform and his formidable weapon, not a
-bad fellow, and if you leave him alone he will leave you alone. He is
-a nuisance of course. He likes jam and honey; but then I am bound
-to confess that I like jam and honey too, and I daresay those
-correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam and honey. We
-shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like jam and honey.
-But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the plate, and he
-is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no doubt. He is
-an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously helpless condition
-from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness for beer. In the
-language of America, he is a “wet.” He cannot resist beer, and having
-rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully tight and
-staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that he
-won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
-Belloc--not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so waspishly
-about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about beer.
-
-This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty
-beer bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets
-out. He is indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings.
-He is excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody
-and nothing, and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of
-things; but a wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin
-that he is, and will never have the sense to walk out the way he went
-in. And on your plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You
-can descend on him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight
-for anything above him, and no sense of looking upward.
-
-His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
-fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
-glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
-familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
-the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.
-
-If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he
-cuts a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
-poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its
-time in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night
-during its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and
-for future generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow
-stripes just lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank
-you. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow----. He
-runs through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time
-in August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving
-only the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of
-20,000 or so next summer.
-
-But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
-you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
-it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet
-he could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than
-the bee, for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel
-competent to speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for
-I've been living in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the
-orchard, with an estimated population of a quarter of a million bees
-and tens of thousands of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never
-deliberately attacked by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around
-me I flee for shelter. There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp,
-the bee's hatred is personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some
-obscure reason, and is always ready to die for the satisfaction of
-its anger. And it dies very profusely. The expert, who has been taking
-sections from the hives, showed me her hat just now. It had nineteen
-stings in it, planted in as neatly as thorns in a bicycle tyre.
-
-It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
-him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
-nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
-devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked,
-and I like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little
-joint, usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real
-virtue, and this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean
-fellow, and is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of
-that supreme abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is
-very cunning. I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He
-got the blow fly down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed
-off one of the creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape,
-and then with a huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away.
-And I confess he carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a
-whole generation of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
-
-And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
-help a fellow in distress.
-
-Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to
-one that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was
-continued for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to
-stroke gently the injured wings.
-
-There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
-who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
-carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp
-as an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
-sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to
-kill her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
-preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we
-wish ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for
-their enemy.
-
-[Illustration: 0040]
-
-[Illustration: 0041]
-
-
-
-
-ON PILLAR ROCK
-
-|Those, we are told, who have heard the East a-calling “never heed
-naught else.” Perhaps it is so; but they can never have heard the call
-of Lakeland at New Year. They can never have scrambled up the screes of
-the Great Gable on winter days to try a fall with the Arrow Head and the
-Needle, the Chimney and Kern Knotts Crack; never have seen the mighty
-Pillar Rock beckoning them from the top of Black Sail Pass, nor the inn
-lights far down in the valley calling them back from the mountains when
-night has fallen; never have sat round the inn fire and talked of the
-jolly perils of the day, or played chess with the landlord--and been
-beaten--or gone to bed with the refrain of the climbers' chorus still
-challenging the roar of the wind outside--
-
-               Come, let us tie the rope, the rope, the rope,
-
-                   Come, let us link it round, round, round.
-
-               And he that will not climb to-day
-
-                   Why--leave him on the ground, the ground, the ground.
-
-If you have done these things you will not make much of the call of the
-temple bells and the palm trees and the spicy garlic smells--least of
-all at New Year. You will hear instead the call of the Pillar Rock and
-the chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your oldest clothes and
-wind the rope around you--singing meanwhile “the rope, the rope,”--and
-take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will step out
-at that gateway of the enchanted land--Keswick. Keswick! Wastdale!...
-Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to whom they
-open the magic casements at a breath.
-
-And at Keswick you call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go
-to Keswick without calling on George Abraham. You might as well go to
-Wastdale Head without calling on the Pillar Rock. And George tells you
-that of course he will be over at Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will
-climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle with you on New Year's Day.
-
-The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave adieus, and are soon
-jolting down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where every object is
-an old friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the Bowder
-Stone and there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow of
-Cat Bells. (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and picking
-wimberries and waking the echoes of Grisedale.)
-
-And there before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the
-billowy summits of Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky
-sentinels of the valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name.
-Perhaps you jump down at Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to
-Rosthwaite and lunch.
-
-And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street is
-a myth and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of the
-sanctuary and the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling your
-rucksack on your back and your rope over your shoulder and set out on
-the three hours' tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.
-
-It is dark when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and
-these December days are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by
-the landlord and landlady--heirs of Auld Will Ritson--and in the flagged
-entrance you see coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of
-climbers' boots--boots that make the heart sing to look upon, boots that
-have struck music out of many a rocky breast, boots whose missing nails
-has each a story of its own. You put your own among them, don your
-slippers, and plunge among your old companions of the rocks with jolly
-greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it is--a master from a
-school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a young clergyman, a
-barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham, and so on.
-But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and the eternal
-boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.
-
-Who shall tell of the days and nights that follow?--of the songs that
-are sung, and the “traverses” that are made round the billiard room and
-the barn, of the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous
-climb, of the letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and
-the departures for the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich
-with new memories, you all foregather again--save only, perhaps, the
-jolly lawyer and his fellows who have lost their way back from Scafell,
-and for whom you are about to send out a search party when they turn up
-out of the darkness with new material for fireside tales.
-
-Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's Day--clear and
-bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost in the
-air. In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up ropes,
-putting on putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for boots
-(the boots are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing nails).
-We separate at the threshold--this group for the Great Gable, that for
-Scafell, ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock. It
-is a two and a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and as
-daylight is short there is no time to waste. We follow the water course
-up the valley, splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice, cross
-the stream where the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount the
-steep ascent of Black Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down lonely
-Ennerdale, where, springing from the flank of the Pillar mountain,
-is the great Rock we have come to challenge. It stands like a tower,
-gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600 feet from its northern base to its
-summit, split on the south side by Jordan Gap that divides the High Man
-or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser rock.
-
-We have been overtaken by another party of three from the inn--one in
-a white jersey which, for reasons that will appear, I shall always
-remember. Together we follow the High Level Traverse, the track that
-leads round the flank of the mountain to the top of Walker's Gully, the
-grim descent to the valley, loved by the climber for the perils to which
-it invites him. Here wre lunch and here we separate. We, unambitious
-(having three passengers in our party of five), are climbing the East
-face by the Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending by the New
-West route, one of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here; theirs
-is from the other side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I wish
-to speak, but of theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will find
-the Slab and Notch route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it is
-held in little esteem.
-
-With five on the rope, however, our progress is slow, and it is two
-o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring and triumphant, and
-stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar Rock, where the
-wind blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over half the
-peaks of Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in the
-book that lies under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on the
-West face for signs of our late companions. The sound of their voices
-comes up from below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a glimpse
-of their forms. “They're going to be late,” says George Abraham--the
-discoverer of the New West--and then he indicates the closing stages of
-the climb and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the most
-thrilling escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock--two men
-falling, and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of those
-three, two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the next
-year on the Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and turn
-cheerfully to descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route which
-ends on the slope of the mountain near to the starting point of the New
-West route.
-
-The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in the East sheds
-no light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are quite
-distinct, coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the directions
-and distinguish the speakers. “Can't understand why those lads are
-cutting it so fine,” says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace down
-cracks and grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and safety.
-And now we look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one thing
-is visible--a figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at full
-stretch. There it hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the rocks.
-
-[Illustration: 0047]
-
-The party, then, are only just making the traverse from the chimney to
-the right, the most difficult manoeuvre of the climb--a manoeuvre in
-which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain stationary while his
-fellows pass him. “This is bad,” says George Abraham and he prepares
-for a possible emergency. “Are you in difficulties? Shall we wait?” he
-cries. “Yes, wait.” The words rebound from the cliff in the still air
-like stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white jersey,
-still moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every word
-they speak echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board. You
-hear the iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds on
-the ringing wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if both
-feet are dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a hold.
-I fancy one or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look at
-each other in silent comment. And all the time the figure in white, now
-growing dim, is impaled on the face of the darkness, and the voices
-come down to us in brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon is
-sailing into the clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.
-
-At last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery “All
-right” drops down from above. The difficult operation is over, the
-scattered rocks are reached and nothing remains but the final slabs,
-which in the absence of ice offer no great difficulty. Their descent by
-the easy Jordan route will be quick. We turn to go with the comment that
-it is perhaps more sensational to watch a climb than to do one.
-
-And then we plunge over the debris behind Pisgah, climb up the Great
-Doup, where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we reach the friendly
-fence that has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down to the top of
-Black Sail Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours later we
-have rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.
-
-In a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one
-to his office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem
-prosaic and ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say
-only the word “Wastdale” to them and you shall awake its echoes; then
-you shall see their faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable
-things. They are no longer men of the world; they are spirits of the
-mountains.
-
-[Illustration: 0049]
-
-[Illustration: 0050]
-
-
-
-
-TWO VOICES
-
-|Yes,” said the man with the big voice, “I've seen it coming for years.
-Years.”
-
-“Have you?” said the man with the timid voice. He had taken his seat
-on the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of the tube
-strike that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of London.
-
-“Yes, years,” said big voice, crowding as much modesty into the
-admission as possible. “I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long way
-off. Suppose I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit psychic.”
-
-“Ah,” said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning of the
-word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it meant.
-
-“Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George--that's the man that
- up to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and
-property and things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.'
-Why, his speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's
-it's come back. I always said it would. I said we should pay for it.”
-
-“Did you, though?” observed timid voice--not questioningly, but as an
-assurance that he was listening attentively.
-
-“Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for years--years, I did.
-And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in no time. In the
-first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000 aeroplanes and
-train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what I said.
-But was it done?”
-
-“Of course not,” said timid voice.
-
-“I saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why,
-but there it is. I'm not much at the platform business--tub-thumping,
-I call it--but for seeing things far off--well, I'm a bit psychic, you
-know.”
-
-“Ah,” said timid voice, mournfully, “it's a pity some of those talking
-fellows are not psychic, too.” He'd got the word firmly now.
-
-“Them psychic!” said big voice, with scorn. “We know what they are.
-You see that Miss Asquith is marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word,
-he'll turn out to be a German, that's what he'll turn out to be. It's
-German money all round. Same with these strikes. There's German money
-behind them.”
-
-“Shouldn't wonder at all,” said timid voice.
-
-“I know,” said big voice. “I've a way of seeing things. The same in the
-Boer War. I saw that coming for years.”
-
-“Did you, indeed?” said timid voice.
-
-“Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to some of my friends. There it
-was in black and white. They said it was wonderful how it all turned
-out--two years, I said, 250 millions of money, and 20,000 casualties.
-That's what I said, and that's what it was. I said the Boers would win,
-and I claim they did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave them all
-they asked for.”
-
-“You were about right,” assented timid voice.
-
-“And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round his
-finger--that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his finger.
-Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building a
-fleet as big as ours.”
-
-“Never did like that man,” said timid voice.
-
-“It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the armistice
-means. They've escaped--and just when we'd got them down.”
-
-“It's a shame,” said timid voice.
-
-“This war ought to have gone on longer,” continued big voice. “My
-opinion is that the world wanted thinning out. People are too crowded.
-That's what they are--they're too crowded.”
-
-“I agree there,” said timid voice. “We wanted thinning.”
-
-“I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It ought to
-have gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should like to
-know his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says _John Bull_, and
-that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a case
-down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building society--regular
-chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building society
-went smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot.”
-
-“I don't like those goody-goody people,” said timid voice.
-
-“No,” said big voice. “William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what
-that man knew. 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women
-players,' he said. Strordinary how he knew things.”
-
-“Wonderful,” said timid voice.
-
-“There's never been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare
-knew--not one-half.”
-
-“No doubt about it,” said timid voice.
-
-“I consider that William Shakespeare was the most psychic man that ever
-lived. I don't suppose there was ever such a long-sighted man before
-_or_ since. He could see through anything. He'd have seen through Wilson
-and he'd have seen this war didn't stop before the job was done. It's a
-pity we haven't a William Shakespeare now. Lloyd George and Asquith
-are not in it with him. They're simply duds beside William Shakespeare.
-Couldn't hold a candle to him.”
-
-“Seems to me,” said timid voice, “that there's nobody, as you might say,
-worth anything to-day.”
-
-“Nobody,” said big voice. “We've gone right off. There used to be men.
-Old Dizzy, he was a man. So was Joseph Chamberlain. He was right about
-Tariff Reform. I saw it years before he did. Free Trade I said was all
-right years ago, when we were manufacturing for the world. But it's out
-of date. I saw it was out of date long before Joseph Chamberlain. It's
-the result of being long-sighted. I said to my father, 'If we stick to
-Free Trade this country is done.' That's what I said, and it's true. We
-_are_ done. Look at these strikes. We stick to things too long. I
-believe in looking ahead. When I was in America before the war they
-wouldn't believe I came from England. Wouldn't believe it. 'But the
-English are so slow,' they said, 'and you--why you want to be getting on
-in front of us.' That's my way. I look ahead and don't stand still.”
-
-“It's the best way too,” said timid voice. “We want more of it. We're
-too slow.”
-
-And so on. When I came to the end of my journey I rose so that the
-light of a lamp shone on the speakers as I passed. They were both
-well-dressed, ordinary-looking men. If I had passed them in the street
-I should have said they were intelligent men of the well-to-do business
-class. I have set down their conversation, which I could not help
-overhearing, and which was carried on by the big voice in a tone meant
-for publication, as exactly as I can recall it. There was a good deal
-more of it, all of the same character. You will laugh at it, or weep
-over it, according to your humour.
-
-[Illustration: 0055]
-
-
-
-
-ON BEING TIDY
-
-|Any careful observer of my habits would know that I am on the eve of
-an adventure--a holiday, or a bankruptcy, or a fire, or a voluntary
-liquidation (whatever that may be), or an elopement, or a duel, or a
-conspiracy, or--in short, of something out of the normal, something
-romantic or dangerous, pleasurable or painful, interrupting the calm
-current of my affairs. Being the end of July, he would probably say:
-That fellow is on the brink of the holiday fever. He has all the
-symptoms of the epidemic. Observe his negligent, abstracted manner.
-Notice his slackness about business--how he just comes and looks in and
-goes out as though he were a visitor paying a call, or a person who had
-been left a fortune and didn't care twopence what happened. Observe his
-clothes, how they are burgeoning into unaccustomed gaiety, even levity.
-Is not his hat set on at just a shade of a sporting angle? Does not
-his stick twirl with a hint of irresponsible emotions? Is there not the
-glint of far horizons in his eye? Did you not hear him humming as he
-came up the stairs? Yes, assuredly the fellow is going for a holiday.
-
-Your suspicions would be confirmed when you found me ransacking my
-private room and clearing up my desk. The news that I am clearing up my
-desk has been an annual sensation for years. I remember a colleague of
-mine once coming in and finding me engaged in that spectacular feat.
-His face fell with apprehension. His voice faltered. “I hope you are not
-leaving us,” he said. He, poor fellow, could not think of anything else
-that could account for so unusual an operation.
-
-For I am one of those people who treat their desks with respect. We do
-not believe in worrying them about their contents. We do not bully them
-into disclosing their secrets. We stuff the drawers full of papers and
-documents, and leave them to mellow and ripen. And when the drawers are
-full we pile up other papers and documents on either side of us; and the
-higher the pile gets the more comfortable and cosy we feel. We would not
-disturb them for worlds. Why should we set our sleeping dogs barking at
-us when they are willing to go on sleeping if we leave them alone? And
-consider the show they make. No one coming to see us can fail to be
-impressed by such piles of documents. They realise how busy we are. They
-understand that we have no time for idle talk. They see that we have
-all these papers to dispose of--otherwise, why are they there? They get
-their business done and go away quickly, and spread the news of what
-tremendous fellows we are for work.
-
-I am told by one who worked with him, that old Lord Strathcona knew the
-trick quite well, and used it unblushingly. When a visitor was announced
-he tumbled his papers about in imposing confusion and was discovered
-breasting the mighty ocean of his labours, his chin resolutely out
-of the water. But he was a supreme artist in this form of amiable
-imposture. On one occasion he was entertained at a great public dinner
-in a provincial city. In the midst of the proceedings a portly flunkey
-was observed carrying a huge envelope, with seals and trappings, on a
-salver. For whom was this momentous document intended? Ah, he has paused
-behind the grand old man with the wonderful snowy head. It is for him.
-The company looks on in respectful silence. Even here this astonishing
-old man cannot escape the cares of office. As he takes the envelope his
-neighbour at the table looks at the address. It was in Strathcona's own
-hand-writing!
-
-But we of the rank and file are not dishevelled by artifice, like this
-great man. It is a natural gift. And do not suppose that our disorder
-makes us unhappy. We like it. We follow our vocation, as Falstaff says.
-Some people are born tidy and some are born untidy. We were bom untidy,
-and if good people, taking pity on us, try to make us tidy we get lost.
-It was so with George Crabbe. He lived in magnificent disorder, papers
-and books and letters all over the floor, piled on every chair, surging
-up to the ceiling. Once, in his absence, his niece tidied up for him.
-When he came back he found himself like a stranger in a strange land.
-He did not know his way about in this desolation of tidiness, and he
-promptly restored the familiar disorder, so that he could find things.
-It sounds absurd, of course, but we people with a genius for untidiness
-must always seem absurd to the tidy people. They cannot understand that
-there is a method in our muddle, an order in our disorder, secret paths
-through the wilderness known only to our feet, that, in short, we are
-rather like cats whose perceptions become more acute the darker it gets.
-It is not true that we never find things. We often find things.
-
-And consider the joy of finding things you don't hope to find. You, sir,
-sitting at your spotless desk, with your ordered and labelled shelves
-about you, and your files and your letter-racks, and your card indexes
-and your cross references, and your this, that, and the other--what do
-you know of the delights of which I speak? You do not come suddenly
-and ecstatically upon the thing you seek. You do not know the shock of
-delighted discovery. You do not shout “Eureka,” and summon your family
-around you to rejoice in the miracle that has happened. No star swims
-into your ken out of the void. You cannot be said to find things at
-all, for you never lose them, and things must be lost before they can
-be truly found. The father of the Prodigal had to lose his son before
-he could experience the joy that has become an immortal legend of the
-world. It is we who lose things, not you, sir, who never find them, who
-know the Feast of the Fatted Calf.
-
-This is not a plea for untidiness. I am no hot gospeller of disorder.
-I only seek to make the best, of a bad job, and to show that we untidy
-fellows are not without a case, have our romantic compensations, moments
-of giddy exaltation unknown to those who are endowed with the pedestrian
-and profitable virtue of tidiness. That is all. I would have the
-pedestrian virtue if I could. In other days, before I had given up hope
-of reforming myself, and when I used to make good resolutions as piously
-as my neighbours, I had many a spasm of tidiness. I looked with envy on
-my friend Higginson, who was a miracle of order, could put his hand on
-anything he wanted in the dark, kept his documents and his files and
-records like regiments of soldiers obedient to call, knew what he had
-written on 4th March 1894, and what he had said on 10th January 1901,
-and had a desk that simply perspired with tidiness. And in a spirit
-of emulation I bought a roll-top desk. I believed that tidiness was a
-purchasable commodity. You went to a furniture dealer and bought a large
-roll-top desk, and when it came home the genius of order came home with
-it. The bigger the desk, the more intricate its devices, the larger
-was the measure of order bestowed on you. My desk was of the first
-magnitude. It had an inconceivable wealth of drawers and pigeon-holes.
-It was a desk of many mansions. And I labelled them all, and gave them
-all separate jobs to perform.
-
-And then I sat back and looked the future boldly in the face. Now, said
-I, the victory is won. Chaos and old night are banished. Order reigns
-in Warsaw. I have but to open a drawer and every secret I seek will
-leap magically to light. My articles will write themselves, for every
-reference will come to my call, obedient as Ariel to the bidding of
-Prospero.
-
-                   “Approach, my Ariel; come,”
-
-I shall say, and from some remote fastness the obedient spirit will
-appear with--
-
-               “All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come
-
-               To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,
-
-               To swim, to dive into the sea, to ride
-
-               On the curl'd clouds.”
-
-I shall know where Aunt Jane's letters are, and where my bills are,
-and my cuttings about this, that, and the other, and my diaries and
-notebooks, and the time-table and the street guide. I shall never be
-short of a match or a spare pair of spectacles, or a pencil, or--in
-short, life will henceforth be an easy amble to old age. For a week it
-worked like a charm. Then the demon of disorder took possession of the
-beast. It devoured everything and yielded up nothing. Into its soundless
-deeps my merchandise sank to oblivion. And I seemed to sink with it.
-It was not a desk, but a tomb. One day I got a man to take it away to a
-second-hand shop.
-
-Since then I have given up being tidy. I have realised that the quality
-of order is not purchasable at furniture shops, is not a quality of
-external things, but an indwelling spirit, a frame of mind, a habit that
-perhaps may be acquired but cannot be bought.
-
-I have a smaller desk with fewer drawers, all of them nicely choked up
-with the litter of the past. Once a year I have a gaol delivery of the
-incarcerated. The ghosts come out into the daylight, and I face them
-unflinching and unafraid. They file past, pointing minatory fingers at
-me as they go into the waste-paper basket. They file past now. But I
-do not care a dump; for to-morrow I shall seek fresh woods and pastures
-new. To-morrow the ghosts of that old untidy desk will have no terrors
-for my emancipated spirit.
-
-[Illustration: 0061]
-
-[Illustration: 0062]
-
-
-
-
-AN EPISODE
-
-|We were talking of the distinction between madness and sanity when one
-of the company said that we were all potential madmen, just as every
-gambler was a potential suicide, or just as every hero was a potential
-coward.
-
-“I mean,” he said, “that the difference between the sane and the
-insane is not that the sane man never has mad thoughts. He has, but he
-recognises them as mad, and keeps his hand on the rein of action. He
-thinks them, and dismisses them. It is so with the saint and the sinner.
-The saint is not exempt from evil thoughts, but he knows they are evil,
-is master of himself, and puts them away.
-
-“I speak with experience,” he went on, “for the potential madman in me
-once nearly got the upper hand. I won, but it was a near thing, and if
-I had gone down in that struggle I should have been branded for all
-time as a criminal lunatic, and very properly put away in some place of
-safety. Yet I suppose no one ever suspected me of lunacy.”
-
-“Tell us about it,” we said in chorus.
-
-“It was one evening in New York,” he said. “I had had a very exhausting
-time, and was no doubt mentally tired. I had taken tea with two friends
-at the Belmont Hotel, and as we found we were all disengaged that
-evening we agreed to spend it together at the Hippodrome, where a revue,
-winding up with a great spectacle that had thrilled New York, was being
-presented. When we went to the box office we found that we could not get
-three seats together, so we separated, my friends going to the floor of
-the house and I to the dress circle.
-
-“If you are familiar with the place you will know its enormous
-dimensions and the vastness of the stage. When I took my seat next but
-one to one of the gangways the house was crowded and the performance had
-begun. It was trivial and ordinary enough, but it kept me amused, and
-between the acts I went out to see the New Yorkers taking 'soft' drinks
-in the promenades. I did not join them in that mild indulgence, nor did
-I speak to anyone.
-
-“After the interval before the concluding spectacle I did not return to
-my seat until the curtain was up. The transformation hit me like a
-blow. The huge stage had been converted into a lake, and behind the lake
-through filmy draperies there was the suggestion of a world in flames.
-I passed to my seat and sat down. I turned from the blinding glow of the
-conflagration in front and cast my eye over the sea of faces that filled
-the great theatre from floor to ceiling. 'Heavens! if there were a fire
-in this place,' I thought. At that thought the word 'Fire' blazed in my
-brain like a furnace. 'What if some madman cried Fire?' flashed through
-my mind, and then '_What if I cried Fire?_'
-
-“At that hideous suggestion, the demon word that suffused my brain leapt
-like a shrieking maniac within me and screamed and fought for utterance.
-I felt it boiling in my throat, I felt it on my tongue. I felt myself to
-be two persons engaged in a deadly grapple--a sane person struggling to
-keep his feet against the mad rush of an insane monster. I clenched my
-teeth. So long as I kept my teeth tight--tight--tight the raging
-madman would fling himself at the bars in vain. But could I keep up the
-struggle till he fell exhausted? I gripped the arms of my seat. I felt
-beads of perspiration breaking out on my right brow. How singular that
-in moments of strain the moisture always broke out at that spot. I could
-notice these things with a curious sense of detachment as if there were
-a third person within me watching the frenzied conflict. And still
-that titanic impulse lay on my tongue and hammered madly at my clenched
-teeth. Should I go out? That would look odd, and be an ignominious
-surrender. I must fight this folly down honestly and not run away from
-it. If I had a book I would try to read. If I had a friend beside me I
-would talk. But both these expedients were denied me. Should I turn to
-my unknown neighbour and break the spell with an inconsequent remark or
-a request for his programme? I looked at him out of the tail of my eye.
-He was a youngish man, in evening dress, and sitting alone as I was. But
-his eyes were fixed intently on the stage. He was obviously gripped by
-the spectacle. Had I spoken to him earlier in the evening the course
-would have been simple; but to break the ice in the midst of this tense
-silence was impossible. Moreover, I had a programme on my knees and what
-was there to say?...
-
-“I turned my eyes from the stage. What was going on there I could not
-tell. It was a blinding blur of Fire that seemed to infuriate the
-monster within me. I looked round at the house. I looked up at the
-ceiling and marked its gilded ornaments. I turned and gazed intensely at
-the occupants of the boxes, trying to turn the current of my mind into
-speculations about their dress, their faces, their characters. But the
-tyrant was too strong to be overthrown by such conscious effort. I
-looked up at the gallery; I looked down at the pit; I tried to busy my
-thoughts with calculations about the numbers present, the amount of
-money in the house, the cost of running the establishment--anything. In
-vain. I leaned back in my seat, my teeth still clenched, my hands still
-gripping the arms of the chair. How still the house was! How enthralled
-it seemed!... I was conscious that people about me were noticing my
-restless inattention. If they knew the truth.... If they could see the
-raging torment that was battering at my teeth.... Would it never go? How
-long would this wild impulse burn on my tongue? Was there no distraction
-that would
-
-               Cleanse the stuffed bosom of this perilous stuff
-
-               That feeds upon the brain.
-
-“I recalled the reply--
-
-               Therein the patient must minister to himself.
-
-“How fantastic it seemed. Here was that cool observer within me quoting
-poetry over my own delirium without being able to allay it. What a
-mystery was the brain that could become the theatre of such wild
-drama. I turned my glance to the orchestra. Ah, what was that they were
-playing?... Yes, it was a passage from Dvorak's American Symphony. How
-familiar it was! My mind incontinently leapt to a remote scene, I saw
-a well-lit room and children round the hearth and a figure at the
-piano....
-
-“It was as though the madman within me had fallen stone dead. I looked
-at the stage coolly, and observed that someone was diving into the lake
-from a trapeze that seemed a hundred feet high. The glare was still
-behind, but I knew it for a sham glare. What a fool I had been.... But
-what a hideous time I had had.... And what a close shave.... I took out
-my handkerchief and drew it across my forehead.”
-
-[Illustration: 0066]
-
-[Illustration: 0067]
-
-
-
-ON SUPERSTITIONS
-
-|It was inevitable that the fact that a murder has taken place at a
-house with the number 13 in a street, the letters of whose name number
-13, would not pass unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that
-have been committed, I suppose we should find that as many have taken
-place at No. 6 or No. 7, or any other number you choose, as at No.
-13--that the law of averages is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But
-this consideration does not prevent the world remarking on the fact when
-No. 13 has its turn. Not that the world believes there is anything
-in the superstition. It is quite sure it is a mere childish folly, of
-course. Few of us would refuse to take a house because its number was
-13, or decline an invitation to dinner because there were to be 13 at
-table. But most of us would be just a shade happier if that desirable
-residence were numbered 11, and not any the less pleased with the dinner
-if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept him away. We would
-not confess this little weakness to each other. We might even refuse to
-admit it to ourselves, but it is there.
-
-That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are
-numerous streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which
-there is no house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a
-bed in a hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though
-it has worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations
-of a discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house,
-and into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of
-a bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession
-to the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery
-is a matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow
-on the mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat
-recovery. Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers
-in the sick bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of
-a certain state of mind in the patient. There are few more curious
-revelations in that moving record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences
-during the war, than the case of the man who died of a pimple on his
-nose. He had been hideously mutilated in battle and was brought into
-hospital a sheer wreck; but he was slowly patched up and seemed to have
-been saved when a pimple appeared on his nose. It was nothing in itself,
-but it was enough to produce a mental state that checked the flickering
-return of life. It assumed a fantastic importance in the mind of the
-patient who, having survived the heavy blows of fate, died of something
-less than a pin prick. It is not difficult to understand that so fragile
-a hold of life might yield to the sudden discovery that you were lying
-in No. 13 bed.
-
-I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
-wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of
-all the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that
-I constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have
-associated the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had
-anything but the most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved
-a bus, and as free from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I
-would not change its number if I had the power to do so. But there are
-other circumstances of which I should find it less easy to clear myself
-of suspicion under cross examination. I never see a ladder against a
-house side without feeling that it is advisable to walk round it rather
-than under it. I say to myself that this is not homage to a foolish
-superstition, but a duty to my family. One must think of one's family.
-The fellow at the top of the ladder may drop anything. He may even
-drop himself. He may have had too much to drink. He may be a victim of
-epileptic fits, and epileptic fits, as everyone knows, come on at the
-most unseasonable times and places. It is a mere measure of ordinary
-safety to walk round the ladder. No man is justified in inviting danger
-in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle fancy. Moreover, probably
-that fancy has its roots in the common-sense fact that a man on a ladder
-does occasionally drop things. No doubt many of our superstitions have
-these commonplace and sensible origins. I imagine, for example, that the
-Jewish objection to pork as unclean on religious grounds is only due to
-the fact that in Eastern climates it is unclean on physical grounds.
-
-All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather
-glad that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing
-so. Even if--conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to
-myself--I walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not
-done so as a kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have
-challenged it rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way
-of dodging the absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the
-ladder. This is not easy. In the same way I am sensible of a certain
-satisfaction when I see the new moon in the open rather than through
-glass, and over my right shoulder rather than my left. I would not for
-any consideration arrange these things consciously; but if they happen
-so I fancy I am better pleased than if they do not. And on these
-occasions I have even caught my hand--which chanced to be in my pocket
-at the time--turning over money, a little surreptitiously I thought,
-but still undeniably turning it. Hands have habits of their own and one
-can't always be watching them.
-
-But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover
-in ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a
-creed outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the
-laws of the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
-superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and
-man seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
-neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of
-their hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
-inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
-misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon
-of life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of
-battles being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more
-relation to the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When
-Pompey was afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as prætor he shouted
-to the Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election
-postponed, for the Romans would never transact business after it had
-thundered. Alexander surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took
-counsel with them as a modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers.
-Even so great a man as Cæsar and so modern and enlightened a man as
-Cicero left their fate to augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were
-right and sometimes they were wrong, but whether right or wrong they
-were equally meaningless. Cicero lost his life by trusting to the wisdom
-of crows. When he was in flight from Antony and Cæsar Augustus he put to
-sea and might have escaped. But some crows chanced to circle round his
-vessel, and he took the circumstance to be unfavourable to his action,
-returned to shore and was murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece
-consulted the omens and the oracles where the farmer to-day is only
-careful of his manures.
-
-I should have liked to have seen Cæsar and I should have liked to have
-heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later
-day and who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the
-better end of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad.
-We do not know much more of the Power that
-
-                   Turns the handle of this idle show
-
-than our forefathers did, but at least we have escaped the grotesque
-shadows that enveloped them. We do not look for divine guidance in the
-entrails of animals or the flight of crows, and the House of Commons
-does not adjourn at a clap of thunder.
-
-[Illustration: 0072]
-
-[Illustration: 0073]
-
-
-
-
-ON POSSESSION
-
-|I met a lady the other day who had travelled much and seen much, and
-who talked with great vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one
-peculiarity about her. If I happened to say that I too had been, let us
-say, to Tangier, her interest in Tangier immediately faded away and
-she switched the conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not
-been, and where therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about
-the Honble. Ulick de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had
-the honour of meeting that eminent personage. And so with books and
-curiosities, places and things--she was only interested in them so long
-as they were her exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and
-when she ceased to possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have
-Tangier all to herself she did not want it at all.
-
-And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
-people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
-not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
-exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
-countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else
-in the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching
-that appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he
-was getting something that no one else had got, and when he found that
-someone else had got it its value ceased to exist.
-
-The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything
-in the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
-material thing. I do not own--to take an example--that wonderful picture
-by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his grandchild. I
-have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own room I could
-not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for years. It
-is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries of the
-mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have read, and
-beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it whenever I
-like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the painter saw in
-the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the bottle nose as he
-stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long centuries ago. The
-pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may share this spiritual
-ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine, or the shade of
-a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or the song of the
-lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is common to
-all.
-
-From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
-woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of
-solitude which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient
-Britons hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense
-a certain noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether
-he has seen these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the
-little hamlet know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them
-for a perpetual playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but
-we could not have a richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on
-every tree. For the pleasure of things is not in their possession but in
-their use.
-
-It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised
-long ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who
-scurried through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to
-say that they had done something that other people had not done. Even
-so great a man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive
-possession. De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at
-the mountains, he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene,
-whereupon Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone
-else to praise _his_ mountains. He was the high priest of nature,
-and had something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of
-revelation, and anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence,
-except through him, was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to
-nature.
-
-In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
-possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and
-Bernard Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy
-of the free human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of
-communism. On this point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's
-doctrine and pointed out that the State is not a mere individual, but
-a body composed of dissimilar parts whose unity is to be drawn “ex
-dissimilium hominum consensu.” I am as sensitive as anyone about my
-title to my personal possessions. I dislike having my umbrella stolen
-or my pocket picked, and if I found a burglar on my premises I am sure I
-shouldn't be able to imitate the romantic example of the good bishop in
-“Les Misérables.” When I found the other day that some young fruit trees
-I had left in my orchard for planting had been removed in the night I
-was sensible of a very commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean
-Valjean was I shouldn't have asked him to come and take some more trees.
-I should have invited him to return what he had removed or submit to
-consequences that follow in such circumstances.
-
-I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
-necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
-society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who
-ventured to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or
-two hence. Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control
-and the range of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If
-mankind finds that it can live more conveniently and more happily
-without private property it will do so. In spite of the Decalogue
-private property is only a human arrangement, and no reasonable observer
-of the operation of the arrangement will pretend that it executes
-justice unfailingly in the affairs of men. But because the idea of
-private property has been permitted to override with its selfishness the
-common good of humanity, it does not follow that there are not limits
-within which that idea can function for the general convenience and
-advantage. The remedy is not in abolishing it altogether, but in
-subordinating it to the idea of equal justice and community of purpose.
-It will, reasonably understood, deny me the right to call the coal
-measures, which were laid with the foundations of the earth, my private
-property or to lay waste a countryside for deer forests, but it will
-still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of ownership. And the
-more true the equation of private and public rights is, the more secure
-shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and common
-interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the grotesque
-and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of private
-property which to some minds make the idea of private property itself
-inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea of
-private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
-the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger
-of attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard
-without any apprehensions as to their safety.
-
-But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
-ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
-things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment.
-I do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
-experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
-mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. “I do
-not know how it is,” said a very rich man in my hearing, “but when I
-am in London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I
-want to be in London.” He was not wanting to escape from London or the
-country, but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions
-and was bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher “his hands were full
-but his soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world.” There
-was wisdom as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that “he who was
-born first has the greatest number of old clothes.” It is not a bad rule
-for the pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage
-to those who take a pride in its abundance.
-
-[Illustration: 0078]
-
-
-[Illustration: 0079]
-
-
-
-
-ON BORES
-
-|I was talking in the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat
-blunt manner when Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and
-began:
-
-“Well, I think America is bound to----” “Now, do you mind giving us two
-minutes?” broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom, unabashed
-and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group. Poor
-Blossom! I had almost said “Dear Blossom.” For he is really an excellent
-fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that he is a
-bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable company.
-You feel that you could love Blossom if he would only keep away. If
-you heard of his death you would be genuinely grieved and would send
-a wreath to his grave and a nice letter of condolence to his wife and
-numerous children.
-
-But it is only absence that makes the heart grow fond of Blossom. When
-he appears all your affection for him withers. You hope that he will not
-see you. You shrink to your smallest dimensions. You talk with an air of
-intense privacy. You keep your face averted. You wonder whether the back
-of your head is easily distinguishable among so many heads. All in vain.
-He approacheth with the remorselessness of fate. He putteth his hand
-upon your shoulder. He remarketh with the air of one that bringeth new
-new's and good news--“Well, I think that America is bound to----” And
-then he taketh a chair and thou lookest at the clock and wonderest how
-soon thou canst decently remember another engagement.
-
-Blossom is the bore courageous. He descends on the choicest company
-without fear or parley. Out, sword, and at 'em, is his motto. He
-advances with a firm voice and a confident air, as of one who knows he
-is welcome everywhere and has only to choose his company. He will have
-nothing but the best, and as he enters the room you may see his
-eye roving from table to table, not in search of the glad eye of
-recognition, but of the most select companionship, and having marked
-down his prey he goes forward boldly to the attack. Salutes the circle
-with easy familiarity, draw's up his chair with assured and masterful
-authority, and plunges into the stream of talk with the heavy impact
-of a walrus or hippopotamus taking a bath. The company around him melts
-away, but he is not dismayed. Left alone with a circle of empty chairs,
-he riseth like a giant refreshed, casteth his eye abroad, noteth another
-group that whetteth his appetite for good fellowship, moveth towards it
-with bold and resolute front. You may see him put to flight as many as
-three circles inside an hour, and retire at the end, not because he is
-beaten, but because there is nothing left worth crossing swords with. “A
-very good club to-night,” he says to Mrs B. as he puts on his slippers.
-
-Not so Trip. He is the bore circumspect. He proceeds by sap and mine
-where Blossom charges the battlements sword in hand. He enters timidly
-as one who hopes that he will be unobserved. He goes to the table and
-examines the newspapers, takes one and seats himself alone. But not so
-much alone that he is entirely out of the range of those fellows in the
-corner who keep up such a cut-and-thrust of wit. Perchance one of them
-may catch his eye and open the circle to him. He readeth his paper
-sedulously, but his glance passeth incontinently outside the margin or
-over the top of the page to the coveted group. No responsive eye meets
-his. He moveth just a thought nearer along the sofa by the wall. Now
-he is well within hearing. Now he is almost of the company itself.
-But still unseen--noticeably unseen. He puts down his paper, not
-ostentatiously but furtively. He listens openly to the conversation,
-as one who has been enmeshed in it unconsciously, accidentally,
-almost unwillingly, for was he not absorbed in his paper until this
-conversation disturbed him? And now it would be almost uncivil not to
-listen. He waits for a convenient opening and then gently insinuates
-a remark like one venturing on untried ice. And the ice breaks and the
-circle melts. For Trip, too, is a bore.
-
-I remember in those wonderful submarine pictures of the brothers
-Williamson, which we saw in London some time ago, a strange fish at
-whose approach all the other fish turned tail. It was not, I think, that
-they feared him, nor that he was less presentable in appearance than any
-other fish, but simply that there was something about him that made them
-remember things. I forget what his name was, or whether he even had a
-name. But his calling was obvious. He was the Club Bore. He was the fish
-who sent the other fish about their business. I thought of Blossom as
-I saw that lonely creature whisking through the water in search of some
-friendly ear into which he could remark--“Well, I think that America is
-bound to----” or words to that effect. I thought how superior an animal
-is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish did. He
-hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb. He
-looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth even
-to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his
-feelings.
-
-It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of
-sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists
-on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but
-this is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. And the humour must
-not be that counterfeit currency which consists in the retailing of
-borrowed stories. “Of all bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang,
-and Heaven in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate its species,”
- says De Quincey, “the most insufferable is the teller of good stories.”
- It is an over hard saying, subject to exceptions; but it contains the
-essential truth, for the humour of good company must be an authentic
-emanation of personality and not a borrowed tale. It is no discredit to
-be a bore. Very great men have been bores! I fancy that Macaulay,
-with all his transcendent gifts, was a bore. My head aches even at the
-thought of an evening spent in the midst of the terrific torrent of
-facts and certainties that poured from that brilliant and amiable man. I
-find myself in agreement for once with Melbourne who wished that he
-was “as cocksure of one thing as Macaulay was of everything.” There is
-pretty clear evidence that Wordsworth was a bore and that Coleridge was
-a bore, and I am sure Bob Southey must have been an intolerable
-bore. And Neckar's daughter was fortunate to escape Gibbon for he was
-assuredly a prince of bores. He took pains to leave posterity in
-no doubt on the point. He wrote his “Autobiography” which, as a wit
-observed, showed that “he did not know the difference between himself
-and the Roman Empire. He has related his 'progressions from London to
-Bariton and from Bariton to London' in the same monotonous, majestic
-periods that he recorded the fall of states and empires.” Yes, an
-indubitable bore. Yet these were all admirable men and even great men.
-Let not therefore the Blossoms and the Trips be discomfited. It may be
-that it is not they who are not fit company for us, but we who are not
-fit company for them.
-
-[Illustration: 0084]
-
-[Illustration: 0085]
-
-
-
-
-A LOST SWARM
-
-|We were busy with the impossible hen when the alarm came. The
-impossible hen is sitting on a dozen eggs in the shed, and, like the boy
-on the burning deck, obstinately refuses to leave the post of duty. A
-sense of duty is an excellent thing, but even a sense of duty can be
-carried to excess, and this hen's sense of duty is simply a disease. She
-is so fiercely attached to her task that she cannot think of eating, and
-resents any attempt to make her eat as a personal affront or a malignant
-plot against her impending family. Lest she should die at her post, a
-victim to a misguided hunger strike, we were engaged in the delicate
-process of substituting a more reasonable hen, and it was at this moment
-that a shout from the orchard announced that No. 5 was swarming.
-
-It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had
-been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells
-visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around
-the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the
-thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more
-exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You
-pass it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched
-within. The next, the whole colony roars out like a cataract, envelops
-the hive in a cloud of living dust until the queen has emerged and gives
-direction to the masses that slowly cohere around her as she settles
-on some branch. The excitement is contagious. It is a call to adventure
-with the unknown, an adventure sharpened by the threat of loss and tense
-with the instancy of action. They have the start. It is your wit against
-their impulse, your strategy against their momentum. The cloud thins
-and expands as it moves away from the hive and you are puzzled to
-know whither the main stream is moving in these ever widening folds of
-motion. The first indeterminate signs of direction to-day were towards
-the beech woods behind the cottage, but with the aid of a syringe we put
-up a barrage of water in that direction, and headed them off towards a
-row of chestnuts and limes at the end of the paddock beyond the orchard.
-A swift encircling move, armed with syringe and pail, brought them again
-under the improvised rainstorm. They concluded that it was not such a
-fine day as they had thought after all, and that they had better take
-shelter at once, and to our entire content the mass settled in a great
-blob on a conveniently low bough of a chestnut tree. Then, by the aid of
-a ladder and patient coaxing, the blob was safely transferred to a skep,
-and carried off triumphantly to the orchard.
-
-[Illustration: 0089]
-
-And now, but for the war, all would have been well. For, but for the
-war, there would have been a comfortable home in which the adventurers
-could have taken up their new quarters. But hives are as hard to come by
-in these days as petrol or matches, or butter or cheese, or most of the
-other common things of life. We had ransacked England for hives and the
-neighbourhood for wood with which to make hives; but neither could be
-had, though promises were plenty, and here was the beginning of the
-swarms of May, each of them worth a load of hay according to the adage,
-and never a hive to welcome them with. Perhaps to-morrow something would
-arrive, if not from Gloucester, then from Surrey. If only the creatures
-would make themselves at home in the skep for a day or two....
-
-But no. For two hours or so all seemed well. Then perhaps they found
-the skep too hot, perhaps they detected the odour of previous tenants,
-perhaps--but who can read the thoughts of these inscrutable creatures?
-Suddenly the skep was enveloped in a cyclone of bees, and again the
-orchard sang with the exciting song of the wings. For a moment the cloud
-seemed to hover over an apple tree near by, and once more the syringe
-was at work insisting, in spite of the sunshine, that it was a
-dreadfully wet day on which to be about, and that a dry skep,
-even though pervaded by the smell of other bees, had points worth
-considering. In vain. This time they had made up their minds. It may
-be that news had come to them, from one of the couriers sent out to
-prospect for fresh quarters, of a suitable home elsewhere, perhaps a
-deserted hive, perhaps a snug hollow in some porch or in the bole of an
-ancient tree. Whatever the goal, the decision was final. One moment the
-cloud was about us; the air was filled with the high-pitched roar of
-thirty thousand pair of wings. The next moment the cloud had gone--gone
-sailing high over the trees in the paddock and out across the valley. We
-burst through the paddock fence into the cornfield beyond; but we might
-as well have chased the wind. Our first load of hay had taken wings
-and gone beyond recovery. For an hour or two there circled round the
-deserted skep a few hundred odd bees who had apparently been out when
-the second decision to migrate was taken, and found themselves homeless
-and queenless. I saw some of them try to enter other hives, but they
-were promptly ejected as foreigners by the sentries who keep the porch
-and admit none who do not carry the authentic odour of the hive. Perhaps
-the forlorn creatures got back to No. 5, and the young colony left in
-possession of that tenement.
-
-We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full of
-hope, for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's bench
-under the pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and plane,
-and before nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And it
-never rains but it pours--here is a telegram telling us of three hives
-on the way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We will
-harvest our loads of hay before they take wing.
-
-[Illustration: 0090]
-
-[Illustration: 0091]
-
-
-
-
-YOUNG AMERICA
-
-|If you want to understand America,” said my host, “come and see
-her young barbarians at play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at
-Princeton. It will be a great game. Come and see it.”
-
-He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured
-victory in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but
-consider the record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was
-as much ahead of Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of
-Cambridge on the river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It
-was like a Derby Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the
-great hall of that magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated
-men and women, wearing the favours of the rival colleges--yellow for
-Princeton and red for Harvard--passed through the gateways to the
-platform, filling train after train, that dipped under the Hudson and,
-coming out into the sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered
-away with its jolly load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country,
-through historic Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off
-towers of Princeton.
-
-And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges,
-such a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
-“how-d'ye-do's” and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
-times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
-haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured
-in the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some
-terrific memorial of antiquity--seen from without a mighty circular wall
-of masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval,
-or rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the
-level of the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand
-spectators--on this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side,
-with the sunlight full upon them, the yellows.
-
-Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
-playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings---for this American
-game is much more complicated than English Rugger--its goal-posts and
-its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
-minute record of the game.
-
-The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
-there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
-music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
-like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
-horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
-opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
-
-Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
-Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
-greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.
-
-The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war.
-Three flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They
-shout through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line,
-they wave their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with
-that leap there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of
-cheers roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
-demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of
-a tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey--the growl rising
-to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
-
-The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell,
-roar for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of
-us, and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their
-limbs we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I
-cannot hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off
-with the battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand
-lusty pairs of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid,
-we rise like one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our
-cheer-leaders, gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad
-dervishes, we shout back the song of “Har-vard! Har-vard!”
-
-And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into
-the field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson,
-that in the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and
-helmeted so that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic
-muscular development and horrific visage. At their entrance the
-megaphones opposite are heard again, and the enemy host rises and
-repeats its wonderful cheer and tiger growl. We rise and heave the
-challenge back. And now the teams are in position, the front lines, with
-the ball between, crouching on the ground for the spring. In the silence
-that has suddenly fallen on the scene, one hears short, sharp cries of
-numbers. “Five!” “Eleven!” “Three!” “Six!” “Ten!” like the rattle of
-musketry. Then--crash! The front lines have leapt on each other. There
-is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs and bodies. The swirl clears and
-men are seen lying about all over the line as though a shell had burst
-in their midst, while away to the right a man with the ball is brought
-down with a crash to the ground by another, who leaps at him like a
-projectile that completes its trajectory at his ankles.
-
-I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
-thrilling minutes--which, with intervals and stoppages for the
-attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours--how the battle
-surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the tension
-of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how Harvard
-scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm of
-victory, how Princeton drew level--a cyclone from the other side!--and
-forged ahead--another cyclone--how man after man went down like an ox,
-was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how another
-brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last hardly a
-man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every convenient
-interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we jumped up
-and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how the match
-ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of victory that
-is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters--all this is recorded
-in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives in my mind as
-a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous “rag” in which young and old, gravity
-and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly confounded.
-
-“And what did you think of it?” asked my host as we rattled back to New
-York in the darkness that night. “I think it has helped me to understand
-America,” I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
-explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.
-
-[Illustration: 0095]
-
-[Illustration: 0096]
-
-
-
-
-ON GREAT REPLIES
-
-|At a dinner table the other night, the talk turned upon a certain
-politician whose cynical traffic in principles and loyalties has
-eclipsed even the record of Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one
-defender, an amiable and rather portentous gentleman who did not so much
-talk as lecture, and whose habit of looking up abstractedly and fixedly
-at some invisible altitude gave him the impression of communing with the
-Almighty. He was profuse in his admissions and apologies, but he wound
-up triumphantly with the remark:
-
-“But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.”
-
-“So was Madame de Pompadour,” said a voice from the other side of the
-table.
-
-It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
-replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician
-with a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of
-democracy who, like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things
-for ambition and power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through
-the dull, solemn man on the other side of the table like a rapier. There
-was no reply. There was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash
-of lightning. It revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift,
-searching intelligence, equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that
-went with deadly certainty to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed
-on the whole landscape of discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that
-gave it larger significance and range.
-
-It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour
-and finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
-absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and
-personality. There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning
-phrase that has leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental
-things. I do not know much about the military genius or the deeds of
-Augureau, but I know the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon
-about the celebration at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial
-ambitions of the First Consul. Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought
-of the ceremony. “Oh, it was very fine,” replied the general; “there was
-nothing wanting, _except the million of men who have perished in pulling
-down what you are setting up_.”
-
-And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
-the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
-make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
-bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
-him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud
-Italian, a poor peasant's son--a miserable friar of a country town--was
-prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
-Christendom.
-
-“What!” said the Cardinal at last to him, “do you think the Pope cares
-for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
-than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
-_you--you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you
-be then--where will you be then?”
-
-“Then, as now,” replied Luther. “Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
-God.”
-
-<b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
-venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
-century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man--one of the
-profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
-country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
-brilliant author of the papers on “The Crisis,” that kept the flame of
-the rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of
-the United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the
-Bastille for presentation to Washington. The true character of this
-great Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had
-discoursed “On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.” And
-Paine answered, “God did not make rich and poor. God made male and
-female and gave the earth for their inheritance.”</b>
-
-It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
-this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
-to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
-Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
-boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
-remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. “Indeed,”
- said the President. “Then whose boots do they black?” There was the same
-mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
-inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. “I do not know,
-madam,” he said, “but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.”
-
-And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
-when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
-dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
-disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
-using his department to further his ambitions. “Raymond,” he said, “you
-were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
-is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving
-the horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he
-rushed across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely
-keep pace with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an
-enormous chin fly fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother
-asked me what I did that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse
-bitten in that way. 'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him
-go!' Now, if Mr Chase has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm
-not going to knock it off, if it will only make his department _go!_” If
-one were asked to name the most famous answer in history, one might, not
-unreasonably, give the palm to a woman--a poor woman, too, who has been
-dust for three thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke
-six words that gave her immortality. They have been recalled on
-thousands of occasions and in all lands, but never more memorably than
-by John Bright when he was speaking of the hesitation with which he
-accepted cabinet office: “I should have preferred much,” he said, “to
-have remained in the common rank of citizenship in which heretofore I
-have lived. There is a passage in the Old Testament that has often
-struck me as being one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect that
-the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very hospitably entertained
-by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make her some amends, and
-he called her to him and asked her what there was he should do for her.
-'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to the captain of the
-host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the Shunamite woman
-returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the prophet's offer,
-'I dwell among mine own people.'”
-
-It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
-point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
-babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if
-by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the
-spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty
-replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp
-tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit or
-cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he never
-made one. His repartees are perfect of their kind, but they belong to
-the debating club and the law court. They raise a laugh and score a
-point, but they are summer lightnings. The great reply does not come
-from witty minds, but from rare and profound souls. The brilliant
-adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that reply of Augereau
-than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it because with
-all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a great part on
-the world's stage.
-
-[Illustration: 0101]
-
-[Illustration: 0102]
-
-
-
-
-ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES
-
-|I went recently to an industrial town in the North on some business,
-and while there had occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and
-engines and machinery of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers
-and engines and machinery of all sorts, and I did my best to appear
-interested and understanding. But I was neither one nor the other. I was
-only bored. Boilers and engines, I know, are important things. Compared
-with a boiler, the finest lyric that was ever written is only a perfume
-on the gale. There is a practical downrightness about a boiler that
-makes “Drink to me only with thine eyes,” or “O mistress mine, where are
-you roaming?” or even “Twelfth Night” itself, a mere idle frivolity.
-All you can say in favour of “Twelfth Night,” from the strictly business
-point of view, is that it doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank
-heaven for that.
-
-But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
-never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought
-to be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How,
-for example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of
-a boiler? How--and this was still more important--how could I hope
-to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
-gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
-great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it
-as much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
-discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no
-bowels of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the
-symbol of brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional
-values. In Dante's “Inferno” each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted
-to give him the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room
-for me, and there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever
-among wheels and pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying
-amidst the thud and din of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily
-“waste” to catch those perfumes on the gale, those frivolous rhythms
-to which I had devoted so much of that life' which should be “real and
-earnest” and occupied with serious things like boilers. And so it came
-about that as my friend talked I spiritually wilted away.
-
-I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
-learned and articulate boiler.
-
-Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
-boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
-inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a “b” in
-boilers and a “b” in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect
-was miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit.
-The light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if
-I were a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved
-brother. Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come,
-I must see his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could
-whisk us to his house in the suburbs, and there in a great room,
-surrounded with hundreds of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from
-the ends of the earth, butterflies from the forests of Brazil and
-butterflies from the plains of India, and butterflies from the veldt of
-South Africa and butterflies from the bush of Australia, all arranged
-in the foliage natural to their habitat to show how their scheme of
-coloration conformed to their setting. Some of them had their wings
-folded back and were indistinguishable from the leaves among which they
-lay. And as my friend, with growing excitement, revealed his treasure,
-he talked of his adventures in the pursuit of them, and of the law of
-natural selection and all its bearing upon the mystery of life, its
-survivals and its failures. This hobby of his was, in short, the key
-of his world. The boiler house was the prison where he did time. At the
-magic word “butterflies” the prison door opened, and out he sailed on
-the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the mind.
-
-There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
-something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a
-ship without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair
-that most of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the
-end of the journey without ever having found a path and a sense of
-direction. But a hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial
-a thing, but it supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm
-outside the mere routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it
-will lead. You may begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in
-continents. You may collect coins, and find that the history of man is
-written on them. You may begin with bees, and end with the science of
-life. Ruskin began with pictures and found they led to economics and
-everything else. For as every road was said to lead to Rome, so every
-hobby leads out into the universe, and supplies us with a compass
-for the adventure. It saves us from the humiliation of being merely
-smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in general, for the world
-is too full of things to permit us to be anything else, but one field
-of intensive culture will give even our smattering a respectable
-foundation.
-
-It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who
-knows even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might
-be when he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not
-know them and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of
-measurement which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters.
-He will have, above all, an attachment to life which will make him at
-home in the world. Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged
-into this bewildering whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of
-circumstance. We have in us the genius of speculation, but the further
-our speculations penetrate the profounder becomes the mystery that
-baffles us. We are caught in the toils of affections that crumble to
-dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither like grass, beaten about by
-storms that shatter our stoutest battlements like spray blown upon the
-wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little more than dreams within
-a dream--or as Carlyle puts it, “exhalations that are and then are not.”
- And we share the poet's sense of exile--
-
-               In this house with starry dome,
-
-                   Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
-
-               Shall I never be at home?
-
-                   Never wholly at my ease?
-
-From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
-stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
-hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
-that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
-without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
-find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come
-and go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always
-renewed. Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with
-Horace or Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the
-sense of the mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden
-of the mind, self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of
-intractible circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the
-spirit and endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman
-in “Romany Rye,” you will remember, found his deliverance in studying
-Chinese. His bereavement had left him without God and without hope in
-the world, without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the
-things that reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly
-before him, when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and
-he thought he heard a voice say, “The marks! the marks! cling to the
-marks! or-----” And from this beginning--but the story is too fruity,
-too rich with the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book
-down, turn to the episode, and thank me for sending you again into the
-enchanted Borrovian realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in
-books. It is enough for the purpose here to recall this perfect example
-of the healing power of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little
-world of our own where we can be at ease, and from whose warmth and
-friendliness we can look out on the vast conundrum without expecting an
-answer or being much troubled because we do not get one. It was a hobby
-that poor Pascal needed to allay that horror of the universe which he
-expressed in the desolating phrase, “Le silence étemel de ces espaces
-infinis m'effraie.” For on the wings of the butterfly one can not only
-outrange the boiler, but can adventure into the infinite in the spirit
-of happy and confident adventure.
-
-[Illustration: 0108]
-
-[Illustration: 0109]
-
-
-
-
-ON HEREFORD BEACON
-
-|Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she
-died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble
-range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester beacon
-to Gloucester beacon.
-
-It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way
-up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its
-descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire
-country.
-
-Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
-range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the
-deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as
-this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman
-legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural
-ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the
-work to----. But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell
-his own story.
-
-He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
-conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
-the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
-slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of
-the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up
-the steep road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the
-Cotswolds, Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and
-the other features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the
-road, Hereford beacon came in view.
-
-“That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.”
-
-He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
-
-“Killed?” said I, a little stunned.
-
-“Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
-from about here you know, sir.”
-
-“But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he
-wasn't killed at all. He died in his bed.”
-
-The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
-
-“Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
-captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
-sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard
-tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.”
-
-He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but
-the capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
-Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must
-be fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
-
-“He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,” he went on. “He blowed
-away Little Malvern Church down yonder.”
-
-He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
-visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
-ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of
-Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
-
-“Left the tower standing he did, sir,” pursued the historian. “Now, why
-should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?”
-
-And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought
-us to Wynd's Point.
-
-The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an
-old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the
-little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out
-on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently
-declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred
-to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and
-singer.
-
-It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of
-a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
-roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
-chalet, “the golden cage,” of the singer fronting the drawing-room
-bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter
-pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls--all speak with mute
-eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres,
-whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet
-simplicity of her name.
-
-“Why did you leave the stage?” asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
-like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
-surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for
-the sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for
-charity.
-
-Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
-
-“Because,” she said, touching the Bible, “it left me so little time for
-this, and” (looking at the sunset) “none for that.”
-
-There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
-cuckoo--his voice failing slightly in these hot June days--wakes you in
-the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows
-lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
-against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
-deepening gloom of the vast plain.
-
-Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
-unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the
-road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the
-broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come
-out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the
-green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of
-Worcester beacon.
-
-Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon
-to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these
-ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled
-at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of
-exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It
-is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of
-the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and
-look out over half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills,
-Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where
-southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the
-imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you
-may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill, and
-plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs are
-grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of that
-ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of
-smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of
-the Roses, of “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the
-field at Tewkesbury,” and of Ancient Pistol, whose “wits were thick as
-Tewkesbury mustard.” There is the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and
-far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of that
-great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at Worcester,
-where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land and
-where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.
-
-The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to
-cast its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the
-wide plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing
-here through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to
-Oxford and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are
-coming up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom.
-Now is the moment to turn westward, where
-
-                   Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
-
-                   Bleeds upon the road to Wales.
-
-All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun,
-and in the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the
-far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of
-alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that clothe these western
-slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the startled noise and
-flurry of its flight.
-
-The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
-the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
-suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
-
-Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and
-a late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through
-the twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great
-sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads
-of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an
-unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all
-save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its
-graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come
-those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that close
-the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is unbroken.
-
-          And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
-
-          In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
-
-Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
-
-[Illustration: 0115]
-
-[Illustration: 0116]
-
-
-
-
-CHUM
-
-|When I turned the key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a
-familiar sound. It was the “thump, thump, thump,” of a tail on the floor
-at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place
-was vacant. Chum had gone, and he would not return. I knew that the
-veterinary must have called, pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him
-away, and that I should hear no more his “welcome home!” at midnight. No
-matter what the labours of the day had been or how profound his sleep,
-he never failed to give me a cheer with the stump of his tail and to
-blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him “Good dog” and a pat on the head.
-Then with a huge sigh of content he would lapse back into slumber,
-satisfied that the last duty of the day was done, and that all was well
-with the world for the night. Now he has lapsed into sleep altogether.
-
-I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will
-pay my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and
-in any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that
-I enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he
-enjoyed my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom
-he went, and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to
-go with, unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person.
-It was not that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned
-after a longish absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would
-leap round and round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent
-her to the floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's
-schoolmaster who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and
-explained that “he didn't know his own strength.”
-
-But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and
-I was the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the
-woodlands, and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his
-reddish-brown coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan,
-and his head down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there
-was more than a hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was
-precisely no one ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up.
-His fine liquid brown eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but
-he had a nobler head than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain
-of the Irish terrier in him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat
-was all his own. And all his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and
-his genius for friendship.
-
-There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he
-was reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had
-been sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
-grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin,
-and he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
-schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
-eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
-something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
-when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
-abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
-ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
-You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about
-his affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to
-the forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled
-to any good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and
-watchful, his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury
-and pity for the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the
-qualities of a rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into
-an unspeakable abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your
-voice and all the world was young and full of singing birds again.
-
-He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
-that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
-For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or
-his colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more
-than a little of the spirit of the flunkey. “A man's a man, for a'
-that,” was not his creed. He discriminated between the people who came
-to the front door and the people who came to the side door. To the
-former he was systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly
-hostile. “The poor in a loomp is bad,” was his fixed principle, and any
-one carrying a basket, wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was _ipso
-facto_ suspect. He held, in short, to the servile philosophy of
-clothes as firmly as any waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair.
-Familiarity never altered his convictions. No amount of correction
-affected his stubborn dislike of postmen. They offended him in many
-ways. They wore uniforms; they came, nevertheless, to the front door;
-they knocked with a challenging violence that revolted his sense of
-propriety. In the end, the burden of their insults was too much for
-him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of trousers. Perhaps that
-incident was not unconnected with his passing.
-
-One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
-Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in
-leaping a stile--he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow--or
-had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
-latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
-for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted.
-But whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all
-the veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to
-the revels in his native woods--for he had come to us as a pup from a
-cottage in the heart of the woodland country--no longer made him tense
-as a drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and
-left his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the
-hill to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into
-the house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to
-be forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a
-place he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream
-of the happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there
-waiting to scour the woods with me as of old.
-
-[Illustration: 0120]
-
-[Illustration: 0121]
-
-
-
-
-ON MATCHES AND THINGS
-
-|I had an agreeable assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I
-went-into a tea-shop and sat down. There were several young waitresses
-by the counter engaged in animated conversation. They eyed me with that
-cold aloofness which is the ritual of the order, and which, I take
-it, is intended to convey to you the fact that they are princesses in
-disguise who only serve in shops for a pastime. When I had taken out
-my watch twice with an appearance of ostentatious urgency, one of the
-princesses came towards me, took my order (looking meanwhile out of
-the window to remind me that she was not really aware of me, but only
-happened to be there by chance), and moved languorously away. When she
-returned she brought tea--and sugar. In that moment her disdain was
-transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel who under the disguise of
-indifference went about scattering benedictions among her customers and
-assuring them that the spring had come back to the earth.
-
-It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future
-became suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine)
-had passed magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be
-sweetened thrice a day by honest sugar.
-
-Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised
-how I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my
-friends through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump
-person, but in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the
-spoon and stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer
-did the spoon seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere
-survival of an antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the
-back of your coat. It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the
-tea-table. To stir your tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It
-keeps tune with your thoughts if you are alone, and it keeps time with
-your tongue if you are talking. It helps out the argument, fills up
-the gaps, provides the animated commentary on your discourse. There are
-people I shall always remember in the attitude of standing, cup in hand,
-and stirring, stirring, stirring as the current of talk flowed on. Such
-a one was that fine old tea-drinker, Prince Kropotkin--rest his gentle
-soul if he indeed be among the slain.... With what universal benevolence
-his patriarchal face used to gleam as he stood stirring and talking,
-talking and stirring, with the hurry of his teeming thoughts.
-
-It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
-for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
-little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
-of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
-solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
-with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon
-the grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all
-the pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious
-than you had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days
-knitting up your severed friendships with things. You slip into the
-National Gallery just to see what old favourites have come up from the
-darkness of the cellars. You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in
-the great moon that shines again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that
-chimes gives you a pleasant emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds
-like the salutation of an old friend who had been given up as lost. And
-matches.... There was a time when I thought nothing of a match. I would
-strike a match as thoughtlessly as I would breathe. And for the same
-reason, that matches were as plentiful as air. I would strike a match
-and let the wind puff it out; another and let it burn out before using
-it, simply because I was too busy talking or listening or thinking
-or doing nothing. I would try to light a pipe in a gale of wind on a
-mountain top, crouching behind a boulder, getting inside my hat, lying
-on the ground under my coat, and wasting matches by the dozen. I would
-get rid of a box of matches a day, and not care a dump. The world was
-simply choked with matches, and it was almost a duty to go on striking
-them to make room for the rest. You could get a dozen boxes for a penny
-or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see great bags of matches with
-boxes bursting out at the top, and simply asking to be taken. If by some
-accident you found yourself without a box in your pocket you asked the
-stranger for a light as confidently as you would ask him for the time
-o' day. You were asking for something that cost him nothing except a
-commonplace civility.
-
-And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
-Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
-away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, “No; we haven't any.” They
-simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
-smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the
-habit and just go on in their sleep. “Oh, you funny people,” they seem
-to say, dreamily. “Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach
-you that there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years
-and years; never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let
-the other fools follow on.” And you go away, feeling much as though you
-had been caught trying to pass a bad half-crown.
-
-No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, “Can you oblige me
-with a light, sir?” You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or
-a pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
-wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
-fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting
-to pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket,
-preparing to have “After you, sir,” on your lips at the exact moment
-when he has lit his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out
-the precious flame. Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps
-the fellow is only waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting
-for what the other hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless
-world.
-
-I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which
-I can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips
-I know that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that
-excellent fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine,
-and I have had more lights from him in these days than from any other
-man on earth. I never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it
-quite boldly, fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me--but not so
-often, not nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If--having
-borrowed a little too recklessly from him of late--I go into his room
-and begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the
-Peace Conference, or things like that--is he deceived? Not at all. He
-knows that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has
-one left it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his
-pipe because he knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man
-Higginson is. I cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
-
-But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
-tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
-authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
-before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
-welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
-Lords and the Oval.
-
-And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning,
-Your young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is
-sailing home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds
-instead of khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters
-who are strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on
-historic battlefields and now ask you whether you will have “thick or
-clear,” with the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your
-galley proof is brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you
-look at with a shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he
-is that pale, thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago,
-and who in the interval has been fighting in many lands near and far,
-in France and Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing
-the burnished livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a
-stoutish fellow who turns out to be the old professional released from
-Germany after long months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one
-“of the lucky ones; nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and
-lived with the farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir,
-nothing to complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.”
-
-Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men
-and things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those
-who will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound
-of Big Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we
-enter the new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the
-stimulus of the princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the
-credit side of things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We
-have left the deathly solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the
-moraine is rough and toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we
-can hear the pleasant tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old
-pastures.
-
-[Illustration: 0127]
-
-[Illustration: 0128]
-
-
-
-
-ON BEING REMEMBERED
-
-|As I lay on the hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods
-watching the harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows
-chasing each other across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were
-looking down with me. For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an
-old school book is scored with the names of generations of scholars.
-Near by are the earthworks of the ancient Britons, and on the face of
-the hill is a great white horse carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those
-white marks, that look like sheep feeding on the green hill-side, are
-reminders of the great war. How long ago it seems since the recruits
-from the valley used to come up here to learn the art of trench-digging,
-leaving these memorials behind them before they marched away to whatever
-fate awaited them! All over the hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit
-by merry parties on happy holidays. One scorched and blackened area,
-more spacious than the rest, marks the spot where the beacon fire was
-lit to celebrate the signing of Peace. And on the boles of the beech
-trees are initials carved deep in the bark--some linked like those of
-lovers, some freshly cut, some old and covered with lichen.
-
-What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and
-school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is
-as ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school
-desks of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of
-the schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted
-them. There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood
-or scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled.
-And the joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found
-pleasure in whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice
-white ceiling above me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's
-hankering for a charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies.
-But at the back of it all, the explanation of those initials
-on the boles of the beeches is a desire for some sort of
-immortality--terrestrial if not celestial. Even the least of us would
-like to be remembered, and so we carve our names on tree trunks and
-tombstones to remind later generations that we too once passed this way.
-
-If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great.
-One of the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will
-trumpet its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries
-to take care that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's “Exegi
-monumentum ære perennius” is one of many confident assertions that he
-knew he would be among the immortals. “I have raised a monument,” he
-says, “more enduring than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings;
-a monument which shall not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by
-the rage of the north wind, nor by the countless years and the flight
-of ages.” The same magnificent confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud
-declaration--
-
-               Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
-
-               Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
-
-and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had
-written a song of a sparrow--
-
-               And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
-
-               Of which I sang one song that will not die.
-
-Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was “writ in water,” but
-behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for
-immortality.
-
-Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable
-confidence. “I'll be more respected,” he said, “a hundred years after
-I am dead than I am at present;” and even John Knox had his eye on
-an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus.
-“Theologians there will always be in abundance,” he said; “the like of
-me comes but once in centuries.”
-
-Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
-their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
-conceit on the subject. “What I write,” he said, “is not written on
-slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of
-years can efface it.” And again, “I shall dine late, but the dining-room
-will be well-lighted, the guests few and select.” A proud fellow, if
-ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le
-Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. “I do not die,” he
-said grandly; “_I quit the time_.” And beside this we may put Victor
-Hugo's rather truculent, “It is time my name ceased to fill the world.”
-
-But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
-that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. “Do you suppose,” he
-said, “to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
-should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
-service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
-Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
-toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has
-ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life,
-then at last it would begin to live.” The context, it is true,
-suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a
-terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.
-
-Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject
-is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in
-books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable
-terms. In the preface to his “Account of Corsica” he says:--
-
-_For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
-ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should
-imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able
-to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established
-himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any
-danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his
-weaknesses. (_Oh, you rogue!_) To preserve a uniform dignity among those
-who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us
-under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved
-book may allow his natural disposition an easy play (“_You were drunk
-last night, you dog_”), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius
-when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he
-never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and
-discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are
-at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may
-cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great
-object of the noblest minds in all ages._
-
-We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition.
-Most of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of
-Gray's depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the “dull
-cold ear of death.” In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy
-and immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of
-“Alpha of the Plough” an agreeable fancy something like this. In the
-year two thousand--or it may be three thousand--yes, let us do the thing
-handsomely and not stint the centuries--in the year three thousand and
-ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and the
-Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe for
-democracy--at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer who has
-been swished that morning from the British Isles across the Atlantic
-to the Patagonian capital--swished, I need hardly remark, being the
-expression used to describe the method of flight which consists in
-being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made
-to complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be
-desired--bursts in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered
-by him in the course of some daring investigations of the famous
-subterranean passages of the ancient British capital--those passages
-which have so long perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the
-Patagonian savants, some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers,
-and some that they were the roadways of a people who had become
-so afflicted with photophobia that they had to build their cities
-underground. The trophy is a book by one “Alpha of the Plough.” It
-creates an enormous sensation. It is put under a glass case in the
-Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is translated into every Patagonian
-dialect. It is read in schools. It is referred to in pulpits. It is
-discussed in learned societies. Its author, dimly descried across the
-ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
-
-[Illustration: 0134]
-
-An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
-celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
-assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
-marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha--a gentleman with a flowing
-beard and a dome-like brow--that overlooks the market-place, and places
-wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of bells
-and a salvo of artillery.
-
-There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you,
-my dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in
-the New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved
-for most, even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world
-to-day. And yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who
-writes has the best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox,
-who among the statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But
-Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb,
-even second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the
-temple of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military
-feats of Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza
-of the poem in which he poured out his creed--
-
-               He either fears his fate too much,
-
-                   Or his deserts are small.
-
-               That dares not put it to the touch
-
-                   To win or lose it all.
-
-Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship
-with Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he
-befriended a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the
-name of his benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of
-Ægina is full of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would
-like to be remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went
-to Pindar and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his
-praise. Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. “Why, for
-so much money,” said Pytheas, “I can erect a statue of bronze in the
-temple.”
-
-“Very likely.” On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And
-now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the
-statues of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples
-themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the
-ode of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer
-paths to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of
-the Earl of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of
-Shakespeare live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their
-dedication. But one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise
-you to go and give Mr -------- £200 and a commission to send your name
-echoing down the corridors of time.
-
-Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr -------- (you will fill in the
-blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them. It would be
-safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a rose, or an
-overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can confer a modest
-immortality. They have done so for many. A certain Maréchal Neil is
-wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which is as enviable
-a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr Mackintosh is
-talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of rain, and even
-Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his battles. It would
-not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone will be thought
-of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just as Archimedes
-is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.
-
-But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the
-healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps
-one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of
-forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike,
-and we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as
-if the world babbles about us for ever.
-
-[Illustration: 0137]
-
-[Illustration: 0138]
-
-
-
-
-ON DINING
-
-|There are people who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can
-hoard it not for the sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy,
-for the satisfaction of feeling that they have got something locked up
-that they could spend if they chose without being any the poorer and
-that other people would enjoy knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending
-what they can afford to spend. It is a pleasure akin to the economy of
-the Scotsman, which, according to a distinguished member of that race,
-finds its perfect expression in taking the tube when you can afford a
-cab. But the gift of secrecy is rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the
-sake of telling them. We spend our secrets as Lamb's spendthrift spent
-his money--while they are fresh. The joy of creating an emotion in other
-people is too much for us. We like to surprise them, or shock them, or
-please them as the case may be, and we give away the secret with which
-we have been entrusted with a liberal hand and a solemn request “to say
-nothing about it.” We relish the luxury of telling the secret, and leave
-the painful duty of keeping it to the other fellow. We let the horse out
-and then solemnly demand that the stable door shall be shut so that
-it shan't escape, I have done it myself--often. I have no doubt that
-I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret to reveal, but I
-shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely selfish reasons,
-which will appear later. You may conceive me going about choking with
-mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years have
-I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can
-dine wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the
-atmosphere restful, and the prices moderate--in short, the happy
-mean between the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the
-uncompromising cheapness of Lockhart's. In those extremes I find no
-satisfaction.
-
-It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its
-ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to
-a good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren't many
-families that enjoyed their “vittles” more than her's did, and I can
-claim the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that
-I count good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I
-could join very heartily in Peacock's chorus:
-
-                   “How can a man, in his life of a span,
-
-                   Do anything better than dine.”
-
-Give me a satisfactory' dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel
-themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads
-the landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who
-insisted that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life.
-That, I think, is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few
-things more revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by
-taking emetics. But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise
-for enjoying a good dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good
-dinners. I see no necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and
-a holy mind. There was a saintly man once in this city--a famous man,
-too--who was afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out
-to dinner, he had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to
-enable him to start even with the other guests. And it is on record
-that when the ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with
-Cardinal Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses
-that hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season
-of fasting, “I fear,” said one of them, “that there is a lobster salad
-side to the Cardinal.” I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side
-too. A hot day and a lobster salad--what happier conjunction can we look
-for in a plaguey world?
-
-But, in making this confession, I am neither _gourmand_ nor _gourmet_.
-Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic
-conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and
-the great language of the _menu_ does not stir my pulse. I do not ask
-for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt
-would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for
-talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was
-pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have
-for supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as
-the shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right
-spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes--eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
-smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke
-approvingly of Sancho's choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way
-with him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against
-his rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with
-conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the
-matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to
-follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart's desire at
-the Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel
-when I enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things.
-I stroke the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and
-rises, purring with dignity, under my caress. I say “Good evening” to
-the landlord who greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once
-cordial and restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of
-his hand. No frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a
-neat-handed Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress
-and white cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility
-and aloofness that establishes the perfect relationship--obliging,
-but not familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The
-napery makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a
-mirror, and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced
-dish of hors d'ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the
-modest four-course table d'hôte begins, and when at the end you light
-your cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only
-dined, but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement,
-touched with the subtle note of a personality.
-
-And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall
-not tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It
-may be in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's
-Inn, or it may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you
-because I sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it
-I shall shatter the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the
-Mermaid and find its old English note of kindly welcome and decorous
-moderation gone, and that in its place there will be a noisy, bustling,
-popular restaurant with a band, from which I shall flee. When it is
-“discovered” it will be lost, as the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so
-I shall keep its secret. I only purr it to the cat who arches her back
-and purrs understanding in response. It is the bond of freemasonry
-between us.
-
-[Illustration: 0142]
-
-[Illustration: 0143]
-
-
-
-
-IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA
-
-|I was leaning over the rails of the upper deck idly watching the
-Chinese whom, to the number of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre
-and were to disgorge at Halifax, when the bugle sounded for lunch. A
-mistake, I thought, looking at my watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon
-hour was one. Then I remembered. I had not corrected my watch that
-morning by the ship's clock. In our pursuit of yesterday across the
-Atlantic we had put on another three-quarters of an hour. Already on
-this journey we had outdistanced to-day by two and a half hours. By
-the time we reached Halifax we should have gained perhaps six hours. In
-thought I followed the Chinamen thundering across Canada to Vancouver,
-and thence onward across the Pacific on the last stage of their voyage.
-And I realised that by the time they reached home they would have caught
-yesterday up.
-
-But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
-this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
-years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
-thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always
-the same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of
-it than I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind
-as insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
-beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we
-were overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by
-sea and land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight
-across the plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it
-was neither yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a
-confusion of all three.
-
-In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
-absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom--a parochial illusion
-of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
-axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
-light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that
-they were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
-numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away
-on the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length
-of light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
-meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
-and dark--what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for ever
-and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark--not many days, but
-just one day and that always midday.
-
-At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
-itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck
-of dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A
-few hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of
-dark, I should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo
-sky--specks whose strip of daylight was many times the length of
-ours, and whose year would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the
-astronomers tell us that Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years?
-Think of it--our Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round
-a single solar year of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and
-live to a green old age according to our reckoning, and still never see
-the glory of midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our
-ideas of Time have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune--if,
-that is, there be any dwellers on Neptune.
-
-And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts
-of other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this
-regal orb above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and
-numbered their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons
-by the illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of
-other systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to
-have any fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the
-unthinkable void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time:
-there was only duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of
-fable.
-
-As I reached this depressing conclusion--not a novel or original one,
-but always a rather cheerless one--a sort of orphaned feeling stole over
-me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
-from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
-eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly
-in the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a
-gay time on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during
-yesterday's storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of
-his comrades at an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges
-before him, was crying something that sounded like “Al-lay! Al-lay!”
- counting the money in his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he
-doubted whether it was all there, but because he liked the feel and
-the look of it. A sprightly young rascal, dressed as they all were in a
-grotesque mixture of garments, French and English and German, picked
-up on the battlefields of France, where they had been working for three
-years, stole up behind the orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me
-as he did so) snatched an orange and bolted. There followed a roaring
-scrimmage on deck, in the midst of which the orange-seller's coppers
-were sent flying along the boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and
-scuffling, and from which the author of the mischief emerged riotously
-happy and, lighting a cigarette, flung himself down with an air of
-radiant good humour, in which he enveloped me with a glance of his bold
-and merry eye.
-
-The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
-illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass,
-not intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The
-experiences were always associated with great physical weariness and
-the sense of the endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the
-Dauphiné coming down from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other
-experience in the Lake District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a
-companion in the doorway of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain.
-We had come to the end of our days in the mountains, and now we were
-going back to Keswick, climbing Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was
-robed in clouds, and the rain was of that determined kind that admits of
-no hope. And so, after a long wait, we decided that Helvellyn “would
-not go,” as the climber would say, and, putting on our mackintoshes and
-shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for Keswick by the lower slopes of
-the mountains--by the track that skirts Great Dodd and descends by the
-moorlands into the Vale of St John.
-
-All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung
-low over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
-booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
-tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
-struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to
-be without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious
-loneliness of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the
-late afternoon we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the
-Vale of St John and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the
-road. What with battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the
-dripping mackintosh and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked
-myself into that passive mental state which is like a waking dream,
-in which your voice sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your
-thoughts seem to play irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering
-consciousness.
-
-Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember
-that it is what Mr Chesterton calls “a rolling road, a reeling road.”
- It is like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it
-is going down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for
-Penrith, then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that
-goal, only to give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so
-on, and all the time it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or
-to Penrith, but is sidling crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road
-which is like the whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of
-his signature, thus:
-
-[Illustration: 0148]
-
-Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw
-through the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that
-fine mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses
-that sustain the southern face were visible. They looked like the
-outstretched fingers of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds
-and clutching the earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The
-image fell in with the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the
-similitude out to my companion as we paced along the muddy road.
-
-Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and
-we went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As
-we did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds
-and clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere,
-far off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same
-mist of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
-gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been
-years ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might
-have been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was
-this evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the
-impression remained of something outside the confines of time. I had
-passed into a static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished,
-and Time was only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I
-had walked through the shadow into the deeps.
-
-But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when
-I reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very
-earnestly in order to discover the time of the trains for London next
-day. And the recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings
-brought my thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just
-below me, was happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread,
-one of those long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck
-from the shore at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed
-along a rope connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of
-the man as he devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the
-brown crust reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had
-gone for lunch long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this
-time. I turned hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch
-back three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the
-fiction of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.
-
-[Illustration: 0150]
-
-[Illustration: 0151]
-
-
-
-
-TWO DRINKS OF MILK
-
-|The cabin lay a hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between
-Sneam and Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and
-out to the open Atlantic.
-
-A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down
-the rocks.
-
-We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to
-the cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received
-us.
-
-Milk? Yes. Would we come in?
-
-We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade
-of the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother
-of the girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and
-having done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen
-floor out into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and
-on a bench by the ingle sat the third member of the family.
-
-She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her
-eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and
-untroubled as a child's. She paused in her knitting to make room for me
-on the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she
-played the hostess.
-
-If you have travelled in Kerry you don't need to be told of the charm
-of the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful
-country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of
-Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the
-look of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a
-spring morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and
-to know them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of
-Kerry, O'Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities
-of a poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always
-warm with the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted
-with wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving
-pleasure to others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every
-peasant you meet is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted
-if you will stop to talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be
-your guide. It is like being back in the childhood of the world, among
-elemental things and an ancient, unhasting people.
-
-The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess
-in disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that
-a duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of
-Sneam, five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin
-and among these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she
-had caught something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out
-there through the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of
-exiles had gone to far lands. Some few had returned and some had been
-for ever silent. As I sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle
-accents all the tale of a stricken people and of a deserted land. There
-was no word of complaint--only a cheerful acceptance of the decrees
-of Fate. There is the secret of the fascination of the Kérry
-temperament--the happy sunlight playing across the sorrow of things.
-
-The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost
-to the brim, and a couple of mugs.
-
-We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to
-pay.
-
-“Sure, there's nothing to pay,” said the old lady with just a touch of
-pride in her sweet voice. “There's not a cabin in Kerry where you'll not
-be welcome to a drink of milk.”
-
-The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed
-in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane,
-and as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they
-added a benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague
-M'Carty's hotel--Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker,
-whose rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits
-among the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with
-many-coloured flies--we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville and
-heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.
-
-When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take
-the northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much
-better made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before
-the coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)
-
-In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a
-day of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the
-lake we dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage--neat and
-well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense
-of plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark
-of a dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged
-interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and
-leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before
-us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt
-that we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver
-affairs than thirsty travelers to attend to.
-
-Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back
-to the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed
-suddenly less friendly.
-
-In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two
-glasses--a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of feature.
-While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the doorstep,
-looking away across the lake to where the noble form of Schiehallion
-dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time was money and
-talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty haste.
-
-“What have we to pay, please?”
-
-“Sixpence.”
-
-And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.
-
-It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked
-something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant
-memory.
-
-[Illustration: 0155]
-
-[Illustration: 0156]
-
-
-
-
-ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH
-
-|It was my fortune the other evening to be at dinner with a large
-company of doctors. While we were assembling I fell into conversation
-with an eminent physician, and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked
-that we English seasoned our dishes far too freely. We scattered salt
-and pepper and vinegar over our food so recklessly that we destroyed the
-delicacy of our taste, and did ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was
-especially unfriendly to the use of salt. He would not admit even
-that it improved the savour of things. It destroyed our sense of their
-natural flavour, and substituted a coarser appeal to the palate. From
-the hygienic point of view, the habit was all wrong. All the salts
-necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat, and the use of salt
-independently is entirely harmful.
-
-“Take the egg, for example,” he said. “It contains in it all the
-elements necessary for the growth of a chicken--salt among the rest.
-That is sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article
-of food. Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise
-its delicate flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.” And he
-concluded, as we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example
-of the Japanese in this matter. “They,” he said laughingly, “only take
-salt when they want to die.”
-
-At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
-and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
-applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
-who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with
-great energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we
-eat contain the salt required by the human body. “Not even the egg?”
- I asked. “No, not even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our
-foods, and even if the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw
-state they tend to lose their character cooked.” He admitted that
-that was an argument for eating things _au naturel_ more than is the
-practice. But he was firm in his conviction that the separate use of
-salt is essential. “And as for flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw,
-with or without salt. What comparison is there?”
-
-“But,” said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about
-the Japanese), “are there not races who do not use salt?” “My dear sir,”
- said he, “the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of
-salt is supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of
-the prime essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause
-or another, is seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute
-exactness in the mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of
-salt to eat with their food they die.”
-
-After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening
-in examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt
-I should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the
-face of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have
-quoted, especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians.
-Yet I daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the
-facts. For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice,
-the Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the
-world, and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat
-their fish in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would
-go far to explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
-
-But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
-the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about
-which there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be
-a commonplace thing like the use of salt.
-
-Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random--men
-whose whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its
-requirements--whose views on the subject were in violent antagonism.
-They approached their subject from contrary angles and with contrary
-sets of facts, and the truth they were in search of took a wholly
-different form for each.
-
-It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
-judicious manipulation.
-
-A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our
-air service. He was very confident that we were “simply out of it--that
-was all, simply out of it.” And he was full of facts on the subject.
-<b>I don't like people who brim over with facts--who lead facts about,
-as Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few
-people so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His
-conclusions are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot
-sort them out and add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès
-called “loose, unstitched minds.”
-
-Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
-facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember
-whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her
-husband had told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so
-bad as that, but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact
-away in the chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not
-infrequently, that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something
-chipped off, and I can never trust it until I have verified my
-references.
-
-But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was
-that, so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell
-you how many English machines had failed to return on each day of the
-week, and how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to
-descend. And judging from his figures he was quite right. “We were out
-of it--simply out of it.” Yet the truth is that while his facts were
-right, his deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken
-account of some facts, but had left other equally important facts out of
-consideration. For example, through all this time the German airmen had
-been on the defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen
-had taken great risks for a great object. They had gone miles over
-the enemy's lines--as much as fifty miles over--and had come back with
-priceless information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but
-the whole truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this
-time the most victorious element of our Army.
-
-I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are
-not always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is
-often composed of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to
-contradict each other. Take the handkerchief incident in “Othello.” Poor
-Desdemona could not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that
-the Moor saw. Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello
-believed she had given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio
-wipe his beard with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the
-catastrophe.
-
-But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them
-in real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
-free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
-report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
-knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
-knife discovered--also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of pawntickets
-for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he was a
-thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
-his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
-clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of
-the trousers was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt
-uncomfortable. He took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was
-doing so he saw a steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a
-timid person he furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches
-came on, and when he had got his “take” he left to transcribe it,
-having forgotten all about the knife. The rest followed as stated. The
-pawntickets, which seemed so strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were
-of course not his at all. They belonged to the owner of the suit.
-
-You remember that Browning in “The Ring and the Book,” tells the story
-of the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before
-he feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
-annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
-
-Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
-different aspects of one truth. “Mostly,” he says, “matters of any
-consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself,
-I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
-contradicted myself three times.” I fancy it is this discovery of
-the falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less
-cocksure as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts
-that belong to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that “a
-lie that is only half a truth is ever the blackest of lies”; but he is
-wrong. It is the fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter)
-which is the most dangerous lie--for a fact seems so absolute, so
-incontrovertible. Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts,
-their arrangement and concealment. It was never better stated than by a
-famous business man in an action for libel which I have referred to in
-another connection. He was being examined about the visit of Government
-experts to his works, and the instructions he gave to his manager. And
-this, as I remember it, was the dialogue between counsel and witness:
-
-“Did you tell him to tell them the facts?”
-
-“Yes.”
-
-“The whole facts?”
-
-“No.”
-
-“What facts?”
-
-“_Selected facts_.”
-
-It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the
-midst of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody
-bearing his name.
-
-If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to
-a scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things,
-we cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of
-politics and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a
-speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of
-which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is
-so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in
-the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation
-is denounced as the heresy of another. Justification by “works” is
-displaced by justification by faith, and that in turn is superseded by
-justification by “service” which is “works” in new terms. Which is
-truth and which error? Or is that the real alternative? May they not
-be different facets of one truth. The prism breaks up the sunlight into
-many different colours and facts are only the broken lights of truth.
-In this perplexing world we must be prepared to find the same truth
-demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die because they take salt, and
-the fact that Indians die because they don't take it.
-
-[Illustration: 0163]
-
-[Illustration: 0164]
-
-
-
-
-ON GREAT MEN
-
-|I was reading just now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of
-him expressed by Macaulay who declared him to be “the greatest man since
-Milton.” I paused over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally
-enough to ask myself who were the great Englishmen in history--for the
-sake of argument, the six greatest. I found the question so exciting
-that I had reached the end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time)
-almost before I had reached the end of my list. I began by laying down
-my premises or principles. I would not restrict the choice to men of
-action. The only grievance I have against Plutarch is that he followed
-that course. His incomparable “Lives,” would be still more satisfying, a
-still more priceless treasury of the ancient world, if, among his crowd
-of statesmen and warriors, we could make friends with Socrates and
-Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus, with the men whose work survived
-them as well as with the men whose work is a memory. And I rejected the
-blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I would not have in my list a mere
-homicidal genius. My great man may have been a great killer of his kind,
-but he must have some better claim to inclusion than the fact that he
-had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On the other hand, I would not
-exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to be a bad man. Henry
-Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad men. “Greatness,”
- he said, “consists in bringing all manner of mischief upon mankind,
-and goodness in removing it from them.” And it was to satirise the
-traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific satire
-“The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,” probably having in mind the
-Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
-traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad
-man. I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that
-he was a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful
-ogre, a sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless,
-ruthless jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent,
-merciless as a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a
-sort of mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought
-of nature.
-
-Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
-governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
-mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was
-a great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about
-Cæsar, but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds
-down twenty centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must
-have design. It must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere
-accident, emotion or effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured
-by its influence on the current of the world, on its extension of
-the kingdom of the mind, on its contribution to the riches of living.
-Applying tests like these, who are our six greatest Englishmen? For
-our first choice there would be a unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the
-greatest thing we have done. He is our challenger in the fists of the
-world, and there is none to cross swords with him. Like Sirius, he has a
-magnitude of his own. Take him away from our heavens, conceive him never
-to have been born, and the imaginative wealth of fife shrinks to a
-lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's phrase, “poor indeed.” There is
-nothing English for which we would exchange him. “Indian Empire or
-no Indian Empire,” we say with Carlyle, “we cannot do without our
-Shakespeare.”
-
-For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
-indisputably to him who had
-
-               ”... a voice whose sound was like the sea.”
-
-Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
-harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of
-the sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
-intangible, indestructible. With him stands his “chief of men”--the
-“great bad man” of Burke--the one man of action in our annals capable of
-measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
-Bismarck in the realm of the spirit--the man at whose name the cheek
-of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
-death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
-these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda)
-first made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
-
-But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as
-the bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning
-eternally with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his
-soul to tatters, and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding
-eloquence, and Burke, the prose Milton, to whose deep well all
-statesmanship goes with its pail, and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court
-in his brown wig, and Newton plumbing the ultimate secrets of this
-amazing universe, and deep-browed Darwin unravelling the mystery of
-life, and Wordsworth giving “to weary feet the gift of rest,” and
-Dickens bringing with him a world of creative splendour only less
-wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these and a host of others
-aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip him of all the
-legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name, and he is still
-one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic, enlightened
-man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first great
-Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
-quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be
-Roger--there by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range
-of his adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through
-which he ploughed his lonely way to truth.
-
-I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a
-woman, Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic “lady of the
-lamp,” but as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the
-adventurer into a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by
-a will of iron, a terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful
-and creative woman this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not
-because she is unworthy, but because she must head a companion fist of
-great Englishwomen. I hurriedly summon up two candidates from among
-our English saints--Sir Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the
-intolerance (incredible to modern ears) that could jest so diabolically
-at the martyrdom of the “heretic,” Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his
-place as the most fragrant flower of English culture, but if greatness
-be measured by achievement and enduring influence he must yield place to
-the astonishing revivalist of the eighteenth century who left a deeper
-mark upon the spiritual life of England than any man in our history.
-
-There is my list--Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
-Bacon, John Wesley--and anybody can make out another who cares and
-a better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
-unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is
-not a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the
-kibe of Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
-
-There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
-contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher.
-If the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness
-cannot be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left
-out of any list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature,
-we are poor in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see
-the great name of Turner.
-
-[Illustration: 0169]
-
-[Illustration: 0170]
-
-
-
-
-ON SWEARING
-
-|A young officer in the flying service was describing to me the other
-day some of his recent experiences in France. They were both amusing
-and sensational, though told with that happy freedom from vanity and
-self-consciousness which is so pleasant a feature of the British soldier
-of all ranks. The more he has done and seen the less disposed he seems
-to regard himself as a hero. It is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging
-is a sham currency. It is the base coin with which the fraudulent pay
-their way. F. C. Selous was the greatest big game hunter of modern
-times, but when he talked about his adventures he gave the impression of
-a man who had only been out in the back garden killing slugs. And Peary,
-who found the North Pole, writes as modestly as if he had only found a
-new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr Cook, who didn't find the North Pole
-and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who does the boasting. And the man who
-talks most about patriotism is usually the man who has least of that
-commodity, just as the man who talks most about his honesty is rarely to
-be trusted with your silver spoons. A man who really loves his country
-would no more brag about it than he would brag about loving his mother.
-
-But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to
-write of him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
-good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
-seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It
-was just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
-convolvulus overgrows my garden. “Hell” was his favourite expletive, and
-he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
-scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
-he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it
-as a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear
-that he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
-
-And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only
-secular quality it possesses--the quality of emphasis. It is speech
-breaking bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the
-dictionary and the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord
-in music that in shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music
-which is all discord is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is
-deadly dull.
-
-It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
-emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
-habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. “When I have said
-'Malaga,'” says Plancus, in the “Vicomte de Bragelonne,” “I am no
-longer a man.” He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his
-imprecations for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils
-swell and his eyes flash fire as he cries, “Malaga.” It is a good swear
-word. It has the advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely
-what a swear word should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying
-nothing. It should be incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the
-passion that evokes it.
-
-If “Malaga” has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was
-that defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. “'Damns'
-have had their day,” he said, and when he swore he used the “oath
-referential.” “Odds hilts and blades,” he said, or “Odds slanders and
-lies,” or “Odds bottles and glasses.” But when he sat down to write his
-challenge to Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him.
-“Do, Sir Lucius, let me begin with a damme,” he said. He had to give
-up artificial swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to
-something which had a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it
-is the idea of being a little wicked that is one of the attractions of
-swearing. It is a symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so.
-For in its origin always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates
-spoke “By the Gods,” he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest
-reverence he could command. But the oaths of to-day are not the
-expression of piety, but of violent passion, and the people who indulge
-in a certain familiar expletive would not find half so much satisfaction
-in it if they felt that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration
-of faith--“By our Lady.” That is the way our ancestors used to swear,
-and we have corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith
-and meaning.
-
-The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of
-life breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is
-the prerogative of the soldier to be “full of strange oaths.” In this
-respect Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used “strange
-oaths.” He stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most
-industrious in it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that
-have come down to us which are not garnished with “damns” or “By Gods.”
- Hear him on the morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to
-gossip Creevey--“It has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I
-have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing--the nearest run
-thing you ever saw in your life.” Or when some foolish Court flunkey
-appeals to him to support his claim to ride in the carriage with the
-young Queen on some public occasion--“Her Majesty can make you ride
-on the box or inside the carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's
-dog.” But in this he followed not only the practice of soldiers in all
-times, but the fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to
-have regarded himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at
-the language of the Prince Regent.
-
-“By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,” he remarks,
-speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. “Then he speaks and swears so
-like old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the
-room with him.” This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices,
-but whose recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It
-suggests also that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of
-his own comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and
-swore as naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that
-other famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy,
-as when, speaking of Grant, he said, “I'll tell you where he beats me,
-and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy
-does out of his sight, but it scares me like Hell.” Two centuries ago,
-according to Uncle Toby, our men “swore terribly in Flanders,” and they
-are swearing terribly there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time
-that the Flanders mud, which has been watered for centuries by English
-blood, will ensanguine the speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant
-young airman will talk a good deal less about “Hell” when he escapes
-from it to a cleaner world.
-
-[Illustration: 0174]
-
-[Illustration: 0175]
-
-
-
-
-ON A HANSOM CAB
-
-|I saw a surprising spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a
-hansom cab. Not a derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally
-see, with an obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the
-box, crawling along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has
-escaped from a cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way
-back--no, but a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting
-in the shafts and tossing its head as though it were full of beans
-and importance, and a slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as
-a sandboy as he flicked and flourished his whip, and, still more
-astonishing, a real passenger, a lady, inside the vehicle.
-
-I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the
-driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of
-the poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas
-of the past--sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the
-quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there
-flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs,
-the London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King
-Petrol, when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and
-the two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place
-then, of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a
-formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took
-your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver,
-you settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and
-the bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins
-of that “orf horse,” the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of
-the police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse
-joke to a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in
-the revelry. The conductor would stroll up to him and continue a
-conversation that had begun early in the morning and seemed to go on
-intermittently all day--a conversation of that jolly sort in which,
-as Washington Irving says, the jokes are rather small and the laughter
-abundant.
-
-In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside
-the bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It
-was an act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the
-top alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes.
-And even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been
-quite above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The
-hansom was a rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the
-thing for a lady to be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested
-romance, mysteries, elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of
-wickednesses. A staid, respectable “growler” was much more fitting for
-so delicate an exotic as Woman. If she began riding in hansoms
-alone anything might happen. She might want to go to public
-dinners next--think of it!--she might be wanting to ride a
-bicycle--horrors!--she might discover a shameless taste for cigarettes,
-or demand a living wage, or University degrees, or a vote, just for all
-the world as though she was the equal of Man, the Magnificent....
-
-As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and
-challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to
-the coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy,
-and impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable,
-mighty, but blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets,
-reeling from right to left like a drunken giant, encountering the
-kerb-stone, skimming the lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of
-boorish revolt, standing obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the
-street or across the street amidst the derision and rejoicing of those
-whose empire he threatened, and who saw in these pranks the assurance of
-his ultimate failure. Memory went back to the old One a.m. from the Law
-Courts, and to one night that sums up for me the spirit of those days of
-the great transition....
-
-It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to
-start from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew
-his power. He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along
-the Edgeware Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men
-who wrote him down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles
-
-                   (from Our Peking Correspondent)
-
-in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
-chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was “full
-up” hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded
-in with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen--yes,
-cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the
-One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only
-cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end
-of the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the
-tipsy gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at
-Baker Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is
-being swept on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are
-exchanged, what jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the
-top hat, under the impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the
-floor--oh, then the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy
-gentleman opens his dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these
-revels soon are ended.
-
-An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:
-
-                   First a shiver, and then a thrill,
-
-                   Then something decidedly like a spill--
-
-                         O. W. Holmes,
-
-                        _The Deacon's Masterpiece_ (DW)
-
-and we are left sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with
-the clock over the shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.
-
-It is the spirit of Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting
-himself. He disapproves of the passengers having all the fun. Is he not
-a humorist too? May he not be merry in the dawn of this May morning?
-
-We take our fate like Englishmen, bravely, even merrily.
-
-The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment. This is worth living
-for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base betrayer of the
-innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though it is two
-or three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the morning! Who
-cares?
-
-Only the gentleman with the big bag in the corner.
-
-“'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?” he asks the conductor with tears
-in his voice.
-
-The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help the driver. They busy
-themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn handles, they work
-pumps, they probe here and thump there.
-
-They come out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They
-have the cheerful philosophy of people who meddle with things that
-move--cab drivers, bus-drivers, engine-drivers.
-
-               If, when looking well won't move thee.
-
-                        Looking ill prevail?
-
-So they take a breather, light cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it
-again.
-
-Meanwhile all the hansoms in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us,
-like sharks upon the dead whale. Up they rattle from this side and that,
-and every cabman flings a jibe as he passes.
-
-“Look 'ere,” says one, pulling up. “Why don't yer take the
-genelmen where they want to go? That's what I asks yer.
-Why--don't--yer--take--the--genelmen--where--they--want--to go? It's
-only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't want
-to go.”
-
-For the cabman is like “the wise thrush who sings his song twice over.”
-
-“'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!” cries another.
-
-“We can't 'elp larfin', yer know,” says a third feelingly.
-
-“Well, you keep on larfin',” says the chauffeur looking up from the
-inside of One a.m. “It suits your style o' beauty.”
-
-A mellow voice breaks out:
-
-                   We won't go home till morning,
-
-                   Till daylight does appear.
-
-And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen in comic chorus.
-Those who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither sing nor
-whistle, croak.
-
-We sit inside patiently. We even joke too. All but the man with the big
-bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his life-long enemy.
-
-He appeals again to the conductor, who laughs.
-
-The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back, puts
-his head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and says:
-
-“It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning.”
-
-We think better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is
-that of the politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart.
-He is like Dick Steele--“when he was sober he was delightful; when he
-was drunk he was irresistible.”
-
-“She won't go any more to-night,” says the conductor.
-
-So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal away. All but
-the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a problem
-that looks insoluble.
-
-Two of us jump into a hansom that still prowls around, the last of the
-shoal of sharks.
-
-“Drive up West End Lane.”
-
-“Right, sir.”
-
-Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's face, wreathed in smiles,
-beams down on us.
-
-“I see what was coming all the way from Baker Street,” he savs. “I see
-the petrol was on fire.”
-
-“Ah!”
-
-“Yus,” he says. “Thought I should pick you up about 'ere.”
-
-“Ah!”
-
-“No good, motors,” he goes on, cheerfully. “My opinion is they'll go
-out as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the aristocracy are
-giving 'em up and goin' back to 'orses.”
-
-“Hope they'll get better horses than this,” for we are crawling
-painfully up the tortuous reaches of West End Lane.
-
-“Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's overworked. 'E ain't earned more
-than three bob to-night. That's jest what' e's earned. Three bob. It's
-the cold weather, you know. That's what it is. It's the cold weather
-as makes 'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And 'e does go after
-all, even if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't say of that
-there motor-bus.”
-
-We had no reply to this thrust, and the lid dropped down with a sound of
-quiet triumph.
-
-And so home. And my dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge
-Monster, reeking with strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious
-laughter and standing for ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road
-with the clock opposite pointing to a quarter to two, a rueful face in
-the corner staring fixedly at a big bag and a tipsy gentleman in a
-tall hat finding his way back to Baker Street in happy converse with a
-policeman.
-
-Gone is the old London over which the shade of Mr Hansom presided like
-a king. Gone is the “orf horse” with all its sins; gone is the
-rosy-cheeked driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent whip and his
-tales of the streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you your
-ticket, talked to you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about the
-weather, the Boat Race, or the latest clue to the latest mystery. We
-amble no more. We have banished laughter and leisure from the streets,
-and the face of the motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the symbol
-of the change. We have passed into a breathless world, a world of
-wonderful mechanical contrivances that have quickened the tempo of life
-and will soon have made the horse as much a memory as the bow and arrow
-or the wherry that used to be the principal vehicle of Elizabethan
-London. As I watched the hansom bowling along Regent Street until it
-was lost in the swirl of motor-buses and taxis I seemed to see in it the
-last straggler of an epoch passing away into oblivion. I am glad it went
-so gallantly, and I am half sorry I did not give the driver a parting
-cheer as he flicked his whip in the face of the night.
-
-[Illustration: 0183]
-
-[Illustration: 0184]
-
-
-
-
-ON MANNERS
-
-
-I
-
-|It is always surprising, if not always agreeable, <b>to see ourselves
-as others see us</b>. The picture we present to others is never the
-picture we present to ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally
-it is a much plainer picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always
-a strange picture. Just now we English are having our portrait painted
-by an American lady, Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been
-appearing in the press. It is not a flattering portrait, and it seems to
-have angered a good many people who deny the truth of the likeness very
-passionately. The chief accusation seems to be that we have no manners,
-are lacking in the civilities and politenesses of life, and so on, and
-are inferior in these things to the French, the Americans, and other
-peoples. It is not an uncommon charge, and it comes from many quarters.
-It came to me the other day in a letter from a correspondent, French
-or Belgian, who has been living in this country during the war, and who
-wrote bitterly about the manners of the English towards foreigners. In
-the course of his letter he quoted with approval the following cruel
-remark of Jean Carrière, written, needless to say, before the war:
-
-“Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal élevé du fait
-qu'il manque de manières; il ignore encore la politesse, voilà tout.”
-
-The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the
-whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.
-
-I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have
-enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken
-up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and
-we suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should
-be told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At
-the same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's
-warning about the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty
-millions of us, and we have some forty million different manners, and it
-is not easy to get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will
-take this “copy” to the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who
-preceded him was a monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all
-civility; another is all bad temper, and between the two extremes you
-will get every shade of good and bad manners. And so through every phase
-of society.
-
-Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the
-widest differences of manner in different parts of the country. In
-Lancashire and Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There
-is a deep-seated distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the
-code of conduct differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral
-town as the manner of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But
-even here you will find behind the general bearing infinite shades of
-difference that make your generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more
-you know of any people the less you feel able to sum them up in broad
-categories.
-
-Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our
-ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete
-darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting--apropos of the
-Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because
-of the strangeness of his appearance--lamenting the deplorable manners
-of the people. “Lord!” he says, “to see the absurd nature of Englishmen
-that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks
-strange.” Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him
-describing the English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
-
-But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
-earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. “To mention but a
-single attraction,” he says in one of his letters, “the English girls
-are divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses.
-They have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go
-anywhere on a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you
-arrive, they kiss you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you
-return. Go where you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if
-you had once tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish
-to spend your life there.” Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens
-a good deal changed to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a
-cigarette.
-
-I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing
-and less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the
-saying of O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good
-criticism. Our lack of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but
-more probably it is traceable not to a physical but to a social source.
-Unlike the Celtic and the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have
-not the ease that comes from the ingrained tradition of human equality.
-The French have that ease. So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So
-have the Americans. But the English are class conscious. The dead
-hand of feudalism is still heavy upon our souls. If it were not, the
-degrading traffic in titles would long since have been abolished as an
-insult to our intelligence. But we not only tolerate it: we delight
-in this artificial scheme of relationship. It is not human values, but
-social discriminations that count. And while human values are cohesive
-in their effect, social discriminations are separatist. They break
-society up into castes, and permeate it with the twin vices of snobbery
-and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is subdivided into
-infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious restraints of a
-people uncertain of their social relationships create a defensive manner
-which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true root is a
-timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his ground
-tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is proud: it
-may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away from this
-fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners for
-independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.
-
-The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from
-a sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented
-to keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression
-that he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he
-had more _abandon_. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical
-politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the
-spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which
-makes the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably
-what Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the
-impression that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good
-manners that they exist most where they do not exist at all--that is to
-say, where conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told
-James Hogg that no man who was content to be himself, without either
-diffidence or egotism, would fail to be at home in any company, and I do
-not know a better recipe for good manners.
-
-
-II
-
-I was riding in a bus yesterday afternoon when I overheard a
-conversation between a couple of smartly dressed young people--a youth
-and a maiden--at the other end of the vehicle. It was not an amusing
-conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about. Indeed,
-I could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be about
-anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which consist
-chiefly of “Awfullys” and “Reallys!” and “Don't-you-knows” and tattle
-about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and similar
-common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter but
-because of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the speakers
-were alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of wind.
-
-The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to hear,
-while others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not of
-approval. They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved an
-air of being unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of not
-being aware that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact, their
-manner indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings. They
-were really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the bus.
-If they had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in quite
-reasonable tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly and
-defiantly to an empty bus. They would have made no impression on an
-empty bus. But they were happily sensible of making quite a marked
-impression on a full bus.
-
-But it was not the impression they imagined. It was another impression
-altogether. There are few more unpleasing and vulgar habits than that of
-loud, aggressive conversation in public places. It is an impertinence to
-inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who do not want to know about
-them, and who may want to read or doze or think or look out of the
-window at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The assumption
-behind the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is an
-announcement to the world that we are someone in particular and can
-talk as loudly as we please whenever we please. It is a sort of social
-Prussianism that presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by a
-superior egotism. The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in the
-world is mistaken. On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an inverted
-self-consciousness. These young people were talking loudly, not because
-they were unconscious of themselves in relation to their fellows, but
-because they were much too conscious and were not content to be just
-quiet, ordinary people like the rest of us.
-
-I hesitate to say that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not
-lived abroad sufficiently to judge. But it is a common experience
-of those who travel to find, as I have often found, their country
-humiliated by this habit of aggressive bearing in public places. It is
-unlovely at home, but it is much more offensive abroad, for then it is
-not only the person who is brought into disrepute, but the country he
-(and not less frequently she) is supposed to represent. We in the bus
-could afford to bear the affliction of that young couple with tolerance
-and even amusement, for they only hurt themselves. We could discount
-them. But the same bearing in a foreign capital gives the impression
-that we are all like this, just as the rather crude boasting of certain
-types of American grossly misrepresent a people whose general
-conduct, as anyone who sees them at home will agree, is unaffected,
-unpretentious, and good-natured.
-
-The truth, I suspect, is that every country sends abroad a
-disproportionate number of its “bounders.” It is inevitable that it
-should be so, for the people who can afford to travel are the people who
-have made money, and while many admirable qualities may be involved
-in the capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain coarse
-assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got so
-hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are better
-than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot attune
-his voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second generation,
-this congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high school
-it is apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the bus
-yesterday.
-
-So far from being representative of the English, they are violently
-unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take
-an average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust
-the sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted
-with egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and
-monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract attention
-without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy
-mean between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the
-overbearing note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk
-of our affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without
-desiring to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without
-wishing to be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we
-have achieved that social ease which consists in the adjustment of
-a reasonable confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the
-sensibilities of others.
-
-[Illustration: 0192]
-
-[Illustration: 0193]
-
-
-
-
-ON A FINE DAY
-
-|It's just like summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have
-forgotten to say it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it
-from the orchard with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery.
-There are some people of penurious emotions and speech, like the
-Drumtochty farmer in Ian Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of
-this iteration. They would find it wasteful and frivolous. They do not
-understand that we go on saying it over and over again, like the birds,
-for the sheer joy of saying it. Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice.
-There he goes skipping from branch to branch and twig to twig, and
-after each skip he pauses to say, “It's just like summer,” and from a
-neighbouring tree his mate twitters confirmation in perfect time. I've
-listened to them for half an hour and they've talked about nothing else.
-
-In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great
-baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the
-paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully
-and tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well
-aired before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows
-his score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has
-only one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the
-world, but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer,
-and not a conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who
-seems never to forget the listening world.
-
-In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
-There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along
-the turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football
-match, I fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the
-cheerful outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens
-and the fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of
-hammering; from the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor
-voice that comes up from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I
-have not heard it for four years or more; but it has been heard in many
-lands and by many rivers from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would
-rather be singing in the allotment with his young brother Sam (the
-leader of the trebles in the village choir) than anywhere else in the
-vide world. “Yes, I've been to Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the
-'Oly Land,” he says. “I don't care if I never see the 'Oly Land again.
-Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far as I'm concerned. This is good
-enough for me--that is, if there's a place for a chap that wants to get
-married to live in.”
-
-Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at
-her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. “Well, this is all
-right, ain't it, mother?”
-
-“Yes,” says the old lady, “it's just like summer.”
-
-“And to think,” continues the voice, “that there was a thick layer o'
-snow a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to
-come yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar,
-and it stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though
-it do seem like it, don't it?”
-
-“Yes, it's just like summer,” repeats the old lady tranquilly.
-
-There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
-sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
-like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we
-are here. Weather in town is only an incident--a pleasurable incident
-or a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella,
-whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a
-mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or
-outside. It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your
-visit to the theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for
-this reason the incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as
-an acquaintance of a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he
-is in a good humour and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
-
-But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven.
-It is politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual
-diversion. You study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and
-watch the change of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the
-mood of the public. When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a
-fine day, or has been a cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a
-conventional civility. It is the formal opening of the discussion of
-weighty matters. It involves the prospects of potatoes and the sowing of
-onions, the blossoms on the trees, the effects of weather on the poultry
-and the state of the hives. I do not suppose that there is a moment of
-his life when Jim is unconscious of the weather or indifferent to
-it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not care what happens to
-the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands and secular
-interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is a stem
-Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the chapel
-in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always
-trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi'
-work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to
-dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. “I don't hold wi'
-work on Sundays,” he would repeat inflexibly.
-
-[Illustration: 0197]
-
-And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other
-end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the
-weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call
-her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward.
-It is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants
-hens. If the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an
-unerring instinct to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin
-of feathers. The hard frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes
-when everybody else's escaped, and it was her hive that brought the
-“Isle of Wight” into our midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds
-that the last was a visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a
-death in the family--true, it was only a second cousin, but it was “in
-the family”--and had neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive.
-And of course they died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow
-Walsh has no patience with people who fly in the face of Providence in
-this way.
-
-But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is the most
-unremittingly malevolent. It is either “smarty hot” or “smarty cold.” If
-it isn't giving her a touch of “brownchitis,” or “a blowy feeling all up
-the back,” or making her feel “blubbed all over,” it is dripping through
-her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke,
-or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary
-life. I think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the
-hill-side like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even
-smiles, but his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the
-bottom he is a terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country
-woman no end of work, and makes her life a burden.
-
-But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
-When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that “it is
-a bit better to-day.” This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays
-to the weather. And we translate it for her into “Yes, it's just like
-summer.”
-
-In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
-damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most
-part the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees
-are white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees
-which fill the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note
-of an aerial violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of
-his double bass to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way
-from blossom to blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is
-as full of the gossip of summer as the peacock butterfly that comes
-flitting back across the orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old
-Benjy, who saluted me over the hedge just now with the remark that
-he didn't recall the like of this for a matter o' seventy year. Yes,
-seventy year if 'twas a day.
-
-Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy
-years ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks
-about anything in the memory of this generation. “I be nearer a
-'underd,” he says, “than seventy,” by which I think he means that he is
-eighty-six. He longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see
-no reason why he shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old boy,
-still does a good day's gardening and has come up the lane on this hot
-day at a nimble speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to
-have made his coffin and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from
-any morbid yearning for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding
-him off, just as the rest of us “touch wood” lest evil befall. “It's
-just like summer,” he says.
-
-“I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty....”
-
-
-[Illustration: 0200]
-
-[Illustration: 0201]
-
-
-
-
-ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO
-
-|I see that Mr Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to
-women very seriously on the subject of smoking. “Would you like to see
-your mother smoke?” asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he was
-addressing, and Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco
-smoke in the face of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed
-feelings on this subject, and in order to find out what I really think I
-will write about it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby.
-I do not want to see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the
-baby. But neither do I want to see father doing so. If father is smoking
-when he nurses the baby he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs
-out his smoke. Do not let us drag in the baby.
-
-The real point is in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your
-affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would
-not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be
-absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because
-he smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of
-disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of
-taste which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is
-wasteful and unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the
-habit regardless of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that _women_ must not
-smoke because the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that _men_ may.
-He would no more say this than he would say that it is right for men to
-live in stuffy rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right
-for men to get drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of
-drunkenness there is no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel
-that it is more tragic in the case of the woman, but it is equally
-disgusting in both sexes.
-
-What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men
-is vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up
-morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women
-not smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom
-been otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle,
-for example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he would have answered the
-question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their
-pipes together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and
-eternity, and no one who has read his letters will doubt his love for
-her. There are no such letters from son to mother in all literature. And
-of course Mr Hicks knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be
-surprised to know that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of
-some women who smoke, and that he will be as cordial with them as with
-those who do not smoke.
-
-And yet.... Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of
-a bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to
-smoke. And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these
-now not infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I
-had been smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If
-smoking is an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the
-case of women as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women
-smoking outdoors while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an
-irrational fellow, said I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I
-replied. We are all irrational fellows. If we were brought to the
-judgment seat of pure reason how few of us would escape the cells.
-
-Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young
-women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke
-was a flag--the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got perplexed
-again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women--this universal
-claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous fact of
-the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag. Yet when
-I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it myself),
-flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I rejoice, I
-felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I came to
-the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These young
-women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men smoked
-on the top of the bus they must smoke too--not perhaps because they
-liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them on
-an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge
-of servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the
-symbols of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of
-women, but preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to
-their finer perceptions and traditions.
-
-But here my perplexity returned. It is not the fact of those young women
-smoking that offends you, I said addressing myself. It is the fact of
-their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you agree that the habit of
-smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of women as of men,
-why should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised in their
-case, while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself are
-smoking at this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged in
-defending the propriety of women smoking, and at the same time mentally
-reprobating the conduct of the young women who are smoking in front
-of you, not because they are smoking, but because (like you) they are
-smoking in public. How do you reconcile such confusions of mind?
-
-At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the horns
-of a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to the
-habit. And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to defend
-differential smoking conditions for men and women. If the main position
-was surrendered no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked in
-public then women could smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and cigars
-then women could smoke pipes and cigars. And at the thought of women
-smoking pipes on the top of buses, I realised that I had not yet found a
-path out of the absurd bog in which I had become mentally involved.
-
-Then something happened which suggested another solution. The young
-women rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was
-wafted with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown
-their cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy,
-languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial
-fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man's
-tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt
-the woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and
-wear rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity.
-The mind revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered and
-be-ringed. Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their cheeks.
-But Disraeli was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort of
-belated tale from the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of men
-universally revolts against paint, powder, and perfume. And asking
-myself why a habit, which custom had made tolerable in the case of
-women, became grotesque and offensive if imagined in connection with
-men, I saw a way out of my puzzle. I dismissed the view that the
-difference of sex accounted for the different emotions awakened. It was
-the habit itself which was objectionable. Familiarity with it in the
-case of women had dulled our perceptions to the reality. It was only
-when we conceived the habit in an unusual connection--imagined men going
-about with painted and powdered faces, with rings in their ears
-and heavy scents on their clothes--that its essential vulgarity and
-uncleanness were freshly and intensely presented to the mind.
-
-And that, said I, is the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit
-in the abstract which is vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in
-the case of man has deadened our sense of the fact, but the adoption
-of the habit by women, coupled with the fact that there is no logical
-halting-place between the cigarette indoors and a pipe on the top of the
-bus, gives us what the Americans call a new view-point. From that new
-view-point we are bound to admit that there is much to be said against
-tobacco and not much to be said for it--except, of course, that we like
-it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk to the
-men as well as to the women.
-
-Then perhaps we will see what can be done. For myself, I make no
-promise. After forty, says Meredith, we are wedded to our habits. And I,
-alas, am long past forty....
-
-[Illustration: 0207]
-
-[Illustration: 0208]
-
-
-
-
-DOWN TOWN
-
-|Through the grey mists that hang over the water in the late autumn
-afternoon there emerges a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of
-a distant range of mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with
-a precision that suggests the work of man rather than the careless
-architecture of Nature The mass is compact and isolated. It rises
-from the level of the water, sheer on either side, in bold precipitous
-cliffs, broken by horizontal lines, and dominated by one kingly, central
-peak that might be the Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the
-spire of some cathedral fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race.
-As the vessel from afar moves slowly through the populous waters and
-between the vaguely defined shores of the harbour, another shadow
-emerges ahead, rising out of the sea in front of the mountain mass. It
-is a colossal statue, holding up a torch to the open Atlantic.
-
-Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition.
-It turns to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable
-windows. Even the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of
-myriad windows. The day begins to darken and a swift transformation
-takes place. Points of light begin to shine from the windows like stars
-in the darkening firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters
-with thousands of tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy
-palace, glowing with illuminations from the foundations to the topmost
-height of the giddy precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in
-the scintillating pinnacle of the slender cathedral spire. The first
-daylight impression was of something as solid and enduring as the
-foundations of the earth; the second, in the gathering twilight, is of
-something slight and fanciful, of' towering proportions but infinitely
-fragile structure, a spectacle as airy and dream-like as a tale from the
-“Arabian Nights.”
-
-It is “down town.” It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its
-astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that
-lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest
-group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over
-the tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable
-maze of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion
-of the London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its
-direction, but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east
-and west, crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to
-the Harlem River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing
-island of Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the
-noble Fifth Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty
-buildings that shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to
-gild the upper storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many
-churches and the gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving,
-on a sunny afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you
-move in the shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the
-air above. And around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the
-architectural glories of “up town” New York, the great hotels stand
-like mighty fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great
-terminus. And in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled
-to the twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you
-are summoned.
-
-But it is in “down town,” on the tip of the tongue that is put out
-to the Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the
-stranger. It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no
-doubt, that make an equally striking appeal to the eye--Salzburg,
-Innsbruck, Edinburgh, Tunis--but it is the appeal of nature supplemented
-by art. Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not
-an approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of
-surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind,
-that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous,
-and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New
-York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you
-land. It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It
-ascends its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation
-over the Atlantic. “Down town” stands like a strong man on the shore
-of the ocean, asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind
-these terrific battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to
-the skies. Look at this muscular development. And I am only the advance
-agent. I am only the symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste
-of the power that heaves and throbs through the veins of the giant that
-bestrides this continent for three thousand miles, from his gateway to
-the Atlantic to his gateway, to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to
-the Gulf of Mexico.
-
-And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this
-terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from
-within, stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway
-ends, a street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned
-between two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more'
-lofty than the cross of St Paul's Cathedral--square towers, honeycombed
-with thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying
-up in lifts--called “elevators” for short--clicking at typewriters,
-performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns
-at the threshold of the giant.
-
-For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which
-he rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon
-is Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure
-in the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the
-high priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds
-are shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on
-the kerbstone of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its
-sovereigns wilting away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you
-stand, in devout respect before the modest threshold of the high priest
-a babel of strange sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn
-towards it and come suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange
-than anything pictured by Hogarth--in the street a jostling mass of
-human beings, fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like
-jockeys or pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended
-high as if in prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working
-with frantic symbols, their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at
-a hundred windows in the great buildings on either side of the street
-little groups of men and women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob
-below. It is the outside market of Mammon.
-
-You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
-great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements
-like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender
-and beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle
-nearly twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the
-temple of St Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth
-acquired in his sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most
-significant building in America and the first turret to catch the noose
-of light that the dawn flings daily over the Atlantic from the East.
-You enter its marble halls and take an express train to the forty-ninth
-floor, flashing in your journey past visions of crowded offices, tier
-after tier, offices of banks and publishers and merchants and
-jewellers, like a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been
-miraculously turned skywards by some violent geological “fault.” And at
-the forty-ninth floor you get out and take another “local” train to the
-top, and from thence you look giddily down, far down even upon the great
-precipices of the Grand Canon, down to the streets where the moving
-throng you left a few minutes ago looks like a colony of ants or
-black-beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement.
-
-And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
-with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to
-be large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
-churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are
-swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that
-loom above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George
-Washington still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the
-original union. Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted
-world an inverted civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the
-vision of the great dome that seems to float in the heavens over the
-secular activities of another city, still holding aloft, to however
-negligent and indifferent a generation, the symbol of the supremacy
-of spiritual things. And you will wonder whether in this astonishing
-spectacle below you, in which the temples of the ancient worship crouch
-at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce, there is the
-unconscious expression of another philosophy of life in which St
-Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to the stars.
-
-And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the
-scene below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so
-near that you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open
-Atlantic, with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million
-a year, that has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of
-hopes, past the statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the
-harbour, to be swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that
-lies behind you. You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught
-in the arms of its two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before
-you, with its overflow of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream,
-and its overflow of Jersey City on the far bank of the other. In the
-brilliant sunshine and the clear, smokeless atmosphere the eye travels
-far over this incredible vista of human activity. And beyond the vision
-of the eye, the mind carries the thought onward to the great lakes and
-the seething cities by their shores, and over the illimitable plains
-westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe, but still obedient to
-the stars and stripes, and southward by the great rivers to the tropic
-sea.
-
-And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the
-far horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings.
-They will not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those
-horizons, after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields
-of activity, you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the
-contrary, they will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense
-of power unlike anything else the world has to offer--the power of
-immeasurable resources, still only in the infancy of their development,
-of inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the
-mind, of a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one--one in a
-certain fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident
-prime of their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of
-the day before them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its
-crudeness and freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as
-to something avuncular and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late
-afternoon, a little tired and more than a little disillusioned and
-battered by the journey. For him the light has left the morning
-hills, but here it still clothes those hills with hope and spurs on to
-adventure.
-
-That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
-his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
-“the goods.” He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
-power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the
-inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the
-tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and
-the squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the
-chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction
-at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush,
-and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism
-has shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American
-interests, and the “100 per cent. American” in every disguise of
-designing self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything
-that is significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not
-a moment when the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the
-harbour, can feel very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no
-longer lit to invite the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the
-contrary, she turns her back on America and warns the alien away. Her
-torch has become a policeman's baton.
-
-And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
-breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous
-waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back
-upon the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun
-floods the land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near
-his setting, but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his
-morning prime, so vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of
-your first impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud
-pinnacle that looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the
-temple of primeval gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And
-as you gaze you are conscious of a great note of interrogation taking
-shape in the mind. Is that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic
-expression of the soul of America, or has this mighty power you
-are leaving another gospel for mankind? And as the light fades and
-battlements and pinnacle merge into the encompassing dark there sounds
-in the mind the echoes of an immortal voice--“Let us here highly resolve
-that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under
-God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the
-people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth!”
-
-And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell
-to America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of
-Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
-
-[Illustration: 0217]
-
-[Illustration: 0208]
-
-
-
-
-ON KEYHOLE MORALS
-
-|My neighbour at the breakfast table complained that he had had a bad
-night. What with the gale and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of
-the timbers of the ship and the pair in the next cabin--especially the
-pair in the next cabin.... How they talked! It was two o'clock
-before they sank into silence. And such revelations! He couldn't help
-overhearing them. He was alone in his cabin, and what was he to do? He
-couldn't talk to himself to let them know they were being overheard. And
-he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And, in short, there was nothing
-for it but to overhear. And the things he heard--well.... And with a
-gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he left it to me to imagine the
-worst. I suggested that he might cure the trouble by telling the steward
-to give the couple a hint that the next cabin was occupied. He received
-the idea as a possible way out of a painful and delicate situation.
-Strange, he said, it had not occurred to him.
-
-Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very
-important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man.
-It would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper,
-and there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are
-not to be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper
-enough when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not
-our public hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only
-indicates the kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We
-want the world's good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company
-manners as we put on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would
-put his ear to a keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole
-behind him watching him in the act. The true estimate of your character
-(and mine) depends on what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole
-behind us. It depends, not on whether you are chivalrous to some one
-else's wife in public, but whether you are chivalrous to your own wife
-in private. The eminent judge who, checking himself in a torrent of
-abuse of his partner at whist, contritely observed, “I beg your pardon,
-madam; I thought you were my wife,” did not improve matters. He only
-lifted the curtain of a rather shabby private cabin. He white-washed
-himself publicly out of his dirty private pail.
-
-Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the
-quiet and undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps
-you have accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the
-pockets bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental
-concern is awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own
-son. It is natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing
-and weighty reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that
-all those respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard
-young John's step approaching. You know that this very reasonable
-display of paternal interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying
-of which you would be ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is
-miles off--perhaps down in the city, perhaps far away in the country.
-You are left alone with his letters and your own sense of decency. You
-can read the letters in perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you
-can share them. Not a soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled
-to know those secrets, and young John may be benefited by your knowing
-them. What do you do in these circumstances? The answer will provide you
-with a fairly reliable tape measure for your own spiritual contents.
-
-There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next
-Cabin. We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of “Le
-Diable Boiteux,” Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one
-house to another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside,
-with very surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the
-guise of a very civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and
-offered to do the same for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and
-lift with magic and inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the
-mysteries and privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should have
-the decency to thank him and send him away. The amusement would be
-purchased at too high a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm,
-but it would do me a lot of harm. For, after all, the important thing
-is not that we should be able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the
-whole world in the face, but that we should be able to look ourselves in
-the face. And it is our private standard of conduct and not our public
-standard of conduct which gives or denies us that privilege. We are
-merely counterfeit coin if our respect for the Eleventh Commandment only
-applies to being found out by other people. It is being found out by
-ourselves that ought to hurt us.
-
-It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass
-a tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never
-committed a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or
-forged a cheque. But these things are not evidence of good character.
-They may only mean that I never had enough honest indignation to commit
-a murder, nor enough courage to break into a house. They may only mean
-that I never needed to forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may
-only mean that I am afraid of the police. Respect for the law is a
-testimonial that will not go far in the Valley of Jehosophat. The
-question that will be asked of me there is not whether I picked my
-neighbour's lock, but whether I put my ear to his keyhole; not whether
-I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but whether I read his
-letters when his back was turned--in short, not whether I had respect
-for the law, but whether I had respect for myself and the sanctities
-that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is what went on in my
-private cabin which will probably be my undoing.
-
-[Illustration: 0222]
-
-[Illustration: 0223]
-
-
-
-
-FLEET STREET NO MORE
-
-|To-day I am among the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a
-lifetime and am a person at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that
-is told, a rumour on the wind; a memory of far-off things and battles
-long ago. At this hour I fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm.
-There is the thunder of machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above,
-the click-click-click of the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph
-operators, the tinkling of telephones, the ringing of bells for
-messengers who tarry, reporters coming in with “stories” or without
-“stories,” leader-writers writing for dear life and wondering whether
-they will beat the clock and what will happen if they don't, night
-editors planning their pages as a shopman dresses his shop window,
-sub-editors breasting the torrent of “flimsies” that flows in from the
-ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and the other. I hear
-the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit might hear the
-murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as a policeman
-must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the Strand
-submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his glory
-departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the
-middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible
-embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong
-arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and
-the waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a
-personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could
-stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the
-street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to
-the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety.
-His cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of
-the Constitution, and his truncheon was as indispensable as a
-field-marshal's baton.
-
-And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on
-the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make
-a pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk
-across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers.
-Even “J. B.,” who has never been known to pass a policeman without a
-gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived
-under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly
-Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates
-or in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished
-magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free,
-independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He
-can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand,
-but he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting,
-or Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in
-the shop windows, or turn into the “pictures” or go home to tea. He can
-light his pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as
-he pleases. He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a
-realm where the clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes
-without stirring his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will
-not care.
-
-And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock
-and take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous
-thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me
-as my own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life
-until I have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have
-heard its chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the
-swanking swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its
-unceasing life during every hour of the twenty-four--in the afternoon
-when the pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are
-crossing to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air
-is shrill with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide
-of the day's life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work,
-and the telegraph boys flit from door to door with their tidings of
-the world's happenings; in the small hours when the great lorries come
-thundering up the side streets with their mountains of papers and rattle
-through the sleeping city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag
-of morn in sovereign state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral
-that looks down so grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. “I see it
-arl so plainly as I saw et, long ago.” I have worn its paving stones as
-industriously as Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as
-one who had the run of the estate and the freeman's right. I have
-known its _habitues_ as familiarly as if they had belonged to my own
-household, and its multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have
-drunk the solemn toast with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken
-counsel with the lawyers in the Temple, and wandered in its green and
-cloistered calm in the hot afternoons, and written thousands of leaders
-and millions of words on this, that, and the other, wise words and
-foolish words, and words without any particular quality at all, except
-that they filled up space, and have had many friendships and fought many
-battles, winning some and losing others, and have seen the generations
-go by, and the young fellows grow into old fellows who scan a little
-severely the new race of ardent boys that come along so gaily to the
-enchanted street and are doomed to grow old and weary in its service
-also. And at the end it has come to be a street of ghosts--a street of
-memories, with faces that I knew lurking in its shadows and peopling
-its rooms and mingling with the moving pageant that seems like a phantom
-too.
-
-Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like
-the Chambered Nautilus, I
-
-                   ... seal up the idle door,
-
-          Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.
-
-I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape
-at its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no
-more. No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual
-footsteps. No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had
-always “gone out to supper, sir,” or been called to the news-room or
-sent on an errand. No more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous
-clock that ticked so much faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will
-come down from above like snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults
-of the world will boil in like the roar of many waters, but I shall not
-hear them. For I have come into the inheritance of leisure. Time, that
-has lorded it over me so long, is henceforth my slave, and the future
-stretches before me like an infinite green pasture in which I can wander
-till the sun sets. I shall let the legions thunder by while I tend
-my bees and water my plants, and mark how my celery grows and how the
-apples ripen.
-
-And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the
-chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great
-noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him
-a tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his
-orchard when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys,
-bearing an urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in
-the Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to
-their plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water,
-took a sponge _and washed out his ears._
-
-[Illustration: 0228]
-
-[Illustration: 0229]
-
-
-
-
-ON WAKING UP
-
-|When I awoke this morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the
-valley and the beech woods glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and
-heard the ducks clamouring for their breakfast, and felt all the kindly
-intimacies of life coming back in a flood for the new day, I felt,
-as the Americans say, “good.” Waking up is always--given a clear
-conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy faculty of sleep--a joyous
-experience. It has the pleasing excitement with which the tuning up of
-the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the symphony affects you. It is
-like starting out for a new adventure, or coming into an unexpected
-inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling suddenly upon some author
-whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes to your heart like a
-brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden and beautiful and
-full of promise.
-
-But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is
-now that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of
-consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has
-happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and
-realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The
-fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does
-not diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into
-the future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking
-to each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over,
-that the years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining
-and the birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going
-forth to their labour until the evening without fear and without hate.
-As the day advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find
-it is very much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment
-when you step over the threshold of sleep into the living world the
-revelation is simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed.
-The devil is dead. The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the
-earth. You recall the far different emotions of a few brief months ago
-when the morning sun woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling
-of the birds seemed pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the
-paper spoiled your breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the
-Kaiser. Poor wretch, he is waking, too, probably about this time and
-wondering what will happen to him before nightfall, wondering where
-he will spend the miserable remnant of his days, wondering whether his
-great ancestor's habit of carrying a dose of poison was not after all a
-practice worth thinking about. He wanted the whole, earth, and now he is
-discovering that he is entitled to just six feet of it--the same as the
-lowliest peasant in his land. “The foxes have holes and the birds of
-the air have nests,” but there is neither hole nor nest where he will be
-welcome. There is not much joy for him in waking to a new day.
-
-But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has “murdered
-Sleep,” and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose
-a crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to
-enter the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease
-of life after our present lease had run out and were told that we could
-nominate our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor
-an earldom, nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my
-childhood when I thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin
-man, eternally perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a
-basket on my head and shouting “Muffins,” in the ears of a delighted
-populace. I loved muffins and I loved bells, and here was a man who had
-those joys about him all day long and every day. But now my ambitions
-are more restrained. I would no more wish to be born a muffin man than
-a poet or an Archbishop. The first gift I should ask would be something
-modest. It would be the faculty of sleeping eight solid hours every
-night, and waking each morning with the sense of unfathomable and
-illimitable content with which I opened my eyes to the world to-day.
-
-All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to
-their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put
-eating first, “for,” said he, “there is no other pleasure that comes
-three times a day and lasts an hour each time.” But sleep lasts eight
-hours. It fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it
-fills it up with the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom
-of democracy. “All equal are within the church's gate,” said George
-Herbert. It may have been so in George Herbert's parish; but it is
-hardly so in most parishes. It is true of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you
-enter its portals all discriminations vanish, and Hodge and his master,
-the prince and the pauper, are alike clothed in the royal purple and
-inherit the same golden realm. There is more harmony and equality in
-life than wre are apt to admit. For a good twenty-five years of our
-seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an agreement that is simply
-wonderful.
-
-And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What
-delight is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing
-the sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of
-the birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or
-the cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or
-(as now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the
-day will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as
-any that have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there
-is eternal renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best
-that is still to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot
-stale nor familiarity make tame.
-
-That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note
-of the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that
-all must feel on this exultant morning--
-
-                   Good morning, Life--and all
-
-                   Things glad and beautiful.
-
-                   My pockets nothing hold,
-
-                   But he that owns the gold,
-
-                   The Sun, is my great friend--
-
-                   His spending has no end.
-
-Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the
-bells. There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
-
-It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of
-sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain
-perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we
-can hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall
-get through it. We shall not “get through it,” of course, but speech is
-only fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have
-had a sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror
-of a dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of
-consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite
-mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of
-immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than
-from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose
-love and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this
-perplexity the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of
-happy awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not
-being. I can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than
-
-                   To dream as I may,
-
-                        And awake when I will,
-
-                   With the song of the bird,
-
-                        And the sun on the hill.
-
-Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in
-which, once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, “Are you there,
-beloved?” and hear the reply, “Yes, beloved, I am here,” and with
-that sweet assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The
-tenderness and beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred
-Austin, whom some one in a jest made Poet Laureate. “For my part,” he
-said, “I should like to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of
-another victory for the British Empire.” It would not be easy to invent
-a more perfect contrast between the feeling of a poet and the simulated
-passion of a professional patriot. He did not really think that, of
-course. He was simply a timid, amiable little man who thought it was
-heroic and patriotic to think that. He had so habituated his tiny talent
-to strutting about in the grotesque disguise of a swashbuckler that it
-had lost all touch with the primal emotions of poetry. Forgive me for
-intruding him upon the theme. The happy awakenings of eternity
-must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings and its vulgar
-patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to sleep on.
-
-[Illustration: 0235]
-
-[Illustration: 0236]
-
-
-
-
-ON RE-READING
-
-
-I
-
-|A weekly paper has been asking well-known people what books they
-re-read. The most pathetic reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir
-Arthur Conan Doyle. “I seldom re-read now,” says that unhappy man. “Time
-is so short and literature so vast and unexplored.” What a desolating
-picture! It is like saying, “I never meet my old friends now. Time is so
-short and there are so many strangers I have not yet shaken hands with.”
- I see the poor man, hot and breathless, scurrying over the “vast and
-unexplored” fields of literature, shaking hands and saying, “How
-d'ye do?” to everybody he meets and reaching the end of his journey,
-impoverished and pitiable, like the peasant in Tolstoi's “How much land
-does a man need?”
-
-I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with
-strangers. I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North
-Pole and the South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson
-said of the Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should
-not like _to go_ to see them. And so with books. Time is so short that
-I have none to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library.
-I could almost say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is
-published I read an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion,
-and a book has to weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I
-embark on it. When it has proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but
-meanwhile the old ships are good enough for me. I know the captain
-and the crew, the fare I shall get and the port I shall make and the
-companionship I shall have by the way.
-
-Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write--Boswell, “The
-Bible in Spain,” Pepys, Horace, “Elia,” Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve,
-“Travels with a Donkey,” Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, “The Early
-Life of Charles James Fox,”
-
-“Under the Greenwood Tree,” and so on. Do not call them books.
-
-                   Camerado, this is no book.
-
-                   Who touches this, touches a man,
-
-as Walt Whitman said of his own “Leaves of Grass.” They are not books.
-They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on
-my pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was
-worth making the great adventure of life to find such company. Come
-revolutions and bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace,
-gain or loss--these friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes
-of the journey. The friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are
-estranged, die, but these friends of the spirit are not touched with
-mortality. They were not born for death, no hungry generations tread
-them down, and with their immortal wisdom and laughter they give us
-the password to the eternal. You can no more exhaust them than you
-can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the joyous melody of Mozart or
-Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or any other thing of beauty.
-They are a part of ourselves, and through their noble fellowship we are
-made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind--
-
-               ... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
-
-               In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
-
-We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion
-with these spirits.
-
-I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old
-friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever
-and went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he
-sits in his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale.
-It is a way Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph
-captive. They cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern
-flight without thinking that they are going to breathe the air that
-Horace breathed, and asking them to carry some such message as John
-Marshall's:
-
-                        Tell him, bird,
-
-               That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
-
-               One man at least seeks not admittance there.
-
-This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss
-the figure of Horace--short and fat, according to Suetonius--in the
-fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with
-equal animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry.
-Meanwhile, so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would
-say, is imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading
-the books in which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored
-tracts of the desert to those who like deserts.
-
-
-II
-
-|A correspondent asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve
-Books that he ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not
-know what he had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs
-were, and even with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for
-another. But I compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed
-that for some offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a
-desert island out in the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for
-twelve months, or perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a
-mitigation of the penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve
-books of my own choosing. On what principles should I set about so
-momentous a choice?
-
-In the first place I decided that they must be books of the
-inexhaustible kind. Rowland Hill said that “the love of God was like a
-generous roast of beef--you could cut and come again.” That must be the
-first quality of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could
-go on reading and re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in
-Borrow went on reading “Moll Flanders.” If only her son had known that
-immortal book, she said, he would never have got transported for life.
-That was the sort of book I must have with me on my desert island. But
-my choice would be different from that of the old apple-woman of Old
-London Bridge. I dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the
-best of novels are exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my
-bundle of books would be complete before I had made a start with the
-essentials, for I should want “Tristram Shandy” and “Tom Jones,” two
-or three of Scott's, Gogol's “Dead Souls,” “David Copperfield,” “Evan
-Harrington,” “The Brothers Karamazoff,” “Père Goriot,” “War and Peace,”
- “The Three Musketeers,” all of Hardy's, “Treasure Island,” “Robinson
-Crusoe,” “Silas Marner,” “Don Quixote,” the “Cloister and the Hearth,”
- “Esmond”--no, no, it would never do to include novels. They must be left
-behind.
-
-The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but
-these had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not
-come in the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale,
-so that I can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have
-no doubt about my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first
-among the historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him
-by the lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and
-understanding that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf
-of twenty-three centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and
-fro, as it were, from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty
-drama of ancient Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the
-same ambitions, the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and
-the same heroes. Yes, Thucydides of course.
-
-And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is
-there to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history
-and philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come
-to the story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned
-Mommsen, or the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard
-choice. I shut my eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well,
-I make no complaint. And then I will have those three fat volumes of
-Motley's, “Rise of the Dutch Republic” (4) put in my boat, please,
-and--yes, Carlyle's “French Revolution” (5), which is history and drama
-and poetry and fiction all in one. And, since I must take the story of
-my own land with me, just throw in Green's “Short History” (6). It is
-lovable for its serene and gracious temper as much as for its story.
-
-That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the
-more personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep
-the fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course,
-there is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition,
-for there only is the real Samuel revealed “wart and all”). I should
-like to take “Elia” and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit
-my personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place
-must be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that
-frank, sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to
-these good fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality
-of open-air romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more
-I choose indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a
-choice between the “Bible in Spain,” “The Romany Rye,” “Lavengro,” and
-“Wild Wales.” But I rejoice when I find that “Lavengro” (10) is in the
-boat.
-
-I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could
-have had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is
-Wordsworth (11) _contra mundum_, I have no doubt. He is the man who will
-“soothe and heal and bless.” My last selection shall be given to a
-work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's
-“Voyages” and the “Voyage of the Beagle,” and while I am balancing their
-claims the “Beagle” (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library
-is complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the
-Pacific.
-
-[Illustration: 0243]
-
-
-
-
-FEBRUARY DAYS
-
-
-|The snow has gone from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of
-setting, has got round to the wood that crowns the hill on the other
-side of the valley. Soon it will set on the slope of the hill and then
-down on the plain. Then we shall know that spring has come. Two days
-ago a blackbird, from the paddock below the orchard, added his golden
-baritone to the tenor of the thrush who had been shouting good news
-from the beech tree across the road for weeks past. I don't know why the
-thrush should glimpse the dawn of the year before the blackbird, unless
-it is that his habit of choosing the topmost branches of the tree gives
-him a better view of the world than that which the golden-throated
-fellow gets on the lower branches that he always affects. It may be
-the same habit of living in the top storey that accounts for the early
-activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours, but never so noisy as
-in these late February days, when they are breaking up into families and
-quarrelling over their slatternly household arrangements in the topmost
-branches of the elm trees. They are comic ruffians who wash all their
-dirty linen in public, and seem almost as disorderly and bad-tempered as
-the human family itself. If they had only a little of our ingenuity
-in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my friend the farmer to
-light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive the female from
-the eggs and save his crops.
-
-A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his
-modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but
-he is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden
-and the pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is
-as industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the
-starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been
-observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two
-minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that
-deserves encouragement--a bird that loves caterpillars and does not love
-cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So hang
-out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
-
-And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no
-unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape
-the general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been
-agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below
-the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting
-industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with
-that innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just
-in front of you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of
-hide-and-seek. But not now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in
-the best of us. Now he reminds us that he too is a part of that nature
-which feeds so relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing
-about in his own erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that
-the coast is clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his
-beak. He skips away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper
-of the hive comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops
-the great tit and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in
-spite of his air of innocence.
-
-There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the
-starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months
-hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's
-“Oh, that the Romans had only one neck!” For then he will come out of
-the beech woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive
-against my cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an
-obscene picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and
-the stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I
-can be just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not
-all bad any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See
-him on autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his
-forages in the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in
-the sky that are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud
-approaches like a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting,
-changing formation, breaking up into battalions, merging into columns,
-opening out on a wide front, throwing out flanks and advance guards
-and rear guards, every complication unravelled in perfect order, every
-movement as serene and assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat
-of some invisible conductor below--a very symphony of the air, in which
-motion merges into music, until it seems that you are not watching a
-flight of birds, but listening with the inner ear to great waves of
-soundless harmony. And then, the overture over, down the cloud descends
-upon the fields, and the farmers' pests vanish before the invasion.
-And if you will follow them into the fields you will find infinite tiny
-holes that they have drilled and from which they have extracted the
-lurking enemy of the drops, and you will remember that it is to their
-beneficial activities that we owe the extermination of the May beetle,
-whose devastations were so menacing a generation ago. And after the
-flock has broken up and he has paired, and the responsibilities of
-housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy labours. When spring has
-come you can see him dart from his nest in the hollow of the tree and
-make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field, returning each
-time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other succulent, but
-pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at home. That
-acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted eighteen such
-journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for a fellow of
-such benignant spirit?
-
-But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and
-see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
-
-Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration.
-Sufficient unto the day---- And to-day I will think only good of the
-sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the brave
-news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as
-this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that
-all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, “according
-to plan,” and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score
-of hives in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its
-perils. We saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay
-on the ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had
-come from a neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there
-was no admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he
-came. Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness
-and great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him
-trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh,
-these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.
-
-In the garden the news is coming up from below, borne by those unfailing
-outriders of the spring, the snowdrop and the winter aconite. A modest
-company; but in their pennons is the assurance of the many-coloured host
-that is falling unseen into the vast pageant of summer and will fill the
-woods with the trumpets of the harebell and the wild hyacinth, and make
-the hedges burst into foam, and the orchard a glory of pink and white,
-and the ditches heavy with the scent of the meadowsweet, and the fields
-golden with harvest and the gardens a riot of luxuriant life. I said
-it was all right, chirps little red waistcoat from the fence--all the
-winter I've told you that there was a good time coming and now you see
-for yourself. Look at those flowers. Ain't they real? The philosopher in
-the red waistcoat is perfectly right. He has kept his end up all through
-the winter, and has taken us into his fullest confidence. Formerly he
-never came beyond the kitchen, but this winter when the snow was about
-he advanced to the parlour where he pottered about like one of the
-family. Now, however, with the great news outside and the earth full of
-good things to pick up, he has no time to call.
-
-Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save
-for the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the
-message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of
-the spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the
-sunrise is unlike the spirit of the sunset. It is the lusty breath of
-life coming back to the dead earth, and making these February days the
-most thrilling of the year. For in these expanding skies and tremors of
-life and unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and
-hope, and nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes
-that the joy of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The
-cherry blossom comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the
-spring with it, and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent
-of the lime trees and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days
-of birth when
-
-          “Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.”
-
-there is no hint of mortality and no reverted glance. The curtain is
-rising and the pageant is all before us.
-
-[Illustration: 0249]
-
-[Illustration: 0250]
-
-
-
-
-ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE
-
-
-|Among my letters this morning was one requesting that if I were in
-favour of “the reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the
-Jewish people,” I should sign the enclosed declaration and return it in
-the envelope (unstamped), also enclosed. I dislike unstamped envelopes.
-I also dislike stamped envelopes. You can ignore an unstamped enveloped
-but a stamped envelope compels you to write a letter, when perhaps you
-don't want to write a letter. My objection to unstamped envelopes is
-that they show a meagre spirit and a lack of confidence in you. They
-suggest that you are regarded with suspicion as a person who will
-probably steam off the stamp and use it to receipt a bill.
-
-But I waived the objection, signed the declaration, stamped the envelope
-and put it in the post. I did all this because I am a Zionist. I am so
-keen a Zionist that I would use a whole bookful of stamps in the cause.
-I am a Zionist, not on sentimental grounds, but on very practical
-grounds. I want the Jews to have Palestine, so that the English may have
-England and the Germans Germany and the Russians Russia. I want them to
-have a home of their own so that the rest of us can have a home of
-our own. By this I do not mean that I am an anti-Semite. I loathe
-Jew-baiting, and regard the Jew-baiter as a very unlovely person. But I
-want the Jew to be able to decide whether he is an alien or a citizen.
-I want him to shed the dualism that makes him such an affliction to
-himself and to other people. I want him to possess Palestine so that he
-may cease to want to possess the earth.
-
-I am therefore fiercely on the side of the Zionist Jews, and fiercely
-against their opponents. These people want to be Jews, but they do not
-want Jewry. They do not want to be compelled to make a choice between
-being Jews and being Englishmen or Americans, Germans or French. They
-want the best of both worlds. We are not a nation, they say; we are
-Englishmen, or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, or
-Russians, or Japanese “of the Jewish persuasion.” We are a religious
-community like the Catholics, or the Presbyterians, or the Unitarians,
-or the Plymouth Brethren. Indeed! And what is your religion, pray? _It
-is the religion of the Chosen People_. Great heavens! You deny that
-you are a nation, and in the same breath claim that you are the Chosen
-Nation. The very foundation of your religion is that Jehovah has picked
-you out from all the races of men as his own. Over you his hand is
-spread in everlasting protection. For you the cloud by day and the
-pillar of fire by night; for the rest of us the utter darkness of the
-breeds that have not the signature of Jehovah. We cannot enter your
-kingdom by praying or fasting, by bribe or entreaty. Every other nation
-is accessible to us on its own conditions; every other religion is eager
-to welcome us, sends its missionaries to us to implore us to come in.
-But you, the rejected of nations, yourself reject all nations and forbid
-your sacraments to those who are not bom of your household. You are
-the Chosen People, whose religion is the nation and whose nationhood is
-religion.
-
-Why, my dear sir, history offers no parallel to your astounding claim to
-nationality--the claim that has held your race together through nearly
-two thousand years of dispersion and wandering, of persecution and
-pride, of servitude and supremacy--
-
-          Slaves in eternal Egypts, baking your strawless bricks;
-
-          At ease in successive Zions, prating your politics.
-
-All nations are afflicted with egoism. It is the national egoism
-of Prussia that has just brought it to such catastrophic ruin. The
-Frenchman entertains the firm conviction that civilisation ends at the
-French frontier. Being a polite person, he does his best not to betray
-the conviction to us, and sometimes almost succeeds. The Englishman,
-being less sophisticated, does not try to conceal the fact that he has
-a similar conviction. It does not occur to him that anyone can doubt his
-claim. He knows that every foreigner would like to be an Englishman if
-he knew how. The pride of the Spaniard is a legend, and you have only to
-see Arab salute Arab to understand what a low person the European must
-seem in their eyes. In short, national egoism is a folly which is pretty
-equally distributed among all of us. But your national egoism is unlike
-any other brand on earth. In the humility of Shylock is the pride of the
-most arrogant racial aristocracy the world has ever seen. God appeared
-to you in the burning bush and spoke to you in the thunders of Sinai,
-and set you apart as his own exclusive household. And when one of your
-prophets declared that all nations were one in the sight of God, you
-rejected his gospel and slew the prophet. By comparison with you we are
-a humble people. We know we are a mixed race and that we have no more
-divine origin--and no less--than anybody else. Mr Kipling, it is true,
-has caught your arrogant note:
-
-          For the Lord our God Most High,
-
-          He hath made the deep as dry,
-
-          He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.
-
-But that is because Mr Kipling seems to be one of those who believe we
-are one of the lost tribes of your Chosen race. I gather that is so from
-another of his poems in which he cautions us against
-
-                   Such boastings as the Gentiles use
-
-                   And lesser breeds without the law.
-
-But Mr Kipling is only a curiosity among us. We are much more modest
-than that. But you are like that. You are not only a nation. You are,
-except the Chinese, the most isolated, the most tenacious, the most
-exclusive nation in history. Other races have changed through the
-centuries beyond recognition or have disappeared altogether. Where are
-the Persians of the spacious days of Cyrus? Who finds in the Egyptians
-of to-day the spirit and genius of the mighty people who built the
-Pyramids and created the art of the Third Dynasty? What trace is there
-in the modern Cretans of the imperial race whose seapower had become
-a legend before Homer sang? Can we find in the Greeks of our time any
-reminiscence of the Athens of Pericles? Or in the Romans any kinship
-with the sovereign people that conquered the world from Parthia to
-Britain, and stamped it with the signature of its civilisation as
-indelibly as it stamped it with its great highways? The nations chase
-each other across the stage of time, and vanish as the generations
-of men chase each other and vanish. You and the Chinese alone seem
-indestructible. It is no extravagant fancy that foresees that when the
-last fire is lit on this expiring planet it will be a Chinaman and a Jew
-who will stretch their hands to its warmth, drink in the last breath of
-air, and write the final epitaph of earth. No, it is too late by many a
-thousand years to deny your nationhood, for it is the most enduring fact
-in human records. And being a nation without a fatherland, you run like
-a disturbing immiscible fluid through the blood of all the nations. You
-need a home for your own peace and for the world's peace. I am going to
-try and help you to get one.
-
-[Illustration: 0254]
-
-[Illustration: 0201]
-
-
-
-
-ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
-
-|I think, on the whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good
-display of moral fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen
-(and admired) I propose to let them off in public. When I awoke in
-the morning I made a good resolution.... At this point, if I am
-not mistaken, I observe a slight shudder on your part, madam. “How
-Victorian!” I think I hear you remark. You compel me, madam, to digress.
-
-It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year's resolutions
-nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we
-elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No
-one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian
-England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This
-querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like
-the scorn of youth for its elders.
-
-I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I
-should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as
-it is to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the
-Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as
-we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren
-will be as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of
-yesterday. The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered
-poison gas, and have invented submarines and guns that will kill a
-churchful of people seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding
-the Nineteenth Century as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good
-things as well as very bad things about our old Victorian England. It
-did not go to the Ritz to dance in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz
-did not exist, and the modern hotel life had not been invented. It used
-to go instead to the watch-night service, and it was not above making
-good resolutions, which for the most part, no doubt, it promptly
-proceeded to break.
-
-Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of
-watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I
-had my way I would be as “merry” as Pepys, if in a different fashion.
-“Merry” is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that
-merriment is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a
-mere spasm, whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy
-of life. But the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other,
-and an occasional burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for
-anybody--even for an Archbishop--especially for an Archbishop. The
-trouble with an Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take
-himself too seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad
-for him. He needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally
-that his virtue is not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary
-humanity. At least once a year he should indulge in a certain
-liveliness, wear the cap and bells, dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe,
-not too publicly, but just publicly enough so that there should be
-nothing furtive about it. If not done on the village green it might
-at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and chronicled in the
-local newspapers. “Last evening His Grace the Archbishop attended the
-servants' ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the chief
-scullery-maid.”
-
-[Illustration: 0257]
-
-And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its
-good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you “A Merry Christmas
-and a Happy New Year.” Nowadays the formula is “A Happy Christmas and a
-Prosperous New Year.” It is a priggish, sophisticated change--a sort of
-shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being “merry.”
- There isn't. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a
-Merry Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a
-Happy New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
-
-If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making
-good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that
-virtue is a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride
-Victorian England because it went to watch-night services it is not
-because I think there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is
-because, in the words of the old song, I think “It is good to be
-merry _and_ wise.” I like a festival of foolishness and I like good
-resolutions, too. Why shouldn't I? Lewis Carrol's gift for mathematics
-was not less admirable because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at
-doing sums in his head.
-
-From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution.
-The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New
-Year's morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is
-that you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn't call you an
-intolerant fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow.
-Perhaps to put the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous
-reaction to events is a little too immediate. I don't want to be
-unpleasant, but I think you see what I mean. Do not suppose that I am
-asking you to be a cold-blooded, calculating person. God forbid. But it
-would do you no harm to wear a snaffle bar and a tightish rein--or, as
-we used to say in our Victorian England, to “count ten.” I accepted
-the criticism with approval. For though we do not like to hear of our
-failings from other people, that does not mean that we are unconscious
-of them. The more conscious we are of them, the less we like to hear of
-them from others and the more we hear of them from ourselves. So I said
-“Agreed. We will adopt 'Second thoughts' as our New Year policy and
-begin the campaign at once.”
-
-And then came my letters--nice letters and nasty letters and indifferent
-letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say, “raised
-the waters.” No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters which
-anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I
-might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting
-assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of
-writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different.
-As I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding
-expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I
-said “Second thoughts,” and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as
-the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect
-to dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old
-imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to
-have a periodical brush with one's habits, even if one knows one is
-pretty sure to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a
-reminder that we are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of
-the imperfections of others. And that, I think, is the case for our old
-Victorian habit of New Year's Day commandments.
-
-I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite _pianissimo_ and
-nice.
-
-[Illustration: 0261]
-
-
-
-
-ON A GRECIAN PROFILE
-
-|I see that the ghouls have descended upon George Meredith, and are
-desecrating his remains. They have learned from the life of him just
-published that he did not get on well with his father, or his eldest
-son, and that he did not attend his first wife's funeral. Above all,
-he was a snob. He was ashamed of the tailoring business from which he
-sprang, concealed the fact that he was bom at Portsmouth, and generally
-turned his Grecian profile to the world and left it to be assumed that
-his pedigree was wrapped in mystery and magnificence.
-
-I daresay it is all true. Many of us have an indifferent record at home
-and most of us like to turn our Grecian profiles to the world, if we
-have Grecian profiles. We are like the girl in Hardy's story who always
-managed to walk on the right side of her lover, because she fancied that
-the left side of her face was her strong point. The most distinguished
-and, I think, the noblest American of our time always turns his profile
-to the camera--and a beautiful profile it is--for reasons quite
-obvious and quite pardonable to those who have seen the birth-mark that
-disfigures the other cheek. I suspect that I do not myself object to
-being caught unaware in favourable attitudes or pleasing situations that
-dispose the observer to agreeable impressions. And, indeed, why should I
-(or you) be ashamed to give-a pleasant thrill to anybody if it is in
-our power. If we pretend we are above these human frailties, what is the
-meaning of the pains we take about choosing a hat, or about the cut of
-a coat, or the colour of a cloth for the new suit? Why do we so seldom
-find pleasure in a photograph of ourselves--so seldom feel that it
-does justice to that benignant and Olympian ideal of ourselves which we
-cherish secretly in our hearts? I should have to admit, if I went into
-the confession box, that I had never seen a photograph of myself that
-had satisfied me. And I fancy you would do the same if you were honest.
-We may pretend to ourselves that it is only abstract beauty or absolute
-truth that we are concerned about, but we know better. We are thinking
-of our Grecian profile.
-
-It is no doubt regrettable to find that great men are so often afflicted
-with little weaknesses. There are some people who delight in pillorying
-the immortals and shying dead cats and rotten eggs at them.
-
-They enjoy the discovery that no one is better than he should be. It
-gives them a comfortable feeling to discover that the austere outside of
-the lord Angelo conceals the libertine. If you praise Caesar they will
-remind you that after dinner he took emetics; if Brutus, they will say
-he made an idol of his public virtue. They like to remember that Lamb
-was not quite the St Charles he is represented to be, but took far
-too much wine at dinner and dosed beautifully, but alcoholically,
-afterwards, as you may read in De Quincey. They like to recall that
-Scott was something of a snob, and put the wine-glass that the Prince
-Regent had used at dinner in his pocket, sitting down on it afterwards
-in a moment of happy forgetfulness. In short, they go about like
-Alcibiades mutilating the statues of Hermes (if he was indeed the
-culprit), and will leave us nothing in human nature that we can entirely
-reverence.
-
-I suppose they are right enough on the facts. Considering what
-multitudinous persons we are it would be a miracle if, when we button
-up ourselves in the morning we did not button up some individual of
-unpleasant propensities, whom we pretend we do not know. I have never
-been interested in my pedigree. I am sure it is a very ancient one,
-and I leave it at that. But I once made a calculation--based on the
-elementary fact that I had two parents and they had each two parents,
-and so on--and came to the conclusion that about the time of the Norman
-Conquest my ancestors were much more numerous than the population
-then inhabiting this island. I am aware that this proves rather too
-much--that it is an example of the fact that you can prove anything by
-statistics, including the impossible. But the truth remains that I am
-the temporary embodiment of a very large number of people--of millions
-of millions of people, if you trace me back to my ancestors who used to
-sharpen flints some six hundred thousand years ago. It would be singular
-if in such a crowd there were not some ne'er-do-wells jostling about
-among the nice, reputable persons who, I flatter myself, constitute my
-Parliamentary majority. Sometimes I fancy that, in a snap election taken
-at a moment of public excitement within myself, the ne'er-do-wells get
-on top. These accidents will happen, and the best I can hope is that the
-general trend of policy in the multitudinous kingdom that I carry under
-my hat is in the hands of the decent people.
-
-And that is the best we can expect from anybody--the great as well as
-the least. If we demand of the supreme man that he shall be a perfect
-whole we shall have no supreme man--only a plaster saint. Certainly we
-shall have no great literature. Shakespeare did not sit aloof like a
-perfect god imagining the world of imperfect creatures that he created.
-The world was within him and he was only the vehicle of his enormous
-ancestry and of the tumultuous life that they reproduced in the theatre
-of his mind. In him was the mirth of a roystering Falstaff of long ago,
-the calculating devilry of some Warwickshire Iago, the pity of Hubert,
-the perplexity of some village Hamlet, the swagger of Ancient Pistol,
-the bucolic simplicity of Cousin Silence, the mingled nobleness and
-baseness of Macbeth, the agony of Lear, the sweetness of many a maiden
-who walked by Avon's banks in ancient days and lived again in
-the Portias and Rosalinds of his mind. All these people dwelt in
-Shakespeare. They were the ghosts of his ancestors. He was, like the
-rest of us, not a man, but multitudes of men. He created all these
-people because he was all these people, contained in a larger measure
-than any man who ever lived all the attributes, good and bad, of
-humanity. Each character was a peep into the gallery of his ancestors.
-Meredith, himself, recognised the ancestral source of creative power.
-When Lady Butcher asked him to explain his insight into the character of
-women he replied, “It is the spirit of my mother in me.” It was indeed
-the spirit of many mothers working in and through him.
-
-It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it
-so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never
-more difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along
-the Embankment last evening with a friend--a man known alike for his
-learning and character--when he turned to me and said, “I will
-never have a hero again.” We had been speaking of the causes of
-the catastrophe of Paris, and his remark referred especially to his
-disappointment with President Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair
-to the President. He did not make allowance for the devil's broth of
-intrigue and ambitions into which the President was plunged on this side
-of the Atlantic. But, leaving that point aside, his remark expressed a
-very common feeling. There has been a calamitous slump in heroes. They
-have fallen into as much disrepute as kings.
-
-And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the
-fabulous offspring of comfortable times--supermen reigning on Olympus
-and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the
-storm and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy
-and prove that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they
-are discovered to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind,
-feeble folk like you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as
-helpless as any of us. Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and
-their feet have come down from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of
-clay.
-
-It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of
-the Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron
-expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:
-
-          I want a hero: an uncommon want,
-
-               When every year and month sends forth a new one.
-
-          Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
-
-               The age discovers he is not the true one.
-
-The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that “no man is
-a hero to his valet.” To be a hero you must be remote in time or
-circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and
-fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities
-and angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is
-privileged to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the
-tricks you have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a
-faithful secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture
-he gives of Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome
-loathing for that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name
-thunders down the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his
-contemporaries. It was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom
-he had just appointed to the choicest command in his gift, who went to
-Caesar's house on that March morning, two thousand years ago, to bring
-him to the slaughter.
-
-If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men
-I should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely
-than anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance
-in secondary things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and
-tenderness with resolution and strength, he stands alone in history.
-But even he was not a hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too
-near--near enough to note his frailties, for he was human, too near to
-realise the grand and significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was
-not until he was dead that the world realised what a leader had fallen
-in Israel. Motley thanked heaven, as for something unusual, that he had
-been privileged to appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed
-him to men. Stanton fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end,
-and it was only when life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur
-of the force that had been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. “There
-lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen,” he said,
-as he stood with other colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had
-breathed his last. But the point here is that, sublime though the sum of
-the man was, his heroic profile had its abundant human warts.
-
-It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of
-reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It
-will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have
-made the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not
-find them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are
-these the men--these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards--the
-demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the
-microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than
-demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and
-then you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.
-
-It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto
-Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless
-picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its
-arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion
-to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is
-a painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never
-will be such a being. The best of us is woven of “mingled yarn, good and
-ill together.” And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and
-the ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he “contained
-multitudes” too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful
-for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects
-of that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
-
-[Illustration: 0269]
-
-[Illustration: 0270]
-
-
-
-
-ON TAKING A HOLIDAY
-
-|I hope the two ladies from the country who have been writing to the
-newspapers to know what sights they ought to see in London during their
-Easter holiday will have a nice time. I hope they will enjoy the tube
-and have fine weather for the Monument, and whisper to each other
-successfully in the whispering gallery of St Paul's, and see the
-dungeons at the Tower and the seats of the mighty at Westminster, and
-return home with a harvest of joyful memories. But I can promise them
-that there is one sight they will not see. They will not see me. Their
-idea of a holiday is London. My idea of a holiday is forgetting there is
-such a place as London.
-
-Not that I dislike London. I should like to see it.
-
-I have long promised myself that I would see it. Some day, I have said,
-I will surely have a look at this place. It is a shame, I have said, to
-have lived in it so long and never to have seen it. I suppose I am not
-much worse than other Londoners. Do you, sir, who have been taking the
-morning bus from Balham for heaven knows how many years--do you, when
-you are walking down Fleet Street, stand still with a shock of delight
-as the dome of St Paul's and its cross of gold burst on your astonished
-sight? Do you go on a fine afternoon and take your stand on Waterloo
-Bridge to see that wondrous river façade that stretches with its
-cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces from Westminster to St Paul's?
-Do you know the spot where Charles was executed, or the church where
-there are the best Grinling Gibbons carvings? Did you ever go into
-Somerset House to see the will of William Shakespeare, or--in short, did
-you ever see London? Did you ever see it, not with your eyes merely, hut
-with your mind, with the sense of revelation, of surprise, of discovery?
-Did you ever see it as those two ladies from the country will see it
-this Easter as they pass breathlessly from wonder to wonder? Of course
-not. You need a holiday in London as I do. You need to set out with
-young Tom (aged ten) on a voyage of discovery and see all the sights of
-this astonishing city as though you had come to it from a far country.
-
-That is how I hope to visit it--some day. But not this Easter, not when
-I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the cherry
-blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the chestnut
-tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long and the
-April meadows are “smoored wi' new grass,” as they say in the Yorkshire
-dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at the magic
-casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn to the
-fringe of Dartmoor and let loose--shall it be from Okehampton or Bovey
-Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? what matter the gate by which we enter the
-sanctuary?--let loose, I say, into the vast spaces of earth and sky
-where the moorland streams sing their ancient runes over the boulders
-and the great tors stand out like castles of the gods against the
-horizon and the Easter sun dances, as the legend has it, overhead and
-founders gloriously in the night beyond Plymouth Sound.
-
-Or, perhaps, ladies, if you come from the North, I may pass you
-unawares, and just about the time when you are cracking your breakfast
-egg in the boarding house at Russell Square--heavens, Russell
-Square!--and discussing whether you shall first go down the deepest
-lift or up the highest tower, or stand before the august ugliness of
-Buckingham Palace, or see the largest station or the smallest church,
-I shall be stepping out from Keswick, by the lapping waters of Derwent
-water, hailing the old familiar mountains as they loom into sight,
-looking down again--think of it!--into the' Jaws of Borrowdale, having
-a snack at Rosthwaite, and then, hey for Styehead! up, up ever the rough
-mountain track, with the buzzard circling with slow flapping wings about
-the mountain flanks, with glorious Great Gable for my companion on the
-right hand and no less glorious Scafell for my companion on the left
-hand, and at the rocky turn in the track--lo! the great amphitheatre of
-Wasdale, the last Sanctuary of lakeland.
-
-And at this point, ladies, you may as you crane your neck to see the
-Duke of York at the top of his column--wondering all the while who the
-deuce the fellow was that he should stand so high--you may, I say, if
-you like, conceive me standing at the top of the pass, taking my hat
-from my head and pronouncing a terrific curse on the vandals who would
-desecrate the last temple of solitude by driving a road over this
-fastness of the mountains in order that the gross tribe of motorists may
-come with their hoots and their odours, their hurry and vulgarity, and
-chase the spirit of the mountains away from us for ever.... And then
-by the screes of Great Gable to the hollow among the mountains. Or
-perchance, I may turn by Sprinkling Tam and see the Pikes of Langdale
-come into view and stumble down Rossett Ghyll and so by the green
-pastures of Langdale to Grasmere.
-
-In short, ladies, I may be found in many places. But I shall not tell
-you where. I am not quite sure that I could tell you where at this
-moment, for I am like a fellow who has come into great riches and
-is doubtful how he can squander them most gloriously. But, I repeat,
-ladies, that you will not find me in London. I leave London to you. May
-you enjoy it.
-
-[Illustration: 0201]
-
-
-
-
-UNDER THE SYCAMORE
-
-|An odd question was put to me the other day which I think I may venture
-to pass on to a wider circle. It was this: What is the best dish that
-life has set before you? At first blush it seems an easy question to
-answer. It was answered gaily enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked
-what was the best thing that had ever happened to him. “The best thing
-that ever happened to me was to be born,” he replied. But that is not an
-answer: it is an evasion. It belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether
-life is worth living. Life may be worth living or not worth living on
-balance, but in either case we can still say what was the thing in it
-that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a dinner on the whole and yet
-make an exception of the trout, or the braised ham and spinach or the
-dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and still admit that he
-has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift and many more, have
-cursed the day you were born and still remember many pleasant things
-that have happened to you--falling in love, making friends, climbing
-mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs, watching the
-sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You may write
-off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush outside.
-It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very sad heart
-who has never had anything to thank his stars for.
-
-But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it
-grows difficult on reflection.
-
-In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily
-answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over
-and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things
-that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long
-sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and
-agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree--sycamore or chestnut
-for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because their
-generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade--to sit, I say, and
-think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball which the
-Blessèd Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven near by,
-sees “spinning like a midge” below.
-
-And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and
-asked us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play
-to which we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped
-away so quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we
-should make now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will
-be there) will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer.
-That glorious contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool
-million--come now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair
-to remember your journey by. You will have to think of something better
-than that as the splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to
-confess to a very complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser
-pleasures seemed so important, you will not like to admit, even to
-yourself, that your most rapturous memory of earth centres round the
-grillroom at the Savoy. You will probably find that the things best
-worth remembering are the things you rejected.
-
-I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose
-pleasures were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of
-life, after all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers
-in money, and traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those
-occupations to hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon
-under that sycamore tree--which of them, now that it is all over, will
-have most joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one
-and a gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the
-earth as a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the
-mountains, and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and
-where season followed season with a processional glory that never grew
-dim. And Mozart will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and
-Turner as a panorama of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect,
-with what delight they will look back on the great moments of
-life--Columbus seeing the new world dawning on his vision, Copernicus
-feeling the sublime architecture of the universe taking shape in his
-mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal mystery of the human frame, Darwin
-thrilling with the birth pangs of the immense secret that he wrung
-from Nature. These men will be able to answer the question grandly. The
-banquet they had on earth will bear talking about even in Heaven.
-
-But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the
-scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will,
-I fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and
-humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we
-won the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or
-shook hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our
-name in the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament.
-It will be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human
-comradeship we had on the journey--the friendships of the spirit,
-whether made in the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or
-art. We shall remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its
-affections--
-
-               For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
-
-               The fates some recompense have sent--
-
-               Thrice blessed are the things that last,
-
-               The things that are more excellent.
-
-[Illustration: 0278]
-
-[Illustration: 0279]
-
-
-
-
-ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE
-
-
-|I met an old gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with
-whom I have a slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he
-asked me whether I remembered Walker of _The Daily News_. No, said I,
-he was before my time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the
-'seventies.
-
-“Before that,” said the old gentleman. “Must have been in the 'sixties.”
-
-“Probably,” I said. “Did you know him in the 'sixties?”
-
-“Oh, I knew him before then,” said the old gentleman, warming to his
-subject. “I knew him in the 'forties.”
-
-I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman
-enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.
-
-“Heavens!” said I, “the 'forties!”
-
-“No,” said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a
-better view across the ages. “No.... It must have been in
-the 'thirties.... Yes, it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school
-together in the 'thirties. We called him Sawney Walker.”
-
-I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I
-had paid him the one compliment that appealed to him--the compliment of
-astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.
-
-His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety
-not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked “well
-set” for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance
-as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his
-hundred at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement
-was mixed with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent
-vanity is the last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last
-infirmity that humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that
-rages around Dean Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the
-angels. I want to feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are
-moving upwards in the scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round
-and round and biting our tail. I think the case for the ascent of man
-is stronger than the Dean admits. A creature that has emerged from the
-primordial slime and evolved a moral law has progressed a good way. It
-is not unreasonable to think that he has a future. Give him time--and it
-may be that the world is still only in its rebellious childhood--and he
-will go far.
-
-But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a
-time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant
-and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first
-knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We
-are vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of
-his acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all
-the year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes
-at the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots
-and his cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of
-mine who, in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing
-boots to the children at a London school, heard one day a little child
-pattering behind her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of
-the beneficiaries “keeping up” with her. She turned and recognised the
-wearer. “So you've got your new boots on, Mary?” she said. “Yes,” said
-little Mary grandly. “Don't they squeak beautiful, mum.” And though, as
-we grow older, we cease to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we
-find other material to keep the flame of vanity alive. “What for should
-I ride in a carriage if the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?” said
-the Fifer, putting his head out of the window. He spoke for all of
-us. We are all a little like that. I confess that I cannot ride in
-a motor-car that whizzes past other motor-cars without an absurd and
-irrational vanity. I despise the emotion, but it is there in spite of
-me. And I remember that when I was young I could hardly free-wheel down
-a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior to the man who was grinding
-his way up with heavings and perspiration. I have no shame in making
-these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that you, sir (or madam),
-will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite audible echo of
-yourself.
-
-And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we
-are vain of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our
-neighbours as we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our
-neighbours. We are like the old maltster in “Far from the Madding
-Crowd,” when Henery Fray claimed to be “a strange old piece, goodmen.”
-
-“A strange old piece, ye say!” interposed the maltster in a querulous
-voice. “Ye be no old man worth naming--no old man at all. Yer teeth
-bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
-bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis
-a poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore--a boast
-weak as water.”
-
-It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences
-when the maltster had to be pacified.
-
-“Weak as water, yes,” said Jan Coggan. “Malter, we feel ye to be a
-wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.”
-
-“Nobody,” said Joseph Poorgrass. “Ye be a very rare old spectacle,
-malter, and we all respect ye for that gift.”
-
-That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in
-being “a very rare old spectacle.” We count the reigns we've lived in
-and exalt the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes
-at midnight. Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite
-early, as in the case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of
-Cicero who was only in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as
-an old man and wrote his “De Senectute,” exalting the pleasures of old
-age. In the eyes of the maltster he would never have been an old man
-worth naming, for he was only sixty-four when he was murdered. I
-have noticed in my own case of late a growing tendency to flourish my
-antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure in recalling the 'seventies to
-those who can remember, say, only the 'nineties, that my fine old friend
-in the lane had in talking to me about the 'thirties. I met two nice
-boys the other day at a country house, and they were full, as boys ought
-to be, of the subject of the cricket. And when they found I was worth
-talking to on that high theme, they submitted their ideal team to me
-for approval, and I launched out about the giants that lived in the
-days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds of “W. G.” and
-Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G. Steel, and
-many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their stature
-did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those memories
-as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I shall be
-proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning nurse.
-She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope
-and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our
-toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant
-vanity we are soothed to sleep.
-
-[Illustration: 0284]
-
-[Illustration: 0285]
-
-
-
-
-ON SIGHTING LAND
-
-|I was in the midst of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me
-to my feet with a leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a
-doughty fellow, who wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and
-had trained it to stand up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of
-interrogation. “I offer you a draw,” I said with a regal wave of the
-hand, as though I was offering him Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or
-something substantial like that. “Accepted,” he cried with a gesture no
-less reckless and comprehensive. And then we bolted for the top deck.
-For the cry we had heard was “Land in sight!” And if there are three
-more comfortable words to hear when you have been tossing about on the
-ocean for a week or two, I do not know them.
-
-For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the
-Atlantic is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely
-facetious when he said he was “disappointed with the Atlantic.” But now
-I am disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way
-I knew it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order
-to know what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until
-he was a middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to
-his conception of the sea because “we have in us the glance of the
-universe.” But though the actual experience of the ocean adds little to
-the broad imaginative conception of it formed by the mind, we are
-not prepared for the effect of sameness, still less for the sense
-of smallness. It is as though we are sitting day after day in the
-geometrical centre of a very round table-top.
-
-The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are
-told that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before
-yesterday and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility
-to the fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured
-by and here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is
-perfectly flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn
-by compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have “a
-drop into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.” You
-conceive yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth
-which hangs over the sides.
-
-For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its
-appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue
-cloth, with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption
-of transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey
-cloth; sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth
-and tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the
-table, and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth
-flinging itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an
-incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion
-and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under
-the impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment
-suspended in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like
-a wrestler fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning,
-every joint creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful
-strain. A gleam of sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching
-the clouds of spray turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling
-ship with the glamour of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there
-is nothing but the raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler
-in their midst, and far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the
-horizon, as if it were a pencil of white flame, to a spectral and
-unearthly beauty.
-
-But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are
-moveless in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our
-magic carpet (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or
-Europe, as the case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we
-are standing still for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers
-progress to the mind. The circle we looked out on last night is
-indistinguishable from the circle we look out on this morning. Even the
-sky and cloud effects are lost on this flat contracted stage, with its
-hard horizon and its thwarted vision. There is a curious absence of the
-sense of distance, even of distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as
-abruptly as the sea at that severely drawn circumference and there is
-no vague merging of the seen into the unseen, which alone gives the
-imagination room for flight. To live in this world is to be imprisoned
-in a double sense--in the physical sense that Johnson had in mind in
-his famous retort, and in the emotional sense that I have attempted
-to describe. In my growing list of undesirable occupations--sewermen,
-lift-men, stokers, tram-conductors, and so on--I shall henceforth
-include ships' stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being
-shot like a shuttle in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New
-York and back from New York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the
-ill-humour of the ocean and to play the sick nurse to a never-ending
-mob of strangers, is as dreary a part as one could be cast for. I would
-rather navigate a barge on the Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall
-in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet, on second thoughts, they have their
-joys. They hear, every fortnight or so, that thrilling cry, “Land in
-sight!”
-
-It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and
-however familiar it may be.
-
-The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example.
-Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the
-first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some
-unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively,
-comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment
-seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination.
-Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the
-monotonous rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with
-the emotion of the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of
-the sea. Such a cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three
-hundred years ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of
-that immortal little company of the _Mayflower_ caught sight of the land
-where, they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down
-through the centuries that cry of “Land in sight!” has been sounded in
-the ears of generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to
-the new land of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see
-that land shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great
-drama of the ages.
-
-But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English
-eyes as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this
-sunny morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the
-sight there is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself
-heaving with a hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders.
-I have a fleeting vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling
-down there amid a glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to
-sea, and standing on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home
-to the Ark that is for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.
-
-I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is
-a rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his
-hills hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager
-comes from, whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic
-from the Cape, or round the Cape from Australia, or through the
-Mediterranean from India, this is the first glimpse of the homeland that
-greets him, carrying his mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the
-journey's end. And that vision links him up with the great pageant of
-history. Drake, sailing in from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and
-knew he was once more in his Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck
-beside me with a wisp of hair, curled and questioning, on his baldish
-forehead, and I mark the shine in his eyes....
-
-[Illustration: 0291]
-
-[Illustration: 0294]
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-***** This file should be named 47429-0.txt or 47429-0.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/7/4/2/47429/
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
-will be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
-one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
-(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
-permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
-set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
-copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
-protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
-Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
-charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
-do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
-rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
-such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
-research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
-practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
-subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
-redistribution.
-
-
-
-*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase “Project
-Gutenberg”), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-  www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works
-
-1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
-all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
-If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
-
-1.B.  “Project Gutenberg” is a registered trademark.  It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
-paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (“the Foundation”
- or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
-collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
-copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
-works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
-are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
-Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
-freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
-this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
-the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
-keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
-a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
-Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
-States.
-
-1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
-access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
-whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
-phrase “Project Gutenberg” appears, or with which the phrase “Project
-Gutenberg” is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
-copied or distributed:
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
-from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
-posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
-and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
-or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
-with the phrase “Project Gutenberg” associated with or appearing on the
-work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
-through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
-Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
-1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
-terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
-to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
-permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
-word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
-“Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other format used in the official version
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
-you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
-copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
-request, of the work in its original “Plain Vanilla ASCII” or other
-form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
-that
-
-- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
-     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
-     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
-     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
-     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
-     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
-     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
-     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
-     address specified in Section 4, “Information about donations to
-     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.”
-
-- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-     License.  You must require such a user to return or
-     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
-     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
-     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
-     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
-     of receipt of the work.
-
-- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
-forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
-both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
-collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
-“Defects,” such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
-corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
-property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
-computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
-your equipment.
-
-1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the “Right
-of Replacement or Refund” described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
-your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
-refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
-opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
-the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
-Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
-
-
-Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
-people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
-To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
-and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
-and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
-Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
-permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
-Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
-throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
-North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
-contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
-Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-     Chief Executive and Director
-     gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
-SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
-particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
-To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-
-Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
-with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
-Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
-unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
-keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
-
-     www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-0.zip b/47429/old/47429-0.zip
deleted file mode 100644
index 00d9eb1..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-0.zip
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-8.txt b/47429/old/47429-8.txt
deleted file mode 100644
index ef6f093..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-8.txt
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,6706 +0,0 @@
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by 
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Windfalls
-
-Author: (AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-Illustrator: Clive Gardiner
-
-Release Date: November 22, 2014 [EBook #47429]
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-WINDFALLS
-
-By Alfred George Gardiner
-
-(Alpha of the Plough)
-
-Illustrations by Clive Gardiner
-
-J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd.
-
-1920
-
-
-[Illustration: 0002]
-
-[Illustration: 0008]
-
-[Illustration: 0009]
-
-
-TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS
-
-I think this book belongs to you because, if it can be said to be about
-anything in particular--which it cannot--it is, in spite of its delusive
-title, about bees, and as I cannot dedicate it to them, I offer it to
-those who love them most.
-
-[Illustration: 0013]
-
-
-
-
-PREFACE
-
-|In offering a third basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is
-hoped that the fruit will not be found to have deteriorated. If that is
-the case, I shall hold myself free to take another look under the
-trees at my leisure. But I fancy the three baskets will complete the
-garnering. The old orchard from which the fruit has been so largely
-gathered is passing from me, and the new orchard to which I go has not
-yet matured. Perhaps in the course of years it will furnish material for
-a collection of autumn leaves.
-
-[Illustration: 0015]
-
-[Illustration: 0021]
-
-
-
-
-JEMIMA
-
-|I took a garden fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes.
-When Jemima saw me crossing the orchard with a fork he called a
-committee meeting, or rather a general assembly, and after some joyous
-discussion it was decided _nem. con_. that the thing was worth looking
-into. Forthwith, the whole family of Indian runners lined up in single
-file, and led by Jemima followed faithfully in my track towards the
-artichoke bed, with a gabble of merry noises. Jemima was first into the
-breach. He always is...
-
-But before I proceed it is necessary to explain. You will have observed
-that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless,
-you said, "How careless of the printer. Once might be forgiven; but
-twice----" Dear madam' (or sir), the printer is on this occasion
-blameless. It seems incredible, but it's so. The truth is that Jemima
-was the victim of an accident at the christening ceremony. He was one of
-a brood who, as they came like little balls of yellow fluff out of the
-shell, received names of appropriate ambiguity--all except Jemima. There
-were Lob and Lop, Two Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?, Greedy
-and Baby, and so on. Every name as safe as the bank, equal to all
-contingencies--except Jemima. What reckless impulse led us to call him
-Jemima I forget. But regardless of his name, he grew up into a handsome
-drake--a proud and gaudy fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you call
-him so long as you call him to the Diet of Worms.
-
-And here he is, surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble,
-gobble, and crowd in on me so that I have to scare them off in order to
-drive in the fork. Jemima keeps his eye on the fork as a good batsman
-keeps his eye on the ball. The flash of a fork appeals to him like the
-sound of a trumpet to the warhorse. He will lead his battalion through
-fire and water in pursuit of it. He knows that a fork has some mystical
-connection with worms, and doubtless regards it as a beneficent deity.
-The others are content to grub in the new-turned soil, but he, with his
-larger reasoning power, knows that the fork produces the worms and that
-the way to get the fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the way
-he watches it I rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the fork.
-Look at him now. He cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating fork,
-expecting to see large, squirming worms dropping from it, and Greedy
-nips in under his nose and gobbles a waggling beauty. My excellent
-friend, I say, addressing Jemima, you know both too much and too little.
-If you had known a little more you would have had that worm; if you had
-known a little less you would have had that worm. Let me commend to you
-the words of the poet:=
-
-```A little learning is a dangerous thing:
-
-```Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
-
-I've known many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too
-much but don't know enough. Now Greedy----
-
-But clear off all of you. What ho! there.... The scales!... Here is a
-bumper root.... Jemima realises that something unusual has happened,
-assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with great animation. It
-is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners such agreeable
-companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian runners
-about. Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the orchard
-without an idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in a
-perpetual gossip. The world is full of such a number of things that they
-hardly ever leave off talking, and though they all talk together they
-are so amiable about it that it makes you feel cheerful to hear them....
-But here are the scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do you
-say to that, Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.
-
-The idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am
-enveloped once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful
-risks in his attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be
-ungracious to complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it,
-I said, but you are feasting to-day in order that others may feast
-tomorrow. You devour the worm, and a larger and more cunning animal will
-devour you. He cocks up his head and fixes me with that beady eye that
-gleams with such artless yet searching intelligence.... You are right,
-Jemima. That, as you observe, is only half the tale. You eat the worm,
-and the large, cunning animal eats you, but--yes, Jemima, the crude
-fact has to be faced that the worm takes up the tale again where Man the
-Mighty leaves off:=
-
-`````His heart is builded
-
-```For pride, for potency, infinity,
-
-```All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
-
-```Arrased with purple like the house of kings,
-
-```_To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm_
-
-```_Statelily lodge..._=
-
-I accept your reminder, Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like
-you, am only a link in the chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries,
-who creates to devour and devours to create. I thank you, Jemima. And
-driving in the fork and turning up the soil I seized a large fat worm. I
-present you with this, Jemima, I said, as a mark of my esteem...
-
-[Illustration: 0024]
-
-[Illustration: 0025]
-
-
-
-
-ON BEING IDLE
-
-|I have long laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person.
-It is an entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in
-conversation, I do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am
-idle, in fact, to prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art
-of defence is attack. I defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a
-verdict of not guilty by the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm
-you by laying down my arms. "Ah, ah," I expect you to say. "Ah, ah, you
-an idle person. Well, that is good." And if you do not say it I at least
-give myself the pleasure of believing that you think it.
-
-This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things
-about ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about
-us. We say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way
-some people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their
-early decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as
-remote as it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating
-the sorrow it will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be
-missed. We all like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember
-a nice old gentleman whose favourite topic was "When I am gone." One day
-he was telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee,
-what would happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up
-cheerfully and said, "When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at
-the funeral?" It was a devastating question, and it was observed that
-afterwards the old gentleman never discussed his latter end with his
-formidable grandchild. He made it too painfully literal.
-
-And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were
-to express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad
-as the old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and
-I daresay I should take care not to lay myself open again to such
-_gaucherie_. But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling
-self-deception. I can speak the plain truth about "Alpha of the Plough"
-without asking for any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how
-he suffers. And I say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was
-never more satisfied of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has
-been engaged in the agreeable task of dodging his duty to _The Star_.
-
-It began quite early this morning--for you cannot help being about
-quite early now that the clock has been put forward--or is it back?--for
-summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and
-there at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved
-to write an article _en plein air_, as Corot used to paint his
-pictures--an article that would simply carry the intoxication of
-this May morning into Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare
-carolling with larks, and make it green with the green and dappled
-wonder of the beech woods. But first of all he had to saturate himself
-with the sunshine. You cannot give out sunshine until you have taken it
-in. That, said he, is plain to the meanest understanding. So he took it
-in. He just lay on his back and looked at the clouds sailing serenely in
-the blue. They were well worth looking at--large, fat, lazy, clouds
-that drifted along silently and dreamily, like vast bales of wool being
-wafted from one star to another. He looked at them "long and long" as
-Walt Whitman used to say. How that loafer of genius, he said, would have
-loved to lie and look at those woolly clouds.
-
-And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
-another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not
-have a picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began
-enumerating the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the
-wings of the west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could
-hear if one gave one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin
-whisper of the breeze in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of
-the woodland behind, the dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech
-near by, the boom of a bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of
-the meadow pipit rising from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo
-sailing up the valley, the clatter of magpies on the hillside, the
-"spink-spink" of the chaffinch, the whirr of a tractor in a distant
-field, the crowing of a far-off cock, the bark of a sheep dog, the ring
-of a hammer reverberating from a remote clearing in the beech woods,
-the voices of children who were gathering violets and bluebells in the
-wooded hollow on the other side of the hill. All these and many other
-things he heard, still lying on his back and looking at the heavenly
-bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him; their billowy softness
-invited to slumber....
-
-When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
-Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and
-the best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the
-blossoms falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you
-preaching the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He
-would catch something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did
-not lie about on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds.
-To them, life was real, life was earnest. They were always "up and
-doing." It was true that there were the drones, impostors who make ten
-times the buzz of the workers, and would have you believe they do all
-the work because they make most of the noise. But the example of these
-lazy fellows he would ignore. Under the cherry tree he would labour like
-the honey bee.
-
-But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came
-out to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives
-alone, but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put
-on a veil and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time
-flies when you are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do
-and see. You always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure
-that she is there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took
-more time than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one
-of the hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other
-hives, and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was
-visible. The frames were turned over industriously without reward. At
-last, on the floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found.
-This deepened the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason,
-rejected her sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne
-appeared and given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last
-the new queen was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of
-her subjects. She had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped
-notice when the brood frames were put in and, according to the merciless
-law of the hive, had slain her senior. All this took time, and before
-he had finished, the cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard
-announced another interruption of his task.
-
-And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
-of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article
-about how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one
-virtue. It exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.
-
-[Illustration: 0030]
-
-[Illustration: 0031]
-
-
-
-
-ON HABITS
-
-|I sat down to write an article this morning, but found I could make
-no progress. There was grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels
-refused to revolve. I was writing with a pen--a new fountain pen
-that someone had been good enough to send me, in commemoration of an
-anniversary, my interest in which is now very slight, but of which one
-or two well-meaning friends are still in the habit of reminding me. It
-was an excellent pen, broad and free in its paces, and capable of a most
-satisfying flourish. It was a pen, you would have said, that could have
-written an article about anything. You had only to fill it with ink and
-give it its head, and it would gallop away to its journey's end without
-a pause. That is how I felt about it when I sat down. But instead of
-galloping, the thing was as obstinate as a mule. I could get no more
-speed out of it than Stevenson could get out of his donkey in the
-Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried the bastinado, equally without
-effect on my Modestine.
-
-Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
-practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without
-my using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
-there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
-thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
-extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
-bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a
-whole forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to
-me what his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke
-of Cambridge, or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to
-Jackson or--in short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my
-hand, seat me before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as
-they say of the children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an
-eight-day clock. I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten.
-But the magic wand must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen
-in my hand, and the whole complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an
-atmosphere of strangeness. The pen kept intruding between me and my
-thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the touch. It seemed to write a foreign
-language in which nothing pleased me.
-
-This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
-better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
-of his school days. "There was," he said, "a boy in my class at school
-who stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant
-him. Day came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would;
-till at length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always
-fumbled with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
-waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in
-an evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know
-the success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was
-again questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not
-to be found. In his distress he looked down for it--it was to be seen no
-more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
-place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was
-the author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him
-smote me as I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some
-reparation; but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed
-my acquaintance with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior
-office in one of the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe
-he is dead, he took early to drinking."
-
-It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
-regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
-and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come.
-to grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits,
-so long as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little
-more than bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take
-away our habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about.
-We could not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life.
-They enable us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we
-had to give fresh and original thought to them each time, would make
-existence an impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our
-commonplace activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more
-leisure we command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but
-not so large as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up
-your own hat and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long
-time it was my practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant
-hook and to take no note of the place. When I sought them I found it
-absurdly difficult to find them in the midst of so many similar hats and
-coats. Memory did not help me, for memory refused to burden itself with
-such trumpery things, and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering
-forlornly and vacuously between the rows and rows of clothes in search
-of my own garments murmuring, "Where _did_ I put my hat?" Then one day a
-brilliant inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on
-a certain peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to
-it. It needed a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked
-like a charm. I can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding
-them. I go to them as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to
-its mark. It is one of the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
-
-But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
-ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally
-break them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ
-them, without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once
-saw Mr Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial
-breach of habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of
-Trinity House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House.
-It is his custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the
-most comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms
-about in a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief
-and the body in repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no
-lapels, and when the hands went up in search of them they wandered about
-pathetically like a couple of children who had lost their parents on
-Blackpool sands. They fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung
-to each other in a visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed
-the search for the lost lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with
-the glasses on the table, sought again for the lapels, did everything
-but take refuge in the pockets of the trousers. It was a characteristic
-omission. Mr Balfour is too practised a speaker to come to disaster as
-the boy in Scott's story did; but his discomfiture was apparent. He
-struggled manfully through his speech, but all the time it was obvious
-that he was at a loss what to do with his hands, having no lapels on
-which to hang them.
-
-I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out
-a pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit,
-ticked away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I
-hope) pardonable result.
-
-[Illustration: 0036]
-
-
-
-
-IN DEFENCE OF WASPS
-
-|It is time, I think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He
-is no saint, but he is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been
-unusually prolific this summer, and agitated correspondents have been
-busy writing to the newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how
-by holding your breath you may miraculously prevent him stinging you.
-Now the point about the wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He
-is, in spite of his military uniform and his formidable weapon, not a
-bad fellow, and if you leave him alone he will leave you alone. He is
-a nuisance of course. He likes jam and honey; but then I am bound
-to confess that I like jam and honey too, and I daresay those
-correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam and honey. We
-shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like jam and honey.
-But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the plate, and he
-is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no doubt. He is
-an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously helpless condition
-from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness for beer. In the
-language of America, he is a "wet." He cannot resist beer, and having
-rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully tight and
-staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that he
-won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
-Belloc--not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so waspishly
-about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about beer.
-
-This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty
-beer bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets
-out. He is indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings.
-He is excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody
-and nothing, and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of
-things; but a wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin
-that he is, and will never have the sense to walk out the way he went
-in. And on your plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You
-can descend on him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight
-for anything above him, and no sense of looking upward.
-
-His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
-fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
-glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
-familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
-the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.
-
-If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he
-cuts a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
-poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its
-time in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night
-during its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and
-for future generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow
-stripes just lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank
-you. Let us eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow----. He
-runs through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time
-in August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving
-only the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of
-20,000 or so next summer.
-
-But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
-you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
-it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet
-he could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than
-the bee, for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel
-competent to speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for
-I've been living in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the
-orchard, with an estimated population of a quarter of a million bees
-and tens of thousands of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never
-deliberately attacked by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around
-me I flee for shelter. There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp,
-the bee's hatred is personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some
-obscure reason, and is always ready to die for the satisfaction of
-its anger. And it dies very profusely. The expert, who has been taking
-sections from the hives, showed me her hat just now. It had nineteen
-stings in it, planted in as neatly as thorns in a bicycle tyre.
-
-It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
-him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
-nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
-devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked,
-and I like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little
-joint, usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real
-virtue, and this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean
-fellow, and is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of
-that supreme abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is
-very cunning. I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He
-got the blow fly down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed
-off one of the creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape,
-and then with a huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away.
-And I confess he carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a
-whole generation of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
-
-And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
-help a fellow in distress.
-
-Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to
-one that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was
-continued for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to
-stroke gently the injured wings.
-
-There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
-who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
-carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp
-as an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
-sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to
-kill her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
-preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we
-wish ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for
-their enemy.
-
-[Illustration: 0040]
-
-[Illustration: 0041]
-
-
-
-
-ON PILLAR ROCK
-
-|Those, we are told, who have heard the East a-calling "never heed
-naught else." Perhaps it is so; but they can never have heard the call
-of Lakeland at New Year. They can never have scrambled up the screes of
-the Great Gable on winter days to try a fall with the Arrow Head and the
-Needle, the Chimney and Kern Knotts Crack; never have seen the mighty
-Pillar Rock beckoning them from the top of Black Sail Pass, nor the inn
-lights far down in the valley calling them back from the mountains when
-night has fallen; never have sat round the inn fire and talked of the
-jolly perils of the day, or played chess with the landlord--and been
-beaten--or gone to bed with the refrain of the climbers' chorus still
-challenging the roar of the wind outside--=
-
-```Come, let us tie the rope, the rope, the rope,
-
-````Come, let us link it round, round, round.
-
-```And he that will not climb to-day
-
-````Why--leave him on the ground, the ground, the ground.=
-
-If you have done these things you will not make much of the call of the
-temple bells and the palm trees and the spicy garlic smells--least of
-all at New Year. You will hear instead the call of the Pillar Rock and
-the chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your oldest clothes and
-wind the rope around you--singing meanwhile "the rope, the rope,"--and
-take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will step out
-at that gateway of the enchanted land--Keswick. Keswick! Wastdale!...
-Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to whom they
-open the magic casements at a breath.
-
-And at Keswick you call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go
-to Keswick without calling on George Abraham. You might as well go to
-Wastdale Head without calling on the Pillar Rock. And George tells you
-that of course he will be over at Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will
-climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle with you on New Year's Day.
-
-The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave adieus, and are soon
-jolting down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where every object is
-an old friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the Bowder
-Stone and there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow of
-Cat Bells. (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and picking
-wimberries and waking the echoes of Grisedale.)
-
-And there before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the
-billowy summits of Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky
-sentinels of the valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name.
-Perhaps you jump down at Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to
-Rosthwaite and lunch.
-
-And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street is
-a myth and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of the
-sanctuary and the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling your
-rucksack on your back and your rope over your shoulder and set out on
-the three hours' tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.
-
-It is dark when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and
-these December days are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by
-the landlord and landlady--heirs of Auld Will Ritson--and in the flagged
-entrance you see coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of
-climbers' boots--boots that make the heart sing to look upon, boots that
-have struck music out of many a rocky breast, boots whose missing nails
-has each a story of its own. You put your own among them, don your
-slippers, and plunge among your old companions of the rocks with jolly
-greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it is--a master from a
-school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a young clergyman, a
-barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham, and so on.
-But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and the eternal
-boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.
-
-Who shall tell of the days and nights that follow?--of the songs that
-are sung, and the "traverses" that are made round the billiard room and
-the barn, of the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous
-climb, of the letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and
-the departures for the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich
-with new memories, you all foregather again--save only, perhaps, the
-jolly lawyer and his fellows who have lost their way back from Scafell,
-and for whom you are about to send out a search party when they turn up
-out of the darkness with new material for fireside tales.
-
-Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's Day--clear and
-bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost in the
-air. In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up ropes,
-putting on putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for boots
-(the boots are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing nails).
-We separate at the threshold--this group for the Great Gable, that for
-Scafell, ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock. It
-is a two and a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and as
-daylight is short there is no time to waste. We follow the water course
-up the valley, splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice, cross
-the stream where the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount the
-steep ascent of Black Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down lonely
-Ennerdale, where, springing from the flank of the Pillar mountain,
-is the great Rock we have come to challenge. It stands like a tower,
-gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600 feet from its northern base to its
-summit, split on the south side by Jordan Gap that divides the High Man
-or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser rock.
-
-We have been overtaken by another party of three from the inn--one in
-a white jersey which, for reasons that will appear, I shall always
-remember. Together we follow the High Level Traverse, the track that
-leads round the flank of the mountain to the top of Walker's Gully, the
-grim descent to the valley, loved by the climber for the perils to which
-it invites him. Here wre lunch and here we separate. We, unambitious
-(having three passengers in our party of five), are climbing the East
-face by the Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending by the New
-West route, one of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here; theirs
-is from the other side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I wish
-to speak, but of theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will find
-the Slab and Notch route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it is
-held in little esteem.
-
-With five on the rope, however, our progress is slow, and it is two
-o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring and triumphant, and
-stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar Rock, where the
-wind blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over half the
-peaks of Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in the
-book that lies under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on the
-West face for signs of our late companions. The sound of their voices
-comes up from below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a glimpse
-of their forms. "They're going to be late," says George Abraham--the
-discoverer of the New West--and then he indicates the closing stages of
-the climb and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the most
-thrilling escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock--two men
-falling, and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of those
-three, two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the next
-year on the Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and turn
-cheerfully to descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route which
-ends on the slope of the mountain near to the starting point of the New
-West route.
-
-The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in the East sheds
-no light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are quite
-distinct, coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the directions
-and distinguish the speakers. "Can't understand why those lads are
-cutting it so fine," says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace down
-cracks and grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and safety.
-And now we look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one thing
-is visible--a figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at full
-stretch. There it hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the rocks.
-
-[Illustration: 0047]
-
-The party, then, are only just making the traverse from the chimney to
-the right, the most difficult manoeuvre of the climb--a manoeuvre in
-which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain stationary while his
-fellows pass him. "This is bad," says George Abraham and he prepares
-for a possible emergency. "Are you in difficulties? Shall we wait?" he
-cries. "Yes, wait." The words rebound from the cliff in the still air
-like stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white jersey,
-still moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every word
-they speak echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board. You
-hear the iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds on
-the ringing wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if both
-feet are dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a hold.
-I fancy one or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look at
-each other in silent comment. And all the time the figure in white, now
-growing dim, is impaled on the face of the darkness, and the voices
-come down to us in brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon is
-sailing into the clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.
-
-At last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery "All
-right" drops down from above. The difficult operation is over, the
-scattered rocks are reached and nothing remains but the final slabs,
-which in the absence of ice offer no great difficulty. Their descent by
-the easy Jordan route will be quick. We turn to go with the comment that
-it is perhaps more sensational to watch a climb than to do one.
-
-And then we plunge over the debris behind Pisgah, climb up the Great
-Doup, where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we reach the friendly
-fence that has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down to the top of
-Black Sail Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours later we
-have rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.
-
-In a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one
-to his office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem
-prosaic and ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say
-only the word "Wastdale" to them and you shall awake its echoes; then
-you shall see their faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable
-things. They are no longer men of the world; they are spirits of the
-mountains.
-
-[Illustration: 0049]
-
-[Illustration: 0050]
-
-
-
-
-TWO VOICES
-
-|Yes," said the man with the big voice, "I've seen it coming for years.
-Years."
-
-"Have you?" said the man with the timid voice. He had taken his seat
-on the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of the tube
-strike that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of London.
-
-"Yes, years," said big voice, crowding as much modesty into the
-admission as possible. "I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long way
-off. Suppose I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit psychic."
-
-"Ah," said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning of the
-word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it meant.
-
-"Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George--that's the man that
- up to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and
-property and things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.'
-Why, his speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's
-it's come back. I always said it would. I said we should pay for it."
-
-"Did you, though?" observed timid voice--not questioningly, but as an
-assurance that he was listening attentively.
-
-"Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for years--years, I did.
-And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in no time. In the
-first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000 aeroplanes and
-train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what I said.
-But was it done?"
-
-"Of course not," said timid voice.
-
-"I saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why,
-but there it is. I'm not much at the platform business--tub-thumping,
-I call it--but for seeing things far off--well, I'm a bit psychic, you
-know."
-
-"Ah," said timid voice, mournfully, "it's a pity some of those talking
-fellows are not psychic, too." He'd got the word firmly now.
-
-"Them psychic!" said big voice, with scorn. "We know what they are.
-You see that Miss Asquith is marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word,
-he'll turn out to be a German, that's what he'll turn out to be. It's
-German money all round. Same with these strikes. There's German money
-behind them."
-
-"Shouldn't wonder at all," said timid voice.
-
-"I know," said big voice. "I've a way of seeing things. The same in the
-Boer War. I saw that coming for years."
-
-"Did you, indeed?" said timid voice.
-
-"Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to some of my friends. There it
-was in black and white. They said it was wonderful how it all turned
-out--two years, I said, 250 millions of money, and 20,000 casualties.
-That's what I said, and that's what it was. I said the Boers would win,
-and I claim they did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave them all
-they asked for."
-
-"You were about right," assented timid voice.
-
-"And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round his
-finger--that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his finger.
-Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building a
-fleet as big as ours."
-
-"Never did like that man," said timid voice.
-
-"It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the armistice
-means. They've escaped--and just when we'd got them down."
-
-"It's a shame," said timid voice.
-
-"This war ought to have gone on longer," continued big voice. "My
-opinion is that the world wanted thinning out. People are too crowded.
-That's what they are--they're too crowded."
-
-"I agree there," said timid voice. "We wanted thinning."
-
-"I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It ought to
-have gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should like to
-know his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says _John Bull_, and
-that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a case
-down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building society--regular
-chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building society
-went smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot."
-
-"I don't like those goody-goody people," said timid voice.
-
-"No," said big voice. "William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what
-that man knew. 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women
-players,' he said. Strordinary how he knew things."
-
-"Wonderful," said timid voice.
-
-"There's never been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare
-knew--not one-half."
-
-"No doubt about it," said timid voice.
-
-"I consider that William Shakespeare was the most psychic man that ever
-lived. I don't suppose there was ever such a long-sighted man before
-_or_ since. He could see through anything. He'd have seen through Wilson
-and he'd have seen this war didn't stop before the job was done. It's a
-pity we haven't a William Shakespeare now. Lloyd George and Asquith
-are not in it with him. They're simply duds beside William Shakespeare.
-Couldn't hold a candle to him."
-
-"Seems to me," said timid voice, "that there's nobody, as you might say,
-worth anything to-day."
-
-"Nobody," said big voice. "We've gone right off. There used to be men.
-Old Dizzy, he was a man. So was Joseph Chamberlain. He was right about
-Tariff Reform. I saw it years before he did. Free Trade I said was all
-right years ago, when we were manufacturing for the world. But it's out
-of date. I saw it was out of date long before Joseph Chamberlain. It's
-the result of being long-sighted. I said to my father, 'If we stick to
-Free Trade this country is done.' That's what I said, and it's true. We
-_are_ done. Look at these strikes. We stick to things too long. I
-believe in looking ahead. When I was in America before the war they
-wouldn't believe I came from England. Wouldn't believe it. 'But the
-English are so slow,' they said, 'and you--why you want to be getting on
-in front of us.' That's my way. I look ahead and don't stand still."
-
-"It's the best way too," said timid voice. "We want more of it. We're
-too slow."
-
-And so on. When I came to the end of my journey I rose so that the
-light of a lamp shone on the speakers as I passed. They were both
-well-dressed, ordinary-looking men. If I had passed them in the street
-I should have said they were intelligent men of the well-to-do business
-class. I have set down their conversation, which I could not help
-overhearing, and which was carried on by the big voice in a tone meant
-for publication, as exactly as I can recall it. There was a good deal
-more of it, all of the same character. You will laugh at it, or weep
-over it, according to your humour.
-
-[Illustration: 0055]
-
-
-
-
-ON BEING TIDY
-
-|Any careful observer of my habits would know that I am on the eve of
-an adventure--a holiday, or a bankruptcy, or a fire, or a voluntary
-liquidation (whatever that may be), or an elopement, or a duel, or a
-conspiracy, or--in short, of something out of the normal, something
-romantic or dangerous, pleasurable or painful, interrupting the calm
-current of my affairs. Being the end of July, he would probably say:
-That fellow is on the brink of the holiday fever. He has all the
-symptoms of the epidemic. Observe his negligent, abstracted manner.
-Notice his slackness about business--how he just comes and looks in and
-goes out as though he were a visitor paying a call, or a person who had
-been left a fortune and didn't care twopence what happened. Observe his
-clothes, how they are burgeoning into unaccustomed gaiety, even levity.
-Is not his hat set on at just a shade of a sporting angle? Does not
-his stick twirl with a hint of irresponsible emotions? Is there not the
-glint of far horizons in his eye? Did you not hear him humming as he
-came up the stairs? Yes, assuredly the fellow is going for a holiday.
-
-Your suspicions would be confirmed when you found me ransacking my
-private room and clearing up my desk. The news that I am clearing up my
-desk has been an annual sensation for years. I remember a colleague of
-mine once coming in and finding me engaged in that spectacular feat.
-His face fell with apprehension. His voice faltered. "I hope you are not
-leaving us," he said. He, poor fellow, could not think of anything else
-that could account for so unusual an operation.
-
-For I am one of those people who treat their desks with respect. We do
-not believe in worrying them about their contents. We do not bully them
-into disclosing their secrets. We stuff the drawers full of papers and
-documents, and leave them to mellow and ripen. And when the drawers are
-full we pile up other papers and documents on either side of us; and the
-higher the pile gets the more comfortable and cosy we feel. We would not
-disturb them for worlds. Why should we set our sleeping dogs barking at
-us when they are willing to go on sleeping if we leave them alone? And
-consider the show they make. No one coming to see us can fail to be
-impressed by such piles of documents. They realise how busy we are. They
-understand that we have no time for idle talk. They see that we have
-all these papers to dispose of--otherwise, why are they there? They get
-their business done and go away quickly, and spread the news of what
-tremendous fellows we are for work.
-
-I am told by one who worked with him, that old Lord Strathcona knew the
-trick quite well, and used it unblushingly. When a visitor was announced
-he tumbled his papers about in imposing confusion and was discovered
-breasting the mighty ocean of his labours, his chin resolutely out
-of the water. But he was a supreme artist in this form of amiable
-imposture. On one occasion he was entertained at a great public dinner
-in a provincial city. In the midst of the proceedings a portly flunkey
-was observed carrying a huge envelope, with seals and trappings, on a
-salver. For whom was this momentous document intended? Ah, he has paused
-behind the grand old man with the wonderful snowy head. It is for him.
-The company looks on in respectful silence. Even here this astonishing
-old man cannot escape the cares of office. As he takes the envelope his
-neighbour at the table looks at the address. It was in Strathcona's own
-hand-writing!
-
-But we of the rank and file are not dishevelled by artifice, like this
-great man. It is a natural gift. And do not suppose that our disorder
-makes us unhappy. We like it. We follow our vocation, as Falstaff says.
-Some people are born tidy and some are born untidy. We were bom untidy,
-and if good people, taking pity on us, try to make us tidy we get lost.
-It was so with George Crabbe. He lived in magnificent disorder, papers
-and books and letters all over the floor, piled on every chair, surging
-up to the ceiling. Once, in his absence, his niece tidied up for him.
-When he came back he found himself like a stranger in a strange land.
-He did not know his way about in this desolation of tidiness, and he
-promptly restored the familiar disorder, so that he could find things.
-It sounds absurd, of course, but we people with a genius for untidiness
-must always seem absurd to the tidy people. They cannot understand that
-there is a method in our muddle, an order in our disorder, secret paths
-through the wilderness known only to our feet, that, in short, we are
-rather like cats whose perceptions become more acute the darker it gets.
-It is not true that we never find things. We often find things.
-
-And consider the joy of finding things you don't hope to find. You, sir,
-sitting at your spotless desk, with your ordered and labelled shelves
-about you, and your files and your letter-racks, and your card indexes
-and your cross references, and your this, that, and the other--what do
-you know of the delights of which I speak? You do not come suddenly
-and ecstatically upon the thing you seek. You do not know the shock of
-delighted discovery. You do not shout "Eureka," and summon your family
-around you to rejoice in the miracle that has happened. No star swims
-into your ken out of the void. You cannot be said to find things at
-all, for you never lose them, and things must be lost before they can
-be truly found. The father of the Prodigal had to lose his son before
-he could experience the joy that has become an immortal legend of the
-world. It is we who lose things, not you, sir, who never find them, who
-know the Feast of the Fatted Calf.
-
-This is not a plea for untidiness. I am no hot gospeller of disorder.
-I only seek to make the best, of a bad job, and to show that we untidy
-fellows are not without a case, have our romantic compensations, moments
-of giddy exaltation unknown to those who are endowed with the pedestrian
-and profitable virtue of tidiness. That is all. I would have the
-pedestrian virtue if I could. In other days, before I had given up hope
-of reforming myself, and when I used to make good resolutions as piously
-as my neighbours, I had many a spasm of tidiness. I looked with envy on
-my friend Higginson, who was a miracle of order, could put his hand on
-anything he wanted in the dark, kept his documents and his files and
-records like regiments of soldiers obedient to call, knew what he had
-written on 4th March 1894, and what he had said on 10th January 1901,
-and had a desk that simply perspired with tidiness. And in a spirit
-of emulation I bought a roll-top desk. I believed that tidiness was a
-purchasable commodity. You went to a furniture dealer and bought a large
-roll-top desk, and when it came home the genius of order came home with
-it. The bigger the desk, the more intricate its devices, the larger
-was the measure of order bestowed on you. My desk was of the first
-magnitude. It had an inconceivable wealth of drawers and pigeon-holes.
-It was a desk of many mansions. And I labelled them all, and gave them
-all separate jobs to perform.
-
-And then I sat back and looked the future boldly in the face. Now, said
-I, the victory is won. Chaos and old night are banished. Order reigns
-in Warsaw. I have but to open a drawer and every secret I seek will
-leap magically to light. My articles will write themselves, for every
-reference will come to my call, obedient as Ariel to the bidding of
-Prospero.=
-
-````"Approach, my Ariel; come,"=
-
-I shall say, and from some remote fastness the obedient spirit will
-appear with--=
-
-```"All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come
-
-```To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,
-
-```To swim, to dive into the sea, to ride
-
-```On the curl'd clouds."=
-
-I shall know where Aunt Jane's letters are, and where my bills are,
-and my cuttings about this, that, and the other, and my diaries and
-notebooks, and the time-table and the street guide. I shall never be
-short of a match or a spare pair of spectacles, or a pencil, or--in
-short, life will henceforth be an easy amble to old age. For a week it
-worked like a charm. Then the demon of disorder took possession of the
-beast. It devoured everything and yielded up nothing. Into its soundless
-deeps my merchandise sank to oblivion. And I seemed to sink with it.
-It was not a desk, but a tomb. One day I got a man to take it away to a
-second-hand shop.
-
-Since then I have given up being tidy. I have realised that the quality
-of order is not purchasable at furniture shops, is not a quality of
-external things, but an indwelling spirit, a frame of mind, a habit that
-perhaps may be acquired but cannot be bought.
-
-I have a smaller desk with fewer drawers, all of them nicely choked up
-with the litter of the past. Once a year I have a gaol delivery of the
-incarcerated. The ghosts come out into the daylight, and I face them
-unflinching and unafraid. They file past, pointing minatory fingers at
-me as they go into the waste-paper basket. They file past now. But I
-do not care a dump; for to-morrow I shall seek fresh woods and pastures
-new. To-morrow the ghosts of that old untidy desk will have no terrors
-for my emancipated spirit.
-
-[Illustration: 0061]
-
-[Illustration: 0062]
-
-
-
-
-AN EPISODE
-
-|We were talking of the distinction between madness and sanity when one
-of the company said that we were all potential madmen, just as every
-gambler was a potential suicide, or just as every hero was a potential
-coward.
-
-"I mean," he said, "that the difference between the sane and the
-insane is not that the sane man never has mad thoughts. He has, but he
-recognises them as mad, and keeps his hand on the rein of action. He
-thinks them, and dismisses them. It is so with the saint and the sinner.
-The saint is not exempt from evil thoughts, but he knows they are evil,
-is master of himself, and puts them away.
-
-"I speak with experience," he went on, "for the potential madman in me
-once nearly got the upper hand. I won, but it was a near thing, and if
-I had gone down in that struggle I should have been branded for all
-time as a criminal lunatic, and very properly put away in some place of
-safety. Yet I suppose no one ever suspected me of lunacy."
-
-"Tell us about it," we said in chorus.
-
-"It was one evening in New York," he said. "I had had a very exhausting
-time, and was no doubt mentally tired. I had taken tea with two friends
-at the Belmont Hotel, and as we found we were all disengaged that
-evening we agreed to spend it together at the Hippodrome, where a revue,
-winding up with a great spectacle that had thrilled New York, was being
-presented. When we went to the box office we found that we could not get
-three seats together, so we separated, my friends going to the floor of
-the house and I to the dress circle.
-
-"If you are familiar with the place you will know its enormous
-dimensions and the vastness of the stage. When I took my seat next but
-one to one of the gangways the house was crowded and the performance had
-begun. It was trivial and ordinary enough, but it kept me amused, and
-between the acts I went out to see the New Yorkers taking 'soft' drinks
-in the promenades. I did not join them in that mild indulgence, nor did
-I speak to anyone.
-
-"After the interval before the concluding spectacle I did not return to
-my seat until the curtain was up. The transformation hit me like a
-blow. The huge stage had been converted into a lake, and behind the lake
-through filmy draperies there was the suggestion of a world in flames.
-I passed to my seat and sat down. I turned from the blinding glow of the
-conflagration in front and cast my eye over the sea of faces that filled
-the great theatre from floor to ceiling. 'Heavens! if there were a fire
-in this place,' I thought. At that thought the word 'Fire' blazed in my
-brain like a furnace. 'What if some madman cried Fire?' flashed through
-my mind, and then '_What if I cried Fire?_'
-
-"At that hideous suggestion, the demon word that suffused my brain leapt
-like a shrieking maniac within me and screamed and fought for utterance.
-I felt it boiling in my throat, I felt it on my tongue. I felt myself to
-be two persons engaged in a deadly grapple--a sane person struggling to
-keep his feet against the mad rush of an insane monster. I clenched my
-teeth. So long as I kept my teeth tight--tight--tight the raging
-madman would fling himself at the bars in vain. But could I keep up the
-struggle till he fell exhausted? I gripped the arms of my seat. I felt
-beads of perspiration breaking out on my right brow. How singular that
-in moments of strain the moisture always broke out at that spot. I could
-notice these things with a curious sense of detachment as if there were
-a third person within me watching the frenzied conflict. And still
-that titanic impulse lay on my tongue and hammered madly at my clenched
-teeth. Should I go out? That would look odd, and be an ignominious
-surrender. I must fight this folly down honestly and not run away from
-it. If I had a book I would try to read. If I had a friend beside me I
-would talk. But both these expedients were denied me. Should I turn to
-my unknown neighbour and break the spell with an inconsequent remark or
-a request for his programme? I looked at him out of the tail of my eye.
-He was a youngish man, in evening dress, and sitting alone as I was. But
-his eyes were fixed intently on the stage. He was obviously gripped by
-the spectacle. Had I spoken to him earlier in the evening the course
-would have been simple; but to break the ice in the midst of this tense
-silence was impossible. Moreover, I had a programme on my knees and what
-was there to say?...
-
-"I turned my eyes from the stage. What was going on there I could not
-tell. It was a blinding blur of Fire that seemed to infuriate the
-monster within me. I looked round at the house. I looked up at the
-ceiling and marked its gilded ornaments. I turned and gazed intensely at
-the occupants of the boxes, trying to turn the current of my mind into
-speculations about their dress, their faces, their characters. But the
-tyrant was too strong to be overthrown by such conscious effort. I
-looked up at the gallery; I looked down at the pit; I tried to busy my
-thoughts with calculations about the numbers present, the amount of
-money in the house, the cost of running the establishment--anything. In
-vain. I leaned back in my seat, my teeth still clenched, my hands still
-gripping the arms of the chair. How still the house was! How enthralled
-it seemed!... I was conscious that people about me were noticing my
-restless inattention. If they knew the truth.... If they could see the
-raging torment that was battering at my teeth.... Would it never go? How
-long would this wild impulse burn on my tongue? Was there no distraction
-that would=
-
-```Cleanse the stuffed bosom of this perilous stuff
-
-```That feeds upon the brain.=
-
-"I recalled the reply--=
-
-```Therein the patient must minister to himself.=
-
-"How fantastic it seemed. Here was that cool observer within me quoting
-poetry over my own delirium without being able to allay it. What a
-mystery was the brain that could become the theatre of such wild
-drama. I turned my glance to the orchestra. Ah, what was that they were
-playing?... Yes, it was a passage from Dvorak's American Symphony. How
-familiar it was! My mind incontinently leapt to a remote scene, I saw
-a well-lit room and children round the hearth and a figure at the
-piano....
-
-"It was as though the madman within me had fallen stone dead. I looked
-at the stage coolly, and observed that someone was diving into the lake
-from a trapeze that seemed a hundred feet high. The glare was still
-behind, but I knew it for a sham glare. What a fool I had been.... But
-what a hideous time I had had.... And what a close shave.... I took out
-my handkerchief and drew it across my forehead."
-
-[Illustration: 0066]
-
-[Illustration: 0067]
-
-
-
-ON SUPERSTITIONS
-
-|It was inevitable that the fact that a murder has taken place at a
-house with the number 13 in a street, the letters of whose name number
-13, would not pass unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that
-have been committed, I suppose we should find that as many have taken
-place at No. 6 or No. 7, or any other number you choose, as at No.
-13--that the law of averages is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But
-this consideration does not prevent the world remarking on the fact when
-No. 13 has its turn. Not that the world believes there is anything
-in the superstition. It is quite sure it is a mere childish folly, of
-course. Few of us would refuse to take a house because its number was
-13, or decline an invitation to dinner because there were to be 13 at
-table. But most of us would be just a shade happier if that desirable
-residence were numbered 11, and not any the less pleased with the dinner
-if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept him away. We would
-not confess this little weakness to each other. We might even refuse to
-admit it to ourselves, but it is there.
-
-That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are
-numerous streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which
-there is no house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a
-bed in a hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though
-it has worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations
-of a discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house,
-and into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of
-a bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession
-to the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery
-is a matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow
-on the mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat
-recovery. Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers
-in the sick bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of
-a certain state of mind in the patient. There are few more curious
-revelations in that moving record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences
-during the war, than the case of the man who died of a pimple on his
-nose. He had been hideously mutilated in battle and was brought into
-hospital a sheer wreck; but he was slowly patched up and seemed to have
-been saved when a pimple appeared on his nose. It was nothing in itself,
-but it was enough to produce a mental state that checked the flickering
-return of life. It assumed a fantastic importance in the mind of the
-patient who, having survived the heavy blows of fate, died of something
-less than a pin prick. It is not difficult to understand that so fragile
-a hold of life might yield to the sudden discovery that you were lying
-in No. 13 bed.
-
-I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
-wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of
-all the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that
-I constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have
-associated the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had
-anything but the most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved
-a bus, and as free from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I
-would not change its number if I had the power to do so. But there are
-other circumstances of which I should find it less easy to clear myself
-of suspicion under cross examination. I never see a ladder against a
-house side without feeling that it is advisable to walk round it rather
-than under it. I say to myself that this is not homage to a foolish
-superstition, but a duty to my family. One must think of one's family.
-The fellow at the top of the ladder may drop anything. He may even
-drop himself. He may have had too much to drink. He may be a victim of
-epileptic fits, and epileptic fits, as everyone knows, come on at the
-most unseasonable times and places. It is a mere measure of ordinary
-safety to walk round the ladder. No man is justified in inviting danger
-in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle fancy. Moreover, probably
-that fancy has its roots in the common-sense fact that a man on a ladder
-does occasionally drop things. No doubt many of our superstitions have
-these commonplace and sensible origins. I imagine, for example, that the
-Jewish objection to pork as unclean on religious grounds is only due to
-the fact that in Eastern climates it is unclean on physical grounds.
-
-All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather
-glad that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing
-so. Even if--conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to
-myself--I walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not
-done so as a kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have
-challenged it rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way
-of dodging the absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the
-ladder. This is not easy. In the same way I am sensible of a certain
-satisfaction when I see the new moon in the open rather than through
-glass, and over my right shoulder rather than my left. I would not for
-any consideration arrange these things consciously; but if they happen
-so I fancy I am better pleased than if they do not. And on these
-occasions I have even caught my hand--which chanced to be in my pocket
-at the time--turning over money, a little surreptitiously I thought,
-but still undeniably turning it. Hands have habits of their own and one
-can't always be watching them.
-
-But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover
-in ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a
-creed outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the
-laws of the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
-superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and
-man seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
-neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of
-their hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
-inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
-misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon
-of life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of
-battles being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more
-relation to the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When
-Pompey was afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as pr�tor he shouted
-to the Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election
-postponed, for the Romans would never transact business after it had
-thundered. Alexander surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took
-counsel with them as a modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers.
-Even so great a man as C�sar and so modern and enlightened a man as
-Cicero left their fate to augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were
-right and sometimes they were wrong, but whether right or wrong they
-were equally meaningless. Cicero lost his life by trusting to the wisdom
-of crows. When he was in flight from Antony and C�sar Augustus he put to
-sea and might have escaped. But some crows chanced to circle round his
-vessel, and he took the circumstance to be unfavourable to his action,
-returned to shore and was murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece
-consulted the omens and the oracles where the farmer to-day is only
-careful of his manures.
-
-I should have liked to have seen C�sar and I should have liked to have
-heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later
-day and who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the
-better end of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad.
-We do not know much more of the Power that=
-
-````Turns the handle of this idle show=
-
-than our forefathers did, but at least we have escaped the grotesque
-shadows that enveloped them. We do not look for divine guidance in the
-entrails of animals or the flight of crows, and the House of Commons
-does not adjourn at a clap of thunder.
-
-[Illustration: 0072]
-
-[Illustration: 0073]
-
-
-
-
-ON POSSESSION
-
-|I met a lady the other day who had travelled much and seen much, and
-who talked with great vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one
-peculiarity about her. If I happened to say that I too had been, let us
-say, to Tangier, her interest in Tangier immediately faded away and
-she switched the conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not
-been, and where therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about
-the Honble. Ulick de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had
-the honour of meeting that eminent personage. And so with books and
-curiosities, places and things--she was only interested in them so long
-as they were her exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and
-when she ceased to possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have
-Tangier all to herself she did not want it at all.
-
-And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
-people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
-not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
-exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
-countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else
-in the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching
-that appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he
-was getting something that no one else had got, and when he found that
-someone else had got it its value ceased to exist.
-
-The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything
-in the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
-material thing. I do not own--to take an example--that wonderful picture
-by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his grandchild. I
-have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own room I could
-not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for years. It
-is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries of the
-mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have read, and
-beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it whenever I
-like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the painter saw in
-the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the bottle nose as he
-stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long centuries ago. The
-pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may share this spiritual
-ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine, or the shade of
-a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or the song of the
-lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is common to
-all.
-
-From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
-woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of
-solitude which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient
-Britons hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense
-a certain noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether
-he has seen these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the
-little hamlet know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them
-for a perpetual playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but
-we could not have a richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on
-every tree. For the pleasure of things is not in their possession but in
-their use.
-
-It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised
-long ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who
-scurried through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to
-say that they had done something that other people had not done. Even
-so great a man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive
-possession. De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at
-the mountains, he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene,
-whereupon Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone
-else to praise _his_ mountains. He was the high priest of nature,
-and had something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of
-revelation, and anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence,
-except through him, was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to
-nature.
-
-In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
-possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and
-Bernard Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy
-of the free human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of
-communism. On this point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's
-doctrine and pointed out that the State is not a mere individual, but
-a body composed of dissimilar parts whose unity is to be drawn "ex
-dissimilium hominum consensu." I am as sensitive as anyone about my
-title to my personal possessions. I dislike having my umbrella stolen
-or my pocket picked, and if I found a burglar on my premises I am sure I
-shouldn't be able to imitate the romantic example of the good bishop in
-"Les Mis�rables." When I found the other day that some young fruit trees
-I had left in my orchard for planting had been removed in the night I
-was sensible of a very commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean
-Valjean was I shouldn't have asked him to come and take some more trees.
-I should have invited him to return what he had removed or submit to
-consequences that follow in such circumstances.
-
-I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
-necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
-society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who
-ventured to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or
-two hence. Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control
-and the range of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If
-mankind finds that it can live more conveniently and more happily
-without private property it will do so. In spite of the Decalogue
-private property is only a human arrangement, and no reasonable observer
-of the operation of the arrangement will pretend that it executes
-justice unfailingly in the affairs of men. But because the idea of
-private property has been permitted to override with its selfishness the
-common good of humanity, it does not follow that there are not limits
-within which that idea can function for the general convenience and
-advantage. The remedy is not in abolishing it altogether, but in
-subordinating it to the idea of equal justice and community of purpose.
-It will, reasonably understood, deny me the right to call the coal
-measures, which were laid with the foundations of the earth, my private
-property or to lay waste a countryside for deer forests, but it will
-still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of ownership. And the
-more true the equation of private and public rights is, the more secure
-shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and common
-interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the grotesque
-and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of private
-property which to some minds make the idea of private property itself
-inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea of
-private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
-the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger
-of attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard
-without any apprehensions as to their safety.
-
-But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
-ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
-things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment.
-I do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
-experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
-mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. "I do
-not know how it is," said a very rich man in my hearing, "but when I
-am in London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I
-want to be in London." He was not wanting to escape from London or the
-country, but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions
-and was bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher "his hands were full
-but his soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world." There
-was wisdom as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that "he who was
-born first has the greatest number of old clothes." It is not a bad rule
-for the pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage
-to those who take a pride in its abundance.
-
-[Illustration: 0078]
-
-
-[Illustration: 0079]
-
-
-
-
-ON BORES
-
-|I was talking in the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat
-blunt manner when Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and
-began:
-
-"Well, I think America is bound to----" "Now, do you mind giving us two
-minutes?" broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom, unabashed
-and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group. Poor
-Blossom! I had almost said "Dear Blossom." For he is really an excellent
-fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that he is a
-bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable company.
-You feel that you could love Blossom if he would only keep away. If
-you heard of his death you would be genuinely grieved and would send
-a wreath to his grave and a nice letter of condolence to his wife and
-numerous children.
-
-But it is only absence that makes the heart grow fond of Blossom. When
-he appears all your affection for him withers. You hope that he will not
-see you. You shrink to your smallest dimensions. You talk with an air of
-intense privacy. You keep your face averted. You wonder whether the back
-of your head is easily distinguishable among so many heads. All in vain.
-He approacheth with the remorselessness of fate. He putteth his hand
-upon your shoulder. He remarketh with the air of one that bringeth new
-new's and good news--"Well, I think that America is bound to----" And
-then he taketh a chair and thou lookest at the clock and wonderest how
-soon thou canst decently remember another engagement.
-
-Blossom is the bore courageous. He descends on the choicest company
-without fear or parley. Out, sword, and at 'em, is his motto. He
-advances with a firm voice and a confident air, as of one who knows he
-is welcome everywhere and has only to choose his company. He will have
-nothing but the best, and as he enters the room you may see his
-eye roving from table to table, not in search of the glad eye of
-recognition, but of the most select companionship, and having marked
-down his prey he goes forward boldly to the attack. Salutes the circle
-with easy familiarity, draw's up his chair with assured and masterful
-authority, and plunges into the stream of talk with the heavy impact
-of a walrus or hippopotamus taking a bath. The company around him melts
-away, but he is not dismayed. Left alone with a circle of empty chairs,
-he riseth like a giant refreshed, casteth his eye abroad, noteth another
-group that whetteth his appetite for good fellowship, moveth towards it
-with bold and resolute front. You may see him put to flight as many as
-three circles inside an hour, and retire at the end, not because he is
-beaten, but because there is nothing left worth crossing swords with. "A
-very good club to-night," he says to Mrs B. as he puts on his slippers.
-
-Not so Trip. He is the bore circumspect. He proceeds by sap and mine
-where Blossom charges the battlements sword in hand. He enters timidly
-as one who hopes that he will be unobserved. He goes to the table and
-examines the newspapers, takes one and seats himself alone. But not so
-much alone that he is entirely out of the range of those fellows in the
-corner who keep up such a cut-and-thrust of wit. Perchance one of them
-may catch his eye and open the circle to him. He readeth his paper
-sedulously, but his glance passeth incontinently outside the margin or
-over the top of the page to the coveted group. No responsive eye meets
-his. He moveth just a thought nearer along the sofa by the wall. Now
-he is well within hearing. Now he is almost of the company itself.
-But still unseen--noticeably unseen. He puts down his paper, not
-ostentatiously but furtively. He listens openly to the conversation,
-as one who has been enmeshed in it unconsciously, accidentally,
-almost unwillingly, for was he not absorbed in his paper until this
-conversation disturbed him? And now it would be almost uncivil not to
-listen. He waits for a convenient opening and then gently insinuates
-a remark like one venturing on untried ice. And the ice breaks and the
-circle melts. For Trip, too, is a bore.
-
-I remember in those wonderful submarine pictures of the brothers
-Williamson, which we saw in London some time ago, a strange fish at
-whose approach all the other fish turned tail. It was not, I think, that
-they feared him, nor that he was less presentable in appearance than any
-other fish, but simply that there was something about him that made them
-remember things. I forget what his name was, or whether he even had a
-name. But his calling was obvious. He was the Club Bore. He was the fish
-who sent the other fish about their business. I thought of Blossom as
-I saw that lonely creature whisking through the water in search of some
-friendly ear into which he could remark--"Well, I think that America is
-bound to----" or words to that effect. I thought how superior an animal
-is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish did. He
-hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn lamb. He
-looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth even
-to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his
-feelings.
-
-It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of
-sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists
-on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but
-this is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. And the humour must
-not be that counterfeit currency which consists in the retailing of
-borrowed stories. "Of all bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang,
-and Heaven in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate its species,"
-says De Quincey, "the most insufferable is the teller of good stories."
-It is an over hard saying, subject to exceptions; but it contains the
-essential truth, for the humour of good company must be an authentic
-emanation of personality and not a borrowed tale. It is no discredit to
-be a bore. Very great men have been bores! I fancy that Macaulay,
-with all his transcendent gifts, was a bore. My head aches even at the
-thought of an evening spent in the midst of the terrific torrent of
-facts and certainties that poured from that brilliant and amiable man. I
-find myself in agreement for once with Melbourne who wished that he
-was "as cocksure of one thing as Macaulay was of everything." There is
-pretty clear evidence that Wordsworth was a bore and that Coleridge was
-a bore, and I am sure Bob Southey must have been an intolerable
-bore. And Neckar's daughter was fortunate to escape Gibbon for he was
-assuredly a prince of bores. He took pains to leave posterity in
-no doubt on the point. He wrote his "Autobiography" which, as a wit
-observed, showed that "he did not know the difference between himself
-and the Roman Empire. He has related his 'progressions from London to
-Bariton and from Bariton to London' in the same monotonous, majestic
-periods that he recorded the fall of states and empires." Yes, an
-indubitable bore. Yet these were all admirable men and even great men.
-Let not therefore the Blossoms and the Trips be discomfited. It may be
-that it is not they who are not fit company for us, but we who are not
-fit company for them.
-
-[Illustration: 0084]
-
-[Illustration: 0085]
-
-
-
-
-A LOST SWARM
-
-|We were busy with the impossible hen when the alarm came. The
-impossible hen is sitting on a dozen eggs in the shed, and, like the boy
-on the burning deck, obstinately refuses to leave the post of duty. A
-sense of duty is an excellent thing, but even a sense of duty can be
-carried to excess, and this hen's sense of duty is simply a disease. She
-is so fiercely attached to her task that she cannot think of eating, and
-resents any attempt to make her eat as a personal affront or a malignant
-plot against her impending family. Lest she should die at her post, a
-victim to a misguided hunger strike, we were engaged in the delicate
-process of substituting a more reasonable hen, and it was at this moment
-that a shout from the orchard announced that No. 5 was swarming.
-
-It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had
-been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells
-visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around
-the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the
-thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more
-exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You
-pass it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched
-within. The next, the whole colony roars out like a cataract, envelops
-the hive in a cloud of living dust until the queen has emerged and gives
-direction to the masses that slowly cohere around her as she settles
-on some branch. The excitement is contagious. It is a call to adventure
-with the unknown, an adventure sharpened by the threat of loss and tense
-with the instancy of action. They have the start. It is your wit against
-their impulse, your strategy against their momentum. The cloud thins
-and expands as it moves away from the hive and you are puzzled to
-know whither the main stream is moving in these ever widening folds of
-motion. The first indeterminate signs of direction to-day were towards
-the beech woods behind the cottage, but with the aid of a syringe we put
-up a barrage of water in that direction, and headed them off towards a
-row of chestnuts and limes at the end of the paddock beyond the orchard.
-A swift encircling move, armed with syringe and pail, brought them again
-under the improvised rainstorm. They concluded that it was not such a
-fine day as they had thought after all, and that they had better take
-shelter at once, and to our entire content the mass settled in a great
-blob on a conveniently low bough of a chestnut tree. Then, by the aid of
-a ladder and patient coaxing, the blob was safely transferred to a skep,
-and carried off triumphantly to the orchard.
-
-[Illustration: 0089]
-
-And now, but for the war, all would have been well. For, but for the
-war, there would have been a comfortable home in which the adventurers
-could have taken up their new quarters. But hives are as hard to come by
-in these days as petrol or matches, or butter or cheese, or most of the
-other common things of life. We had ransacked England for hives and the
-neighbourhood for wood with which to make hives; but neither could be
-had, though promises were plenty, and here was the beginning of the
-swarms of May, each of them worth a load of hay according to the adage,
-and never a hive to welcome them with. Perhaps to-morrow something would
-arrive, if not from Gloucester, then from Surrey. If only the creatures
-would make themselves at home in the skep for a day or two....
-
-But no. For two hours or so all seemed well. Then perhaps they found
-the skep too hot, perhaps they detected the odour of previous tenants,
-perhaps--but who can read the thoughts of these inscrutable creatures?
-Suddenly the skep was enveloped in a cyclone of bees, and again the
-orchard sang with the exciting song of the wings. For a moment the cloud
-seemed to hover over an apple tree near by, and once more the syringe
-was at work insisting, in spite of the sunshine, that it was a
-dreadfully wet day on which to be about, and that a dry skep,
-even though pervaded by the smell of other bees, had points worth
-considering. In vain. This time they had made up their minds. It may
-be that news had come to them, from one of the couriers sent out to
-prospect for fresh quarters, of a suitable home elsewhere, perhaps a
-deserted hive, perhaps a snug hollow in some porch or in the bole of an
-ancient tree. Whatever the goal, the decision was final. One moment the
-cloud was about us; the air was filled with the high-pitched roar of
-thirty thousand pair of wings. The next moment the cloud had gone--gone
-sailing high over the trees in the paddock and out across the valley. We
-burst through the paddock fence into the cornfield beyond; but we might
-as well have chased the wind. Our first load of hay had taken wings
-and gone beyond recovery. For an hour or two there circled round the
-deserted skep a few hundred odd bees who had apparently been out when
-the second decision to migrate was taken, and found themselves homeless
-and queenless. I saw some of them try to enter other hives, but they
-were promptly ejected as foreigners by the sentries who keep the porch
-and admit none who do not carry the authentic odour of the hive. Perhaps
-the forlorn creatures got back to No. 5, and the young colony left in
-possession of that tenement.
-
-We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full of
-hope, for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's bench
-under the pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and plane,
-and before nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And it
-never rains but it pours--here is a telegram telling us of three hives
-on the way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We will
-harvest our loads of hay before they take wing.
-
-[Illustration: 0090]
-
-[Illustration: 0091]
-
-
-
-
-YOUNG AMERICA
-
-|If you want to understand America," said my host, "come and see
-her young barbarians at play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at
-Princeton. It will be a great game. Come and see it."
-
-He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured
-victory in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but
-consider the record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was
-as much ahead of Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of
-Cambridge on the river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It
-was like a Derby Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the
-great hall of that magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated
-men and women, wearing the favours of the rival colleges--yellow for
-Princeton and red for Harvard--passed through the gateways to the
-platform, filling train after train, that dipped under the Hudson and,
-coming out into the sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered
-away with its jolly load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country,
-through historic Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off
-towers of Princeton.
-
-And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges,
-such a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
-"how-d'ye-do's" and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
-times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
-haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured
-in the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some
-terrific memorial of antiquity--seen from without a mighty circular wall
-of masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval,
-or rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the
-level of the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand
-spectators--on this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side,
-with the sunlight full upon them, the yellows.
-
-Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
-playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings---for this American
-game is much more complicated than English Rugger--its goal-posts and
-its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
-minute record of the game.
-
-The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
-there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
-music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
-like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
-horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
-opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
-
-Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
-Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
-greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.
-
-The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war.
-Three flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They
-shout through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line,
-they wave their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with
-that leap there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of
-cheers roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
-demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of
-a tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey--the growl rising
-to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
-
-The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell,
-roar for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of
-us, and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their
-limbs we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I
-cannot hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off
-with the battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand
-lusty pairs of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid,
-we rise like one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our
-cheer-leaders, gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad
-dervishes, we shout back the song of "Har-vard! Har-vard!"
-
-And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into
-the field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson,
-that in the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and
-helmeted so that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic
-muscular development and horrific visage. At their entrance the
-megaphones opposite are heard again, and the enemy host rises and
-repeats its wonderful cheer and tiger growl. We rise and heave the
-challenge back. And now the teams are in position, the front lines, with
-the ball between, crouching on the ground for the spring. In the silence
-that has suddenly fallen on the scene, one hears short, sharp cries of
-numbers. "Five!" "Eleven!" "Three!" "Six!" "Ten!" like the rattle of
-musketry. Then--crash! The front lines have leapt on each other. There
-is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs and bodies. The swirl clears and
-men are seen lying about all over the line as though a shell had burst
-in their midst, while away to the right a man with the ball is brought
-down with a crash to the ground by another, who leaps at him like a
-projectile that completes its trajectory at his ankles.
-
-I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
-thrilling minutes--which, with intervals and stoppages for the
-attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours--how the battle
-surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the tension
-of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how Harvard
-scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm of
-victory, how Princeton drew level--a cyclone from the other side!--and
-forged ahead--another cyclone--how man after man went down like an ox,
-was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how another
-brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last hardly a
-man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every convenient
-interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we jumped up
-and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how the match
-ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of victory that
-is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters--all this is recorded
-in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives in my mind as
-a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous "rag" in which young and old, gravity
-and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly confounded.
-
-"And what did you think of it?" asked my host as we rattled back to New
-York in the darkness that night. "I think it has helped me to understand
-America," I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
-explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.
-
-[Illustration: 0095]
-
-[Illustration: 0096]
-
-
-
-
-ON GREAT REPLIES
-
-|At a dinner table the other night, the talk turned upon a certain
-politician whose cynical traffic in principles and loyalties has
-eclipsed even the record of Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one
-defender, an amiable and rather portentous gentleman who did not so much
-talk as lecture, and whose habit of looking up abstractedly and fixedly
-at some invisible altitude gave him the impression of communing with the
-Almighty. He was profuse in his admissions and apologies, but he wound
-up triumphantly with the remark:
-
-"But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius."
-
-"So was Madame de Pompadour," said a voice from the other side of the
-table.
-
-It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
-replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician
-with a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of
-democracy who, like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things
-for ambition and power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through
-the dull, solemn man on the other side of the table like a rapier. There
-was no reply. There was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash
-of lightning. It revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift,
-searching intelligence, equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that
-went with deadly certainty to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed
-on the whole landscape of discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that
-gave it larger significance and range.
-
-It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour
-and finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
-absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and
-personality. There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning
-phrase that has leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental
-things. I do not know much about the military genius or the deeds of
-Augureau, but I know the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon
-about the celebration at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial
-ambitions of the First Consul. Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought
-of the ceremony. "Oh, it was very fine," replied the general; "there was
-nothing wanting, _except the million of men who have perished in pulling
-down what you are setting up_."
-
-And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
-the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
-make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
-bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
-him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud
-Italian, a poor peasant's son--a miserable friar of a country town--was
-prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
-Christendom.
-
-"What!" said the Cardinal at last to him, "do you think the Pope cares
-for the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger
-than all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend
-_you--you_, a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you
-be then--where will you be then?"
-
-"Then, as now," replied Luther. "Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
-God."
-
-<b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
-venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
-century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man--one of the
-profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
-country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
-brilliant author of the papers on "The Crisis," that kept the flame of
-the rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of
-the United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the
-Bastille for presentation to Washington. The true character of this
-great Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had
-discoursed "On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor." And
-Paine answered, "God did not make rich and poor. God made male and
-female and gave the earth for their inheritance."</b>
-
-It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
-this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
-to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
-Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
-boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
-remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. "Indeed,"
-said the President. "Then whose boots do they black?" There was the same
-mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
-inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. "I do not know,
-madam," he said, "but I hope that we are on the Lord's side."
-
-And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
-when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
-dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
-disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
-using his department to further his ambitions. "Raymond," he said, "you
-were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
-is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving
-the horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he
-rushed across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely
-keep pace with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an
-enormous chin fly fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother
-asked me what I did that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse
-bitten in that way. 'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him
-go!' Now, if Mr Chase has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm
-not going to knock it off, if it will only make his department _go!_" If
-one were asked to name the most famous answer in history, one might, not
-unreasonably, give the palm to a woman--a poor woman, too, who has been
-dust for three thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke
-six words that gave her immortality. They have been recalled on
-thousands of occasions and in all lands, but never more memorably than
-by John Bright when he was speaking of the hesitation with which he
-accepted cabinet office: "I should have preferred much," he said, "to
-have remained in the common rank of citizenship in which heretofore I
-have lived. There is a passage in the Old Testament that has often
-struck me as being one of great beauty. Many of you will recollect that
-the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very hospitably entertained
-by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make her some amends, and
-he called her to him and asked her what there was he should do for her.
-'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to the captain of the
-host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the Shunamite woman
-returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the prophet's offer,
-'I dwell among mine own people.'"
-
-It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
-point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
-babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if
-by magic, from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the
-spiritual, from the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty
-replies, are another matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp
-tongue and a quick mind. But great replies are not dependent on wit or
-cleverness. If they were Cicero would have made many, whereas he never
-made one. His repartees are perfect of their kind, but they belong to
-the debating club and the law court. They raise a laugh and score a
-point, but they are summer lightnings. The great reply does not come
-from witty minds, but from rare and profound souls. The brilliant
-adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that reply of Augereau
-than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it because with
-all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a great part on
-the world's stage.
-
-[Illustration: 0101]
-
-[Illustration: 0102]
-
-
-
-
-ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES
-
-|I went recently to an industrial town in the North on some business,
-and while there had occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and
-engines and machinery of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers
-and engines and machinery of all sorts, and I did my best to appear
-interested and understanding. But I was neither one nor the other. I was
-only bored. Boilers and engines, I know, are important things. Compared
-with a boiler, the finest lyric that was ever written is only a perfume
-on the gale. There is a practical downrightness about a boiler that
-makes "Drink to me only with thine eyes," or "O mistress mine, where are
-you roaming?" or even "Twelfth Night" itself, a mere idle frivolity.
-All you can say in favour of "Twelfth Night," from the strictly business
-point of view, is that it doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank
-heaven for that.
-
-But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
-never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought
-to be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How,
-for example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of
-a boiler? How--and this was still more important--how could I hope
-to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
-gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
-great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it
-as much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
-discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no
-bowels of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the
-symbol of brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional
-values. In Dante's "Inferno" each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted
-to give him the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room
-for me, and there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever
-among wheels and pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying
-amidst the thud and din of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily
-"waste" to catch those perfumes on the gale, those frivolous rhythms
-to which I had devoted so much of that life' which should be "real and
-earnest" and occupied with serious things like boilers. And so it came
-about that as my friend talked I spiritually wilted away.
-
-I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
-learned and articulate boiler.
-
-Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
-boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
-inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a "b" in
-boilers and a "b" in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect
-was miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit.
-The light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if
-I were a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved
-brother. Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come,
-I must see his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could
-whisk us to his house in the suburbs, and there in a great room,
-surrounded with hundreds of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from
-the ends of the earth, butterflies from the forests of Brazil and
-butterflies from the plains of India, and butterflies from the veldt of
-South Africa and butterflies from the bush of Australia, all arranged
-in the foliage natural to their habitat to show how their scheme of
-coloration conformed to their setting. Some of them had their wings
-folded back and were indistinguishable from the leaves among which they
-lay. And as my friend, with growing excitement, revealed his treasure,
-he talked of his adventures in the pursuit of them, and of the law of
-natural selection and all its bearing upon the mystery of life, its
-survivals and its failures. This hobby of his was, in short, the key
-of his world. The boiler house was the prison where he did time. At the
-magic word "butterflies" the prison door opened, and out he sailed on
-the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the mind.
-
-There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
-something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a
-ship without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair
-that most of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the
-end of the journey without ever having found a path and a sense of
-direction. But a hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial
-a thing, but it supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm
-outside the mere routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it
-will lead. You may begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in
-continents. You may collect coins, and find that the history of man is
-written on them. You may begin with bees, and end with the science of
-life. Ruskin began with pictures and found they led to economics and
-everything else. For as every road was said to lead to Rome, so every
-hobby leads out into the universe, and supplies us with a compass
-for the adventure. It saves us from the humiliation of being merely
-smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in general, for the world
-is too full of things to permit us to be anything else, but one field
-of intensive culture will give even our smattering a respectable
-foundation.
-
-It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who
-knows even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might
-be when he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not
-know them and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of
-measurement which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters.
-He will have, above all, an attachment to life which will make him at
-home in the world. Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged
-into this bewildering whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of
-circumstance. We have in us the genius of speculation, but the further
-our speculations penetrate the profounder becomes the mystery that
-baffles us. We are caught in the toils of affections that crumble to
-dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither like grass, beaten about by
-storms that shatter our stoutest battlements like spray blown upon the
-wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little more than dreams within
-a dream--or as Carlyle puts it, "exhalations that are and then are not."
-And we share the poet's sense of exile--=
-
-```In this house with starry dome,
-
-````Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
-
-```Shall I never be at home?
-
-````Never wholly at my ease?=
-
-From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
-stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
-hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
-that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
-without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
-find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come
-and go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always
-renewed. Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with
-Horace or Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the
-sense of the mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden
-of the mind, self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of
-intractible circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the
-spirit and endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman
-in "Romany Rye," you will remember, found his deliverance in studying
-Chinese. His bereavement had left him without God and without hope in
-the world, without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the
-things that reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly
-before him, when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and
-he thought he heard a voice say, "The marks! the marks! cling to the
-marks! or-----" And from this beginning--but the story is too fruity,
-too rich with the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book
-down, turn to the episode, and thank me for sending you again into the
-enchanted Borrovian realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in
-books. It is enough for the purpose here to recall this perfect example
-of the healing power of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little
-world of our own where we can be at ease, and from whose warmth and
-friendliness we can look out on the vast conundrum without expecting an
-answer or being much troubled because we do not get one. It was a hobby
-that poor Pascal needed to allay that horror of the universe which he
-expressed in the desolating phrase, "Le silence �temel de ces espaces
-infinis m'effraie." For on the wings of the butterfly one can not only
-outrange the boiler, but can adventure into the infinite in the spirit
-of happy and confident adventure.
-
-[Illustration: 0108]
-
-[Illustration: 0109]
-
-
-
-
-ON HEREFORD BEACON
-
-|Jenny Lind sleeps in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she
-died is four miles away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble
-range of the Malverns that marches north and south from Worcester beacon
-to Gloucester beacon.
-
-It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way
-up from Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its
-descent into the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire
-country.
-
-Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
-range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the
-deep trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as
-this, the Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman
-legions. Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural
-ramparts; but the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the
-work to----. But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell
-his own story.
-
-He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
-conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
-the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
-slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of
-the district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up
-the steep road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the
-Cotswolds, Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and
-the other features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the
-road, Hereford beacon came in view.
-
-"That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir."
-
-He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
-
-"Killed?" said I, a little stunned.
-
-"Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
-from about here you know, sir."
-
-"But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he
-wasn't killed at all. He died in his bed."
-
-The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
-
-"Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
-captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
-sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard
-tell as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon."
-
-He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but
-the capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
-Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must
-be fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
-
-"He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell," he went on. "He blowed
-away Little Malvern Church down yonder."
-
-He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
-visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
-ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of
-Piers Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
-
-"Left the tower standing he did, sir," pursued the historian. "Now, why
-should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?"
-
-And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought
-us to Wynd's Point.
-
-The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an
-old gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the
-little arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out
-on the beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently
-declined to go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred
-to disturb. It was the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and
-singer.
-
-It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of
-a vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
-roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
-chalet, "the golden cage," of the singer fronting the drawing-room
-bowered in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter
-pictures of saints, that hang upon the walls--all speak with mute
-eloquence of the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres,
-whose life was an anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet
-simplicity of her name.
-
-"Why did you leave the stage?" asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
-like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
-surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for
-the sober r�le of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for
-charity.
-
-Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
-
-"Because," she said, touching the Bible, "it left me so little time for
-this, and" (looking at the sunset) "none for that."
-
-There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
-cuckoo--his voice failing slightly in these hot June days--wakes you in
-the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the shadows
-lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
-against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
-deepening gloom of the vast plain.
-
-Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
-unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the
-road, with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the
-broom to the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come
-out on the path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the
-green summits that march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of
-Worcester beacon.
-
-Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon
-to Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these
-ten miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled
-at your feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of
-exhilaration that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It
-is a cheerful solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of
-the twin shout of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and
-look out over half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills,
-Birmingham stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where
-southward the shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the
-imagination away with Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you
-may see our rough island story traced in characters of city, hill, and
-plain. These grass-grown trenches, where to-day the young lambs are
-grazing, take us back to the dawn of things and the beginnings of that
-ancient tragedy of the Celtic race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of
-smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of
-the Roses, of "false, fleeting, perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the
-field at Tewkesbury," and of Ancient Pistol, whose "wits were thick as
-Tewkesbury mustard." There is the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and
-far away Edgehill carries the mind forward to the beginning of that
-great struggle for a free England which finished yonder at Worcester,
-where the clash of arms was heard for the last time in our land and
-where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword for ever.
-
-The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to
-cast its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the
-wide plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing
-here through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to
-Oxford and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are
-coming up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom.
-Now is the moment to turn westward, where=
-
-````Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
-
-````Bleeds upon the road to Wales.=
-
-All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun,
-and in the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the
-far battlements of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of
-alabaster, and in the woods of the castle that clothe these western
-slopes a pheasant rends the golden silence with the startled noise and
-flurry of its flight.
-
-The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
-the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
-suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
-
-Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and
-a late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through
-the twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great
-sycamore by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads
-of insects has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an
-unfaltering bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all
-save a pied wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its
-graceful tail by the rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come
-those intimate murmurs of the birds, half chatter, half song, that close
-the day. Even these grow few and faint until the silence is unbroken.=
-
-``And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
-
-``In an ocean of dreams without a sound.=
-
-Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
-
-[Illustration: 0115]
-
-[Illustration: 0116]
-
-
-
-
-CHUM
-
-|When I turned the key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a
-familiar sound. It was the "thump, thump, thump," of a tail on the floor
-at the foot of the stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place
-was vacant. Chum had gone, and he would not return. I knew that the
-veterinary must have called, pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him
-away, and that I should hear no more his "welcome home!" at midnight. No
-matter what the labours of the day had been or how profound his sleep,
-he never failed to give me a cheer with the stump of his tail and to
-blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him "Good dog" and a pat on the head.
-Then with a huge sigh of content he would lapse back into slumber,
-satisfied that the last duty of the day was done, and that all was well
-with the world for the night. Now he has lapsed into sleep altogether.
-
-I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will
-pay my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and
-in any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that
-I enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he
-enjoyed my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom
-he went, and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to
-go with, unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person.
-It was not that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned
-after a longish absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would
-leap round and round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent
-her to the floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's
-schoolmaster who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and
-explained that "he didn't know his own strength."
-
-But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and
-I was the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the
-woodlands, and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his
-reddish-brown coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan,
-and his head down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there
-was more than a hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was
-precisely no one ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up.
-His fine liquid brown eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but
-he had a nobler head than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain
-of the Irish terrier in him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat
-was all his own. And all his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and
-his genius for friendship.
-
-There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he
-was reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had
-been sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
-grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin,
-and he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
-schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
-eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
-something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
-when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
-abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
-ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
-You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about
-his affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to
-the forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled
-to any good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and
-watchful, his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury
-and pity for the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the
-qualities of a rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into
-an unspeakable abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your
-voice and all the world was young and full of singing birds again.
-
-He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
-that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
-For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or
-his colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more
-than a little of the spirit of the flunkey. "A man's a man, for a'
-that," was not his creed. He discriminated between the people who came
-to the front door and the people who came to the side door. To the
-former he was systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly
-hostile. "The poor in a loomp is bad," was his fixed principle, and any
-one carrying a basket, wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was _ipso
-facto_ suspect. He held, in short, to the servile philosophy of
-clothes as firmly as any waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair.
-Familiarity never altered his convictions. No amount of correction
-affected his stubborn dislike of postmen. They offended him in many
-ways. They wore uniforms; they came, nevertheless, to the front door;
-they knocked with a challenging violence that revolted his sense of
-propriety. In the end, the burden of their insults was too much for
-him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of trousers. Perhaps that
-incident was not unconnected with his passing.
-
-One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
-Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in
-leaping a stile--he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow--or
-had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
-latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
-for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted.
-But whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all
-the veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to
-the revels in his native woods--for he had come to us as a pup from a
-cottage in the heart of the woodland country--no longer made him tense
-as a drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and
-left his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the
-hill to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into
-the house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to
-be forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a
-place he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream
-of the happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there
-waiting to scour the woods with me as of old.
-
-[Illustration: 0120]
-
-[Illustration: 0121]
-
-
-
-
-ON MATCHES AND THINGS
-
-|I had an agreeable assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I
-went-into a tea-shop and sat down. There were several young waitresses
-by the counter engaged in animated conversation. They eyed me with that
-cold aloofness which is the ritual of the order, and which, I take
-it, is intended to convey to you the fact that they are princesses in
-disguise who only serve in shops for a pastime. When I had taken out
-my watch twice with an appearance of ostentatious urgency, one of the
-princesses came towards me, took my order (looking meanwhile out of
-the window to remind me that she was not really aware of me, but only
-happened to be there by chance), and moved languorously away. When she
-returned she brought tea--and sugar. In that moment her disdain was
-transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel who under the disguise of
-indifference went about scattering benedictions among her customers and
-assuring them that the spring had come back to the earth.
-
-It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future
-became suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine)
-had passed magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be
-sweetened thrice a day by honest sugar.
-
-Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised
-how I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my
-friends through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump
-person, but in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the
-spoon and stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer
-did the spoon seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere
-survival of an antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the
-back of your coat. It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the
-tea-table. To stir your tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It
-keeps tune with your thoughts if you are alone, and it keeps time with
-your tongue if you are talking. It helps out the argument, fills up
-the gaps, provides the animated commentary on your discourse. There are
-people I shall always remember in the attitude of standing, cup in hand,
-and stirring, stirring, stirring as the current of talk flowed on. Such
-a one was that fine old tea-drinker, Prince Kropotkin--rest his gentle
-soul if he indeed be among the slain.... With what universal benevolence
-his patriarchal face used to gleam as he stood stirring and talking,
-talking and stirring, with the hurry of his teeming thoughts.
-
-It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
-for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
-little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
-of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
-solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
-with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon
-the grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all
-the pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious
-than you had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days
-knitting up your severed friendships with things. You slip into the
-National Gallery just to see what old favourites have come up from the
-darkness of the cellars. You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in
-the great moon that shines again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that
-chimes gives you a pleasant emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds
-like the salutation of an old friend who had been given up as lost. And
-matches.... There was a time when I thought nothing of a match. I would
-strike a match as thoughtlessly as I would breathe. And for the same
-reason, that matches were as plentiful as air. I would strike a match
-and let the wind puff it out; another and let it burn out before using
-it, simply because I was too busy talking or listening or thinking
-or doing nothing. I would try to light a pipe in a gale of wind on a
-mountain top, crouching behind a boulder, getting inside my hat, lying
-on the ground under my coat, and wasting matches by the dozen. I would
-get rid of a box of matches a day, and not care a dump. The world was
-simply choked with matches, and it was almost a duty to go on striking
-them to make room for the rest. You could get a dozen boxes for a penny
-or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see great bags of matches with
-boxes bursting out at the top, and simply asking to be taken. If by some
-accident you found yourself without a box in your pocket you asked the
-stranger for a light as confidently as you would ask him for the time
-o' day. You were asking for something that cost him nothing except a
-commonplace civility.
-
-And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
-Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
-away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, "No; we haven't any." They
-simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
-smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the
-habit and just go on in their sleep. "Oh, you funny people," they seem
-to say, dreamily. "Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach
-you that there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years
-and years; never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let
-the other fools follow on." And you go away, feeling much as though you
-had been caught trying to pass a bad half-crown.
-
-No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, "Can you oblige me
-with a light, sir?" You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or
-a pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
-wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
-fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting
-to pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket,
-preparing to have "After you, sir," on your lips at the exact moment
-when he has lit his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out
-the precious flame. Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps
-the fellow is only waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting
-for what the other hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless
-world.
-
-I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which
-I can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips
-I know that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that
-excellent fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine,
-and I have had more lights from him in these days than from any other
-man on earth. I never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it
-quite boldly, fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me--but not so
-often, not nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If--having
-borrowed a little too recklessly from him of late--I go into his room
-and begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the
-Peace Conference, or things like that--is he deceived? Not at all. He
-knows that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has
-one left it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his
-pipe because he knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man
-Higginson is. I cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
-
-But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
-tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
-authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
-before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
-welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
-Lords and the Oval.
-
-And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning,
-Your young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is
-sailing home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds
-instead of khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters
-who are strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on
-historic battlefields and now ask you whether you will have "thick or
-clear," with the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your
-galley proof is brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you
-look at with a shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he
-is that pale, thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago,
-and who in the interval has been fighting in many lands near and far,
-in France and Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing
-the burnished livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a
-stoutish fellow who turns out to be the old professional released from
-Germany after long months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one
-"of the lucky ones; nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and
-lived with the farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir,
-nothing to complain of. I was one of the lucky ones."
-
-Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men
-and things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those
-who will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound
-of Big Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we
-enter the new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the
-stimulus of the princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the
-credit side of things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We
-have left the deathly solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the
-moraine is rough and toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we
-can hear the pleasant tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old
-pastures.
-
-[Illustration: 0127]
-
-[Illustration: 0128]
-
-
-
-
-ON BEING REMEMBERED
-
-|As I lay on the hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods
-watching the harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows
-chasing each other across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were
-looking down with me. For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an
-old school book is scored with the names of generations of scholars.
-Near by are the earthworks of the ancient Britons, and on the face of
-the hill is a great white horse carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those
-white marks, that look like sheep feeding on the green hill-side, are
-reminders of the great war. How long ago it seems since the recruits
-from the valley used to come up here to learn the art of trench-digging,
-leaving these memorials behind them before they marched away to whatever
-fate awaited them! All over the hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit
-by merry parties on happy holidays. One scorched and blackened area,
-more spacious than the rest, marks the spot where the beacon fire was
-lit to celebrate the signing of Peace. And on the boles of the beech
-trees are initials carved deep in the bark--some linked like those of
-lovers, some freshly cut, some old and covered with lichen.
-
-What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and
-school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is
-as ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school
-desks of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of
-the schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted
-them. There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood
-or scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled.
-And the joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found
-pleasure in whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice
-white ceiling above me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's
-hankering for a charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies.
-But at the back of it all, the explanation of those initials
-on the boles of the beeches is a desire for some sort of
-immortality--terrestrial if not celestial. Even the least of us would
-like to be remembered, and so we carve our names on tree trunks and
-tombstones to remind later generations that we too once passed this way.
-
-If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great.
-One of the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will
-trumpet its name down the centuries. C�sar wrote his Commentaries
-to take care that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's "Exegi
-monumentum �re perennius" is one of many confident assertions that he
-knew he would be among the immortals. "I have raised a monument," he
-says, "more enduring than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings;
-a monument which shall not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by
-the rage of the north wind, nor by the countless years and the flight
-of ages." The same magnificent confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud
-declaration--=
-
-```Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
-
-```Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,=
-
-and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had
-written a song of a sparrow--=
-
-```And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
-
-```Of which I sang one song that will not die.=
-
-Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was "writ in water," but
-behind the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for
-immortality.
-
-Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable
-confidence. "I'll be more respected," he said, "a hundred years after
-I am dead than I am at present;" and even John Knox had his eye on
-an earthly as well as a heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus.
-"Theologians there will always be in abundance," he said; "the like of
-me comes but once in centuries."
-
-Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
-their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
-conceit on the subject. "What I write," he said, "is not written on
-slate and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of
-years can efface it." And again, "I shall dine late, but the dining-room
-will be well-lighted, the guests few and select." A proud fellow, if
-ever there was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le
-Brun-Pindare, cherished his dream of immortality. "I do not die," he
-said grandly; "_I quit the time_." And beside this we may put Victor
-Hugo's rather truculent, "It is time my name ceased to fill the world."
-
-But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
-that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. "Do you suppose," he
-said, "to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
-should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
-service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
-Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
-toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has
-ever looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life,
-then at last it would begin to live." The context, it is true,
-suggests that a celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a
-terrestrial; but earthly glory was never far from his mind.
-
-Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject
-is one of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in
-books. I must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable
-terms. In the preface to his "Account of Corsica" he says:--
-
-_For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
-ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should
-imagine literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able
-to furnish a book which has been approved by the world has established
-himself as a respectable character in distant society, without any
-danger of having the character lessened by the observation of his
-weaknesses. (_Oh, you rogue!_) To preserve a uniform dignity among those
-who see us every day is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us
-under the fetters of a perpetual restraint. The author of an approved
-book may allow his natural disposition an easy play ("_You were drunk
-last night, you dog_"), and yet indulge the pride of superior genius
-when he considers that by those who know him only as an author he
-never ceases to be respected. Such an author in his hours of gloom and
-discontent may have the consolation to think that his writings are
-at that very time giving pleasure to numbers, and such an author may
-cherish the hope of being remembered after death, which has been a great
-object of the noblest minds in all ages._
-
-We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition.
-Most of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of
-Gray's depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the "dull
-cold ear of death." In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy
-and immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of
-"Alpha of the Plough" an agreeable fancy something like this. In the
-year two thousand--or it may be three thousand--yes, let us do the thing
-handsomely and not stint the centuries--in the year three thousand and
-ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and the
-Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe for
-democracy--at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer who has
-been swished that morning from the British Isles across the Atlantic
-to the Patagonian capital--swished, I need hardly remark, being the
-expression used to describe the method of flight which consists in
-being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made
-to complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be
-desired--bursts in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered
-by him in the course of some daring investigations of the famous
-subterranean passages of the ancient British capital--those passages
-which have so long perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the
-Patagonian savants, some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers,
-and some that they were the roadways of a people who had become
-so afflicted with photophobia that they had to build their cities
-underground. The trophy is a book by one "Alpha of the Plough." It
-creates an enormous sensation. It is put under a glass case in the
-Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is translated into every Patagonian
-dialect. It is read in schools. It is referred to in pulpits. It is
-discussed in learned societies. Its author, dimly descried across the
-ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
-
-[Illustration: 0134]
-
-An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
-celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
-assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
-marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha--a gentleman with a flowing
-beard and a dome-like brow--that overlooks the market-place, and places
-wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of bells
-and a salvo of artillery.
-
-There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you,
-my dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in
-the New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved
-for most, even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world
-to-day. And yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who
-writes has the best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox,
-who among the statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But
-Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb,
-even second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the
-temple of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military
-feats of Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza
-of the poem in which he poured out his creed--=
-
-```He either fears his fate too much,
-
-````Or his deserts are small.
-
-```That dares not put it to the touch
-
-````To win or lose it all.=
-
-M�cenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship
-with Octavius C�sar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he
-befriended a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the
-name of his benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of
-�gina is full of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would
-like to be remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went
-to Pindar and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his
-praise. Pindar demanded one talent, about �200 of our money. "Why, for
-so much money," said Pytheas, "I can erect a statue of bronze in the
-temple."
-
-"Very likely." On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And
-now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the
-statues of bronze in the temples of �gina are destroyed, but the temples
-themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the
-ode of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer
-paths to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of
-the Earl of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of
-Shakespeare live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their
-dedication. But one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise
-you to go and give Mr -------- �200 and a commission to send your name
-echoing down the corridors of time.
-
-Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr -------- (you will fill in the
-blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them. It would be
-safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a rose, or an
-overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can confer a modest
-immortality. They have done so for many. A certain Mar�chal Neil is
-wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which is as enviable
-a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr Mackintosh is
-talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of rain, and even
-Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his battles. It would
-not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone will be thought
-of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just as Archimedes
-is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.
-
-But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the
-healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps
-one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of
-forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike,
-and we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as
-if the world babbles about us for ever.
-
-[Illustration: 0137]
-
-[Illustration: 0138]
-
-
-
-
-ON DINING
-
-|There are people who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can
-hoard it not for the sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy,
-for the satisfaction of feeling that they have got something locked up
-that they could spend if they chose without being any the poorer and
-that other people would enjoy knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending
-what they can afford to spend. It is a pleasure akin to the economy of
-the Scotsman, which, according to a distinguished member of that race,
-finds its perfect expression in taking the tube when you can afford a
-cab. But the gift of secrecy is rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the
-sake of telling them. We spend our secrets as Lamb's spendthrift spent
-his money--while they are fresh. The joy of creating an emotion in other
-people is too much for us. We like to surprise them, or shock them, or
-please them as the case may be, and we give away the secret with which
-we have been entrusted with a liberal hand and a solemn request "to say
-nothing about it." We relish the luxury of telling the secret, and leave
-the painful duty of keeping it to the other fellow. We let the horse out
-and then solemnly demand that the stable door shall be shut so that
-it shan't escape, I have done it myself--often. I have no doubt that
-I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret to reveal, but I
-shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely selfish reasons,
-which will appear later. You may conceive me going about choking with
-mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years have
-I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can
-dine wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the
-atmosphere restful, and the prices moderate--in short, the happy
-mean between the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the
-uncompromising cheapness of Lockhart's. In those extremes I find no
-satisfaction.
-
-It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its
-ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to
-a good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren't many
-families that enjoyed their "vittles" more than her's did, and I can
-claim the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that
-I count good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I
-could join very heartily in Peacock's chorus:=
-
-````"How can a man, in his life of a span,
-
-````Do anything better than dine."=
-
-Give me a satisfactory' dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel
-themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads
-the landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who
-insisted that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life.
-That, I think, is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few
-things more revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by
-taking emetics. But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise
-for enjoying a good dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good
-dinners. I see no necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and
-a holy mind. There was a saintly man once in this city--a famous man,
-too--who was afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out
-to dinner, he had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to
-enable him to start even with the other guests. And it is on record
-that when the ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with
-Cardinal Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses
-that hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season
-of fasting, "I fear," said one of them, "that there is a lobster salad
-side to the Cardinal." I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side
-too. A hot day and a lobster salad--what happier conjunction can we look
-for in a plaguey world?
-
-But, in making this confession, I am neither _gourmand_ nor _gourmet_.
-Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic
-conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and
-the great language of the _menu_ does not stir my pulse. I do not ask
-for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt
-would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for
-talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was
-pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have
-for supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as
-the shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right
-spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes--eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
-smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke
-approvingly of Sancho's choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way
-with him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against
-his rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with
-conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the
-matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to
-follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart's desire at
-the Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel
-when I enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things.
-I stroke the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and
-rises, purring with dignity, under my caress. I say "Good evening" to
-the landlord who greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once
-cordial and restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of
-his hand. No frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a
-neat-handed Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress
-and white cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility
-and aloofness that establishes the perfect relationship--obliging,
-but not familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The
-napery makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a
-mirror, and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced
-dish of hors d'ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the
-modest four-course table d'h�te begins, and when at the end you light
-your cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only
-dined, but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement,
-touched with the subtle note of a personality.
-
-And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall
-not tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It
-may be in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's
-Inn, or it may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you
-because I sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it
-I shall shatter the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the
-Mermaid and find its old English note of kindly welcome and decorous
-moderation gone, and that in its place there will be a noisy, bustling,
-popular restaurant with a band, from which I shall flee. When it is
-"discovered" it will be lost, as the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so
-I shall keep its secret. I only purr it to the cat who arches her back
-and purrs understanding in response. It is the bond of freemasonry
-between us.
-
-[Illustration: 0142]
-
-[Illustration: 0143]
-
-
-
-
-IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA
-
-|I was leaning over the rails of the upper deck idly watching the
-Chinese whom, to the number of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre
-and were to disgorge at Halifax, when the bugle sounded for lunch. A
-mistake, I thought, looking at my watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon
-hour was one. Then I remembered. I had not corrected my watch that
-morning by the ship's clock. In our pursuit of yesterday across the
-Atlantic we had put on another three-quarters of an hour. Already on
-this journey we had outdistanced to-day by two and a half hours. By
-the time we reached Halifax we should have gained perhaps six hours. In
-thought I followed the Chinamen thundering across Canada to Vancouver,
-and thence onward across the Pacific on the last stage of their voyage.
-And I realised that by the time they reached home they would have caught
-yesterday up.
-
-But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
-this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
-years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
-thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always
-the same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of
-it than I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind
-as insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
-beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we
-were overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by
-sea and land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight
-across the plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it
-was neither yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a
-confusion of all three.
-
-In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
-absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom--a parochial illusion
-of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
-axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
-light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that
-they were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
-numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away
-on the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length
-of light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
-meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
-and dark--what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for ever
-and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark--not many days, but
-just one day and that always midday.
-
-At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
-itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck
-of dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A
-few hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of
-dark, I should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo
-sky--specks whose strip of daylight was many times the length of
-ours, and whose year would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the
-astronomers tell us that Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years?
-Think of it--our Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round
-a single solar year of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and
-live to a green old age according to our reckoning, and still never see
-the glory of midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our
-ideas of Time have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune--if,
-that is, there be any dwellers on Neptune.
-
-And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts
-of other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this
-regal orb above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and
-numbered their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons
-by the illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of
-other systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to
-have any fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the
-unthinkable void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time:
-there was only duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of
-fable.
-
-As I reached this depressing conclusion--not a novel or original one,
-but always a rather cheerless one--a sort of orphaned feeling stole over
-me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
-from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
-eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly
-in the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a
-gay time on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during
-yesterday's storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of
-his comrades at an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges
-before him, was crying something that sounded like "Al-lay! Al-lay!"
-counting the money in his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he
-doubted whether it was all there, but because he liked the feel and
-the look of it. A sprightly young rascal, dressed as they all were in a
-grotesque mixture of garments, French and English and German, picked
-up on the battlefields of France, where they had been working for three
-years, stole up behind the orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me
-as he did so) snatched an orange and bolted. There followed a roaring
-scrimmage on deck, in the midst of which the orange-seller's coppers
-were sent flying along the boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and
-scuffling, and from which the author of the mischief emerged riotously
-happy and, lighting a cigarette, flung himself down with an air of
-radiant good humour, in which he enveloped me with a glance of his bold
-and merry eye.
-
-The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
-illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass,
-not intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The
-experiences were always associated with great physical weariness and
-the sense of the endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the
-Dauphin� coming down from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other
-experience in the Lake District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a
-companion in the doorway of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain.
-We had come to the end of our days in the mountains, and now we were
-going back to Keswick, climbing Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was
-robed in clouds, and the rain was of that determined kind that admits of
-no hope. And so, after a long wait, we decided that Helvellyn "would
-not go," as the climber would say, and, putting on our mackintoshes and
-shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for Keswick by the lower slopes of
-the mountains--by the track that skirts Great Dodd and descends by the
-moorlands into the Vale of St John.
-
-All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung
-low over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
-booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
-tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
-struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to
-be without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious
-loneliness of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the
-late afternoon we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the
-Vale of St John and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the
-road. What with battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the
-dripping mackintosh and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked
-myself into that passive mental state which is like a waking dream,
-in which your voice sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your
-thoughts seem to play irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering
-consciousness.
-
-Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember
-that it is what Mr Chesterton calls "a rolling road, a reeling road."
-It is like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it
-is going down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for
-Penrith, then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that
-goal, only to give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so
-on, and all the time it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or
-to Penrith, but is sidling crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road
-which is like the whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of
-his signature, thus:
-
-[Illustration: 0148]
-
-Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw
-through the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that
-fine mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses
-that sustain the southern face were visible. They looked like the
-outstretched fingers of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds
-and clutching the earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The
-image fell in with the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the
-similitude out to my companion as we paced along the muddy road.
-
-Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and
-we went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As
-we did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds
-and clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere,
-far off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same
-mist of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
-gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been
-years ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might
-have been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was
-this evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the
-impression remained of something outside the confines of time. I had
-passed into a static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished,
-and Time was only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I
-had walked through the shadow into the deeps.
-
-But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when
-I reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very
-earnestly in order to discover the time of the trains for London next
-day. And the recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings
-brought my thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just
-below me, was happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread,
-one of those long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck
-from the shore at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed
-along a rope connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of
-the man as he devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the
-brown crust reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had
-gone for lunch long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this
-time. I turned hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch
-back three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the
-fiction of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.
-
-[Illustration: 0150]
-
-[Illustration: 0151]
-
-
-
-
-TWO DRINKS OF MILK
-
-|The cabin lay a hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between
-Sneam and Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and
-out to the open Atlantic.
-
-A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down
-the rocks.
-
-We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to
-the cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received
-us.
-
-Milk? Yes. Would we come in?
-
-We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade
-of the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother
-of the girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and
-having done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen
-floor out into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and
-on a bench by the ingle sat the third member of the family.
-
-She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her
-eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and
-untroubled as a child's. She paused in her knitting to make room for me
-on the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she
-played the hostess.
-
-If you have travelled in Kerry you don't need to be told of the charm
-of the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful
-country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of
-Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the
-look of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a
-spring morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and
-to know them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of
-Kerry, O'Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities
-of a poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always
-warm with the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted
-with wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving
-pleasure to others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every
-peasant you meet is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted
-if you will stop to talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be
-your guide. It is like being back in the childhood of the world, among
-elemental things and an ancient, unhasting people.
-
-The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess
-in disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that
-a duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of
-Sneam, five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin
-and among these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she
-had caught something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out
-there through the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of
-exiles had gone to far lands. Some few had returned and some had been
-for ever silent. As I sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle
-accents all the tale of a stricken people and of a deserted land. There
-was no word of complaint--only a cheerful acceptance of the decrees
-of Fate. There is the secret of the fascination of the K�rry
-temperament--the happy sunlight playing across the sorrow of things.
-
-The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost
-to the brim, and a couple of mugs.
-
-We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to
-pay.
-
-"Sure, there's nothing to pay," said the old lady with just a touch of
-pride in her sweet voice. "There's not a cabin in Kerry where you'll not
-be welcome to a drink of milk."
-
-The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed
-in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane,
-and as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they
-added a benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague
-M'Carty's hotel--Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker,
-whose rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits
-among the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with
-many-coloured flies--we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville and
-heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.
-
-When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take
-the northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much
-better made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before
-the coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)
-
-In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a
-day of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the
-lake we dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage--neat and
-well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense
-of plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark
-of a dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged
-interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and
-leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before
-us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt
-that we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver
-affairs than thirsty travelers to attend to.
-
-Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back
-to the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed
-suddenly less friendly.
-
-In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two
-glasses--a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of feature.
-While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the doorstep,
-looking away across the lake to where the noble form of Schiehallion
-dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time was money and
-talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty haste.
-
-"What have we to pay, please?"
-
-"Sixpence."
-
-And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.
-
-It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked
-something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant
-memory.
-
-[Illustration: 0155]
-
-[Illustration: 0156]
-
-
-
-
-ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH
-
-|It was my fortune the other evening to be at dinner with a large
-company of doctors. While we were assembling I fell into conversation
-with an eminent physician, and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked
-that we English seasoned our dishes far too freely. We scattered salt
-and pepper and vinegar over our food so recklessly that we destroyed the
-delicacy of our taste, and did ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was
-especially unfriendly to the use of salt. He would not admit even
-that it improved the savour of things. It destroyed our sense of their
-natural flavour, and substituted a coarser appeal to the palate. From
-the hygienic point of view, the habit was all wrong. All the salts
-necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat, and the use of salt
-independently is entirely harmful.
-
-"Take the egg, for example," he said. "It contains in it all the
-elements necessary for the growth of a chicken--salt among the rest.
-That is sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article
-of food. Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise
-its delicate flavour, and change its natural dietetic character." And he
-concluded, as we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example
-of the Japanese in this matter. "They," he said laughingly, "only take
-salt when they want to die."
-
-At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
-and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
-applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
-who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with
-great energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we
-eat contain the salt required by the human body. "Not even the egg?"
-I asked. "No, not even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our
-foods, and even if the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw
-state they tend to lose their character cooked." He admitted that
-that was an argument for eating things _au naturel_ more than is the
-practice. But he was firm in his conviction that the separate use of
-salt is essential. "And as for flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw,
-with or without salt. What comparison is there?"
-
-"But," said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about
-the Japanese), "are there not races who do not use salt?" "My dear sir,"
-said he, "the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of
-salt is supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of
-the prime essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause
-or another, is seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute
-exactness in the mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of
-salt to eat with their food they die."
-
-After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening
-in examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt
-I should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the
-face of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have
-quoted, especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians.
-Yet I daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the
-facts. For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice,
-the Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the
-world, and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat
-their fish in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would
-go far to explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
-
-But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
-the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about
-which there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be
-a commonplace thing like the use of salt.
-
-Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random--men
-whose whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its
-requirements--whose views on the subject were in violent antagonism.
-They approached their subject from contrary angles and with contrary
-sets of facts, and the truth they were in search of took a wholly
-different form for each.
-
-It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
-judicious manipulation.
-
-A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our
-air service. He was very confident that we were "simply out of it--that
-was all, simply out of it." And he was full of facts on the subject.
-<b>I don't like people who brim over with facts--who lead facts about,
-as Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few
-people so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His
-conclusions are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot
-sort them out and add up the total. He belongs to what the Abb� Siey�s
-called "loose, unstitched minds."
-
-Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
-facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember
-whether the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her
-husband had told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so
-bad as that, but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact
-away in the chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not
-infrequently, that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something
-chipped off, and I can never trust it until I have verified my
-references.
-
-But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was
-that, so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell
-you how many English machines had failed to return on each day of the
-week, and how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to
-descend. And judging from his figures he was quite right. "We were out
-of it--simply out of it." Yet the truth is that while his facts were
-right, his deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken
-account of some facts, but had left other equally important facts out of
-consideration. For example, through all this time the German airmen had
-been on the defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen
-had taken great risks for a great object. They had gone miles over
-the enemy's lines--as much as fifty miles over--and had come back with
-priceless information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but
-the whole truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this
-time the most victorious element of our Army.
-
-I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are
-not always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is
-often composed of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to
-contradict each other. Take the handkerchief incident in "Othello." Poor
-Desdemona could not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that
-the Moor saw. Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello
-believed she had given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio
-wipe his beard with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the
-catastrophe.
-
-But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them
-in real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
-free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
-report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
-knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
-knife discovered--also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of pawntickets
-for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he was a
-thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
-his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
-clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of
-the trousers was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt
-uncomfortable. He took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was
-doing so he saw a steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a
-timid person he furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches
-came on, and when he had got his "take" he left to transcribe it,
-having forgotten all about the knife. The rest followed as stated. The
-pawntickets, which seemed so strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were
-of course not his at all. They belonged to the owner of the suit.
-
-You remember that Browning in "The Ring and the Book," tells the story
-of the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before
-he feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
-annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
-
-Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
-different aspects of one truth. "Mostly," he says, "matters of any
-consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself,
-I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
-contradicted myself three times." I fancy it is this discovery of
-the falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less
-cocksure as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts
-that belong to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that "a
-lie that is only half a truth is ever the blackest of lies"; but he is
-wrong. It is the fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter)
-which is the most dangerous lie--for a fact seems so absolute, so
-incontrovertible. Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts,
-their arrangement and concealment. It was never better stated than by a
-famous business man in an action for libel which I have referred to in
-another connection. He was being examined about the visit of Government
-experts to his works, and the instructions he gave to his manager. And
-this, as I remember it, was the dialogue between counsel and witness:
-
-"Did you tell him to tell them the facts?"
-
-"Yes."
-
-"The whole facts?"
-
-"No."
-
-"What facts?"
-
-"_Selected facts_."
-
-It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the
-midst of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody
-bearing his name.
-
-If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to
-a scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things,
-we cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of
-politics and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a
-speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of
-which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is
-so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in
-the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation
-is denounced as the heresy of another. Justification by "works" is
-displaced by justification by faith, and that in turn is superseded by
-justification by "service" which is "works" in new terms. Which is
-truth and which error? Or is that the real alternative? May they not
-be different facets of one truth. The prism breaks up the sunlight into
-many different colours and facts are only the broken lights of truth.
-In this perplexing world we must be prepared to find the same truth
-demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die because they take salt, and
-the fact that Indians die because they don't take it.
-
-[Illustration: 0163]
-
-[Illustration: 0164]
-
-
-
-
-ON GREAT MEN
-
-|I was reading just now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of
-him expressed by Macaulay who declared him to be "the greatest man since
-Milton." I paused over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally
-enough to ask myself who were the great Englishmen in history--for the
-sake of argument, the six greatest. I found the question so exciting
-that I had reached the end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time)
-almost before I had reached the end of my list. I began by laying down
-my premises or principles. I would not restrict the choice to men of
-action. The only grievance I have against Plutarch is that he followed
-that course. His incomparable "Lives," would be still more satisfying, a
-still more priceless treasury of the ancient world, if, among his crowd
-of statesmen and warriors, we could make friends with Socrates and
-Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus, with the men whose work survived
-them as well as with the men whose work is a memory. And I rejected the
-blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I would not have in my list a mere
-homicidal genius. My great man may have been a great killer of his kind,
-but he must have some better claim to inclusion than the fact that he
-had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On the other hand, I would not
-exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to be a bad man. Henry
-Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad men. "Greatness,"
-he said, "consists in bringing all manner of mischief upon mankind,
-and goodness in removing it from them." And it was to satirise the
-traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific satire
-"The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great," probably having in mind the
-Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
-traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad
-man. I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that
-he was a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful
-ogre, a sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless,
-ruthless jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent,
-merciless as a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a
-sort of mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought
-of nature.
-
-Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
-governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
-mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was
-a great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about
-C�sar, but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds
-down twenty centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must
-have design. It must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere
-accident, emotion or effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured
-by its influence on the current of the world, on its extension of
-the kingdom of the mind, on its contribution to the riches of living.
-Applying tests like these, who are our six greatest Englishmen? For
-our first choice there would be a unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the
-greatest thing we have done. He is our challenger in the fists of the
-world, and there is none to cross swords with him. Like Sirius, he has a
-magnitude of his own. Take him away from our heavens, conceive him never
-to have been born, and the imaginative wealth of fife shrinks to a
-lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's phrase, "poor indeed." There is
-nothing English for which we would exchange him. "Indian Empire or
-no Indian Empire," we say with Carlyle, "we cannot do without our
-Shakespeare."
-
-For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
-indisputably to him who had=
-
-```"... a voice whose sound was like the sea."=
-
-Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
-harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of
-the sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
-intangible, indestructible. With him stands his "chief of men"--the
-"great bad man" of Burke--the one man of action in our annals capable of
-measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
-Bismarck in the realm of the spirit--the man at whose name the cheek
-of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
-death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
-these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda)
-first made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
-
-But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as
-the bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning
-eternally with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his
-soul to tatters, and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding
-eloquence, and Burke, the prose Milton, to whose deep well all
-statesmanship goes with its pail, and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court
-in his brown wig, and Newton plumbing the ultimate secrets of this
-amazing universe, and deep-browed Darwin unravelling the mystery of
-life, and Wordsworth giving "to weary feet the gift of rest," and
-Dickens bringing with him a world of creative splendour only less
-wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these and a host of others
-aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip him of all the
-legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name, and he is still
-one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic, enlightened
-man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first great
-Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
-quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be
-Roger--there by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range
-of his adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through
-which he ploughed his lonely way to truth.
-
-I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a
-woman, Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic "lady of the
-lamp," but as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the
-adventurer into a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by
-a will of iron, a terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful
-and creative woman this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not
-because she is unworthy, but because she must head a companion fist of
-great Englishwomen. I hurriedly summon up two candidates from among
-our English saints--Sir Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the
-intolerance (incredible to modern ears) that could jest so diabolically
-at the martyrdom of the "heretic," Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his
-place as the most fragrant flower of English culture, but if greatness
-be measured by achievement and enduring influence he must yield place to
-the astonishing revivalist of the eighteenth century who left a deeper
-mark upon the spiritual life of England than any man in our history.
-
-There is my list--Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
-Bacon, John Wesley--and anybody can make out another who cares and
-a better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
-unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is
-not a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the
-kibe of Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
-
-There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
-contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher.
-If the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness
-cannot be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left
-out of any list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature,
-we are poor in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see
-the great name of Turner.
-
-[Illustration: 0169]
-
-[Illustration: 0170]
-
-
-
-
-ON SWEARING
-
-|A young officer in the flying service was describing to me the other
-day some of his recent experiences in France. They were both amusing
-and sensational, though told with that happy freedom from vanity and
-self-consciousness which is so pleasant a feature of the British soldier
-of all ranks. The more he has done and seen the less disposed he seems
-to regard himself as a hero. It is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging
-is a sham currency. It is the base coin with which the fraudulent pay
-their way. F. C. Selous was the greatest big game hunter of modern
-times, but when he talked about his adventures he gave the impression of
-a man who had only been out in the back garden killing slugs. And Peary,
-who found the North Pole, writes as modestly as if he had only found a
-new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr Cook, who didn't find the North Pole
-and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who does the boasting. And the man who
-talks most about patriotism is usually the man who has least of that
-commodity, just as the man who talks most about his honesty is rarely to
-be trusted with your silver spoons. A man who really loves his country
-would no more brag about it than he would brag about loving his mother.
-
-But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to
-write of him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
-good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
-seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It
-was just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
-convolvulus overgrows my garden. "Hell" was his favourite expletive, and
-he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
-scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
-he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it
-as a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear
-that he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
-
-And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only
-secular quality it possesses--the quality of emphasis. It is speech
-breaking bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the
-dictionary and the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord
-in music that in shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music
-which is all discord is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is
-deadly dull.
-
-It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
-emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
-habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. "When I have said
-'Malaga,'" says Plancus, in the "Vicomte de Bragelonne," "I am no
-longer a man." He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his
-imprecations for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils
-swell and his eyes flash fire as he cries, "Malaga." It is a good swear
-word. It has the advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely
-what a swear word should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying
-nothing. It should be incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the
-passion that evokes it.
-
-If "Malaga" has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was
-that defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. "'Damns'
-have had their day," he said, and when he swore he used the "oath
-referential." "Odds hilts and blades," he said, or "Odds slanders and
-lies," or "Odds bottles and glasses." But when he sat down to write his
-challenge to Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him.
-"Do, Sir Lucius, let me begin with a damme," he said. He had to give
-up artificial swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to
-something which had a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it
-is the idea of being a little wicked that is one of the attractions of
-swearing. It is a symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so.
-For in its origin always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates
-spoke "By the Gods," he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest
-reverence he could command. But the oaths of to-day are not the
-expression of piety, but of violent passion, and the people who indulge
-in a certain familiar expletive would not find half so much satisfaction
-in it if they felt that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration
-of faith--"By our Lady." That is the way our ancestors used to swear,
-and we have corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith
-and meaning.
-
-The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of
-life breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is
-the prerogative of the soldier to be "full of strange oaths." In this
-respect Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used "strange
-oaths." He stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most
-industrious in it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that
-have come down to us which are not garnished with "damns" or "By Gods."
-Hear him on the morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to
-gossip Creevey--"It has been a damned serious business. Bl�cher and I
-have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing--the nearest run
-thing you ever saw in your life." Or when some foolish Court flunkey
-appeals to him to support his claim to ride in the carriage with the
-young Queen on some public occasion--"Her Majesty can make you ride
-on the box or inside the carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's
-dog." But in this he followed not only the practice of soldiers in all
-times, but the fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to
-have regarded himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at
-the language of the Prince Regent.
-
-"By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is," he remarks,
-speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. "Then he speaks and swears so
-like old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the
-room with him." This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices,
-but whose recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It
-suggests also that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of
-his own comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and
-swore as naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that
-other famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy,
-as when, speaking of Grant, he said, "I'll tell you where he beats me,
-and where he beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy
-does out of his sight, but it scares me like Hell." Two centuries ago,
-according to Uncle Toby, our men "swore terribly in Flanders," and they
-are swearing terribly there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time
-that the Flanders mud, which has been watered for centuries by English
-blood, will ensanguine the speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant
-young airman will talk a good deal less about "Hell" when he escapes
-from it to a cleaner world.
-
-[Illustration: 0174]
-
-[Illustration: 0175]
-
-
-
-
-ON A HANSOM CAB
-
-|I saw a surprising spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a
-hansom cab. Not a derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally
-see, with an obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the
-box, crawling along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has
-escaped from a cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way
-back--no, but a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting
-in the shafts and tossing its head as though it were full of beans
-and importance, and a slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as
-a sandboy as he flicked and flourished his whip, and, still more
-astonishing, a real passenger, a lady, inside the vehicle.
-
-I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the
-driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of
-the poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas
-of the past--sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the
-quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there
-flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs,
-the London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King
-Petrol, when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and
-the two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place
-then, of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to D�lwich, was a
-formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took
-your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver,
-you settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and
-the bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins
-of that "orf horse," the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of
-the police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse
-joke to a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in
-the revelry. The conductor would stroll up to him and continue a
-conversation that had begun early in the morning and seemed to go on
-intermittently all day--a conversation of that jolly sort in which,
-as Washington Irving says, the jokes are rather small and the laughter
-abundant.
-
-In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside
-the bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It
-was an act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the
-top alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes.
-And even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been
-quite above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The
-hansom was a rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the
-thing for a lady to be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested
-romance, mysteries, elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of
-wickednesses. A staid, respectable "growler" was much more fitting for
-so delicate an exotic as Woman. If she began riding in hansoms
-alone anything might happen. She might want to go to public
-dinners next--think of it!--she might be wanting to ride a
-bicycle--horrors!--she might discover a shameless taste for cigarettes,
-or demand a living wage, or University degrees, or a vote, just for all
-the world as though she was the equal of Man, the Magnificent....
-
-As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and
-challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to
-the coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy,
-and impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable,
-mighty, but blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets,
-reeling from right to left like a drunken giant, encountering the
-kerb-stone, skimming the lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of
-boorish revolt, standing obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the
-street or across the street amidst the derision and rejoicing of those
-whose empire he threatened, and who saw in these pranks the assurance of
-his ultimate failure. Memory went back to the old One a.m. from the Law
-Courts, and to one night that sums up for me the spirit of those days of
-the great transition....
-
-It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to
-start from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew
-his power. He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along
-the Edgeware Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men
-who wrote him down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles=
-
-````(from Our Peking Correspondent)=
-
-in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
-chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was "full
-up" hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded
-in with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen--yes,
-cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the
-One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only
-cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end
-of the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the
-tipsy gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at
-Baker Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is
-being swept on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are
-exchanged, what jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the
-top hat, under the impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the
-floor--oh, then the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy
-gentleman opens his dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these
-revels soon are ended.
-
-An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:=
-
-````First a shiver, and then a thrill,
-
-````Then something decidedly like a spill--
-
-````` O. W. Holmes,
-
-`````_The Deacon's Masterpiece_ (DW)=
-
-and we are left sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with
-the clock over the shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.
-
-It is the spirit of Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting
-himself. He disapproves of the passengers having all the fun. Is he not
-a humorist too? May he not be merry in the dawn of this May morning?
-
-We take our fate like Englishmen, bravely, even merrily.
-
-The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment. This is worth living
-for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base betrayer of the
-innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though it is two
-or three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the morning! Who
-cares?
-
-Only the gentleman with the big bag in the corner.
-
-"'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?" he asks the conductor with tears
-in his voice.
-
-The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help the driver. They busy
-themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn handles, they work
-pumps, they probe here and thump there.
-
-They come out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They
-have the cheerful philosophy of people who meddle with things that
-move--cab drivers, bus-drivers, engine-drivers.=
-
-```If, when looking well won't move thee.
-
-`````Looking ill prevail?=
-
-So they take a breather, light cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it
-again.
-
-Meanwhile all the hansoms in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us,
-like sharks upon the dead whale. Up they rattle from this side and that,
-and every cabman flings a jibe as he passes.
-
-"Look 'ere," says one, pulling up. "Why don't yer take the
-genelmen where they want to go? That's what I asks yer.
-Why--don't--yer--take--the--genelmen--where--they--want--to go? It's
-only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't want
-to go."
-
-For the cabman is like "the wise thrush who sings his song twice over."
-
-"'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!" cries another.
-
-"We can't 'elp larfin', yer know," says a third feelingly.
-
-"Well, you keep on larfin'," says the chauffeur looking up from the
-inside of One a.m. "It suits your style o' beauty."
-
-A mellow voice breaks out:=
-
-````We won't go home till morning,
-
-````Till daylight does appear.=
-
-And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen in comic chorus.
-Those who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither sing nor
-whistle, croak.
-
-We sit inside patiently. We even joke too. All but the man with the big
-bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his life-long enemy.
-
-He appeals again to the conductor, who laughs.
-
-The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back, puts
-his head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and says:
-
-"It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning."
-
-We think better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is
-that of the politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart.
-He is like Dick Steele--"when he was sober he was delightful; when he
-was drunk he was irresistible."
-
-"She won't go any more to-night," says the conductor.
-
-So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal away. All but
-the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a problem
-that looks insoluble.
-
-Two of us jump into a hansom that still prowls around, the last of the
-shoal of sharks.
-
-"Drive up West End Lane."
-
-"Right, sir."
-
-Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's face, wreathed in smiles,
-beams down on us.
-
-"I see what was coming all the way from Baker Street," he savs. "I see
-the petrol was on fire."
-
-"Ah!"
-
-"Yus," he says. "Thought I should pick you up about 'ere."
-
-"Ah!"
-
-"No good, motors," he goes on, cheerfully. "My opinion is they'll go
-out as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the aristocracy are
-giving 'em up and goin' back to 'orses."
-
-"Hope they'll get better horses than this," for we are crawling
-painfully up the tortuous reaches of West End Lane.
-
-"Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's overworked. 'E ain't earned more
-than three bob to-night. That's jest what' e's earned. Three bob. It's
-the cold weather, you know. That's what it is. It's the cold weather
-as makes 'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And 'e does go after
-all, even if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't say of that
-there motor-bus."
-
-We had no reply to this thrust, and the lid dropped down with a sound of
-quiet triumph.
-
-And so home. And my dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge
-Monster, reeking with strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious
-laughter and standing for ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road
-with the clock opposite pointing to a quarter to two, a rueful face in
-the corner staring fixedly at a big bag and a tipsy gentleman in a
-tall hat finding his way back to Baker Street in happy converse with a
-policeman.
-
-Gone is the old London over which the shade of Mr Hansom presided like
-a king. Gone is the "orf horse" with all its sins; gone is the
-rosy-cheeked driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent whip and his
-tales of the streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you your
-ticket, talked to you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about the
-weather, the Boat Race, or the latest clue to the latest mystery. We
-amble no more. We have banished laughter and leisure from the streets,
-and the face of the motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the symbol
-of the change. We have passed into a breathless world, a world of
-wonderful mechanical contrivances that have quickened the tempo of life
-and will soon have made the horse as much a memory as the bow and arrow
-or the wherry that used to be the principal vehicle of Elizabethan
-London. As I watched the hansom bowling along Regent Street until it
-was lost in the swirl of motor-buses and taxis I seemed to see in it the
-last straggler of an epoch passing away into oblivion. I am glad it went
-so gallantly, and I am half sorry I did not give the driver a parting
-cheer as he flicked his whip in the face of the night.
-
-[Illustration: 0183]
-
-[Illustration: 0184]
-
-
-
-
-ON MANNERS
-
-
-I
-
-|It is always surprising, if not always agreeable, <b>to see ourselves
-as others see us</b>. The picture we present to others is never the
-picture we present to ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally
-it is a much plainer picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always
-a strange picture. Just now we English are having our portrait painted
-by an American lady, Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been
-appearing in the press. It is not a flattering portrait, and it seems to
-have angered a good many people who deny the truth of the likeness very
-passionately. The chief accusation seems to be that we have no manners,
-are lacking in the civilities and politenesses of life, and so on, and
-are inferior in these things to the French, the Americans, and other
-peoples. It is not an uncommon charge, and it comes from many quarters.
-It came to me the other day in a letter from a correspondent, French
-or Belgian, who has been living in this country during the war, and who
-wrote bitterly about the manners of the English towards foreigners. In
-the course of his letter he quoted with approval the following cruel
-remark of Jean Carri�re, written, needless to say, before the war:
-
-"Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal �lev� du fait
-qu'il manque de mani�res; il ignore encore la politesse, voil� tout."
-
-The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the
-whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.
-
-I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have
-enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken
-up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and
-we suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should
-be told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At
-the same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's
-warning about the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty
-millions of us, and we have some forty million different manners, and it
-is not easy to get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will
-take this "copy" to the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who
-preceded him was a monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all
-civility; another is all bad temper, and between the two extremes you
-will get every shade of good and bad manners. And so through every phase
-of society.
-
-Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the
-widest differences of manner in different parts of the country. In
-Lancashire and Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There
-is a deep-seated distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the
-code of conduct differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral
-town as the manner of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But
-even here you will find behind the general bearing infinite shades of
-difference that make your generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more
-you know of any people the less you feel able to sum them up in broad
-categories.
-
-Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our
-ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete
-darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting--apropos of the
-Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because
-of the strangeness of his appearance--lamenting the deplorable manners
-of the people. "Lord!" he says, "to see the absurd nature of Englishmen
-that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks
-strange." Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him
-describing the English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
-
-But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
-earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. "To mention but a
-single attraction," he says in one of his letters, "the English girls
-are divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses.
-They have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go
-anywhere on a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you
-arrive, they kiss you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you
-return. Go where you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if
-you had once tasted how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish
-to spend your life there." Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens
-a good deal changed to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a
-cigarette.
-
-I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing
-and less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the
-saying of O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good
-criticism. Our lack of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but
-more probably it is traceable not to a physical but to a social source.
-Unlike the Celtic and the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have
-not the ease that comes from the ingrained tradition of human equality.
-The French have that ease. So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So
-have the Americans. But the English are class conscious. The dead
-hand of feudalism is still heavy upon our souls. If it were not, the
-degrading traffic in titles would long since have been abolished as an
-insult to our intelligence. But we not only tolerate it: we delight
-in this artificial scheme of relationship. It is not human values, but
-social discriminations that count. And while human values are cohesive
-in their effect, social discriminations are separatist. They break
-society up into castes, and permeate it with the twin vices of snobbery
-and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is subdivided into
-infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious restraints of a
-people uncertain of their social relationships create a defensive manner
-which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true root is a
-timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his ground
-tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is proud: it
-may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away from this
-fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners for
-independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.
-
-The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from
-a sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented
-to keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression
-that he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he
-had more _abandon_. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical
-politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the
-spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which
-makes the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably
-what Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the
-impression that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good
-manners that they exist most where they do not exist at all--that is to
-say, where conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told
-James Hogg that no man who was content to be himself, without either
-diffidence or egotism, would fail to be at home in any company, and I do
-not know a better recipe for good manners.
-
-
-II
-
-I was riding in a bus yesterday afternoon when I overheard a
-conversation between a couple of smartly dressed young people--a youth
-and a maiden--at the other end of the vehicle. It was not an amusing
-conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about. Indeed,
-I could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be about
-anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which consist
-chiefly of "Awfullys" and "Reallys!" and "Don't-you-knows" and tattle
-about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and similar
-common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter but
-because of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the speakers
-were alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of wind.
-
-The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to hear,
-while others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not of
-approval. They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved an
-air of being unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of not
-being aware that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact, their
-manner indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings. They
-were really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the bus.
-If they had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in quite
-reasonable tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly and
-defiantly to an empty bus. They would have made no impression on an
-empty bus. But they were happily sensible of making quite a marked
-impression on a full bus.
-
-But it was not the impression they imagined. It was another impression
-altogether. There are few more unpleasing and vulgar habits than that of
-loud, aggressive conversation in public places. It is an impertinence to
-inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who do not want to know about
-them, and who may want to read or doze or think or look out of the
-window at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The assumption
-behind the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is an
-announcement to the world that we are someone in particular and can
-talk as loudly as we please whenever we please. It is a sort of social
-Prussianism that presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by a
-superior egotism. The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in the
-world is mistaken. On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an inverted
-self-consciousness. These young people were talking loudly, not because
-they were unconscious of themselves in relation to their fellows, but
-because they were much too conscious and were not content to be just
-quiet, ordinary people like the rest of us.
-
-I hesitate to say that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not
-lived abroad sufficiently to judge. But it is a common experience
-of those who travel to find, as I have often found, their country
-humiliated by this habit of aggressive bearing in public places. It is
-unlovely at home, but it is much more offensive abroad, for then it is
-not only the person who is brought into disrepute, but the country he
-(and not less frequently she) is supposed to represent. We in the bus
-could afford to bear the affliction of that young couple with tolerance
-and even amusement, for they only hurt themselves. We could discount
-them. But the same bearing in a foreign capital gives the impression
-that we are all like this, just as the rather crude boasting of certain
-types of American grossly misrepresent a people whose general
-conduct, as anyone who sees them at home will agree, is unaffected,
-unpretentious, and good-natured.
-
-The truth, I suspect, is that every country sends abroad a
-disproportionate number of its "bounders." It is inevitable that it
-should be so, for the people who can afford to travel are the people who
-have made money, and while many admirable qualities may be involved
-in the capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain coarse
-assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got so
-hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are better
-than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot attune
-his voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second generation,
-this congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high school
-it is apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the bus
-yesterday.
-
-So far from being representative of the English, they are violently
-unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take
-an average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust
-the sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted
-with egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and
-monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract attention
-without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy
-mean between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the
-overbearing note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk
-of our affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without
-desiring to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without
-wishing to be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we
-have achieved that social ease which consists in the adjustment of
-a reasonable confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the
-sensibilities of others.
-
-[Illustration: 0192]
-
-[Illustration: 0193]
-
-
-
-
-ON A FINE DAY
-
-|It's just like summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have
-forgotten to say it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it
-from the orchard with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery.
-There are some people of penurious emotions and speech, like the
-Drumtochty farmer in Ian Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of
-this iteration. They would find it wasteful and frivolous. They do not
-understand that we go on saying it over and over again, like the birds,
-for the sheer joy of saying it. Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice.
-There he goes skipping from branch to branch and twig to twig, and
-after each skip he pauses to say, "It's just like summer," and from a
-neighbouring tree his mate twitters confirmation in perfect time. I've
-listened to them for half an hour and they've talked about nothing else.
-
-In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great
-baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the
-paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully
-and tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well
-aired before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows
-his score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has
-only one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the
-world, but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer,
-and not a conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who
-seems never to forget the listening world.
-
-In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
-There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along
-the turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football
-match, I fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the
-cheerful outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens
-and the fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of
-hammering; from the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor
-voice that comes up from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I
-have not heard it for four years or more; but it has been heard in many
-lands and by many rivers from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would
-rather be singing in the allotment with his young brother Sam (the
-leader of the trebles in the village choir) than anywhere else in the
-vide world. "Yes, I've been to Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the
-'Oly Land," he says. "I don't care if I never see the 'Oly Land again.
-Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far as I'm concerned. This is good
-enough for me--that is, if there's a place for a chap that wants to get
-married to live in."
-
-Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at
-her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. "Well, this is all
-right, ain't it, mother?"
-
-"Yes," says the old lady, "it's just like summer."
-
-"And to think," continues the voice, "that there was a thick layer o'
-snow a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to
-come yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar,
-and it stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though
-it do seem like it, don't it?"
-
-"Yes, it's just like summer," repeats the old lady tranquilly.
-
-There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
-sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
-like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we
-are here. Weather in town is only an incident--a pleasurable incident
-or a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella,
-whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a
-mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or
-outside. It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your
-visit to the theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for
-this reason the incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as
-an acquaintance of a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he
-is in a good humour and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
-
-But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven.
-It is politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual
-diversion. You study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and
-watch the change of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the
-mood of the public. When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a
-fine day, or has been a cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a
-conventional civility. It is the formal opening of the discussion of
-weighty matters. It involves the prospects of potatoes and the sowing of
-onions, the blossoms on the trees, the effects of weather on the poultry
-and the state of the hives. I do not suppose that there is a moment of
-his life when Jim is unconscious of the weather or indifferent to
-it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not care what happens to
-the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands and secular
-interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is a stem
-Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the chapel
-in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always
-trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi'
-work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to
-dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. "I don't hold wi'
-work on Sundays," he would repeat inflexibly.
-
-[Illustration: 0197]
-
-And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other
-end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the
-weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call
-her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward.
-It is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants
-hens. If the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an
-unerring instinct to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin
-of feathers. The hard frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes
-when everybody else's escaped, and it was her hive that brought the
-"Isle of Wight" into our midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds
-that the last was a visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a
-death in the family--true, it was only a second cousin, but it was "in
-the family"--and had neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive.
-And of course they died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow
-Walsh has no patience with people who fly in the face of Providence in
-this way.
-
-But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is the most
-unremittingly malevolent. It is either "smarty hot" or "smarty cold." If
-it isn't giving her a touch of "brownchitis," or "a blowy feeling all up
-the back," or making her feel "blubbed all over," it is dripping through
-her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke,
-or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary
-life. I think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the
-hill-side like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even
-smiles, but his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the
-bottom he is a terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country
-woman no end of work, and makes her life a burden.
-
-But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
-When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that "it is
-a bit better to-day." This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays
-to the weather. And we translate it for her into "Yes, it's just like
-summer."
-
-In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
-damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most
-part the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees
-are white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees
-which fill the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note
-of an aerial violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of
-his double bass to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way
-from blossom to blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is
-as full of the gossip of summer as the peacock butterfly that comes
-flitting back across the orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old
-Benjy, who saluted me over the hedge just now with the remark that
-he didn't recall the like of this for a matter o' seventy year. Yes,
-seventy year if 'twas a day.
-
-Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy
-years ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks
-about anything in the memory of this generation. "I be nearer a
-'underd," he says, "than seventy," by which I think he means that he is
-eighty-six. He longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see
-no reason why he shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old boy,
-still does a good day's gardening and has come up the lane on this hot
-day at a nimble speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to
-have made his coffin and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from
-any morbid yearning for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding
-him off, just as the rest of us "touch wood" lest evil befall. "It's
-just like summer," he says.
-
-"I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty...."
-
-
-[Illustration: 0200]
-
-[Illustration: 0201]
-
-
-
-
-ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO
-
-|I see that Mr Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to
-women very seriously on the subject of smoking. "Would you like to see
-your mother smoke?" asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he was
-addressing, and Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco
-smoke in the face of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed
-feelings on this subject, and in order to find out what I really think I
-will write about it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby.
-I do not want to see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the
-baby. But neither do I want to see father doing so. If father is smoking
-when he nurses the baby he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs
-out his smoke. Do not let us drag in the baby.
-
-The real point is in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your
-affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would
-not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be
-absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because
-he smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of
-disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of
-taste which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is
-wasteful and unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the
-habit regardless of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that _women_ must not
-smoke because the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that _men_ may.
-He would no more say this than he would say that it is right for men to
-live in stuffy rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right
-for men to get drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of
-drunkenness there is no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel
-that it is more tragic in the case of the woman, but it is equally
-disgusting in both sexes.
-
-What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men
-is vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up
-morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women
-not smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom
-been otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle,
-for example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he would have answered the
-question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their
-pipes together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and
-eternity, and no one who has read his letters will doubt his love for
-her. There are no such letters from son to mother in all literature. And
-of course Mr Hicks knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be
-surprised to know that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of
-some women who smoke, and that he will be as cordial with them as with
-those who do not smoke.
-
-And yet.... Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of
-a bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to
-smoke. And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these
-now not infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I
-had been smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If
-smoking is an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the
-case of women as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women
-smoking outdoors while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an
-irrational fellow, said I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I
-replied. We are all irrational fellows. If we were brought to the
-judgment seat of pure reason how few of us would escape the cells.
-
-Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young
-women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke
-was a flag--the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got perplexed
-again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women--this universal
-claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous fact of
-the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag. Yet when
-I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it myself),
-flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I rejoice, I
-felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I came to
-the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These young
-women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men smoked
-on the top of the bus they must smoke too--not perhaps because they
-liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them on
-an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge
-of servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the
-symbols of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of
-women, but preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to
-their finer perceptions and traditions.
-
-But here my perplexity returned. It is not the fact of those young women
-smoking that offends you, I said addressing myself. It is the fact of
-their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you agree that the habit of
-smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of women as of men,
-why should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised in their
-case, while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself are
-smoking at this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged in
-defending the propriety of women smoking, and at the same time mentally
-reprobating the conduct of the young women who are smoking in front
-of you, not because they are smoking, but because (like you) they are
-smoking in public. How do you reconcile such confusions of mind?
-
-At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the horns
-of a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to the
-habit. And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to defend
-differential smoking conditions for men and women. If the main position
-was surrendered no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked in
-public then women could smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and cigars
-then women could smoke pipes and cigars. And at the thought of women
-smoking pipes on the top of buses, I realised that I had not yet found a
-path out of the absurd bog in which I had become mentally involved.
-
-Then something happened which suggested another solution. The young
-women rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was
-wafted with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown
-their cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy,
-languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial
-fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man's
-tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt
-the woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and
-wear rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity.
-The mind revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered and
-be-ringed. Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their cheeks.
-But Disraeli was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort of
-belated tale from the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of men
-universally revolts against paint, powder, and perfume. And asking
-myself why a habit, which custom had made tolerable in the case of
-women, became grotesque and offensive if imagined in connection with
-men, I saw a way out of my puzzle. I dismissed the view that the
-difference of sex accounted for the different emotions awakened. It was
-the habit itself which was objectionable. Familiarity with it in the
-case of women had dulled our perceptions to the reality. It was only
-when we conceived the habit in an unusual connection--imagined men going
-about with painted and powdered faces, with rings in their ears
-and heavy scents on their clothes--that its essential vulgarity and
-uncleanness were freshly and intensely presented to the mind.
-
-And that, said I, is the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit
-in the abstract which is vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in
-the case of man has deadened our sense of the fact, but the adoption
-of the habit by women, coupled with the fact that there is no logical
-halting-place between the cigarette indoors and a pipe on the top of the
-bus, gives us what the Americans call a new view-point. From that new
-view-point we are bound to admit that there is much to be said against
-tobacco and not much to be said for it--except, of course, that we like
-it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk to the
-men as well as to the women.
-
-Then perhaps we will see what can be done. For myself, I make no
-promise. After forty, says Meredith, we are wedded to our habits. And I,
-alas, am long past forty....
-
-[Illustration: 0207]
-
-[Illustration: 0208]
-
-
-
-
-DOWN TOWN
-
-|Through the grey mists that hang over the water in the late autumn
-afternoon there emerges a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of
-a distant range of mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with
-a precision that suggests the work of man rather than the careless
-architecture of Nature The mass is compact and isolated. It rises
-from the level of the water, sheer on either side, in bold precipitous
-cliffs, broken by horizontal lines, and dominated by one kingly, central
-peak that might be the Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the
-spire of some cathedral fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race.
-As the vessel from afar moves slowly through the populous waters and
-between the vaguely defined shores of the harbour, another shadow
-emerges ahead, rising out of the sea in front of the mountain mass. It
-is a colossal statue, holding up a torch to the open Atlantic.
-
-Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition.
-It turns to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable
-windows. Even the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of
-myriad windows. The day begins to darken and a swift transformation
-takes place. Points of light begin to shine from the windows like stars
-in the darkening firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters
-with thousands of tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy
-palace, glowing with illuminations from the foundations to the topmost
-height of the giddy precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in
-the scintillating pinnacle of the slender cathedral spire. The first
-daylight impression was of something as solid and enduring as the
-foundations of the earth; the second, in the gathering twilight, is of
-something slight and fanciful, of' towering proportions but infinitely
-fragile structure, a spectacle as airy and dream-like as a tale from the
-"Arabian Nights."
-
-It is "down town." It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its
-astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that
-lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest
-group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over
-the tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable
-maze of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion
-of the London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its
-direction, but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east
-and west, crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to
-the Harlem River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing
-island of Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the
-noble Fifth Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty
-buildings that shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to
-gild the upper storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many
-churches and the gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving,
-on a sunny afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you
-move in the shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the
-air above. And around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the
-architectural glories of "up town" New York, the great hotels stand
-like mighty fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great
-terminus. And in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled
-to the twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you
-are summoned.
-
-But it is in "down town," on the tip of the tongue that is put out
-to the Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the
-stranger. It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no
-doubt, that make an equally striking appeal to the eye--Salzburg,
-Innsbruck, Edinburgh, Tunis--but it is the appeal of nature supplemented
-by art. Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not
-an approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of
-surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind,
-that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous,
-and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New
-York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you
-land. It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It
-ascends its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation
-over the Atlantic. "Down town" stands like a strong man on the shore
-of the ocean, asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind
-these terrific battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to
-the skies. Look at this muscular development. And I am only the advance
-agent. I am only the symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste
-of the power that heaves and throbs through the veins of the giant that
-bestrides this continent for three thousand miles, from his gateway to
-the Atlantic to his gateway, to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to
-the Gulf of Mexico.
-
-And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this
-terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from
-within, stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway
-ends, a street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned
-between two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more'
-lofty than the cross of St Paul's Cathedral--square towers, honeycombed
-with thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying
-up in lifts--called "elevators" for short--clicking at typewriters,
-performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns
-at the threshold of the giant.
-
-For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which
-he rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon
-is Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure
-in the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the
-high priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds
-are shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on
-the kerbstone of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its
-sovereigns wilting away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you
-stand, in devout respect before the modest threshold of the high priest
-a babel of strange sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn
-towards it and come suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange
-than anything pictured by Hogarth--in the street a jostling mass of
-human beings, fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like
-jockeys or pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended
-high as if in prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working
-with frantic symbols, their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at
-a hundred windows in the great buildings on either side of the street
-little groups of men and women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob
-below. It is the outside market of Mammon.
-
-You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
-great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements
-like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender
-and beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle
-nearly twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the
-temple of St Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth
-acquired in his sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most
-significant building in America and the first turret to catch the noose
-of light that the dawn flings daily over the Atlantic from the East.
-You enter its marble halls and take an express train to the forty-ninth
-floor, flashing in your journey past visions of crowded offices, tier
-after tier, offices of banks and publishers and merchants and
-jewellers, like a great street, Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been
-miraculously turned skywards by some violent geological "fault." And at
-the forty-ninth floor you get out and take another "local" train to the
-top, and from thence you look giddily down, far down even upon the great
-precipices of the Grand Canon, down to the streets where the moving
-throng you left a few minutes ago looks like a colony of ants or
-black-beetles wandering uncertainly over the pavement.
-
-And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
-with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to
-be large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
-churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are
-swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that
-loom above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George
-Washington still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the
-original union. Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted
-world an inverted civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the
-vision of the great dome that seems to float in the heavens over the
-secular activities of another city, still holding aloft, to however
-negligent and indifferent a generation, the symbol of the supremacy
-of spiritual things. And you will wonder whether in this astonishing
-spectacle below you, in which the temples of the ancient worship crouch
-at the porch of these Leviathan temples of commerce, there is the
-unconscious expression of another philosophy of life in which St
-Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to the stars.
-
-And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the
-scene below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so
-near that you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open
-Atlantic, with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million
-a year, that has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of
-hopes, past the statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the
-harbour, to be swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that
-lies behind you. You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught
-in the arms of its two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before
-you, with its overflow of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream,
-and its overflow of Jersey City on the far bank of the other. In the
-brilliant sunshine and the clear, smokeless atmosphere the eye travels
-far over this incredible vista of human activity. And beyond the vision
-of the eye, the mind carries the thought onward to the great lakes and
-the seething cities by their shores, and over the illimitable plains
-westward to sunny lands more remote than Europe, but still obedient to
-the stars and stripes, and southward by the great rivers to the tropic
-sea.
-
-And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the
-far horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings.
-They will not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those
-horizons, after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields
-of activity, you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the
-contrary, they will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense
-of power unlike anything else the world has to offer--the power of
-immeasurable resources, still only in the infancy of their development,
-of inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the
-mind, of a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one--one in a
-certain fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident
-prime of their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of
-the day before them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its
-crudeness and freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as
-to something avuncular and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late
-afternoon, a little tired and more than a little disillusioned and
-battered by the journey. For him the light has left the morning
-hills, but here it still clothes those hills with hope and spurs on to
-adventure.
-
-That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
-his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
-"the goods." He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
-power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the
-inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the
-tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and
-the squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the
-chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction
-at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush,
-and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism
-has shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American
-interests, and the "100 per cent. American" in every disguise of
-designing self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything
-that is significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not
-a moment when the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the
-harbour, can feel very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no
-longer lit to invite the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the
-contrary, she turns her back on America and warns the alien away. Her
-torch has become a policeman's baton.
-
-And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
-breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous
-waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back
-upon the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun
-floods the land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near
-his setting, but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his
-morning prime, so vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of
-your first impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud
-pinnacle that looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the
-temple of primeval gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And
-as you gaze you are conscious of a great note of interrogation taking
-shape in the mind. Is that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic
-expression of the soul of America, or has this mighty power you
-are leaving another gospel for mankind? And as the light fades and
-battlements and pinnacle merge into the encompassing dark there sounds
-in the mind the echoes of an immortal voice--"Let us here highly resolve
-that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under
-God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the
-people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth!"
-
-And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell
-to America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of
-Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
-
-[Illustration: 0217]
-
-[Illustration: 0208]
-
-
-
-
-ON KEYHOLE MORALS
-
-|My neighbour at the breakfast table complained that he had had a bad
-night. What with the gale and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of
-the timbers of the ship and the pair in the next cabin--especially the
-pair in the next cabin.... How they talked! It was two o'clock
-before they sank into silence. And such revelations! He couldn't help
-overhearing them. He was alone in his cabin, and what was he to do? He
-couldn't talk to himself to let them know they were being overheard. And
-he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And, in short, there was nothing
-for it but to overhear. And the things he heard--well.... And with a
-gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he left it to me to imagine the
-worst. I suggested that he might cure the trouble by telling the steward
-to give the couple a hint that the next cabin was occupied. He received
-the idea as a possible way out of a painful and delicate situation.
-Strange, he said, it had not occurred to him.
-
-Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very
-important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man.
-It would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper,
-and there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are
-not to be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper
-enough when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not
-our public hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only
-indicates the kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We
-want the world's good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company
-manners as we put on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would
-put his ear to a keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole
-behind him watching him in the act. The true estimate of your character
-(and mine) depends on what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole
-behind us. It depends, not on whether you are chivalrous to some one
-else's wife in public, but whether you are chivalrous to your own wife
-in private. The eminent judge who, checking himself in a torrent of
-abuse of his partner at whist, contritely observed, "I beg your pardon,
-madam; I thought you were my wife," did not improve matters. He only
-lifted the curtain of a rather shabby private cabin. He white-washed
-himself publicly out of his dirty private pail.
-
-Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the
-quiet and undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps
-you have accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the
-pockets bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental
-concern is awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own
-son. It is natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing
-and weighty reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that
-all those respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard
-young John's step approaching. You know that this very reasonable
-display of paternal interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying
-of which you would be ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is
-miles off--perhaps down in the city, perhaps far away in the country.
-You are left alone with his letters and your own sense of decency. You
-can read the letters in perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you
-can share them. Not a soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled
-to know those secrets, and young John may be benefited by your knowing
-them. What do you do in these circumstances? The answer will provide you
-with a fairly reliable tape measure for your own spiritual contents.
-
-There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next
-Cabin. We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of "Le
-Diable Boiteux," Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one
-house to another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside,
-with very surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the
-guise of a very civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and
-offered to do the same for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and
-lift with magic and inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the
-mysteries and privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should have
-the decency to thank him and send him away. The amusement would be
-purchased at too high a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm,
-but it would do me a lot of harm. For, after all, the important thing
-is not that we should be able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the
-whole world in the face, but that we should be able to look ourselves in
-the face. And it is our private standard of conduct and not our public
-standard of conduct which gives or denies us that privilege. We are
-merely counterfeit coin if our respect for the Eleventh Commandment only
-applies to being found out by other people. It is being found out by
-ourselves that ought to hurt us.
-
-It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass
-a tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never
-committed a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or
-forged a cheque. But these things are not evidence of good character.
-They may only mean that I never had enough honest indignation to commit
-a murder, nor enough courage to break into a house. They may only mean
-that I never needed to forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may
-only mean that I am afraid of the police. Respect for the law is a
-testimonial that will not go far in the Valley of Jehosophat. The
-question that will be asked of me there is not whether I picked my
-neighbour's lock, but whether I put my ear to his keyhole; not whether
-I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but whether I read his
-letters when his back was turned--in short, not whether I had respect
-for the law, but whether I had respect for myself and the sanctities
-that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is what went on in my
-private cabin which will probably be my undoing.
-
-[Illustration: 0222]
-
-[Illustration: 0223]
-
-
-
-
-FLEET STREET NO MORE
-
-|To-day I am among the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a
-lifetime and am a person at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that
-is told, a rumour on the wind; a memory of far-off things and battles
-long ago. At this hour I fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm.
-There is the thunder of machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above,
-the click-click-click of the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph
-operators, the tinkling of telephones, the ringing of bells for
-messengers who tarry, reporters coming in with "stories" or without
-"stories," leader-writers writing for dear life and wondering whether
-they will beat the clock and what will happen if they don't, night
-editors planning their pages as a shopman dresses his shop window,
-sub-editors breasting the torrent of "flimsies" that flows in from the
-ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and the other. I hear
-the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit might hear the
-murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as a policeman
-must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the Strand
-submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his glory
-departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the
-middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible
-embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong
-arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and
-the waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a
-personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could
-stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the
-street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to
-the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety.
-His cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of
-the Constitution, and his truncheon was as indispensable as a
-field-marshal's baton.
-
-And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on
-the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make
-a pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk
-across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers.
-Even "J. B.," who has never been known to pass a policeman without a
-gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived
-under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly
-Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates
-or in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished
-magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free,
-independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He
-can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand,
-but he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting,
-or Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in
-the shop windows, or turn into the "pictures" or go home to tea. He can
-light his pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as
-he pleases. He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a
-realm where the clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes
-without stirring his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will
-not care.
-
-And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock
-and take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous
-thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me
-as my own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life
-until I have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have
-heard its chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the
-swanking swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its
-unceasing life during every hour of the twenty-four--in the afternoon
-when the pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are
-crossing to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air
-is shrill with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide
-of the day's life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work,
-and the telegraph boys flit from door to door with their tidings of
-the world's happenings; in the small hours when the great lorries come
-thundering up the side streets with their mountains of papers and rattle
-through the sleeping city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag
-of morn in sovereign state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral
-that looks down so grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. "I see it
-arl so plainly as I saw et, long ago." I have worn its paving stones as
-industriously as Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as
-one who had the run of the estate and the freeman's right. I have
-known its _habitues_ as familiarly as if they had belonged to my own
-household, and its multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have
-drunk the solemn toast with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken
-counsel with the lawyers in the Temple, and wandered in its green and
-cloistered calm in the hot afternoons, and written thousands of leaders
-and millions of words on this, that, and the other, wise words and
-foolish words, and words without any particular quality at all, except
-that they filled up space, and have had many friendships and fought many
-battles, winning some and losing others, and have seen the generations
-go by, and the young fellows grow into old fellows who scan a little
-severely the new race of ardent boys that come along so gaily to the
-enchanted street and are doomed to grow old and weary in its service
-also. And at the end it has come to be a street of ghosts--a street of
-memories, with faces that I knew lurking in its shadows and peopling
-its rooms and mingling with the moving pageant that seems like a phantom
-too.
-
-Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like
-the Chambered Nautilus, I=
-
-````... seal up the idle door,
-
-``Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.=
-
-I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape
-at its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no
-more. No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual
-footsteps. No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had
-always "gone out to supper, sir," or been called to the news-room or
-sent on an errand. No more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous
-clock that ticked so much faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will
-come down from above like snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults
-of the world will boil in like the roar of many waters, but I shall not
-hear them. For I have come into the inheritance of leisure. Time, that
-has lorded it over me so long, is henceforth my slave, and the future
-stretches before me like an infinite green pasture in which I can wander
-till the sun sets. I shall let the legions thunder by while I tend
-my bees and water my plants, and mark how my celery grows and how the
-apples ripen.
-
-And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the
-chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great
-noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him
-a tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his
-orchard when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys,
-bearing an urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in
-the Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to
-their plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water,
-took a sponge _and washed out his ears._
-
-[Illustration: 0228]
-
-[Illustration: 0229]
-
-
-
-
-ON WAKING UP
-
-|When I awoke this morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the
-valley and the beech woods glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and
-heard the ducks clamouring for their breakfast, and felt all the kindly
-intimacies of life coming back in a flood for the new day, I felt,
-as the Americans say, "good." Waking up is always--given a clear
-conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy faculty of sleep--a joyous
-experience. It has the pleasing excitement with which the tuning up of
-the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the symphony affects you. It is
-like starting out for a new adventure, or coming into an unexpected
-inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling suddenly upon some author
-whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes to your heart like a
-brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden and beautiful and
-full of promise.
-
-But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is
-now that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of
-consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has
-happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and
-realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The
-fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does
-not diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into
-the future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking
-to each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over,
-that the years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining
-and the birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going
-forth to their labour until the evening without fear and without hate.
-As the day advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find
-it is very much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment
-when you step over the threshold of sleep into the living world the
-revelation is simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed.
-The devil is dead. The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the
-earth. You recall the far different emotions of a few brief months ago
-when the morning sun woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling
-of the birds seemed pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the
-paper spoiled your breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the
-Kaiser. Poor wretch, he is waking, too, probably about this time and
-wondering what will happen to him before nightfall, wondering where
-he will spend the miserable remnant of his days, wondering whether his
-great ancestor's habit of carrying a dose of poison was not after all a
-practice worth thinking about. He wanted the whole, earth, and now he is
-discovering that he is entitled to just six feet of it--the same as the
-lowliest peasant in his land. "The foxes have holes and the birds of
-the air have nests," but there is neither hole nor nest where he will be
-welcome. There is not much joy for him in waking to a new day.
-
-But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has "murdered
-Sleep," and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose
-a crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to
-enter the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease
-of life after our present lease had run out and were told that we could
-nominate our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor
-an earldom, nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my
-childhood when I thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin
-man, eternally perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a
-basket on my head and shouting "Muffins," in the ears of a delighted
-populace. I loved muffins and I loved bells, and here was a man who had
-those joys about him all day long and every day. But now my ambitions
-are more restrained. I would no more wish to be born a muffin man than
-a poet or an Archbishop. The first gift I should ask would be something
-modest. It would be the faculty of sleeping eight solid hours every
-night, and waking each morning with the sense of unfathomable and
-illimitable content with which I opened my eyes to the world to-day.
-
-All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to
-their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put
-eating first, "for," said he, "there is no other pleasure that comes
-three times a day and lasts an hour each time." But sleep lasts eight
-hours. It fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it
-fills it up with the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom
-of democracy. "All equal are within the church's gate," said George
-Herbert. It may have been so in George Herbert's parish; but it is
-hardly so in most parishes. It is true of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you
-enter its portals all discriminations vanish, and Hodge and his master,
-the prince and the pauper, are alike clothed in the royal purple and
-inherit the same golden realm. There is more harmony and equality in
-life than wre are apt to admit. For a good twenty-five years of our
-seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an agreement that is simply
-wonderful.
-
-And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What
-delight is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing
-the sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of
-the birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or
-the cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or
-(as now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the
-day will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as
-any that have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there
-is eternal renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best
-that is still to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot
-stale nor familiarity make tame.
-
-That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note
-of the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that
-all must feel on this exultant morning--=
-
-````Good morning, Life--and all
-
-````Things glad and beautiful.
-
-````My pockets nothing hold,
-
-````But he that owns the gold,
-
-````The Sun, is my great friend--
-
-````His spending has no end.=
-
-Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the
-bells. There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
-
-It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of
-sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain
-perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we
-can hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall
-get through it. We shall not "get through it," of course, but speech is
-only fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have
-had a sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror
-of a dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of
-consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite
-mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of
-immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than
-from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose
-love and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this
-perplexity the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of
-happy awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not
-being. I can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than=
-
-````To dream as I may,
-
-`````And awake when I will,
-
-````With the song of the bird,
-
-`````And the sun on the hill.=
-
-Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in
-which, once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, "Are you there,
-beloved?" and hear the reply, "Yes, beloved, I am here," and with
-that sweet assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The
-tenderness and beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred
-Austin, whom some one in a jest made Poet Laureate. "For my part," he
-said, "I should like to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of
-another victory for the British Empire." It would not be easy to invent
-a more perfect contrast between the feeling of a poet and the simulated
-passion of a professional patriot. He did not really think that, of
-course. He was simply a timid, amiable little man who thought it was
-heroic and patriotic to think that. He had so habituated his tiny talent
-to strutting about in the grotesque disguise of a swashbuckler that it
-had lost all touch with the primal emotions of poetry. Forgive me for
-intruding him upon the theme. The happy awakenings of eternity
-must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings and its vulgar
-patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to sleep on.
-
-[Illustration: 0235]
-
-[Illustration: 0236]
-
-
-
-
-ON RE-READING
-
-
-I
-
-|A weekly paper has been asking well-known people what books they
-re-read. The most pathetic reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir
-Arthur Conan Doyle. "I seldom re-read now," says that unhappy man. "Time
-is so short and literature so vast and unexplored." What a desolating
-picture! It is like saying, "I never meet my old friends now. Time is so
-short and there are so many strangers I have not yet shaken hands with."
-I see the poor man, hot and breathless, scurrying over the "vast and
-unexplored" fields of literature, shaking hands and saying, "How
-d'ye do?" to everybody he meets and reaching the end of his journey,
-impoverished and pitiable, like the peasant in Tolstoi's "How much land
-does a man need?"
-
-I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with
-strangers. I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North
-Pole and the South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson
-said of the Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should
-not like _to go_ to see them. And so with books. Time is so short that
-I have none to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library.
-I could almost say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is
-published I read an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion,
-and a book has to weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I
-embark on it. When it has proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but
-meanwhile the old ships are good enough for me. I know the captain
-and the crew, the fare I shall get and the port I shall make and the
-companionship I shall have by the way.
-
-Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write--Boswell, "The
-Bible in Spain," Pepys, Horace, "Elia," Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve,
-"Travels with a Donkey," Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, "The Early
-Life of Charles James Fox,"
-
-"Under the Greenwood Tree," and so on. Do not call them books.=
-
-````Camerado, this is no book.
-
-````Who touches this, touches a man,=
-
-as Walt Whitman said of his own "Leaves of Grass." They are not books.
-They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on
-my pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was
-worth making the great adventure of life to find such company. Come
-revolutions and bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace,
-gain or loss--these friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes
-of the journey. The friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are
-estranged, die, but these friends of the spirit are not touched with
-mortality. They were not born for death, no hungry generations tread
-them down, and with their immortal wisdom and laughter they give us
-the password to the eternal. You can no more exhaust them than you
-can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the joyous melody of Mozart or
-Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or any other thing of beauty.
-They are a part of ourselves, and through their noble fellowship we are
-made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind--=
-
-```... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
-
-```In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.=
-
-We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion
-with these spirits.
-
-I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old
-friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever
-and went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he
-sits in his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale.
-It is a way Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph
-captive. They cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern
-flight without thinking that they are going to breathe the air that
-Horace breathed, and asking them to carry some such message as John
-Marshall's:=
-
-`````Tell him, bird,
-
-```That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
-
-```One man at least seeks not admittance there.=
-
-This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss
-the figure of Horace--short and fat, according to Suetonius--in the
-fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with
-equal animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry.
-Meanwhile, so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would
-say, is imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading
-the books in which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored
-tracts of the desert to those who like deserts.
-
-
-II
-
-|A correspondent asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve
-Books that he ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not
-know what he had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs
-were, and even with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for
-another. But I compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed
-that for some offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a
-desert island out in the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for
-twelve months, or perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a
-mitigation of the penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve
-books of my own choosing. On what principles should I set about so
-momentous a choice?
-
-In the first place I decided that they must be books of the
-inexhaustible kind. Rowland Hill said that "the love of God was like a
-generous roast of beef--you could cut and come again." That must be the
-first quality of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could
-go on reading and re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in
-Borrow went on reading "Moll Flanders." If only her son had known that
-immortal book, she said, he would never have got transported for life.
-That was the sort of book I must have with me on my desert island. But
-my choice would be different from that of the old apple-woman of Old
-London Bridge. I dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the
-best of novels are exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my
-bundle of books would be complete before I had made a start with the
-essentials, for I should want "Tristram Shandy" and "Tom Jones," two
-or three of Scott's, Gogol's "Dead Souls," "David Copperfield," "Evan
-Harrington," "The Brothers Karamazoff," "P�re Goriot," "War and Peace,"
-"The Three Musketeers," all of Hardy's, "Treasure Island," "Robinson
-Crusoe," "Silas Marner," "Don Quixote," the "Cloister and the Hearth,"
-"Esmond"--no, no, it would never do to include novels. They must be left
-behind.
-
-The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but
-these had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not
-come in the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale,
-so that I can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have
-no doubt about my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first
-among the historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him
-by the lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and
-understanding that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf
-of twenty-three centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and
-fro, as it were, from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty
-drama of ancient Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the
-same ambitions, the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and
-the same heroes. Yes, Thucydides of course.
-
-And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is
-there to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history
-and philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come
-to the story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned
-Mommsen, or the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard
-choice. I shut my eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well,
-I make no complaint. And then I will have those three fat volumes of
-Motley's, "Rise of the Dutch Republic" (4) put in my boat, please,
-and--yes, Carlyle's "French Revolution" (5), which is history and drama
-and poetry and fiction all in one. And, since I must take the story of
-my own land with me, just throw in Green's "Short History" (6). It is
-lovable for its serene and gracious temper as much as for its story.
-
-That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the
-more personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep
-the fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course,
-there is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition,
-for there only is the real Samuel revealed "wart and all"). I should
-like to take "Elia" and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit
-my personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place
-must be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that
-frank, sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to
-these good fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality
-of open-air romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more
-I choose indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a
-choice between the "Bible in Spain," "The Romany Rye," "Lavengro," and
-"Wild Wales." But I rejoice when I find that "Lavengro" (10) is in the
-boat.
-
-I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could
-have had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is
-Wordsworth (11) _contra mundum_, I have no doubt. He is the man who will
-"soothe and heal and bless." My last selection shall be given to a
-work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's
-"Voyages" and the "Voyage of the Beagle," and while I am balancing their
-claims the "Beagle" (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library
-is complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the
-Pacific.
-
-[Illustration: 0243]
-
-
-
-
-FEBRUARY DAYS
-
-
-|The snow has gone from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of
-setting, has got round to the wood that crowns the hill on the other
-side of the valley. Soon it will set on the slope of the hill and then
-down on the plain. Then we shall know that spring has come. Two days
-ago a blackbird, from the paddock below the orchard, added his golden
-baritone to the tenor of the thrush who had been shouting good news
-from the beech tree across the road for weeks past. I don't know why the
-thrush should glimpse the dawn of the year before the blackbird, unless
-it is that his habit of choosing the topmost branches of the tree gives
-him a better view of the world than that which the golden-throated
-fellow gets on the lower branches that he always affects. It may be
-the same habit of living in the top storey that accounts for the early
-activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours, but never so noisy as
-in these late February days, when they are breaking up into families and
-quarrelling over their slatternly household arrangements in the topmost
-branches of the elm trees. They are comic ruffians who wash all their
-dirty linen in public, and seem almost as disorderly and bad-tempered as
-the human family itself. If they had only a little of our ingenuity
-in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my friend the farmer to
-light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive the female from
-the eggs and save his crops.
-
-A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his
-modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but
-he is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden
-and the pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is
-as industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the
-starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been
-observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two
-minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that
-deserves encouragement--a bird that loves caterpillars and does not love
-cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So hang
-out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
-
-And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no
-unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape
-the general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been
-agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below
-the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting
-industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with
-that innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just
-in front of you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of
-hide-and-seek. But not now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in
-the best of us. Now he reminds us that he too is a part of that nature
-which feeds so relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing
-about in his own erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that
-the coast is clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his
-beak. He skips away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper
-of the hive comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops
-the great tit and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in
-spite of his air of innocence.
-
-There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the
-starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months
-hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's
-"Oh, that the Romans had only one neck!" For then he will come out of
-the beech woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive
-against my cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an
-obscene picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and
-the stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I
-can be just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not
-all bad any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See
-him on autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his
-forages in the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in
-the sky that are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud
-approaches like a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting,
-changing formation, breaking up into battalions, merging into columns,
-opening out on a wide front, throwing out flanks and advance guards
-and rear guards, every complication unravelled in perfect order, every
-movement as serene and assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat
-of some invisible conductor below--a very symphony of the air, in which
-motion merges into music, until it seems that you are not watching a
-flight of birds, but listening with the inner ear to great waves of
-soundless harmony. And then, the overture over, down the cloud descends
-upon the fields, and the farmers' pests vanish before the invasion.
-And if you will follow them into the fields you will find infinite tiny
-holes that they have drilled and from which they have extracted the
-lurking enemy of the drops, and you will remember that it is to their
-beneficial activities that we owe the extermination of the May beetle,
-whose devastations were so menacing a generation ago. And after the
-flock has broken up and he has paired, and the responsibilities of
-housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy labours. When spring has
-come you can see him dart from his nest in the hollow of the tree and
-make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field, returning each
-time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other succulent, but
-pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at home. That
-acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted eighteen such
-journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for a fellow of
-such benignant spirit?
-
-But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and
-see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
-
-Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration.
-Sufficient unto the day---- And to-day I will think only good of the
-sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the brave
-news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as
-this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that
-all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, "according
-to plan," and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score
-of hives in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its
-perils. We saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay
-on the ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had
-come from a neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there
-was no admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he
-came. Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness
-and great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him
-trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh,
-these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.
-
-In the garden the news is coming up from below, borne by those unfailing
-outriders of the spring, the snowdrop and the winter aconite. A modest
-company; but in their pennons is the assurance of the many-coloured host
-that is falling unseen into the vast pageant of summer and will fill the
-woods with the trumpets of the harebell and the wild hyacinth, and make
-the hedges burst into foam, and the orchard a glory of pink and white,
-and the ditches heavy with the scent of the meadowsweet, and the fields
-golden with harvest and the gardens a riot of luxuriant life. I said
-it was all right, chirps little red waistcoat from the fence--all the
-winter I've told you that there was a good time coming and now you see
-for yourself. Look at those flowers. Ain't they real? The philosopher in
-the red waistcoat is perfectly right. He has kept his end up all through
-the winter, and has taken us into his fullest confidence. Formerly he
-never came beyond the kitchen, but this winter when the snow was about
-he advanced to the parlour where he pottered about like one of the
-family. Now, however, with the great news outside and the earth full of
-good things to pick up, he has no time to call.
-
-Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save
-for the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the
-message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of
-the spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the
-sunrise is unlike the spirit of the sunset. It is the lusty breath of
-life coming back to the dead earth, and making these February days the
-most thrilling of the year. For in these expanding skies and tremors of
-life and unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and
-hope, and nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes
-that the joy of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The
-cherry blossom comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the
-spring with it, and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent
-of the lime trees and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days
-of birth when=
-
-``"Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose."=
-
-there is no hint of mortality and no reverted glance. The curtain is
-rising and the pageant is all before us.
-
-[Illustration: 0249]
-
-[Illustration: 0250]
-
-
-
-
-ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE
-
-
-|Among my letters this morning was one requesting that if I were in
-favour of "the reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the
-Jewish people," I should sign the enclosed declaration and return it in
-the envelope (unstamped), also enclosed. I dislike unstamped envelopes.
-I also dislike stamped envelopes. You can ignore an unstamped enveloped
-but a stamped envelope compels you to write a letter, when perhaps you
-don't want to write a letter. My objection to unstamped envelopes is
-that they show a meagre spirit and a lack of confidence in you. They
-suggest that you are regarded with suspicion as a person who will
-probably steam off the stamp and use it to receipt a bill.
-
-But I waived the objection, signed the declaration, stamped the envelope
-and put it in the post. I did all this because I am a Zionist. I am so
-keen a Zionist that I would use a whole bookful of stamps in the cause.
-I am a Zionist, not on sentimental grounds, but on very practical
-grounds. I want the Jews to have Palestine, so that the English may have
-England and the Germans Germany and the Russians Russia. I want them to
-have a home of their own so that the rest of us can have a home of
-our own. By this I do not mean that I am an anti-Semite. I loathe
-Jew-baiting, and regard the Jew-baiter as a very unlovely person. But I
-want the Jew to be able to decide whether he is an alien or a citizen.
-I want him to shed the dualism that makes him such an affliction to
-himself and to other people. I want him to possess Palestine so that he
-may cease to want to possess the earth.
-
-I am therefore fiercely on the side of the Zionist Jews, and fiercely
-against their opponents. These people want to be Jews, but they do not
-want Jewry. They do not want to be compelled to make a choice between
-being Jews and being Englishmen or Americans, Germans or French. They
-want the best of both worlds. We are not a nation, they say; we are
-Englishmen, or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, or
-Russians, or Japanese "of the Jewish persuasion." We are a religious
-community like the Catholics, or the Presbyterians, or the Unitarians,
-or the Plymouth Brethren. Indeed! And what is your religion, pray? _It
-is the religion of the Chosen People_. Great heavens! You deny that
-you are a nation, and in the same breath claim that you are the Chosen
-Nation. The very foundation of your religion is that Jehovah has picked
-you out from all the races of men as his own. Over you his hand is
-spread in everlasting protection. For you the cloud by day and the
-pillar of fire by night; for the rest of us the utter darkness of the
-breeds that have not the signature of Jehovah. We cannot enter your
-kingdom by praying or fasting, by bribe or entreaty. Every other nation
-is accessible to us on its own conditions; every other religion is eager
-to welcome us, sends its missionaries to us to implore us to come in.
-But you, the rejected of nations, yourself reject all nations and forbid
-your sacraments to those who are not bom of your household. You are
-the Chosen People, whose religion is the nation and whose nationhood is
-religion.
-
-Why, my dear sir, history offers no parallel to your astounding claim to
-nationality--the claim that has held your race together through nearly
-two thousand years of dispersion and wandering, of persecution and
-pride, of servitude and supremacy--=
-
-``Slaves in eternal Egypts, baking your strawless bricks;
-
-``At ease in successive Zions, prating your politics.=
-
-All nations are afflicted with egoism. It is the national egoism
-of Prussia that has just brought it to such catastrophic ruin. The
-Frenchman entertains the firm conviction that civilisation ends at the
-French frontier. Being a polite person, he does his best not to betray
-the conviction to us, and sometimes almost succeeds. The Englishman,
-being less sophisticated, does not try to conceal the fact that he has
-a similar conviction. It does not occur to him that anyone can doubt his
-claim. He knows that every foreigner would like to be an Englishman if
-he knew how. The pride of the Spaniard is a legend, and you have only to
-see Arab salute Arab to understand what a low person the European must
-seem in their eyes. In short, national egoism is a folly which is pretty
-equally distributed among all of us. But your national egoism is unlike
-any other brand on earth. In the humility of Shylock is the pride of the
-most arrogant racial aristocracy the world has ever seen. God appeared
-to you in the burning bush and spoke to you in the thunders of Sinai,
-and set you apart as his own exclusive household. And when one of your
-prophets declared that all nations were one in the sight of God, you
-rejected his gospel and slew the prophet. By comparison with you we are
-a humble people. We know we are a mixed race and that we have no more
-divine origin--and no less--than anybody else. Mr Kipling, it is true,
-has caught your arrogant note:=
-
-``For the Lord our God Most High,
-
-``He hath made the deep as dry,
-
-``He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.=
-
-But that is because Mr Kipling seems to be one of those who believe we
-are one of the lost tribes of your Chosen race. I gather that is so from
-another of his poems in which he cautions us against=
-
-````Such boastings as the Gentiles use
-
-````And lesser breeds without the law.=
-
-But Mr Kipling is only a curiosity among us. We are much more modest
-than that. But you are like that. You are not only a nation. You are,
-except the Chinese, the most isolated, the most tenacious, the most
-exclusive nation in history. Other races have changed through the
-centuries beyond recognition or have disappeared altogether. Where are
-the Persians of the spacious days of Cyrus? Who finds in the Egyptians
-of to-day the spirit and genius of the mighty people who built the
-Pyramids and created the art of the Third Dynasty? What trace is there
-in the modern Cretans of the imperial race whose seapower had become
-a legend before Homer sang? Can we find in the Greeks of our time any
-reminiscence of the Athens of Pericles? Or in the Romans any kinship
-with the sovereign people that conquered the world from Parthia to
-Britain, and stamped it with the signature of its civilisation as
-indelibly as it stamped it with its great highways? The nations chase
-each other across the stage of time, and vanish as the generations
-of men chase each other and vanish. You and the Chinese alone seem
-indestructible. It is no extravagant fancy that foresees that when the
-last fire is lit on this expiring planet it will be a Chinaman and a Jew
-who will stretch their hands to its warmth, drink in the last breath of
-air, and write the final epitaph of earth. No, it is too late by many a
-thousand years to deny your nationhood, for it is the most enduring fact
-in human records. And being a nation without a fatherland, you run like
-a disturbing immiscible fluid through the blood of all the nations. You
-need a home for your own peace and for the world's peace. I am going to
-try and help you to get one.
-
-[Illustration: 0254]
-
-[Illustration: 0201]
-
-
-
-
-ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
-
-|I think, on the whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good
-display of moral fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen
-(and admired) I propose to let them off in public. When I awoke in
-the morning I made a good resolution.... At this point, if I am
-not mistaken, I observe a slight shudder on your part, madam. "How
-Victorian!" I think I hear you remark. You compel me, madam, to digress.
-
-It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year's resolutions
-nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we
-elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No
-one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian
-England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This
-querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like
-the scorn of youth for its elders.
-
-I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I
-should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as
-it is to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the
-Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as
-we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren
-will be as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of
-yesterday. The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered
-poison gas, and have invented submarines and guns that will kill a
-churchful of people seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding
-the Nineteenth Century as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good
-things as well as very bad things about our old Victorian England. It
-did not go to the Ritz to dance in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz
-did not exist, and the modern hotel life had not been invented. It used
-to go instead to the watch-night service, and it was not above making
-good resolutions, which for the most part, no doubt, it promptly
-proceeded to break.
-
-Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of
-watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I
-had my way I would be as "merry" as Pepys, if in a different fashion.
-"Merry" is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that
-merriment is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a
-mere spasm, whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy
-of life. But the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other,
-and an occasional burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for
-anybody--even for an Archbishop--especially for an Archbishop. The
-trouble with an Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take
-himself too seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad
-for him. He needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally
-that his virtue is not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary
-humanity. At least once a year he should indulge in a certain
-liveliness, wear the cap and bells, dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe,
-not too publicly, but just publicly enough so that there should be
-nothing furtive about it. If not done on the village green it might
-at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and chronicled in the
-local newspapers. "Last evening His Grace the Archbishop attended the
-servants' ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the chief
-scullery-maid."
-
-[Illustration: 0257]
-
-And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its
-good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you "A Merry Christmas
-and a Happy New Year." Nowadays the formula is "A Happy Christmas and a
-Prosperous New Year." It is a priggish, sophisticated change--a sort of
-shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being "merry."
-There isn't. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a
-Merry Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a
-Happy New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
-
-If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making
-good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that
-virtue is a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride
-Victorian England because it went to watch-night services it is not
-because I think there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is
-because, in the words of the old song, I think "It is good to be
-merry _and_ wise." I like a festival of foolishness and I like good
-resolutions, too. Why shouldn't I? Lewis Carrol's gift for mathematics
-was not less admirable because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at
-doing sums in his head.
-
-From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution.
-The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New
-Year's morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is
-that you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn't call you an
-intolerant fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow.
-Perhaps to put the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous
-reaction to events is a little too immediate. I don't want to be
-unpleasant, but I think you see what I mean. Do not suppose that I am
-asking you to be a cold-blooded, calculating person. God forbid. But it
-would do you no harm to wear a snaffle bar and a tightish rein--or, as
-we used to say in our Victorian England, to "count ten." I accepted
-the criticism with approval. For though we do not like to hear of our
-failings from other people, that does not mean that we are unconscious
-of them. The more conscious we are of them, the less we like to hear of
-them from others and the more we hear of them from ourselves. So I said
-"Agreed. We will adopt 'Second thoughts' as our New Year policy and
-begin the campaign at once."
-
-And then came my letters--nice letters and nasty letters and indifferent
-letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say, "raised
-the waters." No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters which
-anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I
-might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting
-assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of
-writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different.
-As I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding
-expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I
-said "Second thoughts," and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as
-the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect
-to dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old
-imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to
-have a periodical brush with one's habits, even if one knows one is
-pretty sure to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a
-reminder that we are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of
-the imperfections of others. And that, I think, is the case for our old
-Victorian habit of New Year's Day commandments.
-
-I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite _pianissimo_ and
-nice.
-
-[Illustration: 0261]
-
-
-
-
-ON A GRECIAN PROFILE
-
-|I see that the ghouls have descended upon George Meredith, and are
-desecrating his remains. They have learned from the life of him just
-published that he did not get on well with his father, or his eldest
-son, and that he did not attend his first wife's funeral. Above all,
-he was a snob. He was ashamed of the tailoring business from which he
-sprang, concealed the fact that he was bom at Portsmouth, and generally
-turned his Grecian profile to the world and left it to be assumed that
-his pedigree was wrapped in mystery and magnificence.
-
-I daresay it is all true. Many of us have an indifferent record at home
-and most of us like to turn our Grecian profiles to the world, if we
-have Grecian profiles. We are like the girl in Hardy's story who always
-managed to walk on the right side of her lover, because she fancied that
-the left side of her face was her strong point. The most distinguished
-and, I think, the noblest American of our time always turns his profile
-to the camera--and a beautiful profile it is--for reasons quite
-obvious and quite pardonable to those who have seen the birth-mark that
-disfigures the other cheek. I suspect that I do not myself object to
-being caught unaware in favourable attitudes or pleasing situations that
-dispose the observer to agreeable impressions. And, indeed, why should I
-(or you) be ashamed to give-a pleasant thrill to anybody if it is in
-our power. If we pretend we are above these human frailties, what is the
-meaning of the pains we take about choosing a hat, or about the cut of
-a coat, or the colour of a cloth for the new suit? Why do we so seldom
-find pleasure in a photograph of ourselves--so seldom feel that it
-does justice to that benignant and Olympian ideal of ourselves which we
-cherish secretly in our hearts? I should have to admit, if I went into
-the confession box, that I had never seen a photograph of myself that
-had satisfied me. And I fancy you would do the same if you were honest.
-We may pretend to ourselves that it is only abstract beauty or absolute
-truth that we are concerned about, but we know better. We are thinking
-of our Grecian profile.
-
-It is no doubt regrettable to find that great men are so often afflicted
-with little weaknesses. There are some people who delight in pillorying
-the immortals and shying dead cats and rotten eggs at them.
-
-They enjoy the discovery that no one is better than he should be. It
-gives them a comfortable feeling to discover that the austere outside of
-the lord Angelo conceals the libertine. If you praise Caesar they will
-remind you that after dinner he took emetics; if Brutus, they will say
-he made an idol of his public virtue. They like to remember that Lamb
-was not quite the St Charles he is represented to be, but took far
-too much wine at dinner and dosed beautifully, but alcoholically,
-afterwards, as you may read in De Quincey. They like to recall that
-Scott was something of a snob, and put the wine-glass that the Prince
-Regent had used at dinner in his pocket, sitting down on it afterwards
-in a moment of happy forgetfulness. In short, they go about like
-Alcibiades mutilating the statues of Hermes (if he was indeed the
-culprit), and will leave us nothing in human nature that we can entirely
-reverence.
-
-I suppose they are right enough on the facts. Considering what
-multitudinous persons we are it would be a miracle if, when we button
-up ourselves in the morning we did not button up some individual of
-unpleasant propensities, whom we pretend we do not know. I have never
-been interested in my pedigree. I am sure it is a very ancient one,
-and I leave it at that. But I once made a calculation--based on the
-elementary fact that I had two parents and they had each two parents,
-and so on--and came to the conclusion that about the time of the Norman
-Conquest my ancestors were much more numerous than the population
-then inhabiting this island. I am aware that this proves rather too
-much--that it is an example of the fact that you can prove anything by
-statistics, including the impossible. But the truth remains that I am
-the temporary embodiment of a very large number of people--of millions
-of millions of people, if you trace me back to my ancestors who used to
-sharpen flints some six hundred thousand years ago. It would be singular
-if in such a crowd there were not some ne'er-do-wells jostling about
-among the nice, reputable persons who, I flatter myself, constitute my
-Parliamentary majority. Sometimes I fancy that, in a snap election taken
-at a moment of public excitement within myself, the ne'er-do-wells get
-on top. These accidents will happen, and the best I can hope is that the
-general trend of policy in the multitudinous kingdom that I carry under
-my hat is in the hands of the decent people.
-
-And that is the best we can expect from anybody--the great as well as
-the least. If we demand of the supreme man that he shall be a perfect
-whole we shall have no supreme man--only a plaster saint. Certainly we
-shall have no great literature. Shakespeare did not sit aloof like a
-perfect god imagining the world of imperfect creatures that he created.
-The world was within him and he was only the vehicle of his enormous
-ancestry and of the tumultuous life that they reproduced in the theatre
-of his mind. In him was the mirth of a roystering Falstaff of long ago,
-the calculating devilry of some Warwickshire Iago, the pity of Hubert,
-the perplexity of some village Hamlet, the swagger of Ancient Pistol,
-the bucolic simplicity of Cousin Silence, the mingled nobleness and
-baseness of Macbeth, the agony of Lear, the sweetness of many a maiden
-who walked by Avon's banks in ancient days and lived again in
-the Portias and Rosalinds of his mind. All these people dwelt in
-Shakespeare. They were the ghosts of his ancestors. He was, like the
-rest of us, not a man, but multitudes of men. He created all these
-people because he was all these people, contained in a larger measure
-than any man who ever lived all the attributes, good and bad, of
-humanity. Each character was a peep into the gallery of his ancestors.
-Meredith, himself, recognised the ancestral source of creative power.
-When Lady Butcher asked him to explain his insight into the character of
-women he replied, "It is the spirit of my mother in me." It was indeed
-the spirit of many mothers working in and through him.
-
-It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it
-so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never
-more difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along
-the Embankment last evening with a friend--a man known alike for his
-learning and character--when he turned to me and said, "I will
-never have a hero again." We had been speaking of the causes of
-the catastrophe of Paris, and his remark referred especially to his
-disappointment with President Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair
-to the President. He did not make allowance for the devil's broth of
-intrigue and ambitions into which the President was plunged on this side
-of the Atlantic. But, leaving that point aside, his remark expressed a
-very common feeling. There has been a calamitous slump in heroes. They
-have fallen into as much disrepute as kings.
-
-And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the
-fabulous offspring of comfortable times--supermen reigning on Olympus
-and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the
-storm and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy
-and prove that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they
-are discovered to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind,
-feeble folk like you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as
-helpless as any of us. Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and
-their feet have come down from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of
-clay.
-
-It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of
-the Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron
-expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:=
-
-``I want a hero: an uncommon want,
-
-```When every year and month sends forth a new one.
-
-``Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
-
-```The age discovers he is not the true one.=
-
-The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that "no man is
-a hero to his valet." To be a hero you must be remote in time or
-circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and
-fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities
-and angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is
-privileged to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the
-tricks you have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a
-faithful secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture
-he gives of Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome
-loathing for that scoundrel of genius. And C�sar, loud though his name
-thunders down the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his
-contemporaries. It was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom
-he had just appointed to the choicest command in his gift, who went to
-Caesar's house on that March morning, two thousand years ago, to bring
-him to the slaughter.
-
-If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men
-I should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely
-than anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance
-in secondary things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and
-tenderness with resolution and strength, he stands alone in history.
-But even he was not a hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too
-near--near enough to note his frailties, for he was human, too near to
-realise the grand and significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was
-not until he was dead that the world realised what a leader had fallen
-in Israel. Motley thanked heaven, as for something unusual, that he had
-been privileged to appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed
-him to men. Stanton fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end,
-and it was only when life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur
-of the force that had been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. "There
-lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen," he said,
-as he stood with other colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had
-breathed his last. But the point here is that, sublime though the sum of
-the man was, his heroic profile had its abundant human warts.
-
-It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of
-reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It
-will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have
-made the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not
-find them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are
-these the men--these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards--the
-demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the
-microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than
-demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and
-then you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.
-
-It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto
-Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless
-picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its
-arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion
-to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is
-a painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never
-will be such a being. The best of us is woven of "mingled yarn, good and
-ill together." And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and
-the ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he "contained
-multitudes" too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful
-for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects
-of that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
-
-[Illustration: 0269]
-
-[Illustration: 0270]
-
-
-
-
-ON TAKING A HOLIDAY
-
-|I hope the two ladies from the country who have been writing to the
-newspapers to know what sights they ought to see in London during their
-Easter holiday will have a nice time. I hope they will enjoy the tube
-and have fine weather for the Monument, and whisper to each other
-successfully in the whispering gallery of St Paul's, and see the
-dungeons at the Tower and the seats of the mighty at Westminster, and
-return home with a harvest of joyful memories. But I can promise them
-that there is one sight they will not see. They will not see me. Their
-idea of a holiday is London. My idea of a holiday is forgetting there is
-such a place as London.
-
-Not that I dislike London. I should like to see it.
-
-I have long promised myself that I would see it. Some day, I have said,
-I will surely have a look at this place. It is a shame, I have said, to
-have lived in it so long and never to have seen it. I suppose I am not
-much worse than other Londoners. Do you, sir, who have been taking the
-morning bus from Balham for heaven knows how many years--do you, when
-you are walking down Fleet Street, stand still with a shock of delight
-as the dome of St Paul's and its cross of gold burst on your astonished
-sight? Do you go on a fine afternoon and take your stand on Waterloo
-Bridge to see that wondrous river fa�ade that stretches with its
-cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces from Westminster to St Paul's?
-Do you know the spot where Charles was executed, or the church where
-there are the best Grinling Gibbons carvings? Did you ever go into
-Somerset House to see the will of William Shakespeare, or--in short, did
-you ever see London? Did you ever see it, not with your eyes merely, hut
-with your mind, with the sense of revelation, of surprise, of discovery?
-Did you ever see it as those two ladies from the country will see it
-this Easter as they pass breathlessly from wonder to wonder? Of course
-not. You need a holiday in London as I do. You need to set out with
-young Tom (aged ten) on a voyage of discovery and see all the sights of
-this astonishing city as though you had come to it from a far country.
-
-That is how I hope to visit it--some day. But not this Easter, not when
-I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the cherry
-blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the chestnut
-tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long and the
-April meadows are "smoored wi' new grass," as they say in the Yorkshire
-dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at the magic
-casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn to the
-fringe of Dartmoor and let loose--shall it be from Okehampton or Bovey
-Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? what matter the gate by which we enter the
-sanctuary?--let loose, I say, into the vast spaces of earth and sky
-where the moorland streams sing their ancient runes over the boulders
-and the great tors stand out like castles of the gods against the
-horizon and the Easter sun dances, as the legend has it, overhead and
-founders gloriously in the night beyond Plymouth Sound.
-
-Or, perhaps, ladies, if you come from the North, I may pass you
-unawares, and just about the time when you are cracking your breakfast
-egg in the boarding house at Russell Square--heavens, Russell
-Square!--and discussing whether you shall first go down the deepest
-lift or up the highest tower, or stand before the august ugliness of
-Buckingham Palace, or see the largest station or the smallest church,
-I shall be stepping out from Keswick, by the lapping waters of Derwent
-water, hailing the old familiar mountains as they loom into sight,
-looking down again--think of it!--into the' Jaws of Borrowdale, having
-a snack at Rosthwaite, and then, hey for Styehead! up, up ever the rough
-mountain track, with the buzzard circling with slow flapping wings about
-the mountain flanks, with glorious Great Gable for my companion on the
-right hand and no less glorious Scafell for my companion on the left
-hand, and at the rocky turn in the track--lo! the great amphitheatre of
-Wasdale, the last Sanctuary of lakeland.
-
-And at this point, ladies, you may as you crane your neck to see the
-Duke of York at the top of his column--wondering all the while who the
-deuce the fellow was that he should stand so high--you may, I say, if
-you like, conceive me standing at the top of the pass, taking my hat
-from my head and pronouncing a terrific curse on the vandals who would
-desecrate the last temple of solitude by driving a road over this
-fastness of the mountains in order that the gross tribe of motorists may
-come with their hoots and their odours, their hurry and vulgarity, and
-chase the spirit of the mountains away from us for ever.... And then
-by the screes of Great Gable to the hollow among the mountains. Or
-perchance, I may turn by Sprinkling Tam and see the Pikes of Langdale
-come into view and stumble down Rossett Ghyll and so by the green
-pastures of Langdale to Grasmere.
-
-In short, ladies, I may be found in many places. But I shall not tell
-you where. I am not quite sure that I could tell you where at this
-moment, for I am like a fellow who has come into great riches and
-is doubtful how he can squander them most gloriously. But, I repeat,
-ladies, that you will not find me in London. I leave London to you. May
-you enjoy it.
-
-[Illustration: 0201]
-
-
-
-
-UNDER THE SYCAMORE
-
-|An odd question was put to me the other day which I think I may venture
-to pass on to a wider circle. It was this: What is the best dish that
-life has set before you? At first blush it seems an easy question to
-answer. It was answered gaily enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked
-what was the best thing that had ever happened to him. "The best thing
-that ever happened to me was to be born," he replied. But that is not an
-answer: it is an evasion. It belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether
-life is worth living. Life may be worth living or not worth living on
-balance, but in either case we can still say what was the thing in it
-that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a dinner on the whole and yet
-make an exception of the trout, or the braised ham and spinach or the
-dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and still admit that he
-has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift and many more, have
-cursed the day you were born and still remember many pleasant things
-that have happened to you--falling in love, making friends, climbing
-mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs, watching the
-sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You may write
-off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush outside.
-It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very sad heart
-who has never had anything to thank his stars for.
-
-But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it
-grows difficult on reflection.
-
-In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily
-answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over
-and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things
-that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long
-sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and
-agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree--sycamore or chestnut
-for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because their
-generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade--to sit, I say, and
-think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball which the
-Bless�d Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven near by,
-sees "spinning like a midge" below.
-
-And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and
-asked us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play
-to which we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped
-away so quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we
-should make now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will
-be there) will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer.
-That glorious contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool
-million--come now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair
-to remember your journey by. You will have to think of something better
-than that as the splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to
-confess to a very complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser
-pleasures seemed so important, you will not like to admit, even to
-yourself, that your most rapturous memory of earth centres round the
-grillroom at the Savoy. You will probably find that the things best
-worth remembering are the things you rejected.
-
-I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose
-pleasures were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of
-life, after all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers
-in money, and traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those
-occupations to hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon
-under that sycamore tree--which of them, now that it is all over, will
-have most joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one
-and a gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the
-earth as a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the
-mountains, and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and
-where season followed season with a processional glory that never grew
-dim. And Mozart will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and
-Turner as a panorama of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect,
-with what delight they will look back on the great moments of
-life--Columbus seeing the new world dawning on his vision, Copernicus
-feeling the sublime architecture of the universe taking shape in his
-mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal mystery of the human frame, Darwin
-thrilling with the birth pangs of the immense secret that he wrung
-from Nature. These men will be able to answer the question grandly. The
-banquet they had on earth will bear talking about even in Heaven.
-
-But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the
-scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will,
-I fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and
-humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we
-won the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or
-shook hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our
-name in the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament.
-It will be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human
-comradeship we had on the journey--the friendships of the spirit,
-whether made in the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or
-art. We shall remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its
-affections--=
-
-```For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
-
-```The fates some recompense have sent--
-
-```Thrice blessed are the things that last,
-
-```The things that are more excellent.=
-
-[Illustration: 0278]
-
-[Illustration: 0279]
-
-
-
-
-ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE
-
-
-|I met an old gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with
-whom I have a slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he
-asked me whether I remembered Walker of _The Daily News_. No, said I,
-he was before my time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the
-'seventies.
-
-"Before that," said the old gentleman. "Must have been in the 'sixties."
-
-"Probably," I said. "Did you know him in the 'sixties?"
-
-"Oh, I knew him before then," said the old gentleman, warming to his
-subject. "I knew him in the 'forties."
-
-I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman
-enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.
-
-"Heavens!" said I, "the 'forties!"
-
-"No," said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a
-better view across the ages. "No.... It must have been in
-the 'thirties.... Yes, it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school
-together in the 'thirties. We called him Sawney Walker."
-
-I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I
-had paid him the one compliment that appealed to him--the compliment of
-astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.
-
-His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety
-not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked "well
-set" for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance
-as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his
-hundred at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement
-was mixed with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent
-vanity is the last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last
-infirmity that humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that
-rages around Dean Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the
-angels. I want to feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are
-moving upwards in the scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round
-and round and biting our tail. I think the case for the ascent of man
-is stronger than the Dean admits. A creature that has emerged from the
-primordial slime and evolved a moral law has progressed a good way. It
-is not unreasonable to think that he has a future. Give him time--and it
-may be that the world is still only in its rebellious childhood--and he
-will go far.
-
-But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a
-time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant
-and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first
-knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We
-are vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of
-his acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all
-the year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes
-at the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots
-and his cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of
-mine who, in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing
-boots to the children at a London school, heard one day a little child
-pattering behind her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of
-the beneficiaries "keeping up" with her. She turned and recognised the
-wearer. "So you've got your new boots on, Mary?" she said. "Yes," said
-little Mary grandly. "Don't they squeak beautiful, mum." And though, as
-we grow older, we cease to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we
-find other material to keep the flame of vanity alive. "What for should
-I ride in a carriage if the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?" said
-the Fifer, putting his head out of the window. He spoke for all of
-us. We are all a little like that. I confess that I cannot ride in
-a motor-car that whizzes past other motor-cars without an absurd and
-irrational vanity. I despise the emotion, but it is there in spite of
-me. And I remember that when I was young I could hardly free-wheel down
-a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior to the man who was grinding
-his way up with heavings and perspiration. I have no shame in making
-these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that you, sir (or madam),
-will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite audible echo of
-yourself.
-
-And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we
-are vain of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our
-neighbours as we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our
-neighbours. We are like the old maltster in "Far from the Madding
-Crowd," when Henery Fray claimed to be "a strange old piece, goodmen."
-
-"A strange old piece, ye say!" interposed the maltster in a querulous
-voice. "Ye be no old man worth naming--no old man at all. Yer teeth
-bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
-bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms?'Tis
-a poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore--a boast
-weak as water."
-
-It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences
-when the maltster had to be pacified.
-
-"Weak as water, yes," said Jan Coggan. "Malter, we feel ye to be a
-wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it."
-
-"Nobody," said Joseph Poorgrass. "Ye be a very rare old spectacle,
-malter, and we all respect ye for that gift."
-
-That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in
-being "a very rare old spectacle." We count the reigns we've lived in
-and exalt the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes
-at midnight. Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite
-early, as in the case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of
-Cicero who was only in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as
-an old man and wrote his "De Senectute," exalting the pleasures of old
-age. In the eyes of the maltster he would never have been an old man
-worth naming, for he was only sixty-four when he was murdered. I
-have noticed in my own case of late a growing tendency to flourish my
-antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure in recalling the 'seventies to
-those who can remember, say, only the 'nineties, that my fine old friend
-in the lane had in talking to me about the 'thirties. I met two nice
-boys the other day at a country house, and they were full, as boys ought
-to be, of the subject of the cricket. And when they found I was worth
-talking to on that high theme, they submitted their ideal team to me
-for approval, and I launched out about the giants that lived in the
-days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds of "W. G." and
-Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G. Steel, and
-many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their stature
-did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those memories
-as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I shall be
-proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning nurse.
-She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope
-and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our
-toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant
-vanity we are soothed to sleep.
-
-[Illustration: 0284]
-
-[Illustration: 0285]
-
-
-
-
-ON SIGHTING LAND
-
-|I was in the midst of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me
-to my feet with a leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a
-doughty fellow, who wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and
-had trained it to stand up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of
-interrogation. "I offer you a draw," I said with a regal wave of the
-hand, as though I was offering him Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or
-something substantial like that. "Accepted," he cried with a gesture no
-less reckless and comprehensive. And then we bolted for the top deck.
-For the cry we had heard was "Land in sight!" And if there are three
-more comfortable words to hear when you have been tossing about on the
-ocean for a week or two, I do not know them.
-
-For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the
-Atlantic is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely
-facetious when he said he was "disappointed with the Atlantic." But now
-I am disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way
-I knew it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order
-to know what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until
-he was a middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to
-his conception of the sea because "we have in us the glance of the
-universe." But though the actual experience of the ocean adds little to
-the broad imaginative conception of it formed by the mind, we are
-not prepared for the effect of sameness, still less for the sense
-of smallness. It is as though we are sitting day after day in the
-geometrical centre of a very round table-top.
-
-The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are
-told that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before
-yesterday and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility
-to the fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured
-by and here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is
-perfectly flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn
-by compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have "a
-drop into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit." You
-conceive yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth
-which hangs over the sides.
-
-For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its
-appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue
-cloth, with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption
-of transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey
-cloth; sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth
-and tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the
-table, and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth
-flinging itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an
-incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion
-and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under
-the impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment
-suspended in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like
-a wrestler fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning,
-every joint creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful
-strain. A gleam of sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching
-the clouds of spray turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling
-ship with the glamour of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there
-is nothing but the raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler
-in their midst, and far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the
-horizon, as if it were a pencil of white flame, to a spectral and
-unearthly beauty.
-
-But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are
-moveless in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our
-magic carpet (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or
-Europe, as the case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we
-are standing still for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers
-progress to the mind. The circle we looked out on last night is
-indistinguishable from the circle we look out on this morning. Even the
-sky and cloud effects are lost on this flat contracted stage, with its
-hard horizon and its thwarted vision. There is a curious absence of the
-sense of distance, even of distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as
-abruptly as the sea at that severely drawn circumference and there is
-no vague merging of the seen into the unseen, which alone gives the
-imagination room for flight. To live in this world is to be imprisoned
-in a double sense--in the physical sense that Johnson had in mind in
-his famous retort, and in the emotional sense that I have attempted
-to describe. In my growing list of undesirable occupations--sewermen,
-lift-men, stokers, tram-conductors, and so on--I shall henceforth
-include ships' stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being
-shot like a shuttle in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New
-York and back from New York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the
-ill-humour of the ocean and to play the sick nurse to a never-ending
-mob of strangers, is as dreary a part as one could be cast for. I would
-rather navigate a barge on the Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall
-in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet, on second thoughts, they have their
-joys. They hear, every fortnight or so, that thrilling cry, "Land in
-sight!"
-
-It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and
-however familiar it may be.
-
-The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example.
-Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the
-first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some
-unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively,
-comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment
-seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination.
-Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the
-monotonous rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with
-the emotion of the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of
-the sea. Such a cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three
-hundred years ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of
-that immortal little company of the _Mayflower_ caught sight of the land
-where, they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down
-through the centuries that cry of "Land in sight!" has been sounded in
-the ears of generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to
-the new land of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see
-that land shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great
-drama of the ages.
-
-But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English
-eyes as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this
-sunny morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the
-sight there is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself
-heaving with a hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders.
-I have a fleeting vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling
-down there amid a glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to
-sea, and standing on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home
-to the Ark that is for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.
-
-I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is
-a rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his
-hills hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager
-comes from, whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic
-from the Cape, or round the Cape from Australia, or through the
-Mediterranean from India, this is the first glimpse of the homeland that
-greets him, carrying his mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the
-journey's end. And that vision links him up with the great pageant of
-history. Drake, sailing in from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and
-knew he was once more in his Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck
-beside me with a wisp of hair, curled and questioning, on his baldish
-forehead, and I mark the shine in his eyes....
-
-[Illustration: 0291]
-
-[Illustration: 0294]
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by 
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-***** This file should be named 47429-8.txt or 47429-8.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/7/4/2/47429/
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
-will be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
-one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
-(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
-permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
-set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
-copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
-protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
-Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
-charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
-do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
-rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
-such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
-research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
-practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
-subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
-redistribution.
-
-
-
-*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-  www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works
-
-1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
-all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
-If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
-
-1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
-paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
-or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
-collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
-copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
-works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
-are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
-Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
-freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
-this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
-the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
-keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
-a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
-Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
-States.
-
-1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
-access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
-whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
-phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
-Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
-copied or distributed:
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
-from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
-posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
-and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
-or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
-with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
-work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
-through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
-Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
-1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
-terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
-to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
-permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
-word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
-"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
-you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
-copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
-request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
-form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
-that
-
-- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
-     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
-     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
-     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
-     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
-     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
-     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
-     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
-     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
-     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
-
-- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-     License.  You must require such a user to return or
-     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
-     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
-     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
-     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
-     of receipt of the work.
-
-- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
-forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
-both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
-collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
-"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
-corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
-property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
-computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
-your equipment.
-
-1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
-of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
-your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
-refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
-opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
-the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
-Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
-
-
-Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
-people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
-To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
-and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
-and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
-Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
-permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
-Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
-throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
-North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
-contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
-Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-     Chief Executive and Director
-     gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
-SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
-particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
-To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-
-Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
-with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
-Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
-unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
-keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
-
-     www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-8.zip b/47429/old/47429-8.zip
deleted file mode 100644
index 7d9abda..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-8.zip
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h.htm.2021-01-25 b/47429/old/47429-h.htm.2021-01-25
deleted file mode 100644
index dc7abff..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h.htm.2021-01-25
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,8544 +0,0 @@
-<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html
-   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
-   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
-
-<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
-  <head>
-    <title>
-      Windfalls, by By Alfred George Gardiner
-    </title>
-    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
-    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
-
-    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
-    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
-    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
-    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
-    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
-    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
-    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
-    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
-    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
-    .indent5   { margin-left: 5%;}
-    .indent10  { margin-left: 10%;}
-    .indent15  { margin-left: 15%;}
-    .indent20  { margin-left: 20%;}
-    .indent30  { margin-left: 30%;}
-    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
-    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
-    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
-    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
-    .pagenum   {position: absolute; right: 1%; font-size: 0.6em;
-                font-variant: normal; font-style: normal;
-                text-align: right; background-color: #FFFACD;
-                border: 1px solid; padding: 0.3em;text-indent: 0em;}
-    .side      { float: left; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
-               border-left: dashed thin; text-align: left;
-               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
-               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
-    p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
-    span.dropcap         { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 }
-    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
-
-</style>
-  </head>
-  <body>
-
-
-<pre>
-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Windfalls
-
-Author: (AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-Illustrator: Clive Gardiner
-
-Release Date: November 22, 2014 [EBook #47429]
-Last Updated: March 15, 2018
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-    <div style="height: 8em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h1>
-      WINDFALLS
-    </h1>
-    <h2>
-      By Alfred George Gardiner
-</h2>
-<h3>
-(Alpha of the Plough)
-    </h3>
-
-<h3>Illustrations by Clive Gardiner
-</h3>
-    <h4>
-      J. M. Dent &amp; Sons, Ltd.
-    </h4>
-    <h5>
-      1920
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0002m.jpg" alt="0002m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0002.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0008m.jpg" alt="0008m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0008.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0009m.jpg" alt="0009m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0009.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <h3>
-      TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      I think this book belongs to you because, if it can be said to be about
-      anything in particular&mdash;which it cannot&mdash;it is, in spite of its
-      delusive title, about bees, and as I cannot dedicate it to them, I offer
-      it to those who love them most.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0015m.jpg" alt="0015m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0015.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> JEMIMA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> ON BEING IDLE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> ON HABITS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> IN DEFENCE OF WASPS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> ON PILLAR ROCK </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> TWO VOICES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> ON BEING TIDY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> AN EPISODE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> ON POSSESSION </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> ON BORES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> A LOST SWARM </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> YOUNG AMERICA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> ON GREAT REPLIES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> ON HEREFORD BEACON </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> CHUM </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> ON MATCHES AND THINGS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> ON BEING REMEMBERED </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> ON DINING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> TWO DRINKS OF MILK </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> ON GREAT MEN </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> ON SWEARING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> ON A HANSOM CAB </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> ON MANNERS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> ON A FINE DAY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> DOWN TOWN </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> ON KEYHOLE MORALS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> FLEET STREET NO MORE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> ON WAKING UP </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> ON RE-READING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> FEBRUARY DAYS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> ON A GRECIAN PROFILE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> ON TAKING A HOLIDAY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> UNDER THE SYCAMORE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> ON SIGHTING LAND </a>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a> <br /><br /><a
-      name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0013m.jpg" alt="0013m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0013.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      PREFACE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>n offering a third
-      basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is hoped that the fruit will
-      not be found to have deteriorated. If that is the case, I shall hold
-      myself free to take another look under the trees at my leisure. But I
-      fancy the three baskets will complete the garnering. The old orchard from
-      which the fruit has been so largely gathered is passing from me, and the
-      new orchard to which I go has not yet matured. Perhaps in the course of
-      years it will furnish material for a collection of autumn leaves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0021m.jpg" alt="0021m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0021.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      JEMIMA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> took a garden
-      fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes. When Jemima saw me
-      crossing the orchard with a fork he called a committee meeting, or rather
-      a general assembly, and after some joyous discussion it was decided <i>nem.
-      con</i>. that the thing was worth looking into. Forthwith, the whole
-      family of Indian runners lined up in single file, and led by Jemima
-      followed faithfully in my track towards the artichoke bed, with a gabble
-      of merry noises. Jemima was first into the breach. He always is...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But before I proceed it is necessary to explain. You will have observed
-      that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless,
-      you said, &ldquo;How careless of the printer. Once might be forgiven; but twice&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
-       Dear madam' (or sir), the printer is on this occasion blameless. It seems
-      incredible, but it's so. The truth is that Jemima was the victim of an
-      accident at the christening ceremony. He was one of a brood who, as they
-      came like little balls of yellow fluff out of the shell, received names of
-      appropriate ambiguity&mdash;all except Jemima. There were Lob and Lop, Two
-      Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?, Greedy and Baby, and so on. Every
-      name as safe as the bank, equal to all contingencies&mdash;except Jemima.
-      What reckless impulse led us to call him Jemima I forget. But regardless
-      of his name, he grew up into a handsome drake&mdash;a proud and gaudy
-      fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you call him so long as you call
-      him to the Diet of Worms.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And here he is, surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble, gobble,
-      and crowd in on me so that I have to scare them off in order to drive in
-      the fork. Jemima keeps his eye on the fork as a good batsman keeps his eye
-      on the ball. The flash of a fork appeals to him like the sound of a
-      trumpet to the warhorse. He will lead his battalion through fire and water
-      in pursuit of it. He knows that a fork has some mystical connection with
-      worms, and doubtless regards it as a beneficent deity. The others are
-      content to grub in the new-turned soil, but he, with his larger reasoning
-      power, knows that the fork produces the worms and that the way to get the
-      fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the way he watches it I
-      rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the fork. Look at him now. He
-      cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating fork, expecting to see large,
-      squirming worms dropping from it, and Greedy nips in under his nose and
-      gobbles a waggling beauty. My excellent friend, I say, addressing Jemima,
-      you know both too much and too little. If you had known a little more you
-      would have had that worm; if you had known a little less you would have
-      had that worm. Let me commend to you the words of the poet:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      A little learning is a dangerous thing:
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I've known many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too
-      much but don't know enough. Now Greedy&mdash;&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But clear off all of you. What ho! there.... The scales!... Here is a
-      bumper root.... Jemima realises that something unusual has happened,
-      assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with great animation. It
-      is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners such agreeable
-      companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian runners about.
-      Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the orchard without an
-      idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in a perpetual gossip. The
-      world is full of such a number of things that they hardly ever leave off
-      talking, and though they all talk together they are so amiable about it
-      that it makes you feel cheerful to hear them.... But here are the
-      scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do you say to that,
-      Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am
-      enveloped once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful
-      risks in his attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be
-      ungracious to complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it, I
-      said, but you are feasting to-day in order that others may feast tomorrow.
-      You devour the worm, and a larger and more cunning animal will devour you.
-      He cocks up his head and fixes me with that beady eye that gleams with
-      such artless yet searching intelligence.... You are right, Jemima. That,
-      as you observe, is only half the tale. You eat the worm, and the large,
-      cunning animal eats you, but&mdash;yes, Jemima, the crude fact has to be
-      faced that the worm takes up the tale again where Man the Mighty leaves
-      off:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      His heart is builded
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      For pride, for potency, infinity,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Arrased with purple like the house of kings,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      <i>To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm</i>
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      <i>Statelily lodge...</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I accept your reminder, Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like you,
-      am only a link in the chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries, who creates
-      to devour and devours to create. I thank you, Jemima. And driving in the
-      fork and turning up the soil I seized a large fat worm. I present you with
-      this, Jemima, I said, as a mark of my esteem...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0025m.jpg" alt="0025m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0025.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING IDLE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> have long
-      laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person. It is an
-      entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in conversation, I
-      do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am idle, in fact, to
-      prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art of defence is attack. I
-      defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a verdict of not guilty by
-      the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm you by laying down my
-      arms. &ldquo;Ah, ah,&rdquo; I expect you to say. &ldquo;Ah, ah, you an idle person. Well,
-      that is good.&rdquo; And if you do not say it I at least give myself the
-      pleasure of believing that you think it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things about
-      ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about us. We
-      say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way some
-      people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their early
-      decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as remote as
-      it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating the sorrow it
-      will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be missed. We all
-      like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember a nice old
-      gentleman whose favourite topic was &ldquo;When I am gone.&rdquo; One day he was
-      telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee, what would
-      happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up cheerfully and
-      said, &ldquo;When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at the funeral?&rdquo; It was
-      a devastating question, and it was observed that afterwards the old
-      gentleman never discussed his latter end with his formidable grandchild.
-      He made it too painfully literal.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were to
-      express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad as the
-      old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and I daresay
-      I should take care not to lay myself open again to such <i>gaucherie</i>.
-      But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling self-deception.
-      I can speak the plain truth about &ldquo;Alpha of the Plough&rdquo; without asking for
-      any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how he suffers. And I
-      say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was never more satisfied
-      of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has been engaged in the
-      agreeable task of dodging his duty to <i>The Star</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It began quite early this morning&mdash;for you cannot help being about
-      quite early now that the clock has been put forward&mdash;or is it back?&mdash;for
-      summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and there
-      at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved to write
-      an article <i>en plein air</i>, as Corot used to paint his pictures&mdash;an
-      article that would simply carry the intoxication of this May morning into
-      Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare carolling with larks, and
-      make it green with the green and dappled wonder of the beech woods. But
-      first of all he had to saturate himself with the sunshine. You cannot give
-      out sunshine until you have taken it in. That, said he, is plain to the
-      meanest understanding. So he took it in. He just lay on his back and
-      looked at the clouds sailing serenely in the blue. They were well worth
-      looking at&mdash;large, fat, lazy, clouds that drifted along silently and
-      dreamily, like vast bales of wool being wafted from one star to another.
-      He looked at them &ldquo;long and long&rdquo; as Walt Whitman used to say. How that
-      loafer of genius, he said, would have loved to lie and look at those
-      woolly clouds.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
-      another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not have a
-      picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began enumerating
-      the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the wings of the
-      west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could hear if one gave
-      one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin whisper of the breeze
-      in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of the woodland behind, the
-      dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech near by, the boom of a
-      bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of the meadow pipit rising
-      from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo sailing up the valley, the
-      clatter of magpies on the hillside, the &ldquo;spink-spink&rdquo; of the chaffinch,
-      the whirr of a tractor in a distant field, the crowing of a far-off cock,
-      the bark of a sheep dog, the ring of a hammer reverberating from a remote
-      clearing in the beech woods, the voices of children who were gathering
-      violets and bluebells in the wooded hollow on the other side of the hill.
-      All these and many other things he heard, still lying on his back and
-      looking at the heavenly bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him;
-      their billowy softness invited to slumber....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
-      Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and the
-      best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the blossoms
-      falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you preaching
-      the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He would catch
-      something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did not lie about
-      on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds. To them, life was
-      real, life was earnest. They were always &ldquo;up and doing.&rdquo; It was true that
-      there were the drones, impostors who make ten times the buzz of the
-      workers, and would have you believe they do all the work because they make
-      most of the noise. But the example of these lazy fellows he would ignore.
-      Under the cherry tree he would labour like the honey bee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came out
-      to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives alone,
-      but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put on a veil
-      and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time flies when you
-      are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do and see. You
-      always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure that she is
-      there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took more time
-      than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one of the
-      hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other hives,
-      and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was visible. The
-      frames were turned over industriously without reward. At last, on the
-      floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found. This deepened
-      the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason, rejected her
-      sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne appeared and
-      given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last the new queen
-      was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of her subjects. She
-      had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped notice when the brood
-      frames were put in and, according to the merciless law of the hive, had
-      slain her senior. All this took time, and before he had finished, the
-      cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard announced another
-      interruption of his task.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
-      of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article about
-      how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one virtue. It
-      exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0030m.jpg" alt="0030m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0030.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0031m.jpg" alt="0031m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0031.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON HABITS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> sat down to write
-      an article this morning, but found I could make no progress. There was
-      grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels refused to revolve. I was
-      writing with a pen&mdash;a new fountain pen that someone had been good
-      enough to send me, in commemoration of an anniversary, my interest in
-      which is now very slight, but of which one or two well-meaning friends are
-      still in the habit of reminding me. It was an excellent pen, broad and
-      free in its paces, and capable of a most satisfying flourish. It was a
-      pen, you would have said, that could have written an article about
-      anything. You had only to fill it with ink and give it its head, and it
-      would gallop away to its journey's end without a pause. That is how I felt
-      about it when I sat down. But instead of galloping, the thing was as
-      obstinate as a mule. I could get no more speed out of it than Stevenson
-      could get out of his donkey in the Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried
-      the bastinado, equally without effect on my Modestine.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
-      practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without my
-      using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
-      there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
-      thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
-      extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
-      bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a whole
-      forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to me what
-      his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke of Cambridge,
-      or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to Jackson or&mdash;in
-      short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my hand, seat me
-      before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as they say of the
-      children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an eight-day clock.
-      I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten. But the magic wand
-      must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen in my hand, and the whole
-      complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an atmosphere of strangeness. The
-      pen kept intruding between me and my thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the
-      touch. It seemed to write a foreign language in which nothing pleased me.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
-      better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
-      of his school days. &ldquo;There was,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a boy in my class at school who
-      stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant him. Day
-      came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would; till at
-      length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always fumbled
-      with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
-      waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in an
-      evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know the
-      success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was again
-      questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not to be
-      found. In his distress he looked down for it&mdash;it was to be seen no
-      more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
-      place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was the
-      author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him smote me as
-      I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some reparation;
-      but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance
-      with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior office in one of
-      the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe he is dead, he took
-      early to drinking.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
-      regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
-      and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come. to
-      grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits, so long
-      as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little more than
-      bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take away our
-      habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about. We could
-      not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life. They enable
-      us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we had to give
-      fresh and original thought to them each time, would make existence an
-      impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our commonplace
-      activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more leisure we
-      command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but not so large
-      as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up your own hat
-      and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long time it was my
-      practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant hook and to take
-      no note of the place. When I sought them I found it absurdly difficult to
-      find them in the midst of so many similar hats and coats. Memory did not
-      help me, for memory refused to burden itself with such trumpery things,
-      and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering forlornly and vacuously
-      between the rows and rows of clothes in search of my own garments
-      murmuring, &ldquo;Where <i>did</i> I put my hat?&rdquo; Then one day a brilliant
-      inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on a certain
-      peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to it. It needed
-      a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked like a charm. I
-      can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding them. I go to them
-      as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to its mark. It is one of
-      the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
-      ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally break
-      them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ them,
-      without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once saw Mr
-      Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial breach of
-      habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of Trinity
-      House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House. It is his
-      custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the most
-      comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms about in
-      a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief and the body in
-      repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no lapels, and when the
-      hands went up in search of them they wandered about pathetically like a
-      couple of children who had lost their parents on Blackpool sands. They
-      fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung to each other in a
-      visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed the search for the lost
-      lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with the glasses on the table,
-      sought again for the lapels, did everything but take refuge in the pockets
-      of the trousers. It was a characteristic omission. Mr Balfour is too
-      practised a speaker to come to disaster as the boy in Scott's story did;
-      but his discomfiture was apparent. He struggled manfully through his
-      speech, but all the time it was obvious that he was at a loss what to do
-      with his hands, having no lapels on which to hang them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out a
-      pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit, ticked
-      away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I hope)
-      pardonable result.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0036m.jpg" alt="0036m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0036.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      IN DEFENCE OF WASPS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t is time, I
-      think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He is no saint, but he
-      is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been unusually prolific this
-      summer, and agitated correspondents have been busy writing to the
-      newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how by holding your breath
-      you may miraculously prevent him stinging you. Now the point about the
-      wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He is, in spite of his military
-      uniform and his formidable weapon, not a bad fellow, and if you leave him
-      alone he will leave you alone. He is a nuisance of course. He likes jam
-      and honey; but then I am bound to confess that I like jam and honey too,
-      and I daresay those correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam
-      and honey. We shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like
-      jam and honey. But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the
-      plate, and he is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no
-      doubt. He is an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously
-      helpless condition from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness
-      for beer. In the language of America, he is a &ldquo;wet.&rdquo; He cannot resist
-      beer, and having rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully
-      tight and staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that
-      he won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
-      Belloc&mdash;not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so
-      waspishly about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about
-      beer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty beer
-      bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets out. He is
-      indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings. He is
-      excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody and nothing,
-      and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of things; but a
-      wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin that he is, and
-      will never have the sense to walk out the way he went in. And on your
-      plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You can descend on
-      him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight for anything above
-      him, and no sense of looking upward.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
-      fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
-      glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
-      familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
-      the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he cuts
-      a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
-      poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its time
-      in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night during
-      its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and for future
-      generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow stripes just
-      lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank you. Let us
-      eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow&mdash;&mdash;. He runs
-      through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time in
-      August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving only
-      the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of 20,000 or
-      so next summer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
-      you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
-      it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet he
-      could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than the bee,
-      for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel competent to
-      speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for I've been living
-      in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the orchard, with an
-      estimated population of a quarter of a million bees and tens of thousands
-      of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never deliberately attacked
-      by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around me I flee for shelter.
-      There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp, the bee's hatred is
-      personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some obscure reason, and is
-      always ready to die for the satisfaction of its anger. And it dies very
-      profusely. The expert, who has been taking sections from the hives, showed
-      me her hat just now. It had nineteen stings in it, planted in as neatly as
-      thorns in a bicycle tyre.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
-      him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
-      nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
-      devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked, and I
-      like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little joint,
-      usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real virtue, and
-      this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean fellow, and
-      is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of that supreme
-      abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is very cunning.
-      I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He got the blow fly
-      down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed off one of the
-      creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape, and then with a
-      huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away. And I confess he
-      carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a whole generation
-      of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
-      help a fellow in distress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to one
-      that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was continued
-      for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to stroke gently
-      the injured wings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
-      who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
-      carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp as
-      an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
-      sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to kill
-      her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
-      preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we wish
-      ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for their
-      enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0012" id="linkimage-0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0040m.jpg" alt="0040m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0040.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0041m.jpg" alt="0041m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0041.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON PILLAR ROCK
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>hose, we are told,
-      who have heard the East a-calling &ldquo;never heed naught else.&rdquo; Perhaps it is
-      so; but they can never have heard the call of Lakeland at New Year. They
-      can never have scrambled up the screes of the Great Gable on winter days
-      to try a fall with the Arrow Head and the Needle, the Chimney and Kern
-      Knotts Crack; never have seen the mighty Pillar Rock beckoning them from
-      the top of Black Sail Pass, nor the inn lights far down in the valley
-      calling them back from the mountains when night has fallen; never have sat
-      round the inn fire and talked of the jolly perils of the day, or played
-      chess with the landlord&mdash;and been beaten&mdash;or gone to bed with
-      the refrain of the climbers' chorus still challenging the roar of the wind
-      outside&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Come, let us tie the rope, the rope, the rope,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Come, let us link it round, round, round.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And he that will not climb to-day
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Why&mdash;leave him on the ground, the ground, the ground.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you have done these things you will not make much of the call of the
-      temple bells and the palm trees and the spicy garlic smells&mdash;least of
-      all at New Year. You will hear instead the call of the Pillar Rock and the
-      chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your oldest clothes and wind the
-      rope around you&mdash;singing meanwhile &ldquo;the rope, the rope,&rdquo;&mdash;and
-      take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will step out at
-      that gateway of the enchanted land&mdash;Keswick. Keswick! Wastdale!...
-      Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to whom they
-      open the magic casements at a breath.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And at Keswick you call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go to
-      Keswick without calling on George Abraham. You might as well go to
-      Wastdale Head without calling on the Pillar Rock. And George tells you
-      that of course he will be over at Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will
-      climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle with you on New Year's Day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave adieus, and are soon jolting
-      down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where every object is an old
-      friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the Bowder Stone and
-      there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow of Cat Bells.
-      (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and picking wimberries and
-      waking the echoes of Grisedale.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the
-      billowy summits of Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky
-      sentinels of the valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name.
-      Perhaps you jump down at Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to
-      Rosthwaite and lunch.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street is a myth
-      and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of the sanctuary and
-      the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling your rucksack on your
-      back and your rope over your shoulder and set out on the three hours'
-      tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is dark when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and these
-      December days are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by the
-      landlord and landlady&mdash;heirs of Auld Will Ritson&mdash;and in the
-      flagged entrance you see coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of
-      climbers' boots&mdash;boots that make the heart sing to look upon, boots
-      that have struck music out of many a rocky breast, boots whose missing
-      nails has each a story of its own. You put your own among them, don your
-      slippers, and plunge among your old companions of the rocks with jolly
-      greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it is&mdash;a master
-      from a school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a young
-      clergyman, a barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham,
-      and so on. But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and
-      the eternal boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Who shall tell of the days and nights that follow?&mdash;of the songs that
-      are sung, and the &ldquo;traverses&rdquo; that are made round the billiard room and
-      the barn, of the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous
-      climb, of the letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and the
-      departures for the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich with new
-      memories, you all foregather again&mdash;save only, perhaps, the jolly
-      lawyer and his fellows who have lost their way back from Scafell, and for
-      whom you are about to send out a search party when they turn up out of the
-      darkness with new material for fireside tales.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's Day&mdash;clear and
-      bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost in the air.
-      In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up ropes, putting on
-      putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for boots (the boots
-      are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing nails). We separate
-      at the threshold&mdash;this group for the Great Gable, that for Scafell,
-      ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock. It is a two and
-      a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and as daylight is short
-      there is no time to waste. We follow the water course up the valley,
-      splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice, cross the stream where
-      the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount the steep ascent of Black
-      Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down lonely Ennerdale, where,
-      springing from the flank of the Pillar mountain, is the great Rock we have
-      come to challenge. It stands like a tower, gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600
-      feet from its northern base to its summit, split on the south side by
-      Jordan Gap that divides the High Man or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser
-      rock.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have been overtaken by another party of three from the inn&mdash;one in
-      a white jersey which, for reasons that will appear, I shall always
-      remember. Together we follow the High Level Traverse, the track that leads
-      round the flank of the mountain to the top of Walker's Gully, the grim
-      descent to the valley, loved by the climber for the perils to which it
-      invites him. Here wre lunch and here we separate. We, unambitious (having
-      three passengers in our party of five), are climbing the East face by the
-      Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending by the New West route, one
-      of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here; theirs is from the other
-      side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I wish to speak, but of
-      theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will find the Slab and Notch
-      route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it is held in little esteem.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      With five on the rope, however, our progress is slow, and it is two
-      o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring and triumphant, and
-      stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar Rock, where the wind
-      blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over half the peaks of
-      Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in the book that lies
-      under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on the West face for
-      signs of our late companions. The sound of their voices comes up from
-      below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a glimpse of their forms.
-      &ldquo;They're going to be late,&rdquo; says George Abraham&mdash;the discoverer of
-      the New West&mdash;and then he indicates the closing stages of the climb
-      and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the most thrilling
-      escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock&mdash;two men falling,
-      and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of those three,
-      two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the next year on the
-      Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and turn cheerfully to
-      descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route which ends on the slope
-      of the mountain near to the starting point of the New West route.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in the East sheds no
-      light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are quite distinct,
-      coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the directions and
-      distinguish the speakers. &ldquo;Can't understand why those lads are cutting it
-      so fine,&rdquo; says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace down cracks and
-      grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and safety. And now we
-      look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one thing is visible&mdash;a
-      figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at full stretch. There it
-      hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the rocks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0047m.jpg" alt="0047m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0047.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The party, then, are only just making the traverse from the chimney to the
-      right, the most difficult manoeuvre of the climb&mdash;a manoeuvre in
-      which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain stationary while his
-      fellows pass him. &ldquo;This is bad,&rdquo; says George Abraham and he prepares for a
-      possible emergency. &ldquo;Are you in difficulties? Shall we wait?&rdquo; he cries.
-      &ldquo;Yes, wait.&rdquo; The words rebound from the cliff in the still air like
-      stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white jersey, still
-      moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every word they speak
-      echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board. You hear the
-      iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds on the ringing
-      wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if both feet are
-      dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a hold. I fancy one
-      or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look at each other in
-      silent comment. And all the time the figure in white, now growing dim, is
-      impaled on the face of the darkness, and the voices come down to us in
-      brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon is sailing into the
-      clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery &ldquo;All right&rdquo;
-       drops down from above. The difficult operation is over, the scattered
-      rocks are reached and nothing remains but the final slabs, which in the
-      absence of ice offer no great difficulty. Their descent by the easy Jordan
-      route will be quick. We turn to go with the comment that it is perhaps
-      more sensational to watch a climb than to do one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And then we plunge over the debris behind Pisgah, climb up the Great Doup,
-      where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we reach the friendly fence that
-      has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down to the top of Black Sail
-      Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours later we have
-      rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one to
-      his office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem
-      prosaic and ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say
-      only the word &ldquo;Wastdale&rdquo; to them and you shall awake its echoes; then you
-      shall see their faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable things.
-      They are no longer men of the world; they are spirits of the mountains.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0049m.jpg" alt="0049m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0049.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0050m.jpg" alt="0050m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0050.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      TWO VOICES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">Y</span>es,&rdquo; said the man
-      with the big voice, &ldquo;I've seen it coming for years. Years.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Have you?&rdquo; said the man with the timid voice. He had taken his seat on
-      the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of the tube strike
-      that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of London.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, years,&rdquo; said big voice, crowding as much modesty into the admission
-      as possible. &ldquo;I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long way off. Suppose
-      I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit psychic.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning of the
-      word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it meant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George&mdash;that's the man that up
-      to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and property and
-      things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.' Why, his
-      speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's it's come
-      back. I always said it would. I said we should pay for it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you, though?&rdquo; observed timid voice&mdash;not questioningly, but as an
-      assurance that he was listening attentively.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for years&mdash;years, I did.
-      And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in no time. In the
-      first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000 aeroplanes and
-      train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what I said. But
-      was it done?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why, but
-      there it is. I'm not much at the platform business&mdash;tub-thumping, I
-      call it&mdash;but for seeing things far off&mdash;well, I'm a bit psychic,
-      you know.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said timid voice, mournfully, &ldquo;it's a pity some of those talking
-      fellows are not psychic, too.&rdquo; He'd got the word firmly now.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Them psychic!&rdquo; said big voice, with scorn. &ldquo;We know what they are. You
-      see that Miss Asquith is marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word, he'll
-      turn out to be a German, that's what he'll turn out to be. It's German
-      money all round. Same with these strikes. There's German money behind
-      them.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Shouldn't wonder at all,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;I've a way of seeing things. The same in the
-      Boer War. I saw that coming for years.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you, indeed?&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to some of my friends. There it was
-      in black and white. They said it was wonderful how it all turned out&mdash;two
-      years, I said, 250 millions of money, and 20,000 casualties. That's what I
-      said, and that's what it was. I said the Boers would win, and I claim they
-      did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave them all they asked for.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You were about right,&rdquo; assented timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round his
-      finger&mdash;that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his finger.
-      Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building a
-      fleet as big as ours.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Never did like that man,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the armistice
-      means. They've escaped&mdash;and just when we'd got them down.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's a shame,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;This war ought to have gone on longer,&rdquo; continued big voice. &ldquo;My opinion
-      is that the world wanted thinning out. People are too crowded. That's what
-      they are&mdash;they're too crowded.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I agree there,&rdquo; said timid voice. &ldquo;We wanted thinning.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It ought to have
-      gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should like to know
-      his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says <i>John Bull</i>, and
-      that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a case
-      down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building society&mdash;regular
-      chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building society went
-      smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I don't like those goody-goody people,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what that
-      man knew. 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women players,' he
-      said. Strordinary how he knew things.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Wonderful,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;There's never been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare
-      knew&mdash;not one-half.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No doubt about it,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I consider that William Shakespeare was the most psychic man that ever
-      lived. I don't suppose there was ever such a long-sighted man before <i>or</i>
-      since. He could see through anything. He'd have seen through Wilson and
-      he'd have seen this war didn't stop before the job was done. It's a pity
-      we haven't a William Shakespeare now. Lloyd George and Asquith are not in
-      it with him. They're simply duds beside William Shakespeare. Couldn't hold
-      a candle to him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Seems to me,&rdquo; said timid voice, &ldquo;that there's nobody, as you might say,
-      worth anything to-day.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;We've gone right off. There used to be men. Old
-      Dizzy, he was a man. So was Joseph Chamberlain. He was right about Tariff
-      Reform. I saw it years before he did. Free Trade I said was all right
-      years ago, when we were manufacturing for the world. But it's out of date.
-      I saw it was out of date long before Joseph Chamberlain. It's the result
-      of being long-sighted. I said to my father, 'If we stick to Free Trade
-      this country is done.' That's what I said, and it's true. We <i>are</i>
-      done. Look at these strikes. We stick to things too long. I believe in
-      looking ahead. When I was in America before the war they wouldn't believe
-      I came from England. Wouldn't believe it. 'But the English are so slow,'
-      they said, 'and you&mdash;why you want to be getting on in front of us.'
-      That's my way. I look ahead and don't stand still.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's the best way too,&rdquo; said timid voice. &ldquo;We want more of it. We're too
-      slow.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And so on. When I came to the end of my journey I rose so that the light
-      of a lamp shone on the speakers as I passed. They were both well-dressed,
-      ordinary-looking men. If I had passed them in the street I should have
-      said they were intelligent men of the well-to-do business class. I have
-      set down their conversation, which I could not help overhearing, and which
-      was carried on by the big voice in a tone meant for publication, as
-      exactly as I can recall it. There was a good deal more of it, all of the
-      same character. You will laugh at it, or weep over it, according to your
-      humour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0055m.jpg" alt="0055m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0055.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING TIDY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>ny careful
-      observer of my habits would know that I am on the eve of an adventure&mdash;a
-      holiday, or a bankruptcy, or a fire, or a voluntary liquidation (whatever
-      that may be), or an elopement, or a duel, or a conspiracy, or&mdash;in
-      short, of something out of the normal, something romantic or dangerous,
-      pleasurable or painful, interrupting the calm current of my affairs. Being
-      the end of July, he would probably say: That fellow is on the brink of the
-      holiday fever. He has all the symptoms of the epidemic. Observe his
-      negligent, abstracted manner. Notice his slackness about business&mdash;how
-      he just comes and looks in and goes out as though he were a visitor paying
-      a call, or a person who had been left a fortune and didn't care twopence
-      what happened. Observe his clothes, how they are burgeoning into
-      unaccustomed gaiety, even levity. Is not his hat set on at just a shade of
-      a sporting angle? Does not his stick twirl with a hint of irresponsible
-      emotions? Is there not the glint of far horizons in his eye? Did you not
-      hear him humming as he came up the stairs? Yes, assuredly the fellow is
-      going for a holiday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Your suspicions would be confirmed when you found me ransacking my private
-      room and clearing up my desk. The news that I am clearing up my desk has
-      been an annual sensation for years. I remember a colleague of mine once
-      coming in and finding me engaged in that spectacular feat. His face fell
-      with apprehension. His voice faltered. &ldquo;I hope you are not leaving us,&rdquo; he
-      said. He, poor fellow, could not think of anything else that could account
-      for so unusual an operation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For I am one of those people who treat their desks with respect. We do not
-      believe in worrying them about their contents. We do not bully them into
-      disclosing their secrets. We stuff the drawers full of papers and
-      documents, and leave them to mellow and ripen. And when the drawers are
-      full we pile up other papers and documents on either side of us; and the
-      higher the pile gets the more comfortable and cosy we feel. We would not
-      disturb them for worlds. Why should we set our sleeping dogs barking at us
-      when they are willing to go on sleeping if we leave them alone? And
-      consider the show they make. No one coming to see us can fail to be
-      impressed by such piles of documents. They realise how busy we are. They
-      understand that we have no time for idle talk. They see that we have all
-      these papers to dispose of&mdash;otherwise, why are they there? They get
-      their business done and go away quickly, and spread the news of what
-      tremendous fellows we are for work.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am told by one who worked with him, that old Lord Strathcona knew the
-      trick quite well, and used it unblushingly. When a visitor was announced
-      he tumbled his papers about in imposing confusion and was discovered
-      breasting the mighty ocean of his labours, his chin resolutely out of the
-      water. But he was a supreme artist in this form of amiable imposture. On
-      one occasion he was entertained at a great public dinner in a provincial
-      city. In the midst of the proceedings a portly flunkey was observed
-      carrying a huge envelope, with seals and trappings, on a salver. For whom
-      was this momentous document intended? Ah, he has paused behind the grand
-      old man with the wonderful snowy head. It is for him. The company looks on
-      in respectful silence. Even here this astonishing old man cannot escape
-      the cares of office. As he takes the envelope his neighbour at the table
-      looks at the address. It was in Strathcona's own hand-writing!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we of the rank and file are not dishevelled by artifice, like this
-      great man. It is a natural gift. And do not suppose that our disorder
-      makes us unhappy. We like it. We follow our vocation, as Falstaff says.
-      Some people are born tidy and some are born untidy. We were bom untidy,
-      and if good people, taking pity on us, try to make us tidy we get lost. It
-      was so with George Crabbe. He lived in magnificent disorder, papers and
-      books and letters all over the floor, piled on every chair, surging up to
-      the ceiling. Once, in his absence, his niece tidied up for him. When he
-      came back he found himself like a stranger in a strange land. He did not
-      know his way about in this desolation of tidiness, and he promptly
-      restored the familiar disorder, so that he could find things. It sounds
-      absurd, of course, but we people with a genius for untidiness must always
-      seem absurd to the tidy people. They cannot understand that there is a
-      method in our muddle, an order in our disorder, secret paths through the
-      wilderness known only to our feet, that, in short, we are rather like cats
-      whose perceptions become more acute the darker it gets. It is not true
-      that we never find things. We often find things.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And consider the joy of finding things you don't hope to find. You, sir,
-      sitting at your spotless desk, with your ordered and labelled shelves
-      about you, and your files and your letter-racks, and your card indexes and
-      your cross references, and your this, that, and the other&mdash;what do
-      you know of the delights of which I speak? You do not come suddenly and
-      ecstatically upon the thing you seek. You do not know the shock of
-      delighted discovery. You do not shout &ldquo;Eureka,&rdquo; and summon your family
-      around you to rejoice in the miracle that has happened. No star swims into
-      your ken out of the void. You cannot be said to find things at all, for
-      you never lose them, and things must be lost before they can be truly
-      found. The father of the Prodigal had to lose his son before he could
-      experience the joy that has become an immortal legend of the world. It is
-      we who lose things, not you, sir, who never find them, who know the Feast
-      of the Fatted Calf.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not a plea for untidiness. I am no hot gospeller of disorder. I
-      only seek to make the best, of a bad job, and to show that we untidy
-      fellows are not without a case, have our romantic compensations, moments
-      of giddy exaltation unknown to those who are endowed with the pedestrian
-      and profitable virtue of tidiness. That is all. I would have the
-      pedestrian virtue if I could. In other days, before I had given up hope of
-      reforming myself, and when I used to make good resolutions as piously as
-      my neighbours, I had many a spasm of tidiness. I looked with envy on my
-      friend Higginson, who was a miracle of order, could put his hand on
-      anything he wanted in the dark, kept his documents and his files and
-      records like regiments of soldiers obedient to call, knew what he had
-      written on 4th March 1894, and what he had said on 10th January 1901, and
-      had a desk that simply perspired with tidiness. And in a spirit of
-      emulation I bought a roll-top desk. I believed that tidiness was a
-      purchasable commodity. You went to a furniture dealer and bought a large
-      roll-top desk, and when it came home the genius of order came home with
-      it. The bigger the desk, the more intricate its devices, the larger was
-      the measure of order bestowed on you. My desk was of the first magnitude.
-      It had an inconceivable wealth of drawers and pigeon-holes. It was a desk
-      of many mansions. And I labelled them all, and gave them all separate jobs
-      to perform.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And then I sat back and looked the future boldly in the face. Now, said I,
-      the victory is won. Chaos and old night are banished. Order reigns in
-      Warsaw. I have but to open a drawer and every secret I seek will leap
-      magically to light. My articles will write themselves, for every reference
-      will come to my call, obedient as Ariel to the bidding of Prospero.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;Approach, my Ariel; come,&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I shall say, and from some remote fastness the obedient spirit will appear
-      with&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      To swim, to dive into the sea, to ride
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      On the curl'd clouds.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I shall know where Aunt Jane's letters are, and where my bills are, and my
-      cuttings about this, that, and the other, and my diaries and notebooks,
-      and the time-table and the street guide. I shall never be short of a match
-      or a spare pair of spectacles, or a pencil, or&mdash;in short, life will
-      henceforth be an easy amble to old age. For a week it worked like a charm.
-      Then the demon of disorder took possession of the beast. It devoured
-      everything and yielded up nothing. Into its soundless deeps my merchandise
-      sank to oblivion. And I seemed to sink with it. It was not a desk, but a
-      tomb. One day I got a man to take it away to a second-hand shop.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Since then I have given up being tidy. I have realised that the quality of
-      order is not purchasable at furniture shops, is not a quality of external
-      things, but an indwelling spirit, a frame of mind, a habit that perhaps
-      may be acquired but cannot be bought.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have a smaller desk with fewer drawers, all of them nicely choked up
-      with the litter of the past. Once a year I have a gaol delivery of the
-      incarcerated. The ghosts come out into the daylight, and I face them
-      unflinching and unafraid. They file past, pointing minatory fingers at me
-      as they go into the waste-paper basket. They file past now. But I do not
-      care a dump; for to-morrow I shall seek fresh woods and pastures new.
-      To-morrow the ghosts of that old untidy desk will have no terrors for my
-      emancipated spirit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0061m.jpg" alt="0061m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0061.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0062m.jpg" alt="0062m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0062.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      AN EPISODE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e were talking of
-      the distinction between madness and sanity when one of the company said
-      that we were all potential madmen, just as every gambler was a potential
-      suicide, or just as every hero was a potential coward.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I mean,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that the difference between the sane and the insane is
-      not that the sane man never has mad thoughts. He has, but he recognises
-      them as mad, and keeps his hand on the rein of action. He thinks them, and
-      dismisses them. It is so with the saint and the sinner. The saint is not
-      exempt from evil thoughts, but he knows they are evil, is master of
-      himself, and puts them away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I speak with experience,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;for the potential madman in me
-      once nearly got the upper hand. I won, but it was a near thing, and if I
-      had gone down in that struggle I should have been branded for all time as
-      a criminal lunatic, and very properly put away in some place of safety.
-      Yet I suppose no one ever suspected me of lunacy.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tell us about it,&rdquo; we said in chorus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It was one evening in New York,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I had had a very exhausting
-      time, and was no doubt mentally tired. I had taken tea with two friends at
-      the Belmont Hotel, and as we found we were all disengaged that evening we
-      agreed to spend it together at the Hippodrome, where a revue, winding up
-      with a great spectacle that had thrilled New York, was being presented.
-      When we went to the box office we found that we could not get three seats
-      together, so we separated, my friends going to the floor of the house and
-      I to the dress circle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;If you are familiar with the place you will know its enormous dimensions
-      and the vastness of the stage. When I took my seat next but one to one of
-      the gangways the house was crowded and the performance had begun. It was
-      trivial and ordinary enough, but it kept me amused, and between the acts I
-      went out to see the New Yorkers taking 'soft' drinks in the promenades. I
-      did not join them in that mild indulgence, nor did I speak to anyone.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;After the interval before the concluding spectacle I did not return to my
-      seat until the curtain was up. The transformation hit me like a blow. The
-      huge stage had been converted into a lake, and behind the lake through
-      filmy draperies there was the suggestion of a world in flames. I passed to
-      my seat and sat down. I turned from the blinding glow of the conflagration
-      in front and cast my eye over the sea of faces that filled the great
-      theatre from floor to ceiling. 'Heavens! if there were a fire in this
-      place,' I thought. At that thought the word 'Fire' blazed in my brain like
-      a furnace. 'What if some madman cried Fire?' flashed through my mind, and
-      then '<i>What if I cried Fire?</i>'
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;At that hideous suggestion, the demon word that suffused my brain leapt
-      like a shrieking maniac within me and screamed and fought for utterance. I
-      felt it boiling in my throat, I felt it on my tongue. I felt myself to be
-      two persons engaged in a deadly grapple&mdash;a sane person struggling to
-      keep his feet against the mad rush of an insane monster. I clenched my
-      teeth. So long as I kept my teeth tight&mdash;tight&mdash;tight the raging
-      madman would fling himself at the bars in vain. But could I keep up the
-      struggle till he fell exhausted? I gripped the arms of my seat. I felt
-      beads of perspiration breaking out on my right brow. How singular that in
-      moments of strain the moisture always broke out at that spot. I could
-      notice these things with a curious sense of detachment as if there were a
-      third person within me watching the frenzied conflict. And still that
-      titanic impulse lay on my tongue and hammered madly at my clenched teeth.
-      Should I go out? That would look odd, and be an ignominious surrender. I
-      must fight this folly down honestly and not run away from it. If I had a
-      book I would try to read. If I had a friend beside me I would talk. But
-      both these expedients were denied me. Should I turn to my unknown
-      neighbour and break the spell with an inconsequent remark or a request for
-      his programme? I looked at him out of the tail of my eye. He was a
-      youngish man, in evening dress, and sitting alone as I was. But his eyes
-      were fixed intently on the stage. He was obviously gripped by the
-      spectacle. Had I spoken to him earlier in the evening the course would
-      have been simple; but to break the ice in the midst of this tense silence
-      was impossible. Moreover, I had a programme on my knees and what was there
-      to say?...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I turned my eyes from the stage. What was going on there I could not
-      tell. It was a blinding blur of Fire that seemed to infuriate the monster
-      within me. I looked round at the house. I looked up at the ceiling and
-      marked its gilded ornaments. I turned and gazed intensely at the occupants
-      of the boxes, trying to turn the current of my mind into speculations
-      about their dress, their faces, their characters. But the tyrant was too
-      strong to be overthrown by such conscious effort. I looked up at the
-      gallery; I looked down at the pit; I tried to busy my thoughts with
-      calculations about the numbers present, the amount of money in the house,
-      the cost of running the establishment&mdash;anything. In vain. I leaned
-      back in my seat, my teeth still clenched, my hands still gripping the arms
-      of the chair. How still the house was! How enthralled it seemed!... I was
-      conscious that people about me were noticing my restless inattention. If
-      they knew the truth.... If they could see the raging torment that was
-      battering at my teeth.... Would it never go? How long would this wild
-      impulse burn on my tongue? Was there no distraction that would
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Cleanse the stuffed bosom of this perilous stuff
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That feeds upon the brain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I recalled the reply&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Therein the patient must minister to himself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How fantastic it seemed. Here was that cool observer within me quoting
-      poetry over my own delirium without being able to allay it. What a mystery
-      was the brain that could become the theatre of such wild drama. I turned
-      my glance to the orchestra. Ah, what was that they were playing?... Yes,
-      it was a passage from Dvorak's American Symphony. How familiar it was! My
-      mind incontinently leapt to a remote scene, I saw a well-lit room and
-      children round the hearth and a figure at the piano....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It was as though the madman within me had fallen stone dead. I looked at
-      the stage coolly, and observed that someone was diving into the lake from
-      a trapeze that seemed a hundred feet high. The glare was still behind, but
-      I knew it for a sham glare. What a fool I had been.... But what a hideous
-      time I had had.... And what a close shave.... I took out my handkerchief
-      and drew it across my forehead.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0066m.jpg" alt="0066m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0066.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0067m.jpg" alt="0067m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0067.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <h3>
-      ON SUPERSTITIONS
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was inevitable
-      that the fact that a murder has taken place at a house with the number 13
-      in a street, the letters of whose name number 13, would not pass
-      unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that have been committed, I
-      suppose we should find that as many have taken place at No. 6 or No. 7, or
-      any other number you choose, as at No. 13&mdash;that the law of averages
-      is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But this consideration does not
-      prevent the world remarking on the fact when No. 13 has its turn. Not that
-      the world believes there is anything in the superstition. It is quite sure
-      it is a mere childish folly, of course. Few of us would refuse to take a
-      house because its number was 13, or decline an invitation to dinner
-      because there were to be 13 at table. But most of us would be just a shade
-      happier if that desirable residence were numbered 11, and not any the less
-      pleased with the dinner if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept
-      him away. We would not confess this little weakness to each other. We
-      might even refuse to admit it to ourselves, but it is there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are numerous
-      streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which there is no
-      house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a bed in a
-      hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though it has
-      worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations of a
-      discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house, and
-      into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of a
-      bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession to
-      the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery is a
-      matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow on the
-      mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat recovery.
-      Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers in the sick
-      bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of a certain state of
-      mind in the patient. There are few more curious revelations in that moving
-      record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences during the war, than the case
-      of the man who died of a pimple on his nose. He had been hideously
-      mutilated in battle and was brought into hospital a sheer wreck; but he
-      was slowly patched up and seemed to have been saved when a pimple appeared
-      on his nose. It was nothing in itself, but it was enough to produce a
-      mental state that checked the flickering return of life. It assumed a
-      fantastic importance in the mind of the patient who, having survived the
-      heavy blows of fate, died of something less than a pin prick. It is not
-      difficult to understand that so fragile a hold of life might yield to the
-      sudden discovery that you were lying in No. 13 bed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
-      wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of all
-      the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that I
-      constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have associated
-      the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had anything but the
-      most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved a bus, and as free
-      from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I would not change its
-      number if I had the power to do so. But there are other circumstances of
-      which I should find it less easy to clear myself of suspicion under cross
-      examination. I never see a ladder against a house side without feeling
-      that it is advisable to walk round it rather than under it. I say to
-      myself that this is not homage to a foolish superstition, but a duty to my
-      family. One must think of one's family. The fellow at the top of the
-      ladder may drop anything. He may even drop himself. He may have had too
-      much to drink. He may be a victim of epileptic fits, and epileptic fits,
-      as everyone knows, come on at the most unseasonable times and places. It
-      is a mere measure of ordinary safety to walk round the ladder. No man is
-      justified in inviting danger in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle
-      fancy. Moreover, probably that fancy has its roots in the common-sense
-      fact that a man on a ladder does occasionally drop things. No doubt many
-      of our superstitions have these commonplace and sensible origins. I
-      imagine, for example, that the Jewish objection to pork as unclean on
-      religious grounds is only due to the fact that in Eastern climates it is
-      unclean on physical grounds.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather glad
-      that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing so. Even
-      if&mdash;conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to myself&mdash;I
-      walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not done so as a
-      kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have challenged it
-      rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way of dodging the
-      absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the ladder. This is not easy.
-      In the same way I am sensible of a certain satisfaction when I see the new
-      moon in the open rather than through glass, and over my right shoulder
-      rather than my left. I would not for any consideration arrange these
-      things consciously; but if they happen so I fancy I am better pleased than
-      if they do not. And on these occasions I have even caught my hand&mdash;which
-      chanced to be in my pocket at the time&mdash;turning over money, a little
-      surreptitiously I thought, but still undeniably turning it. Hands have
-      habits of their own and one can't always be watching them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover in
-      ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a creed
-      outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the laws of
-      the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
-      superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and man
-      seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
-      neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of their
-      hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
-      inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
-      misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon of
-      life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of battles
-      being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more relation to
-      the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When Pompey was
-      afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as prætor he shouted to the
-      Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election postponed, for
-      the Romans would never transact business after it had thundered. Alexander
-      surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took counsel with them as a
-      modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers. Even so great a man as
-      Cæsar and so modern and enlightened a man as Cicero left their fate to
-      augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were right and sometimes they were
-      wrong, but whether right or wrong they were equally meaningless. Cicero
-      lost his life by trusting to the wisdom of crows. When he was in flight
-      from Antony and Cæsar Augustus he put to sea and might have escaped. But
-      some crows chanced to circle round his vessel, and he took the
-      circumstance to be unfavourable to his action, returned to shore and was
-      murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece consulted the omens and the
-      oracles where the farmer to-day is only careful of his manures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I should have liked to have seen Cæsar and I should have liked to have
-      heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later day and
-      who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the better end
-      of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad. We do not
-      know much more of the Power that
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Turns the handle of this idle show
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      than our forefathers did, but at least we have escaped the grotesque
-      shadows that enveloped them. We do not look for divine guidance in the
-      entrails of animals or the flight of crows, and the House of Commons does
-      not adjourn at a clap of thunder.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0072m.jpg" alt="0072m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0072.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0073m.jpg" alt="0073m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0073.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON POSSESSION
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> met a lady the
-      other day who had travelled much and seen much, and who talked with great
-      vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one peculiarity about her.
-      If I happened to say that I too had been, let us say, to Tangier, her
-      interest in Tangier immediately faded away and she switched the
-      conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not been, and where
-      therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about the Honble. Ulick
-      de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had the honour of meeting
-      that eminent personage. And so with books and curiosities, places and
-      things&mdash;she was only interested in them so long as they were her
-      exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and when she ceased to
-      possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have Tangier all to herself
-      she did not want it at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
-      people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
-      not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
-      exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
-      countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else in
-      the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching that
-      appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he was getting
-      something that no one else had got, and when he found that someone else
-      had got it its value ceased to exist.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything in
-      the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
-      material thing. I do not own&mdash;to take an example&mdash;that wonderful
-      picture by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his
-      grandchild. I have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own
-      room I could not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for
-      years. It is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries
-      of the mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have
-      read, and beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it
-      whenever I like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the
-      painter saw in the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the
-      bottle nose as he stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long
-      centuries ago. The pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may
-      share this spiritual ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine,
-      or the shade of a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or
-      the song of the lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is
-      common to all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
-      woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of solitude
-      which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient Britons
-      hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense a certain
-      noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether he has seen
-      these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the little hamlet
-      know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them for a perpetual
-      playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but we could not have a
-      richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on every tree. For the
-      pleasure of things is not in their possession but in their use.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised long
-      ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who scurried
-      through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to say that
-      they had done something that other people had not done. Even so great a
-      man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive possession.
-      De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at the mountains,
-      he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene, whereupon
-      Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone else to
-      praise <i>his</i> mountains. He was the high priest of nature, and had
-      something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of revelation, and
-      anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence, except through him,
-      was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to nature.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
-      possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and Bernard
-      Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy of the free
-      human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of communism. On this
-      point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's doctrine and pointed out
-      that the State is not a mere individual, but a body composed of dissimilar
-      parts whose unity is to be drawn &ldquo;ex dissimilium hominum consensu.&rdquo; I am
-      as sensitive as anyone about my title to my personal possessions. I
-      dislike having my umbrella stolen or my pocket picked, and if I found a
-      burglar on my premises I am sure I shouldn't be able to imitate the
-      romantic example of the good bishop in &ldquo;Les Misérables.&rdquo; When I found the
-      other day that some young fruit trees I had left in my orchard for
-      planting had been removed in the night I was sensible of a very
-      commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean Valjean was I shouldn't have
-      asked him to come and take some more trees. I should have invited him to
-      return what he had removed or submit to consequences that follow in such
-      circumstances.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
-      necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
-      society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who ventured
-      to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or two hence.
-      Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control and the range
-      of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If mankind finds that
-      it can live more conveniently and more happily without private property it
-      will do so. In spite of the Decalogue private property is only a human
-      arrangement, and no reasonable observer of the operation of the
-      arrangement will pretend that it executes justice unfailingly in the
-      affairs of men. But because the idea of private property has been
-      permitted to override with its selfishness the common good of humanity, it
-      does not follow that there are not limits within which that idea can
-      function for the general convenience and advantage. The remedy is not in
-      abolishing it altogether, but in subordinating it to the idea of equal
-      justice and community of purpose. It will, reasonably understood, deny me
-      the right to call the coal measures, which were laid with the foundations
-      of the earth, my private property or to lay waste a countryside for deer
-      forests, but it will still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of
-      ownership. And the more true the equation of private and public rights is,
-      the more secure shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and
-      common interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the
-      grotesque and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of
-      private property which to some minds make the idea of private property
-      itself inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea
-      of private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
-      the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger of
-      attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard without
-      any apprehensions as to their safety.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
-      ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
-      things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment. I
-      do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
-      experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
-      mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. &ldquo;I do not
-      know how it is,&rdquo; said a very rich man in my hearing, &ldquo;but when I am in
-      London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I want to
-      be in London.&rdquo; He was not wanting to escape from London or the country,
-      but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions and was
-      bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher &ldquo;his hands were full but his
-      soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world.&rdquo; There was wisdom
-      as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that &ldquo;he who was born first
-      has the greatest number of old clothes.&rdquo; It is not a bad rule for the
-      pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage to those
-      who take a pride in its abundance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0078m.jpg" alt="0078m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0078.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0079m.jpg" alt="0079m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0079.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BORES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was talking in
-      the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat blunt manner when
-      Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and began:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, I think America is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; &ldquo;Now, do you mind giving
-      us two minutes?&rdquo; broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom,
-      unabashed and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group.
-      Poor Blossom! I had almost said &ldquo;Dear Blossom.&rdquo; For he is really an
-      excellent fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that
-      he is a bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable
-      company. You feel that you could love Blossom if he would only keep away.
-      If you heard of his death you would be genuinely grieved and would send a
-      wreath to his grave and a nice letter of condolence to his wife and
-      numerous children.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it is only absence that makes the heart grow fond of Blossom. When he
-      appears all your affection for him withers. You hope that he will not see
-      you. You shrink to your smallest dimensions. You talk with an air of
-      intense privacy. You keep your face averted. You wonder whether the back
-      of your head is easily distinguishable among so many heads. All in vain.
-      He approacheth with the remorselessness of fate. He putteth his hand upon
-      your shoulder. He remarketh with the air of one that bringeth new new's
-      and good news&mdash;&ldquo;Well, I think that America is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
-       And then he taketh a chair and thou lookest at the clock and wonderest how
-      soon thou canst decently remember another engagement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Blossom is the bore courageous. He descends on the choicest company
-      without fear or parley. Out, sword, and at 'em, is his motto. He advances
-      with a firm voice and a confident air, as of one who knows he is welcome
-      everywhere and has only to choose his company. He will have nothing but
-      the best, and as he enters the room you may see his eye roving from table
-      to table, not in search of the glad eye of recognition, but of the most
-      select companionship, and having marked down his prey he goes forward
-      boldly to the attack. Salutes the circle with easy familiarity, draw's up
-      his chair with assured and masterful authority, and plunges into the
-      stream of talk with the heavy impact of a walrus or hippopotamus taking a
-      bath. The company around him melts away, but he is not dismayed. Left
-      alone with a circle of empty chairs, he riseth like a giant refreshed,
-      casteth his eye abroad, noteth another group that whetteth his appetite
-      for good fellowship, moveth towards it with bold and resolute front. You
-      may see him put to flight as many as three circles inside an hour, and
-      retire at the end, not because he is beaten, but because there is nothing
-      left worth crossing swords with. &ldquo;A very good club to-night,&rdquo; he says to
-      Mrs B. as he puts on his slippers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not so Trip. He is the bore circumspect. He proceeds by sap and mine where
-      Blossom charges the battlements sword in hand. He enters timidly as one
-      who hopes that he will be unobserved. He goes to the table and examines
-      the newspapers, takes one and seats himself alone. But not so much alone
-      that he is entirely out of the range of those fellows in the corner who
-      keep up such a cut-and-thrust of wit. Perchance one of them may catch his
-      eye and open the circle to him. He readeth his paper sedulously, but his
-      glance passeth incontinently outside the margin or over the top of the
-      page to the coveted group. No responsive eye meets his. He moveth just a
-      thought nearer along the sofa by the wall. Now he is well within hearing.
-      Now he is almost of the company itself. But still unseen&mdash;noticeably
-      unseen. He puts down his paper, not ostentatiously but furtively. He
-      listens openly to the conversation, as one who has been enmeshed in it
-      unconsciously, accidentally, almost unwillingly, for was he not absorbed
-      in his paper until this conversation disturbed him? And now it would be
-      almost uncivil not to listen. He waits for a convenient opening and then
-      gently insinuates a remark like one venturing on untried ice. And the ice
-      breaks and the circle melts. For Trip, too, is a bore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I remember in those wonderful submarine pictures of the brothers
-      Williamson, which we saw in London some time ago, a strange fish at whose
-      approach all the other fish turned tail. It was not, I think, that they
-      feared him, nor that he was less presentable in appearance than any other
-      fish, but simply that there was something about him that made them
-      remember things. I forget what his name was, or whether he even had a
-      name. But his calling was obvious. He was the Club Bore. He was the fish
-      who sent the other fish about their business. I thought of Blossom as I
-      saw that lonely creature whisking through the water in search of some
-      friendly ear into which he could remark&mdash;&ldquo;Well, I think that America
-      is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; or words to that effect. I thought how superior
-      an animal is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish
-      did. He hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn
-      lamb. He looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth
-      even to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his
-      feelings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of
-      sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists
-      on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but this
-      is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. And the humour must not be
-      that counterfeit currency which consists in the retailing of borrowed
-      stories. &ldquo;Of all bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang, and Heaven
-      in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate its species,&rdquo; says De
-      Quincey, &ldquo;the most insufferable is the teller of good stories.&rdquo; It is an
-      over hard saying, subject to exceptions; but it contains the essential
-      truth, for the humour of good company must be an authentic emanation of
-      personality and not a borrowed tale. It is no discredit to be a bore. Very
-      great men have been bores! I fancy that Macaulay, with all his
-      transcendent gifts, was a bore. My head aches even at the thought of an
-      evening spent in the midst of the terrific torrent of facts and
-      certainties that poured from that brilliant and amiable man. I find myself
-      in agreement for once with Melbourne who wished that he was &ldquo;as cocksure
-      of one thing as Macaulay was of everything.&rdquo; There is pretty clear
-      evidence that Wordsworth was a bore and that Coleridge was a bore, and I
-      am sure Bob Southey must have been an intolerable bore. And Neckar's
-      daughter was fortunate to escape Gibbon for he was assuredly a prince of
-      bores. He took pains to leave posterity in no doubt on the point. He wrote
-      his &ldquo;Autobiography&rdquo; which, as a wit observed, showed that &ldquo;he did not know
-      the difference between himself and the Roman Empire. He has related his
-      'progressions from London to Bariton and from Bariton to London' in the
-      same monotonous, majestic periods that he recorded the fall of states and
-      empires.&rdquo; Yes, an indubitable bore. Yet these were all admirable men and
-      even great men. Let not therefore the Blossoms and the Trips be
-      discomfited. It may be that it is not they who are not fit company for us,
-      but we who are not fit company for them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0084m.jpg" alt="0084m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0084.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0027" id="linkimage-0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0085m.jpg" alt="0085m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0085.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      A LOST SWARM
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e were busy with
-      the impossible hen when the alarm came. The impossible hen is sitting on a
-      dozen eggs in the shed, and, like the boy on the burning deck, obstinately
-      refuses to leave the post of duty. A sense of duty is an excellent thing,
-      but even a sense of duty can be carried to excess, and this hen's sense of
-      duty is simply a disease. She is so fiercely attached to her task that she
-      cannot think of eating, and resents any attempt to make her eat as a
-      personal affront or a malignant plot against her impending family. Lest
-      she should die at her post, a victim to a misguided hunger strike, we were
-      engaged in the delicate process of substituting a more reasonable hen, and
-      it was at this moment that a shout from the orchard announced that No. 5
-      was swarming.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had
-      been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells
-      visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around
-      the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the
-      thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more
-      exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You pass
-      it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched
-      within. The next, the whole colony roars out like a cataract, envelops the
-      hive in a cloud of living dust until the queen has emerged and gives
-      direction to the masses that slowly cohere around her as she settles on
-      some branch. The excitement is contagious. It is a call to adventure with
-      the unknown, an adventure sharpened by the threat of loss and tense with
-      the instancy of action. They have the start. It is your wit against their
-      impulse, your strategy against their momentum. The cloud thins and expands
-      as it moves away from the hive and you are puzzled to know whither the
-      main stream is moving in these ever widening folds of motion. The first
-      indeterminate signs of direction to-day were towards the beech woods
-      behind the cottage, but with the aid of a syringe we put up a barrage of
-      water in that direction, and headed them off towards a row of chestnuts
-      and limes at the end of the paddock beyond the orchard. A swift encircling
-      move, armed with syringe and pail, brought them again under the improvised
-      rainstorm. They concluded that it was not such a fine day as they had
-      thought after all, and that they had better take shelter at once, and to
-      our entire content the mass settled in a great blob on a conveniently low
-      bough of a chestnut tree. Then, by the aid of a ladder and patient
-      coaxing, the blob was safely transferred to a skep, and carried off
-      triumphantly to the orchard.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0028" id="linkimage-0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0089m.jpg" alt="0089m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0089.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And now, but for the war, all would have been well. For, but for the war,
-      there would have been a comfortable home in which the adventurers could
-      have taken up their new quarters. But hives are as hard to come by in
-      these days as petrol or matches, or butter or cheese, or most of the other
-      common things of life. We had ransacked England for hives and the
-      neighbourhood for wood with which to make hives; but neither could be had,
-      though promises were plenty, and here was the beginning of the swarms of
-      May, each of them worth a load of hay according to the adage, and never a
-      hive to welcome them with. Perhaps to-morrow something would arrive, if
-      not from Gloucester, then from Surrey. If only the creatures would make
-      themselves at home in the skep for a day or two....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But no. For two hours or so all seemed well. Then perhaps they found the
-      skep too hot, perhaps they detected the odour of previous tenants, perhaps&mdash;but
-      who can read the thoughts of these inscrutable creatures? Suddenly the
-      skep was enveloped in a cyclone of bees, and again the orchard sang with
-      the exciting song of the wings. For a moment the cloud seemed to hover
-      over an apple tree near by, and once more the syringe was at work
-      insisting, in spite of the sunshine, that it was a dreadfully wet day on
-      which to be about, and that a dry skep, even though pervaded by the smell
-      of other bees, had points worth considering. In vain. This time they had
-      made up their minds. It may be that news had come to them, from one of the
-      couriers sent out to prospect for fresh quarters, of a suitable home
-      elsewhere, perhaps a deserted hive, perhaps a snug hollow in some porch or
-      in the bole of an ancient tree. Whatever the goal, the decision was final.
-      One moment the cloud was about us; the air was filled with the
-      high-pitched roar of thirty thousand pair of wings. The next moment the
-      cloud had gone&mdash;gone sailing high over the trees in the paddock and
-      out across the valley. We burst through the paddock fence into the
-      cornfield beyond; but we might as well have chased the wind. Our first
-      load of hay had taken wings and gone beyond recovery. For an hour or two
-      there circled round the deserted skep a few hundred odd bees who had
-      apparently been out when the second decision to migrate was taken, and
-      found themselves homeless and queenless. I saw some of them try to enter
-      other hives, but they were promptly ejected as foreigners by the sentries
-      who keep the porch and admit none who do not carry the authentic odour of
-      the hive. Perhaps the forlorn creatures got back to No. 5, and the young
-      colony left in possession of that tenement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full of hope,
-      for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's bench under the
-      pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and plane, and before
-      nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And it never rains
-      but it pours&mdash;here is a telegram telling us of three hives on the
-      way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We will harvest our
-      loads of hay before they take wing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0029" id="linkimage-0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0090m.jpg" alt="0090m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0090.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0030" id="linkimage-0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0091m.jpg" alt="0091m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0091.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      YOUNG AMERICA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>f you want to
-      understand America,&rdquo; said my host, &ldquo;come and see her young barbarians at
-      play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at Princeton. It will be a great
-      game. Come and see it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured victory
-      in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but consider the
-      record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was as much ahead of
-      Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of Cambridge on the
-      river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It was like a Derby
-      Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the great hall of that
-      magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated men and women, wearing
-      the favours of the rival colleges&mdash;yellow for Princeton and red for
-      Harvard&mdash;passed through the gateways to the platform, filling train
-      after train, that dipped under the Hudson and, coming out into the
-      sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered away with its jolly
-      load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country, through historic
-      Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off towers of Princeton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges, such
-      a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
-      &ldquo;how-d'ye-do's&rdquo; and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
-      times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
-      haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured in
-      the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some terrific
-      memorial of antiquity&mdash;seen from without a mighty circular wall of
-      masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval, or
-      rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the level of
-      the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand spectators&mdash;on
-      this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side, with the sunlight
-      full upon them, the yellows.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
-      playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings&mdash;-for this American
-      game is much more complicated than English Rugger&mdash;its goal-posts and
-      its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
-      minute record of the game.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
-      there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
-      music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
-      like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
-      horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
-      opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
-      Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
-      greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war. Three
-      flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They shout
-      through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line, they wave
-      their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with that leap
-      there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of cheers
-      roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
-      demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of a
-      tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey&mdash;the growl rising
-      to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell, roar
-      for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of us,
-      and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their limbs
-      we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I cannot
-      hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off with the
-      battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand lusty pairs
-      of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid, we rise like
-      one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our cheer-leaders,
-      gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad dervishes, we shout
-      back the song of &ldquo;Har-vard! Har-vard!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into the
-      field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson, that in
-      the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and helmeted so
-      that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic muscular
-      development and horrific visage. At their entrance the megaphones opposite
-      are heard again, and the enemy host rises and repeats its wonderful cheer
-      and tiger growl. We rise and heave the challenge back. And now the teams
-      are in position, the front lines, with the ball between, crouching on the
-      ground for the spring. In the silence that has suddenly fallen on the
-      scene, one hears short, sharp cries of numbers. &ldquo;Five!&rdquo; &ldquo;Eleven!&rdquo; &ldquo;Three!&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Six!&rdquo; &ldquo;Ten!&rdquo; like the rattle of musketry. Then&mdash;crash! The front
-      lines have leapt on each other. There is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs
-      and bodies. The swirl clears and men are seen lying about all over the
-      line as though a shell had burst in their midst, while away to the right a
-      man with the ball is brought down with a crash to the ground by another,
-      who leaps at him like a projectile that completes its trajectory at his
-      ankles.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
-      thrilling minutes&mdash;which, with intervals and stoppages for the
-      attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours&mdash;how the
-      battle surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the
-      tension of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how
-      Harvard scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm
-      of victory, how Princeton drew level&mdash;a cyclone from the other side!&mdash;and
-      forged ahead&mdash;another cyclone&mdash;how man after man went down like
-      an ox, was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how
-      another brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last
-      hardly a man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every
-      convenient interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we
-      jumped up and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how
-      the match ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of
-      victory that is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters&mdash;all
-      this is recorded in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives
-      in my mind as a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous &ldquo;rag&rdquo; in which young and
-      old, gravity and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly
-      confounded.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And what did you think of it?&rdquo; asked my host as we rattled back to New
-      York in the darkness that night. &ldquo;I think it has helped me to understand
-      America,&rdquo; I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
-      explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0031" id="linkimage-0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0095m.jpg" alt="0095m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0095.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0032" id="linkimage-0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0096m.jpg" alt="0096m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0096.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GREAT REPLIES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>t a dinner table
-      the other night, the talk turned upon a certain politician whose cynical
-      traffic in principles and loyalties has eclipsed even the record of
-      Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one defender, an amiable and rather
-      portentous gentleman who did not so much talk as lecture, and whose habit
-      of looking up abstractedly and fixedly at some invisible altitude gave him
-      the impression of communing with the Almighty. He was profuse in his
-      admissions and apologies, but he wound up triumphantly with the remark:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;So was Madame de Pompadour,&rdquo; said a voice from the other side of the
-      table.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
-      replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician with
-      a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of democracy who,
-      like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things for ambition and
-      power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through the dull, solemn man
-      on the other side of the table like a rapier. There was no reply. There
-      was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash of lightning. It
-      revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift, searching intelligence,
-      equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that went with deadly certainty
-      to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed on the whole landscape of
-      discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that gave it larger significance
-      and range.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour and
-      finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
-      absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and personality.
-      There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning phrase that has
-      leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental things. I do not
-      know much about the military genius or the deeds of Augureau, but I know
-      the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon about the celebration
-      at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial ambitions of the First Consul.
-      Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought of the ceremony. &ldquo;Oh, it was very
-      fine,&rdquo; replied the general; &ldquo;there was nothing wanting, <i>except the
-      million of men who have perished in pulling down what you are setting up</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
-      the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
-      make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
-      bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
-      him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian,
-      a poor peasant's son&mdash;a miserable friar of a country town&mdash;was
-      prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
-      Christendom.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; said the Cardinal at last to him, &ldquo;do you think the Pope cares for
-      the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger than
-      all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend <i>you&mdash;you</i>,
-      a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you be then&mdash;where
-      will you be then?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Then, as now,&rdquo; replied Luther. &ldquo;Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
-      God.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
-      venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
-      century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man&mdash;one of
-      the profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
-      country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
-      brilliant author of the papers on &ldquo;The Crisis,&rdquo; that kept the flame of the
-      rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of the
-      United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the Bastille
-      for presentation to Washington. The true character of this great
-      Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had discoursed
-      &ldquo;On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.&rdquo; And Paine answered,
-      &ldquo;God did not make rich and poor. God made male and female and gave the
-      earth for their inheritance."</b>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
-      this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
-      to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
-      Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
-      boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
-      remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo;
-       said the President. &ldquo;Then whose boots do they black?&rdquo; There was the same
-      mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
-      inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. &ldquo;I do not know,
-      madam,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
-      when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
-      dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
-      disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
-      using his department to further his ambitions. &ldquo;Raymond,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you
-      were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
-      is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving the
-      horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he rushed
-      across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely keep pace
-      with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an enormous chin fly
-      fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother asked me what I did
-      that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse bitten in that way.
-      'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him go!' Now, if Mr Chase
-      has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm not going to knock it
-      off, if it will only make his department <i>go!</i>&rdquo; If one were asked to
-      name the most famous answer in history, one might, not unreasonably, give
-      the palm to a woman&mdash;a poor woman, too, who has been dust for three
-      thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke six words that
-      gave her immortality. They have been recalled on thousands of occasions
-      and in all lands, but never more memorably than by John Bright when he was
-      speaking of the hesitation with which he accepted cabinet office: &ldquo;I
-      should have preferred much,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to have remained in the common rank
-      of citizenship in which heretofore I have lived. There is a passage in the
-      Old Testament that has often struck me as being one of great beauty. Many
-      of you will recollect that the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very
-      hospitably entertained by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make
-      her some amends, and he called her to him and asked her what there was he
-      should do for her. 'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to
-      the captain of the host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the
-      Shunamite woman returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the
-      prophet's offer, 'I dwell among mine own people.'&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
-      point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
-      babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if by magic,
-      from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the spiritual, from
-      the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty replies, are another
-      matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp tongue and a quick mind. But
-      great replies are not dependent on wit or cleverness. If they were Cicero
-      would have made many, whereas he never made one. His repartees are perfect
-      of their kind, but they belong to the debating club and the law court.
-      They raise a laugh and score a point, but they are summer lightnings. The
-      great reply does not come from witty minds, but from rare and profound
-      souls. The brilliant adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that
-      reply of Augereau than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it
-      because with all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a
-      great part on the world's stage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0033" id="linkimage-0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0101m.jpg" alt="0101m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0101.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0034" id="linkimage-0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0102m.jpg" alt="0102m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0102.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> went recently to
-      an industrial town in the North on some business, and while there had
-      occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and engines and machinery
-      of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers and engines and machinery of
-      all sorts, and I did my best to appear interested and understanding. But I
-      was neither one nor the other. I was only bored. Boilers and engines, I
-      know, are important things. Compared with a boiler, the finest lyric that
-      was ever written is only a perfume on the gale. There is a practical
-      downrightness about a boiler that makes &ldquo;Drink to me only with thine
-      eyes,&rdquo; or &ldquo;O mistress mine, where are you roaming?&rdquo; or even &ldquo;Twelfth
-      Night&rdquo; itself, a mere idle frivolity. All you can say in favour of
-      &ldquo;Twelfth Night,&rdquo; from the strictly business point of view, is that it
-      doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank heaven for that.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
-      never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought to
-      be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How, for
-      example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of a
-      boiler? How&mdash;and this was still more important&mdash;how could I hope
-      to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
-      gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
-      great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it as
-      much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
-      discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no bowels
-      of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the symbol of
-      brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional values. In
-      Dante's &ldquo;Inferno&rdquo; each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted to give him
-      the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room for me, and
-      there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever among wheels and
-      pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying amidst the thud and din
-      of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily &ldquo;waste&rdquo; to catch those perfumes
-      on the gale, those frivolous rhythms to which I had devoted so much of
-      that life' which should be &ldquo;real and earnest&rdquo; and occupied with serious
-      things like boilers. And so it came about that as my friend talked I
-      spiritually wilted away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
-      learned and articulate boiler.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
-      boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
-      inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a &ldquo;b&rdquo; in
-      boilers and a &ldquo;b&rdquo; in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect was
-      miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit. The
-      light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if I were
-      a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved brother.
-      Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come, I must see
-      his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could whisk us to his
-      house in the suburbs, and there in a great room, surrounded with hundreds
-      of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from the ends of the earth,
-      butterflies from the forests of Brazil and butterflies from the plains of
-      India, and butterflies from the veldt of South Africa and butterflies from
-      the bush of Australia, all arranged in the foliage natural to their
-      habitat to show how their scheme of coloration conformed to their setting.
-      Some of them had their wings folded back and were indistinguishable from
-      the leaves among which they lay. And as my friend, with growing
-      excitement, revealed his treasure, he talked of his adventures in the
-      pursuit of them, and of the law of natural selection and all its bearing
-      upon the mystery of life, its survivals and its failures. This hobby of
-      his was, in short, the key of his world. The boiler house was the prison
-      where he did time. At the magic word &ldquo;butterflies&rdquo; the prison door opened,
-      and out he sailed on the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the
-      mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
-      something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a ship
-      without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair that most
-      of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the end of the
-      journey without ever having found a path and a sense of direction. But a
-      hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial a thing, but it
-      supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm outside the mere
-      routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it will lead. You may
-      begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in continents. You may
-      collect coins, and find that the history of man is written on them. You
-      may begin with bees, and end with the science of life. Ruskin began with
-      pictures and found they led to economics and everything else. For as every
-      road was said to lead to Rome, so every hobby leads out into the universe,
-      and supplies us with a compass for the adventure. It saves us from the
-      humiliation of being merely smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in
-      general, for the world is too full of things to permit us to be anything
-      else, but one field of intensive culture will give even our smattering a
-      respectable foundation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who knows
-      even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might be when
-      he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not know them
-      and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of measurement
-      which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters. He will have,
-      above all, an attachment to life which will make him at home in the world.
-      Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged into this bewildering
-      whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of circumstance. We have in us
-      the genius of speculation, but the further our speculations penetrate the
-      profounder becomes the mystery that baffles us. We are caught in the toils
-      of affections that crumble to dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither
-      like grass, beaten about by storms that shatter our stoutest battlements
-      like spray blown upon the wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little
-      more than dreams within a dream&mdash;or as Carlyle puts it, &ldquo;exhalations
-      that are and then are not.&rdquo; And we share the poet's sense of exile&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      In this house with starry dome,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Shall I never be at home?
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Never wholly at my ease?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
-      stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
-      hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
-      that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
-      without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
-      find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come and
-      go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always renewed.
-      Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with Horace or
-      Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the sense of the
-      mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden of the mind,
-      self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of intractible
-      circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the spirit and
-      endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman in &ldquo;Romany Rye,&rdquo;
-       you will remember, found his deliverance in studying Chinese. His
-      bereavement had left him without God and without hope in the world,
-      without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the things that
-      reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly before him,
-      when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and he thought he
-      heard a voice say, &ldquo;The marks! the marks! cling to the marks! or&mdash;&mdash;-&rdquo;
-       And from this beginning&mdash;but the story is too fruity, too rich with
-      the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book down, turn to the
-      episode, and thank me for sending you again into the enchanted Borrovian
-      realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in books. It is enough
-      for the purpose here to recall this perfect example of the healing power
-      of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little world of our own where we
-      can be at ease, and from whose warmth and friendliness we can look out on
-      the vast conundrum without expecting an answer or being much troubled
-      because we do not get one. It was a hobby that poor Pascal needed to allay
-      that horror of the universe which he expressed in the desolating phrase,
-      &ldquo;Le silence étemel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.&rdquo; For on the wings of
-      the butterfly one can not only outrange the boiler, but can adventure into
-      the infinite in the spirit of happy and confident adventure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0035" id="linkimage-0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0108m.jpg" alt="0108m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0108.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0036" id="linkimage-0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0109m.jpg" alt="0109m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0109.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON HEREFORD BEACON
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">J</span>enny Lind sleeps
-      in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she died is four miles
-      away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble range of the Malverns
-      that marches north and south from Worcester beacon to Gloucester beacon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way up from
-      Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its descent into
-      the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
-      range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the deep
-      trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as this, the
-      Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman legions.
-      Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural ramparts; but
-      the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the work to&mdash;&mdash;.
-      But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell his own story.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
-      conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
-      the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
-      slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of the
-      district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up the steep
-      road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the Cotswolds,
-      Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and the other
-      features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the road,
-      Hereford beacon came in view.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Killed?&rdquo; said I, a little stunned.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
-      from about here you know, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he wasn't
-      killed at all. He died in his bed.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
-      captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
-      sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard tell
-      as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but the
-      capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
-      Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must be
-      fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;He blowed
-      away Little Malvern Church down yonder.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
-      visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
-      ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of Piers
-      Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Left the tower standing he did, sir,&rdquo; pursued the historian. &ldquo;Now, why
-      should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought us
-      to Wynd's Point.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an old
-      gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the little
-      arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out on the
-      beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently declined to
-      go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred to disturb. It was
-      the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and singer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of a
-      vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
-      roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
-      chalet, &ldquo;the golden cage,&rdquo; of the singer fronting the drawing-room bowered
-      in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter pictures
-      of saints, that hang upon the walls&mdash;all speak with mute eloquence of
-      the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres, whose life was an
-      anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet simplicity of her name.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Why did you leave the stage?&rdquo; asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
-      like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
-      surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for the
-      sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for charity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Because,&rdquo; she said, touching the Bible, &ldquo;it left me so little time for
-      this, and&rdquo; (looking at the sunset) &ldquo;none for that.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
-      cuckoo&mdash;his voice failing slightly in these hot June days&mdash;wakes
-      you in the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the
-      shadows lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
-      against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
-      deepening gloom of the vast plain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
-      unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the road,
-      with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the broom to
-      the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come out on the
-      path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the green summits that
-      march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of Worcester beacon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon to
-      Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these ten
-      miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled at your
-      feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of exhilaration
-      that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It is a cheerful
-      solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of the twin shout
-      of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and look out over
-      half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills, Birmingham
-      stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where southward the
-      shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the imagination away with
-      Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you may see our rough island
-      story traced in characters of city, hill, and plain. These grass-grown
-      trenches, where to-day the young lambs are grazing, take us back to the
-      dawn of things and the beginnings of that ancient tragedy of the Celtic
-      race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see
-      Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of the Roses, of &ldquo;false, fleeting,
-      perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the field at Tewkesbury,&rdquo; and of
-      Ancient Pistol, whose &ldquo;wits were thick as Tewkesbury mustard.&rdquo; There is
-      the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and far away Edgehill carries the
-      mind forward to the beginning of that great struggle for a free England
-      which finished yonder at Worcester, where the clash of arms was heard for
-      the last time in our land and where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword
-      for ever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to cast
-      its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the wide
-      plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing here
-      through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to Oxford
-      and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are coming
-      up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom. Now is
-      the moment to turn westward, where
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Bleeds upon the road to Wales.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun, and in
-      the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the far battlements
-      of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of alabaster, and in the
-      woods of the castle that clothe these western slopes a pheasant rends the
-      golden silence with the startled noise and flurry of its flight.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
-      the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
-      suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and a
-      late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through the
-      twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great sycamore
-      by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads of insects
-      has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an unfaltering
-      bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all save a pied
-      wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its graceful tail by the
-      rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come those intimate murmurs of
-      the birds, half chatter, half song, that close the day. Even these grow
-      few and faint until the silence is unbroken.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0037" id="linkimage-0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0115m.jpg" alt="0115m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0115.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0038" id="linkimage-0038"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0116m.jpg" alt="0116m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0116.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHUM
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>hen I turned the
-      key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a familiar sound. It was
-      the &ldquo;thump, thump, thump,&rdquo; of a tail on the floor at the foot of the
-      stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place was vacant. Chum had gone,
-      and he would not return. I knew that the veterinary must have called,
-      pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him away, and that I should hear
-      no more his &ldquo;welcome home!&rdquo; at midnight. No matter what the labours of the
-      day had been or how profound his sleep, he never failed to give me a cheer
-      with the stump of his tail and to blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him
-      &ldquo;Good dog&rdquo; and a pat on the head. Then with a huge sigh of content he
-      would lapse back into slumber, satisfied that the last duty of the day was
-      done, and that all was well with the world for the night. Now he has
-      lapsed into sleep altogether.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will pay
-      my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and in
-      any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that I
-      enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he enjoyed
-      my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom he went,
-      and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to go with,
-      unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person. It was not
-      that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned after a longish
-      absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would leap round and
-      round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent her to the
-      floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's schoolmaster
-      who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and explained that &ldquo;he
-      didn't know his own strength.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and I was
-      the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the woodlands,
-      and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his reddish-brown
-      coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan, and his head
-      down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there was more than a
-      hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was precisely no one
-      ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up. His fine liquid brown
-      eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but he had a nobler head
-      than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain of the Irish terrier in
-      him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat was all his own. And all
-      his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and his genius for friendship.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he was
-      reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had been
-      sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
-      grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin, and
-      he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
-      schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
-      eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
-      something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
-      when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
-      abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
-      ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
-      You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about his
-      affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to the
-      forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled to any
-      good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and watchful,
-      his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury and pity for
-      the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the qualities of a
-      rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into an unspeakable
-      abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your voice and all the
-      world was young and full of singing birds again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
-      that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
-      For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or his
-      colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more than a
-      little of the spirit of the flunkey. &ldquo;A man's a man, for a' that,&rdquo; was not
-      his creed. He discriminated between the people who came to the front door
-      and the people who came to the side door. To the former he was
-      systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly hostile. &ldquo;The poor in a
-      loomp is bad,&rdquo; was his fixed principle, and any one carrying a basket,
-      wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was <i>ipso facto</i> suspect. He
-      held, in short, to the servile philosophy of clothes as firmly as any
-      waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair. Familiarity never altered
-      his convictions. No amount of correction affected his stubborn dislike of
-      postmen. They offended him in many ways. They wore uniforms; they came,
-      nevertheless, to the front door; they knocked with a challenging violence
-      that revolted his sense of propriety. In the end, the burden of their
-      insults was too much for him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of
-      trousers. Perhaps that incident was not unconnected with his passing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
-      Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in leaping
-      a stile&mdash;he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow&mdash;or
-      had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
-      latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
-      for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted. But
-      whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all the
-      veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to the revels
-      in his native woods&mdash;for he had come to us as a pup from a cottage in
-      the heart of the woodland country&mdash;no longer made him tense as a
-      drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and left
-      his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the hill
-      to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into the
-      house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to be
-      forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a place
-      he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream of the
-      happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there waiting to
-      scour the woods with me as of old.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0039" id="linkimage-0039"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0120m.jpg" alt="0120m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0120.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0040" id="linkimage-0040"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0121m.jpg" alt="0121m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0121.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON MATCHES AND THINGS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> had an agreeable
-      assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I went-into a tea-shop and
-      sat down. There were several young waitresses by the counter engaged in
-      animated conversation. They eyed me with that cold aloofness which is the
-      ritual of the order, and which, I take it, is intended to convey to you
-      the fact that they are princesses in disguise who only serve in shops for
-      a pastime. When I had taken out my watch twice with an appearance of
-      ostentatious urgency, one of the princesses came towards me, took my order
-      (looking meanwhile out of the window to remind me that she was not really
-      aware of me, but only happened to be there by chance), and moved
-      languorously away. When she returned she brought tea&mdash;and sugar. In
-      that moment her disdain was transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel
-      who under the disguise of indifference went about scattering benedictions
-      among her customers and assuring them that the spring had come back to the
-      earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future became
-      suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine) had passed
-      magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be sweetened
-      thrice a day by honest sugar.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised how
-      I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my friends
-      through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump person, but
-      in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the spoon and
-      stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer did the spoon
-      seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere survival of an
-      antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the back of your coat.
-      It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the tea-table. To stir your
-      tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It keeps tune with your thoughts
-      if you are alone, and it keeps time with your tongue if you are talking.
-      It helps out the argument, fills up the gaps, provides the animated
-      commentary on your discourse. There are people I shall always remember in
-      the attitude of standing, cup in hand, and stirring, stirring, stirring as
-      the current of talk flowed on. Such a one was that fine old tea-drinker,
-      Prince Kropotkin&mdash;rest his gentle soul if he indeed be among the
-      slain.... With what universal benevolence his patriarchal face used to
-      gleam as he stood stirring and talking, talking and stirring, with the
-      hurry of his teeming thoughts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
-      for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
-      little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
-      of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
-      solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
-      with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon the
-      grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all the
-      pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious than you
-      had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days knitting up your
-      severed friendships with things. You slip into the National Gallery just
-      to see what old favourites have come up from the darkness of the cellars.
-      You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in the great moon that shines
-      again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that chimes gives you a pleasant
-      emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds like the salutation of an old
-      friend who had been given up as lost. And matches.... There was a time
-      when I thought nothing of a match. I would strike a match as thoughtlessly
-      as I would breathe. And for the same reason, that matches were as
-      plentiful as air. I would strike a match and let the wind puff it out;
-      another and let it burn out before using it, simply because I was too busy
-      talking or listening or thinking or doing nothing. I would try to light a
-      pipe in a gale of wind on a mountain top, crouching behind a boulder,
-      getting inside my hat, lying on the ground under my coat, and wasting
-      matches by the dozen. I would get rid of a box of matches a day, and not
-      care a dump. The world was simply choked with matches, and it was almost a
-      duty to go on striking them to make room for the rest. You could get a
-      dozen boxes for a penny or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see
-      great bags of matches with boxes bursting out at the top, and simply
-      asking to be taken. If by some accident you found yourself without a box
-      in your pocket you asked the stranger for a light as confidently as you
-      would ask him for the time o' day. You were asking for something that cost
-      him nothing except a commonplace civility.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
-      Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
-      away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, &ldquo;No; we haven't any.&rdquo; They
-      simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
-      smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the habit
-      and just go on in their sleep. &ldquo;Oh, you funny people,&rdquo; they seem to say,
-      dreamily. &ldquo;Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach you that
-      there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years and years;
-      never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let the other fools
-      follow on.&rdquo; And you go away, feeling much as though you had been caught
-      trying to pass a bad half-crown.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, &ldquo;Can you oblige me
-      with a light, sir?&rdquo; You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or a
-      pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
-      wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
-      fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting to
-      pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket, preparing
-      to have &ldquo;After you, sir,&rdquo; on your lips at the exact moment when he has lit
-      his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out the precious flame.
-      Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps the fellow is only
-      waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting for what the other
-      hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which I
-      can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips I know
-      that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that excellent
-      fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine, and I have
-      had more lights from him in these days than from any other man on earth. I
-      never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it quite boldly,
-      fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me&mdash;but not so often, not
-      nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If&mdash;having borrowed
-      a little too recklessly from him of late&mdash;I go into his room and
-      begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the Peace
-      Conference, or things like that&mdash;is he deceived? Not at all. He knows
-      that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has one left
-      it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his pipe because he
-      knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man Higginson is. I
-      cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
-      tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
-      authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
-      before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
-      welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
-      Lords and the Oval.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning, Your
-      young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is sailing
-      home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds instead of
-      khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters who are
-      strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on historic
-      battlefields and now ask you whether you will have &ldquo;thick or clear,&rdquo; with
-      the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your galley proof is
-      brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you look at with a
-      shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he is that pale,
-      thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago, and who in the
-      interval has been fighting in many lands near and far, in France and
-      Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing the burnished
-      livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a stoutish fellow
-      who turns out to be the old professional released from Germany after long
-      months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one &ldquo;of the lucky ones;
-      nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and lived with the
-      farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir, nothing to
-      complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men and
-      things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those who
-      will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound of Big
-      Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we enter the
-      new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the stimulus of the
-      princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the credit side of
-      things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We have left the deathly
-      solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the moraine is rough and
-      toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we can hear the pleasant
-      tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old pastures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0041" id="linkimage-0041"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0127m.jpg" alt="0127m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0127.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0042" id="linkimage-0042"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0128m.jpg" alt="0128m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0128.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING REMEMBERED
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>s I lay on the
-      hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods watching the
-      harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows chasing each other
-      across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were looking down with me.
-      For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an old school book is scored
-      with the names of generations of scholars. Near by are the earthworks of
-      the ancient Britons, and on the face of the hill is a great white horse
-      carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those white marks, that look like sheep
-      feeding on the green hill-side, are reminders of the great war. How long
-      ago it seems since the recruits from the valley used to come up here to
-      learn the art of trench-digging, leaving these memorials behind them
-      before they marched away to whatever fate awaited them! All over the
-      hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit by merry parties on happy
-      holidays. One scorched and blackened area, more spacious than the rest,
-      marks the spot where the beacon fire was lit to celebrate the signing of
-      Peace. And on the boles of the beech trees are initials carved deep in the
-      bark&mdash;some linked like those of lovers, some freshly cut, some old
-      and covered with lichen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and
-      school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is as
-      ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school desks
-      of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of the
-      schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted them.
-      There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood or
-      scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled. And the
-      joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found pleasure in
-      whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice white ceiling above
-      me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's hankering for a
-      charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies. But at the back of
-      it all, the explanation of those initials on the boles of the beeches is a
-      desire for some sort of immortality&mdash;terrestrial if not celestial.
-      Even the least of us would like to be remembered, and so we carve our
-      names on tree trunks and tombstones to remind later generations that we
-      too once passed this way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great. One of
-      the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will trumpet
-      its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries to take care
-      that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's &ldquo;Exegi monumentum ære
-      perennius&rdquo; is one of many confident assertions that he knew he would be
-      among the immortals. &ldquo;I have raised a monument,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;more enduring
-      than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings; a monument which shall
-      not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by the rage of the north wind,
-      nor by the countless years and the flight of ages.&rdquo; The same magnificent
-      confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud declaration&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had
-      written a song of a sparrow&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Of which I sang one song that will not die.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was &ldquo;writ in water,&rdquo; but behind
-      the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for immortality.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable confidence.
-      &ldquo;I'll be more respected,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a hundred years after I am dead than I
-      am at present;&rdquo; and even John Knox had his eye on an earthly as well as a
-      heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus. &ldquo;Theologians there will always
-      be in abundance,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;the like of me comes but once in centuries.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
-      their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
-      conceit on the subject. &ldquo;What I write,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is not written on slate
-      and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of years can
-      efface it.&rdquo; And again, &ldquo;I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be
-      well-lighted, the guests few and select.&rdquo; A proud fellow, if ever there
-      was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le Brun-Pindare,
-      cherished his dream of immortality. &ldquo;I do not die,&rdquo; he said grandly; &ldquo;<i>I
-      quit the time</i>.&rdquo; And beside this we may put Victor Hugo's rather
-      truculent, &ldquo;It is time my name ceased to fill the world.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
-      that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. &ldquo;Do you suppose,&rdquo; he
-      said, &ldquo;to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
-      should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
-      service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
-      Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
-      toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has ever
-      looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life, then at
-      last it would begin to live.&rdquo; The context, it is true, suggests that a
-      celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a terrestrial; but
-      earthly glory was never far from his mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject is one
-      of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in books. I
-      must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable terms. In the
-      preface to his &ldquo;Account of Corsica&rdquo; he says:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <i>For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
-      ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine
-      literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish
-      a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a
-      respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having the
-      character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. (</i>Oh, you
-      rogue!<i>) To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day
-      is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a
-      perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural
-      disposition an easy play (&rdquo;</i>You were drunk last night, you dog<i>&ldquo;),
-      and yet indulge the pride of superior genius when he considers that by
-      those who know him only as an author he never ceases to be respected. Such
-      an author in his hours of gloom and discontent may have the consolation to
-      think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers,
-      and such an author may cherish the hope of being remembered after death,
-      which has been a great object of the noblest minds in all ages.</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition. Most
-      of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of Gray's
-      depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the &ldquo;dull cold ear of
-      death.&rdquo; In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy and
-      immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of &ldquo;Alpha of
-      the Plough&rdquo; an agreeable fancy something like this. In the year two
-      thousand&mdash;or it may be three thousand&mdash;yes, let us do the thing
-      handsomely and not stint the centuries&mdash;in the year three thousand
-      and ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and
-      the Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe
-      for democracy&mdash;at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer
-      who has been swished that morning from the British Isles across the
-      Atlantic to the Patagonian capital&mdash;swished, I need hardly remark,
-      being the expression used to describe the method of flight which consists
-      in being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made to
-      complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be desired&mdash;bursts
-      in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered by him in the
-      course of some daring investigations of the famous subterranean passages
-      of the ancient British capital&mdash;those passages which have so long
-      perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the Patagonian savants,
-      some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers, and some that they
-      were the roadways of a people who had become so afflicted with photophobia
-      that they had to build their cities underground. The trophy is a book by
-      one &ldquo;Alpha of the Plough.&rdquo; It creates an enormous sensation. It is put
-      under a glass case in the Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is
-      translated into every Patagonian dialect. It is read in schools. It is
-      referred to in pulpits. It is discussed in learned societies. Its author,
-      dimly descried across the ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0043" id="linkimage-0043"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0134m.jpg" alt="0134m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0134.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
-      celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
-      assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
-      marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha&mdash;a gentleman with a flowing
-      beard and a dome-like brow&mdash;that overlooks the market-place, and
-      places wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of
-      bells and a salvo of artillery.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you, my
-      dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in the
-      New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved for most,
-      even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world to-day. And
-      yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who writes has the
-      best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox, who among the
-      statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But Wordsworth and
-      Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb, even
-      second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the temple
-      of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military feats of
-      Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza of the
-      poem in which he poured out his creed&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      He either fears his fate too much,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Or his deserts are small.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That dares not put it to the touch
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      To win or lose it all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship with
-      Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he befriended
-      a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the name of his
-      benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of Ægina is full
-      of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would like to be
-      remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went to Pindar
-      and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his praise.
-      Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. &ldquo;Why, for so much
-      money,&rdquo; said Pytheas, &ldquo;I can erect a statue of bronze in the temple.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Very likely.&rdquo; On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And
-      now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the statues
-      of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples
-      themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the ode
-      of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer paths
-      to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of the Earl
-      of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of Shakespeare
-      live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their dedication. But
-      one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise you to go and give
-      Mr &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; £200 and a commission to send your name
-      echoing down the corridors of time.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; (you
-      will fill in the blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them.
-      It would be safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a
-      rose, or an overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can
-      confer a modest immortality. They have done so for many. A certain
-      Maréchal Neil is wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which
-      is as enviable a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr
-      Mackintosh is talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of
-      rain, and even Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his
-      battles. It would not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone
-      will be thought of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just
-      as Archimedes is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the
-      healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps
-      one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of
-      forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike, and
-      we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as if the
-      world babbles about us for ever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0044" id="linkimage-0044"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0137m.jpg" alt="0137m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0137.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0045" id="linkimage-0045"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0138m.jpg" alt="0138m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0138.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON DINING
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>here are people
-      who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can hoard it not for the
-      sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy, for the satisfaction of
-      feeling that they have got something locked up that they could spend if
-      they chose without being any the poorer and that other people would enjoy
-      knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending what they can afford to spend.
-      It is a pleasure akin to the economy of the Scotsman, which, according to
-      a distinguished member of that race, finds its perfect expression in
-      taking the tube when you can afford a cab. But the gift of secrecy is
-      rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the sake of telling them. We spend our
-      secrets as Lamb's spendthrift spent his money&mdash;while they are fresh.
-      The joy of creating an emotion in other people is too much for us. We like
-      to surprise them, or shock them, or please them as the case may be, and we
-      give away the secret with which we have been entrusted with a liberal hand
-      and a solemn request &ldquo;to say nothing about it.&rdquo; We relish the luxury of
-      telling the secret, and leave the painful duty of keeping it to the other
-      fellow. We let the horse out and then solemnly demand that the stable door
-      shall be shut so that it shan't escape, I have done it myself&mdash;often.
-      I have no doubt that I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret
-      to reveal, but I shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely
-      selfish reasons, which will appear later. You may conceive me going about
-      choking with mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years
-      have I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can dine
-      wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the atmosphere
-      restful, and the prices moderate&mdash;in short, the happy mean between
-      the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the uncompromising
-      cheapness of Lockhart's. In those extremes I find no satisfaction.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its
-      ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to a
-      good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren't many
-      families that enjoyed their &ldquo;vittles&rdquo; more than her's did, and I can claim
-      the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that I count
-      good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I could join
-      very heartily in Peacock's chorus:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;How can a man, in his life of a span,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Do anything better than dine.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Give me a satisfactory' dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel
-      themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads the
-      landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who insisted
-      that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life. That, I think,
-      is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few things more
-      revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by taking emetics.
-      But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise for enjoying a good
-      dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good dinners. I see no
-      necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and a holy mind. There was
-      a saintly man once in this city&mdash;a famous man, too&mdash;who was
-      afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out to dinner, he
-      had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to enable him to
-      start even with the other guests. And it is on record that when the
-      ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with Cardinal
-      Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses that
-      hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season of
-      fasting, &ldquo;I fear,&rdquo; said one of them, &ldquo;that there is a lobster salad side
-      to the Cardinal.&rdquo; I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side too. A
-      hot day and a lobster salad&mdash;what happier conjunction can we look for
-      in a plaguey world?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, in making this confession, I am neither <i>gourmand</i> nor <i>gourmet</i>.
-      Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic
-      conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and
-      the great language of the <i>menu</i> does not stir my pulse. I do not ask
-      for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt
-      would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for
-      talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was
-      pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have for
-      supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as the
-      shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right
-      spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes&mdash;eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
-      smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke
-      approvingly of Sancho's choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way with
-      him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against his
-      rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with
-      conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the
-      matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to
-      follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart's desire at the
-      Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel when I
-      enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things. I stroke
-      the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and rises, purring
-      with dignity, under my caress. I say &ldquo;Good evening&rdquo; to the landlord who
-      greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once cordial and
-      restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of his hand. No
-      frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a neat-handed
-      Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress and white
-      cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility and aloofness
-      that establishes the perfect relationship&mdash;obliging, but not
-      familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The napery
-      makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a mirror,
-      and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced dish of
-      hors d'ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the modest
-      four-course table d'hôte begins, and when at the end you light your
-      cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only dined,
-      but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement, touched with
-      the subtle note of a personality.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall not
-      tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It may be
-      in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn, or it
-      may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you because I
-      sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it I shall shatter
-      the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the Mermaid and find its
-      old English note of kindly welcome and decorous moderation gone, and that
-      in its place there will be a noisy, bustling, popular restaurant with a
-      band, from which I shall flee. When it is &ldquo;discovered&rdquo; it will be lost, as
-      the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so I shall keep its secret. I only
-      purr it to the cat who arches her back and purrs understanding in
-      response. It is the bond of freemasonry between us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0046" id="linkimage-0046"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0142m.jpg" alt="0142m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0142.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0047" id="linkimage-0047"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0143m.jpg" alt="0143m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0143.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was leaning over
-      the rails of the upper deck idly watching the Chinese whom, to the number
-      of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre and were to disgorge at Halifax,
-      when the bugle sounded for lunch. A mistake, I thought, looking at my
-      watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon hour was one. Then I remembered. I
-      had not corrected my watch that morning by the ship's clock. In our
-      pursuit of yesterday across the Atlantic we had put on another
-      three-quarters of an hour. Already on this journey we had outdistanced
-      to-day by two and a half hours. By the time we reached Halifax we should
-      have gained perhaps six hours. In thought I followed the Chinamen
-      thundering across Canada to Vancouver, and thence onward across the
-      Pacific on the last stage of their voyage. And I realised that by the time
-      they reached home they would have caught yesterday up.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
-      this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
-      years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
-      thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always the
-      same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of it than
-      I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind as
-      insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
-      beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we were
-      overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by sea and
-      land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight across the
-      plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it was neither
-      yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a confusion of
-      all three.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
-      absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom&mdash;a parochial illusion
-      of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
-      axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
-      light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that they
-      were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
-      numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away on
-      the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length of
-      light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
-      meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
-      and dark&mdash;what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for
-      ever and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark&mdash;not many
-      days, but just one day and that always midday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
-      itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck of
-      dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A few
-      hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of dark, I
-      should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo sky&mdash;specks
-      whose strip of daylight was many times the length of ours, and whose year
-      would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the astronomers tell us that
-      Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years? Think of it&mdash;our
-      Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round a single solar year
-      of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and live to a green old
-      age according to our reckoning, and still never see the glory of
-      midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our ideas of Time
-      have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune&mdash;if, that is,
-      there be any dwellers on Neptune.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts of
-      other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this regal orb
-      above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and numbered
-      their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons by the
-      illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of other
-      systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to have any
-      fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the unthinkable
-      void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time: there was only
-      duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of fable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As I reached this depressing conclusion&mdash;not a novel or original one,
-      but always a rather cheerless one&mdash;a sort of orphaned feeling stole
-      over me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
-      from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
-      eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly in
-      the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a gay time
-      on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during yesterday's
-      storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of his comrades at
-      an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges before him, was
-      crying something that sounded like &ldquo;Al-lay! Al-lay!&rdquo; counting the money in
-      his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he doubted whether it was
-      all there, but because he liked the feel and the look of it. A sprightly
-      young rascal, dressed as they all were in a grotesque mixture of garments,
-      French and English and German, picked up on the battlefields of France,
-      where they had been working for three years, stole up behind the
-      orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me as he did so) snatched an
-      orange and bolted. There followed a roaring scrimmage on deck, in the
-      midst of which the orange-seller's coppers were sent flying along the
-      boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and scuffling, and from which the
-      author of the mischief emerged riotously happy and, lighting a cigarette,
-      flung himself down with an air of radiant good humour, in which he
-      enveloped me with a glance of his bold and merry eye.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
-      illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass, not
-      intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The experiences
-      were always associated with great physical weariness and the sense of the
-      endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the Dauphiné coming down
-      from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other experience in the Lake
-      District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a companion in the doorway
-      of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain. We had come to the end of
-      our days in the mountains, and now we were going back to Keswick, climbing
-      Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was robed in clouds, and the rain was
-      of that determined kind that admits of no hope. And so, after a long wait,
-      we decided that Helvellyn &ldquo;would not go,&rdquo; as the climber would say, and,
-      putting on our mackintoshes and shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for
-      Keswick by the lower slopes of the mountains&mdash;by the track that
-      skirts Great Dodd and descends by the moorlands into the Vale of St John.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung low
-      over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
-      booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
-      tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
-      struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to be
-      without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious loneliness
-      of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the late afternoon
-      we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the Vale of St John
-      and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the road. What with
-      battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the dripping mackintosh
-      and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked myself into that
-      passive mental state which is like a waking dream, in which your voice
-      sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your thoughts seem to play
-      irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering consciousness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember that
-      it is what Mr Chesterton calls &ldquo;a rolling road, a reeling road.&rdquo; It is
-      like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it is going
-      down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for Penrith,
-      then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that goal, only to
-      give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so on, and all the time
-      it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or to Penrith, but is sidling
-      crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road which is like the
-      whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of his signature, thus:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0048" id="linkimage-0048"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0148m.jpg" alt="0148m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0148.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw through
-      the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that fine
-      mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses that sustain
-      the southern face were visible. They looked like the outstretched fingers
-      of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds and clutching the
-      earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The image fell in with
-      the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the similitude out to my
-      companion as we paced along the muddy road.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and we
-      went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As we
-      did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds and
-      clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere, far
-      off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same mist
-      of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
-      gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been years
-      ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might have
-      been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was this
-      evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the impression
-      remained of something outside the confines of time. I had passed into a
-      static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished, and Time was
-      only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I had walked
-      through the shadow into the deeps.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when I
-      reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very earnestly
-      in order to discover the time of the trains for London next day. And the
-      recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings brought my
-      thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just below me, was
-      happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread, one of those
-      long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck from the shore
-      at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed along a rope
-      connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of the man as he
-      devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the brown crust
-      reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had gone for lunch
-      long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this time. I turned
-      hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch back
-      three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the fiction
-      of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0049" id="linkimage-0049"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0150m.jpg" alt="0150m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0150.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0050" id="linkimage-0050"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0151m.jpg" alt="0151m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0151.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      TWO DRINKS OF MILK
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he cabin lay a
-      hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between Sneam and
-      Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and out to the
-      open Atlantic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down
-      the rocks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to the
-      cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milk? Yes. Would we come in?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade of
-      the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother of the
-      girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and having
-      done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen floor out
-      into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and on a bench by
-      the ingle sat the third member of the family.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her
-      eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and
-      untroubled as a child's. She paused in her knitting to make room for me on
-      the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she played
-      the hostess.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you have travelled in Kerry you don't need to be told of the charm of
-      the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful
-      country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of
-      Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the look
-      of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a spring
-      morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and to know
-      them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of Kerry,
-      O'Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities of a
-      poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always warm with
-      the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted with
-      wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving pleasure to
-      others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every peasant you meet
-      is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted if you will stop to
-      talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be your guide. It is like
-      being back in the childhood of the world, among elemental things and an
-      ancient, unhasting people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess in
-      disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that a
-      duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of Sneam,
-      five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin and among
-      these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she had caught
-      something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out there through
-      the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of exiles had gone to
-      far lands. Some few had returned and some had been for ever silent. As I
-      sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle accents all the tale of
-      a stricken people and of a deserted land. There was no word of complaint&mdash;only
-      a cheerful acceptance of the decrees of Fate. There is the secret of the
-      fascination of the Kérry temperament&mdash;the happy sunlight playing
-      across the sorrow of things.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost
-      to the brim, and a couple of mugs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to
-      pay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sure, there's nothing to pay,&rdquo; said the old lady with just a touch of
-      pride in her sweet voice. &ldquo;There's not a cabin in Kerry where you'll not
-      be welcome to a drink of milk.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed
-      in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane, and
-      as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they added a
-      benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague M'Carty's
-      hotel&mdash;Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker, whose
-      rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits among
-      the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with
-      many-coloured flies&mdash;we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville
-      and heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take the
-      northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much better
-      made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before the
-      coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a day
-      of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the lake we
-      dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage&mdash;neat and
-      well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense of
-      plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark of a
-      dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged
-      interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and
-      leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before
-      us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt that
-      we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver affairs
-      than thirsty travelers to attend to.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back to
-      the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed suddenly
-      less friendly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two
-      glasses&mdash;a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of
-      feature. While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the
-      doorstep, looking away across the lake to where the noble form of
-      Schiehallion dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time
-      was money and talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty
-      haste.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What have we to pay, please?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sixpence.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked
-      something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant
-      memory.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0051" id="linkimage-0051"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0155m.jpg" alt="0155m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0155.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0052" id="linkimage-0052"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0156m.jpg" alt="0156m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0156.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was my fortune
-      the other evening to be at dinner with a large company of doctors. While
-      we were assembling I fell into conversation with an eminent physician,
-      and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked that we English seasoned our
-      dishes far too freely. We scattered salt and pepper and vinegar over our
-      food so recklessly that we destroyed the delicacy of our taste, and did
-      ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was especially unfriendly to the use
-      of salt. He would not admit even that it improved the savour of things. It
-      destroyed our sense of their natural flavour, and substituted a coarser
-      appeal to the palate. From the hygienic point of view, the habit was all
-      wrong. All the salts necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat,
-      and the use of salt independently is entirely harmful.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Take the egg, for example,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It contains in it all the elements
-      necessary for the growth of a chicken&mdash;salt among the rest. That is
-      sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article of food.
-      Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise its delicate
-      flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.&rdquo; And he concluded, as
-      we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example of the Japanese
-      in this matter. &ldquo;They,&rdquo; he said laughingly, &ldquo;only take salt when they want
-      to die.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
-      and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
-      applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
-      who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with great
-      energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we eat contain
-      the salt required by the human body. &ldquo;Not even the egg?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;No, not
-      even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our foods, and even if
-      the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw state they tend to lose
-      their character cooked.&rdquo; He admitted that that was an argument for eating
-      things <i>au naturel</i> more than is the practice. But he was firm in his
-      conviction that the separate use of salt is essential. &ldquo;And as for
-      flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw, with or without salt. What
-      comparison is there?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about the
-      Japanese), &ldquo;are there not races who do not use salt?&rdquo; &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; said
-      he, &ldquo;the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of salt is
-      supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of the prime
-      essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause or another, is
-      seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute exactness in the
-      mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of salt to eat with
-      their food they die.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening in
-      examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt I
-      should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the face
-      of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have quoted,
-      especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians. Yet I
-      daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the facts.
-      For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice, the
-      Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the world,
-      and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat their fish
-      in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would go far to
-      explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
-      the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about which
-      there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be a
-      commonplace thing like the use of salt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random&mdash;men whose
-      whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its requirements&mdash;whose
-      views on the subject were in violent antagonism. They approached their
-      subject from contrary angles and with contrary sets of facts, and the
-      truth they were in search of took a wholly different form for each.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
-      judicious manipulation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our air
-      service. He was very confident that we were &ldquo;simply out of it&mdash;that
-      was all, simply out of it.&rdquo; And he was full of facts on the subject. <b>I
-      don't like people who brim over with facts&mdash;who lead facts about, as
-      Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few people
-      so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His conclusions
-      are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot sort them out and
-      add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès called &ldquo;loose,
-      unstitched minds.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
-      facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember whether
-      the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her husband had
-      told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so bad as that,
-      but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact away in the
-      chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not infrequently,
-      that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something chipped off, and I
-      can never trust it until I have verified my references.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was that,
-      so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell you how
-      many English machines had failed to return on each day of the week, and
-      how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to descend. And
-      judging from his figures he was quite right. &ldquo;We were out of it&mdash;simply
-      out of it.&rdquo; Yet the truth is that while his facts were right, his
-      deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken account of some
-      facts, but had left other equally important facts out of consideration.
-      For example, through all this time the German airmen had been on the
-      defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen had taken great
-      risks for a great object. They had gone miles over the enemy's lines&mdash;as
-      much as fifty miles over&mdash;and had come back with priceless
-      information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but the whole
-      truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this time the most
-      victorious element of our Army.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are not
-      always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is often composed
-      of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to contradict each
-      other. Take the handkerchief incident in &ldquo;Othello.&rdquo; Poor Desdemona could
-      not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that the Moor saw.
-      Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello believed she had
-      given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio wipe his beard
-      with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the catastrophe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them in
-      real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
-      free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
-      report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
-      knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
-      knife discovered&mdash;also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of
-      pawntickets for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he
-      was a thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
-      his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
-      clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of the trousers
-      was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt uncomfortable. He
-      took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was doing so he saw a
-      steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a timid person he
-      furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches came on, and when he
-      had got his &ldquo;take&rdquo; he left to transcribe it, having forgotten all about
-      the knife. The rest followed as stated. The pawntickets, which seemed so
-      strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were of course not his at all. They
-      belonged to the owner of the suit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You remember that Browning in &ldquo;The Ring and the Book,&rdquo; tells the story of
-      the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before he
-      feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
-      annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
-      different aspects of one truth. &ldquo;Mostly,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;matters of any
-      consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself, I
-      am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
-      contradicted myself three times.&rdquo; I fancy it is this discovery of the
-      falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less cocksure
-      as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts that belong
-      to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that &ldquo;a lie that is only
-      half a truth is ever the blackest of lies&rdquo;; but he is wrong. It is the
-      fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter) which is the most
-      dangerous lie&mdash;for a fact seems so absolute, so incontrovertible.
-      Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts, their arrangement
-      and concealment. It was never better stated than by a famous business man
-      in an action for libel which I have referred to in another connection. He
-      was being examined about the visit of Government experts to his works, and
-      the instructions he gave to his manager. And this, as I remember it, was
-      the dialogue between counsel and witness:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you tell him to tell them the facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The whole facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;<i>Selected facts</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the midst
-      of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody bearing his
-      name.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to a
-      scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things, we
-      cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of politics
-      and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a speech in which
-      there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of which was a
-      colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is so easy to make
-      the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in the realm that lies
-      outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation is denounced as the
-      heresy of another. Justification by &ldquo;works&rdquo; is displaced by justification
-      by faith, and that in turn is superseded by justification by &ldquo;service&rdquo;
-       which is &ldquo;works&rdquo; in new terms. Which is truth and which error? Or is that
-      the real alternative? May they not be different facets of one truth. The
-      prism breaks up the sunlight into many different colours and facts are
-      only the broken lights of truth. In this perplexing world we must be
-      prepared to find the same truth demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die
-      because they take salt, and the fact that Indians die because they don't
-      take it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0053" id="linkimage-0053"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0163m.jpg" alt="0163m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0163.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0054" id="linkimage-0054"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0164m.jpg" alt="0164m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0164.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GREAT MEN
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was reading just
-      now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of him expressed by
-      Macaulay who declared him to be &ldquo;the greatest man since Milton.&rdquo; I paused
-      over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally enough to ask myself
-      who were the great Englishmen in history&mdash;for the sake of argument,
-      the six greatest. I found the question so exciting that I had reached the
-      end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time) almost before I had reached
-      the end of my list. I began by laying down my premises or principles. I
-      would not restrict the choice to men of action. The only grievance I have
-      against Plutarch is that he followed that course. His incomparable
-      &ldquo;Lives,&rdquo; would be still more satisfying, a still more priceless treasury
-      of the ancient world, if, among his crowd of statesmen and warriors, we
-      could make friends with Socrates and Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus,
-      with the men whose work survived them as well as with the men whose work
-      is a memory. And I rejected the blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I
-      would not have in my list a mere homicidal genius. My great man may have
-      been a great killer of his kind, but he must have some better claim to
-      inclusion than the fact that he had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On
-      the other hand, I would not exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to
-      be a bad man. Henry Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad
-      men. &ldquo;Greatness,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;consists in bringing all manner of mischief
-      upon mankind, and goodness in removing it from them.&rdquo; And it was to
-      satirise the traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific
-      satire &ldquo;The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,&rdquo; probably having in mind the
-      Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
-      traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad man.
-      I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that he was
-      a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful ogre, a
-      sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless, ruthless
-      jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent, merciless as
-      a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a sort of
-      mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought of nature.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
-      governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
-      mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was a
-      great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about Cæsar,
-      but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds down twenty
-      centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must have design. It
-      must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere accident, emotion or
-      effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured by its influence on the
-      current of the world, on its extension of the kingdom of the mind, on its
-      contribution to the riches of living. Applying tests like these, who are
-      our six greatest Englishmen? For our first choice there would be a
-      unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the greatest thing we have done. He is our
-      challenger in the fists of the world, and there is none to cross swords
-      with him. Like Sirius, he has a magnitude of his own. Take him away from
-      our heavens, conceive him never to have been born, and the imaginative
-      wealth of fife shrinks to a lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's
-      phrase, &ldquo;poor indeed.&rdquo; There is nothing English for which we would
-      exchange him. &ldquo;Indian Empire or no Indian Empire,&rdquo; we say with Carlyle,
-      &ldquo;we cannot do without our Shakespeare.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
-      indisputably to him who had
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;... a voice whose sound was like the sea.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
-      harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of the
-      sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
-      intangible, indestructible. With him stands his &ldquo;chief of men&rdquo;&mdash;the
-      &ldquo;great bad man&rdquo; of Burke&mdash;the one man of action in our annals capable
-      of measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
-      Bismarck in the realm of the spirit&mdash;the man at whose name the cheek
-      of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
-      death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
-      these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda) first
-      made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as the
-      bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning eternally
-      with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his soul to tatters,
-      and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding eloquence, and Burke,
-      the prose Milton, to whose deep well all statesmanship goes with its pail,
-      and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court in his brown wig, and Newton
-      plumbing the ultimate secrets of this amazing universe, and deep-browed
-      Darwin unravelling the mystery of life, and Wordsworth giving &ldquo;to weary
-      feet the gift of rest,&rdquo; and Dickens bringing with him a world of creative
-      splendour only less wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these
-      and a host of others aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip
-      him of all the legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name,
-      and he is still one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic,
-      enlightened man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first
-      great Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
-      quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be Roger&mdash;there
-      by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range of his
-      adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through which he
-      ploughed his lonely way to truth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a woman,
-      Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic &ldquo;lady of the lamp,&rdquo; but
-      as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the adventurer into
-      a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by a will of iron, a
-      terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful and creative woman
-      this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not because she is unworthy,
-      but because she must head a companion fist of great Englishwomen. I
-      hurriedly summon up two candidates from among our English saints&mdash;Sir
-      Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the intolerance (incredible to
-      modern ears) that could jest so diabolically at the martyrdom of the
-      &ldquo;heretic,&rdquo; Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his place as the most fragrant
-      flower of English culture, but if greatness be measured by achievement and
-      enduring influence he must yield place to the astonishing revivalist of
-      the eighteenth century who left a deeper mark upon the spiritual life of
-      England than any man in our history.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is my list&mdash;Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
-      Bacon, John Wesley&mdash;and anybody can make out another who cares and a
-      better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
-      unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is not
-      a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the kibe of
-      Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
-      contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher. If
-      the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness cannot
-      be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left out of any
-      list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature, we are poor
-      in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see the great
-      name of Turner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0055" id="linkimage-0055"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0169m.jpg" alt="0169m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0169.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0056" id="linkimage-0056"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0170m.jpg" alt="0170m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0170.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON SWEARING
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> young officer in
-      the flying service was describing to me the other day some of his recent
-      experiences in France. They were both amusing and sensational, though told
-      with that happy freedom from vanity and self-consciousness which is so
-      pleasant a feature of the British soldier of all ranks. The more he has
-      done and seen the less disposed he seems to regard himself as a hero. It
-      is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging is a sham currency. It is the base
-      coin with which the fraudulent pay their way. F. C. Selous was the
-      greatest big game hunter of modern times, but when he talked about his
-      adventures he gave the impression of a man who had only been out in the
-      back garden killing slugs. And Peary, who found the North Pole, writes as
-      modestly as if he had only found a new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr
-      Cook, who didn't find the North Pole and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who
-      does the boasting. And the man who talks most about patriotism is usually
-      the man who has least of that commodity, just as the man who talks most
-      about his honesty is rarely to be trusted with your silver spoons. A man
-      who really loves his country would no more brag about it than he would
-      brag about loving his mother.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to write of
-      him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
-      good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
-      seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It was
-      just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
-      convolvulus overgrows my garden. &ldquo;Hell&rdquo; was his favourite expletive, and
-      he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
-      scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
-      he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it as
-      a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear that
-      he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only secular
-      quality it possesses&mdash;the quality of emphasis. It is speech breaking
-      bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the dictionary and
-      the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord in music that in
-      shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music which is all discord
-      is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is deadly dull.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
-      emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
-      habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. &ldquo;When I have said
-      'Malaga,'&rdquo; says Plancus, in the &ldquo;Vicomte de Bragelonne,&rdquo; &ldquo;I am no longer a
-      man.&rdquo; He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his imprecations
-      for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils swell and his
-      eyes flash fire as he cries, &ldquo;Malaga.&rdquo; It is a good swear word. It has the
-      advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely what a swear word
-      should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying nothing. It should be
-      incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the passion that evokes it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If &ldquo;Malaga&rdquo; has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was that
-      defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. &ldquo;'Damns' have had
-      their day,&rdquo; he said, and when he swore he used the &ldquo;oath referential.&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Odds hilts and blades,&rdquo; he said, or &ldquo;Odds slanders and lies,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Odds
-      bottles and glasses.&rdquo; But when he sat down to write his challenge to
-      Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him. &ldquo;Do, Sir
-      Lucius, let me begin with a damme,&rdquo; he said. He had to give up artificial
-      swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to something which had
-      a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it is the idea of being
-      a little wicked that is one of the attractions of swearing. It is a
-      symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so. For in its origin
-      always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates spoke &ldquo;By the Gods,&rdquo;
-       he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest reverence he could
-      command. But the oaths of to-day are not the expression of piety, but of
-      violent passion, and the people who indulge in a certain familiar
-      expletive would not find half so much satisfaction in it if they felt
-      that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration of faith&mdash;&ldquo;By
-      our Lady.&rdquo; That is the way our ancestors used to swear, and we have
-      corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith and meaning.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of life
-      breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is the
-      prerogative of the soldier to be &ldquo;full of strange oaths.&rdquo; In this respect
-      Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used &ldquo;strange oaths.&rdquo; He
-      stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most industrious in
-      it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that have come down
-      to us which are not garnished with &ldquo;damns&rdquo; or &ldquo;By Gods.&rdquo; Hear him on the
-      morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to gossip Creevey&mdash;&ldquo;It
-      has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It
-      has been a damned nice thing&mdash;the nearest run thing you ever saw in
-      your life.&rdquo; Or when some foolish Court flunkey appeals to him to support
-      his claim to ride in the carriage with the young Queen on some public
-      occasion&mdash;&ldquo;Her Majesty can make you ride on the box or inside the
-      carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's dog.&rdquo; But in this he
-      followed not only the practice of soldiers in all times, but the
-      fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to have regarded
-      himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at the language of
-      the Prince Regent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,&rdquo; he remarks,
-      speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. &ldquo;Then he speaks and swears so like
-      old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the room with
-      him.&rdquo; This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices, but whose
-      recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It suggests also
-      that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of his own
-      comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and swore as
-      naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that other
-      famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy, as when,
-      speaking of Grant, he said, &ldquo;I'll tell you where he beats me, and where he
-      beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his
-      sight, but it scares me like Hell.&rdquo; Two centuries ago, according to Uncle
-      Toby, our men &ldquo;swore terribly in Flanders,&rdquo; and they are swearing terribly
-      there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time that the Flanders mud,
-      which has been watered for centuries by English blood, will ensanguine the
-      speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant young airman will talk a
-      good deal less about &ldquo;Hell&rdquo; when he escapes from it to a cleaner world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0057" id="linkimage-0057"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0174m.jpg" alt="0174m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0174.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0058" id="linkimage-0058"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0175m.jpg" alt="0175m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0175.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A HANSOM CAB
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> saw a surprising
-      spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a hansom cab. Not a
-      derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally see, with an
-      obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the box, crawling
-      along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has escaped from a
-      cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way back&mdash;no, but
-      a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting in the shafts
-      and tossing its head as though it were full of beans and importance, and a
-      slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as a sandboy as he flicked and
-      flourished his whip, and, still more astonishing, a real passenger, a
-      lady, inside the vehicle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the
-      driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of the
-      poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas of
-      the past&mdash;sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the
-      quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there
-      flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs, the
-      London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King Petrol,
-      when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and the
-      two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place then,
-      of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a
-      formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took
-      your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver, you
-      settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and the
-      bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins of that
-      &ldquo;orf horse,&rdquo; the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of the
-      police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse joke to
-      a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in the revelry. The
-      conductor would stroll up to him and continue a conversation that had
-      begun early in the morning and seemed to go on intermittently all day&mdash;a
-      conversation of that jolly sort in which, as Washington Irving says, the
-      jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside the
-      bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It was an
-      act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the top
-      alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes. And
-      even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been quite
-      above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The hansom was a
-      rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the thing for a lady to
-      be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested romance, mysteries,
-      elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of wickednesses. A staid,
-      respectable &ldquo;growler&rdquo; was much more fitting for so delicate an exotic as
-      Woman. If she began riding in hansoms alone anything might happen. She
-      might want to go to public dinners next&mdash;think of it!&mdash;she might
-      be wanting to ride a bicycle&mdash;horrors!&mdash;she might discover a
-      shameless taste for cigarettes, or demand a living wage, or University
-      degrees, or a vote, just for all the world as though she was the equal of
-      Man, the Magnificent....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and
-      challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to the
-      coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy, and
-      impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable, mighty, but
-      blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets, reeling from right
-      to left like a drunken giant, encountering the kerb-stone, skimming the
-      lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of boorish revolt, standing
-      obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the street or across the street
-      amidst the derision and rejoicing of those whose empire he threatened, and
-      who saw in these pranks the assurance of his ultimate failure. Memory went
-      back to the old One a.m. from the Law Courts, and to one night that sums
-      up for me the spirit of those days of the great transition....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to start
-      from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew his power.
-      He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along the Edgeware
-      Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men who wrote him
-      down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />=
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      (from Our Peking Correspondent)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
-      chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was &ldquo;full
-      up&rdquo; hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded in
-      with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen&mdash;yes,
-      cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the
-      One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only
-      cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end of
-      the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the tipsy
-      gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at Baker
-      Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is being swept
-      on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are exchanged, what
-      jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the top hat, under the
-      impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the floor&mdash;oh, then
-      the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy gentleman opens his
-      dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these revels soon are ended.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      First a shiver, and then a thrill,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Then something decidedly like a spill&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      O. W. Holmes,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      <i>The Deacon's Masterpiece</i> (DW)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      and we are left sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with the
-      clock over the shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the spirit of Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting
-      himself. He disapproves of the passengers having all the fun. Is he not a
-      humorist too? May he not be merry in the dawn of this May morning?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We take our fate like Englishmen, bravely, even merrily.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment. This is worth living
-      for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base betrayer of the
-      innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though it is two or
-      three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the morning! Who
-      cares?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Only the gentleman with the big bag in the corner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?&rdquo; he asks the conductor with tears in
-      his voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help the driver. They busy
-      themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn handles, they work
-      pumps, they probe here and thump there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They come out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They have
-      the cheerful philosophy of people who meddle with things that move&mdash;cab
-      drivers, bus-drivers, engine-drivers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      If, when looking well won't move thee.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      Looking ill prevail?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So they take a breather, light cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Meanwhile all the hansoms in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us,
-      like sharks upon the dead whale. Up they rattle from this side and that,
-      and every cabman flings a jibe as he passes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Look 'ere,&rdquo; says one, pulling up. &ldquo;Why don't yer take the genelmen where
-      they want to go? That's what I asks yer. Why&mdash;don't&mdash;yer&mdash;take&mdash;the&mdash;genelmen&mdash;where&mdash;they&mdash;want&mdash;to
-      go? It's only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't
-      want to go.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      For the cabman is like &ldquo;the wise thrush who sings his song twice over.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!&rdquo; cries another.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We can't 'elp larfin', yer know,&rdquo; says a third feelingly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, you keep on larfin',&rdquo; says the chauffeur looking up from the inside
-      of One a.m. &ldquo;It suits your style o' beauty.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      A mellow voice breaks out:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      We won't go home till morning,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Till daylight does appear.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen in comic chorus. Those
-      who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither sing nor whistle,
-      croak.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We sit inside patiently. We even joke too. All but the man with the big
-      bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his life-long enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He appeals again to the conductor, who laughs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back, puts his
-      head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and says:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We think better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is that
-      of the politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart. He is
-      like Dick Steele&mdash;&ldquo;when he was sober he was delightful; when he was
-      drunk he was irresistible.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;She won't go any more to-night,&rdquo; says the conductor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal away. All but
-      the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a problem
-      that looks insoluble.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Two of us jump into a hansom that still prowls around, the last of the
-      shoal of sharks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Drive up West End Lane.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Right, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's face, wreathed in smiles,
-      beams down on us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I see what was coming all the way from Baker Street,&rdquo; he savs. &ldquo;I see the
-      petrol was on fire.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yus,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Thought I should pick you up about 'ere.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No good, motors,&rdquo; he goes on, cheerfully. &ldquo;My opinion is they'll go out
-      as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the aristocracy are giving
-      'em up and goin' back to 'orses.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Hope they'll get better horses than this,&rdquo; for we are crawling painfully
-      up the tortuous reaches of West End Lane.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's overworked. 'E ain't earned more
-      than three bob to-night. That's jest what' e's earned. Three bob. It's the
-      cold weather, you know. That's what it is. It's the cold weather as makes
-      'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And 'e does go after all, even
-      if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't say of that there
-      motor-bus.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We had no reply to this thrust, and the lid dropped down with a sound of
-      quiet triumph.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And so home. And my dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge
-      Monster, reeking with strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious
-      laughter and standing for ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road with
-      the clock opposite pointing to a quarter to two, a rueful face in the
-      corner staring fixedly at a big bag and a tipsy gentleman in a tall hat
-      finding his way back to Baker Street in happy converse with a policeman.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Gone is the old London over which the shade of Mr Hansom presided like a
-      king. Gone is the &ldquo;orf horse&rdquo; with all its sins; gone is the rosy-cheeked
-      driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent whip and his tales of the
-      streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you your ticket, talked to
-      you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about the weather, the Boat Race,
-      or the latest clue to the latest mystery. We amble no more. We have
-      banished laughter and leisure from the streets, and the face of the
-      motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the symbol of the change. We have
-      passed into a breathless world, a world of wonderful mechanical
-      contrivances that have quickened the tempo of life and will soon have made
-      the horse as much a memory as the bow and arrow or the wherry that used to
-      be the principal vehicle of Elizabethan London. As I watched the hansom
-      bowling along Regent Street until it was lost in the swirl of motor-buses
-      and taxis I seemed to see in it the last straggler of an epoch passing
-      away into oblivion. I am glad it went so gallantly, and I am half sorry I
-      did not give the driver a parting cheer as he flicked his whip in the face
-      of the night.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0059" id="linkimage-0059"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0183m.jpg" alt="0183m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0183.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0060" id="linkimage-0060"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0184m.jpg" alt="0184m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0184.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON MANNERS
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t is always
-      surprising, if not always agreeable, <b>to see ourselves as others see us</b>.
-      The picture we present to others is never the picture we present to
-      ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally it is a much plainer
-      picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always a strange picture.
-      Just now we English are having our portrait painted by an American lady,
-      Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been appearing in the press. It is
-      not a flattering portrait, and it seems to have angered a good many people
-      who deny the truth of the likeness very passionately. The chief accusation
-      seems to be that we have no manners, are lacking in the civilities and
-      politenesses of life, and so on, and are inferior in these things to the
-      French, the Americans, and other peoples. It is not an uncommon charge,
-      and it comes from many quarters. It came to me the other day in a letter
-      from a correspondent, French or Belgian, who has been living in this
-      country during the war, and who wrote bitterly about the manners of the
-      English towards foreigners. In the course of his letter he quoted with
-      approval the following cruel remark of Jean Carrière, written, needless to
-      say, before the war:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal élevé du fait
-      qu'il manque de manières; il ignore encore la politesse, voilà tout.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the
-      whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have
-      enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken
-      up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and we
-      suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should be
-      told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At the
-      same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's warning about
-      the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty millions of us,
-      and we have some forty million different manners, and it is not easy to
-      get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will take this &ldquo;copy&rdquo; to
-      the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who preceded him was a
-      monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all civility; another is all
-      bad temper, and between the two extremes you will get every shade of good
-      and bad manners. And so through every phase of society.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the widest
-      differences of manner in different parts of the country. In Lancashire and
-      Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There is a deep-seated
-      distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the code of conduct
-      differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral town as the manner
-      of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But even here you will find
-      behind the general bearing infinite shades of difference that make your
-      generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more you know of any people the less
-      you feel able to sum them up in broad categories.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our
-      ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete
-      darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting&mdash;apropos of the
-      Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because of
-      the strangeness of his appearance&mdash;lamenting the deplorable manners
-      of the people. &ldquo;Lord!&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;to see the absurd nature of Englishmen
-      that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks strange.&rdquo;
-       Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him describing the
-      English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
-      earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. &ldquo;To mention but a single
-      attraction,&rdquo; he says in one of his letters, &ldquo;the English girls are
-      divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses. They
-      have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go anywhere on
-      a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive, they kiss
-      you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you return. Go where
-      you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if you had once tasted
-      how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish to spend your life
-      there.&rdquo; Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens a good deal changed
-      to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a cigarette.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing and
-      less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the saying of
-      O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good criticism. Our lack
-      of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but more probably it is
-      traceable not to a physical but to a social source. Unlike the Celtic and
-      the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have not the ease that comes
-      from the ingrained tradition of human equality. The French have that ease.
-      So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So have the Americans. But the
-      English are class conscious. The dead hand of feudalism is still heavy
-      upon our souls. If it were not, the degrading traffic in titles would long
-      since have been abolished as an insult to our intelligence. But we not
-      only tolerate it: we delight in this artificial scheme of relationship. It
-      is not human values, but social discriminations that count. And while
-      human values are cohesive in their effect, social discriminations are
-      separatist. They break society up into castes, and permeate it with the
-      twin vices of snobbery and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is
-      subdivided into infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious
-      restraints of a people uncertain of their social relationships create a
-      defensive manner which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true
-      root is a timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his
-      ground tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is
-      proud: it may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away
-      from this fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners
-      for independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from a
-      sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented to
-      keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression that
-      he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he had
-      more <i>abandon</i>. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical
-      politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the
-      spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which makes
-      the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably what
-      Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the impression
-      that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good manners that
-      they exist most where they do not exist at all&mdash;that is to say, where
-      conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told James Hogg that no
-      man who was content to be himself, without either diffidence or egotism,
-      would fail to be at home in any company, and I do not know a better recipe
-      for good manners.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      I was riding in a bus yesterday afternoon when I overheard a conversation
-      between a couple of smartly dressed young people&mdash;a youth and a
-      maiden&mdash;at the other end of the vehicle. It was not an amusing
-      conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about. Indeed, I
-      could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be about
-      anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which consist
-      chiefly of &ldquo;Awfullys&rdquo; and &ldquo;Reallys!&rdquo; and &ldquo;Don't-you-knows&rdquo; and tattle
-      about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and similar
-      common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter but because
-      of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the speakers were
-      alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of wind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to hear, while
-      others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not of approval.
-      They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved an air of being
-      unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of not being aware
-      that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact, their manner
-      indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings. They were
-      really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the bus. If they
-      had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in quite reasonable
-      tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly and defiantly to an
-      empty bus. They would have made no impression on an empty bus. But they
-      were happily sensible of making quite a marked impression on a full bus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it was not the impression they imagined. It was another impression
-      altogether. There are few more unpleasing and vulgar habits than that of
-      loud, aggressive conversation in public places. It is an impertinence to
-      inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who do not want to know about
-      them, and who may want to read or doze or think or look out of the window
-      at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The assumption behind
-      the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is an announcement to
-      the world that we are someone in particular and can talk as loudly as we
-      please whenever we please. It is a sort of social Prussianism that
-      presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by a superior egotism.
-      The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in the world is mistaken.
-      On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an inverted self-consciousness.
-      These young people were talking loudly, not because they were unconscious
-      of themselves in relation to their fellows, but because they were much too
-      conscious and were not content to be just quiet, ordinary people like the
-      rest of us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I hesitate to say that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not lived
-      abroad sufficiently to judge. But it is a common experience of those who
-      travel to find, as I have often found, their country humiliated by this
-      habit of aggressive bearing in public places. It is unlovely at home, but
-      it is much more offensive abroad, for then it is not only the person who
-      is brought into disrepute, but the country he (and not less frequently
-      she) is supposed to represent. We in the bus could afford to bear the
-      affliction of that young couple with tolerance and even amusement, for
-      they only hurt themselves. We could discount them. But the same bearing in
-      a foreign capital gives the impression that we are all like this, just as
-      the rather crude boasting of certain types of American grossly
-      misrepresent a people whose general conduct, as anyone who sees them at
-      home will agree, is unaffected, unpretentious, and good-natured.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, I suspect, is that every country sends abroad a
-      disproportionate number of its &ldquo;bounders.&rdquo; It is inevitable that it should
-      be so, for the people who can afford to travel are the people who have
-      made money, and while many admirable qualities may be involved in the
-      capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain coarse
-      assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got so
-      hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are better
-      than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot attune his
-      voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second generation, this
-      congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high school it is
-      apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the bus
-      yesterday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So far from being representative of the English, they are violently
-      unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take an
-      average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust the
-      sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted with
-      egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and
-      monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract attention
-      without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy mean
-      between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the overbearing
-      note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk of our
-      affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without desiring
-      to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without wishing to
-      be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we have achieved
-      that social ease which consists in the adjustment of a reasonable
-      confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the sensibilities of
-      others.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0061" id="linkimage-0061"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0192m.jpg" alt="0192m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0192.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0062" id="linkimage-0062"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0193m.jpg" alt="0193m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0193.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A FINE DAY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t's just like
-      summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have forgotten to say
-      it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it from the orchard
-      with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery. There are some
-      people of penurious emotions and speech, like the Drumtochty farmer in Ian
-      Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of this iteration. They would find
-      it wasteful and frivolous. They do not understand that we go on saying it
-      over and over again, like the birds, for the sheer joy of saying it.
-      Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice. There he goes skipping from
-      branch to branch and twig to twig, and after each skip he pauses to say,
-      &ldquo;It's just like summer,&rdquo; and from a neighbouring tree his mate twitters
-      confirmation in perfect time. I've listened to them for half an hour and
-      they've talked about nothing else.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great
-      baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the
-      paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully and
-      tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well aired
-      before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows his
-      score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has only
-      one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the world,
-      but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer, and not a
-      conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who seems never
-      to forget the listening world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
-      There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along the
-      turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football match, I
-      fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the cheerful
-      outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens and the
-      fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of hammering; from
-      the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor voice that comes up
-      from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I have not heard it for
-      four years or more; but it has been heard in many lands and by many rivers
-      from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would rather be singing in the
-      allotment with his young brother Sam (the leader of the trebles in the
-      village choir) than anywhere else in the vide world. &ldquo;Yes, I've been to
-      Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the 'Oly Land,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I don't care
-      if I never see the 'Oly Land again. Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far
-      as I'm concerned. This is good enough for me&mdash;that is, if there's a
-      place for a chap that wants to get married to live in.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at
-      her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. &ldquo;Well, this is all
-      right, ain't it, mother?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; says the old lady, &ldquo;it's just like summer.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And to think,&rdquo; continues the voice, &ldquo;that there was a thick layer o' snow
-      a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to come
-      yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar, and it
-      stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though it do seem
-      like it, don't it?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, it's just like summer,&rdquo; repeats the old lady tranquilly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
-      sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
-      like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we are
-      here. Weather in town is only an incident&mdash;a pleasurable incident or
-      a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella,
-      whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a
-      mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or outside.
-      It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your visit to the
-      theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for this reason the
-      incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as an acquaintance of
-      a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he is in a good humour
-      and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven. It is
-      politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual diversion. You
-      study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and watch the change
-      of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the mood of the public.
-      When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a fine day, or has been a
-      cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a conventional civility. It is
-      the formal opening of the discussion of weighty matters. It involves the
-      prospects of potatoes and the sowing of onions, the blossoms on the trees,
-      the effects of weather on the poultry and the state of the hives. I do not
-      suppose that there is a moment of his life when Jim is unconscious of the
-      weather or indifferent to it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not
-      care what happens to the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands
-      and secular interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is
-      a stem Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the
-      chapel in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always
-      trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi'
-      work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to
-      dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. &ldquo;I don't hold wi'
-      work on Sundays,&rdquo; he would repeat inflexibly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0063" id="linkimage-0063"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0197m.jpg" alt="0197m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0197.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other
-      end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the
-      weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call
-      her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward. It
-      is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants hens. If
-      the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an unerring instinct
-      to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin of feathers. The hard
-      frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes when everybody else's
-      escaped, and it was her hive that brought the &ldquo;Isle of Wight&rdquo; into our
-      midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds that the last was a
-      visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a death in the family&mdash;true,
-      it was only a second cousin, but it was &ldquo;in the family&rdquo;&mdash;and had
-      neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive. And of course they
-      died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow Walsh has no patience
-      with people who fly in the face of Providence in this way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is the most
-      unremittingly malevolent. It is either &ldquo;smarty hot&rdquo; or &ldquo;smarty cold.&rdquo; If
-      it isn't giving her a touch of &ldquo;brownchitis,&rdquo; or &ldquo;a blowy feeling all up
-      the back,&rdquo; or making her feel &ldquo;blubbed all over,&rdquo; it is dripping through
-      her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke,
-      or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary life. I
-      think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the hill-side
-      like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even smiles, but
-      his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the bottom he is a
-      terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country woman no end of
-      work, and makes her life a burden.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
-      When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that &ldquo;it is a
-      bit better to-day.&rdquo; This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays to
-      the weather. And we translate it for her into &ldquo;Yes, it's just like
-      summer.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
-      damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most part
-      the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees are
-      white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees which fill
-      the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note of an aerial
-      violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of his double bass
-      to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way from blossom to
-      blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is as full of the gossip of
-      summer as the peacock butterfly that comes flitting back across the
-      orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old Benjy, who saluted me over the
-      hedge just now with the remark that he didn't recall the like of this for
-      a matter o' seventy year. Yes, seventy year if 'twas a day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy years
-      ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks about
-      anything in the memory of this generation. &ldquo;I be nearer a 'underd,&rdquo; he
-      says, &ldquo;than seventy,&rdquo; by which I think he means that he is eighty-six. He
-      longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see no reason why he
-      shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old boy, still does a good
-      day's gardening and has come up the lane on this hot day at a nimble
-      speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to have made his coffin
-      and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from any morbid yearning
-      for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding him off, just as the
-      rest of us &ldquo;touch wood&rdquo; lest evil befall. &ldquo;It's just like summer,&rdquo; he
-      says.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty....&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0064" id="linkimage-0064"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0200m.jpg" alt="0200m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0200.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0065" id="linkimage-0065"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> see that Mr
-      Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to women very
-      seriously on the subject of smoking. &ldquo;Would you like to see your mother
-      smoke?&rdquo; asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he was addressing, and
-      Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face
-      of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed feelings on this
-      subject, and in order to find out what I really think I will write about
-      it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby. I do not want to
-      see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the baby. But neither do I
-      want to see father doing so. If father is smoking when he nurses the baby
-      he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs out his smoke. Do not let
-      us drag in the baby.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The real point is in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your
-      affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would
-      not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be
-      absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because he
-      smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of
-      disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of taste
-      which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is wasteful and
-      unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the habit regardless
-      of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that <i>women</i> must not smoke because
-      the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that <i>men</i> may. He would no
-      more say this than he would say that it is right for men to live in stuffy
-      rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right for men to get
-      drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of drunkenness there is
-      no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel that it is more tragic in
-      the case of the woman, but it is equally disgusting in both sexes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men is
-      vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up
-      morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women not
-      smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom been
-      otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle, for
-      example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he would have answered the
-      question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their pipes
-      together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and eternity, and no
-      one who has read his letters will doubt his love for her. There are no
-      such letters from son to mother in all literature. And of course Mr Hicks
-      knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be surprised to know
-      that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of some women who smoke,
-      and that he will be as cordial with them as with those who do not smoke.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet.... Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of a
-      bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to smoke.
-      And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these now not
-      infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I had been
-      smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If smoking is
-      an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the case of women
-      as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women smoking outdoors
-      while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an irrational fellow, said
-      I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I replied. We are all irrational
-      fellows. If we were brought to the judgment seat of pure reason how few of
-      us would escape the cells.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young
-      women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke
-      was a flag&mdash;the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got
-      perplexed again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women&mdash;this
-      universal claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous
-      fact of the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag.
-      Yet when I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it
-      myself), flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I
-      rejoice, I felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I
-      came to the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These
-      young women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men
-      smoked on the top of the bus they must smoke too&mdash;not perhaps because
-      they liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them
-      on an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge of
-      servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the symbols
-      of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of women, but
-      preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to their finer
-      perceptions and traditions.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But here my perplexity returned. It is not the fact of those young women
-      smoking that offends you, I said addressing myself. It is the fact of
-      their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you agree that the habit of
-      smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of women as of men, why
-      should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised in their case,
-      while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself are smoking at
-      this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged in defending the
-      propriety of women smoking, and at the same time mentally reprobating the
-      conduct of the young women who are smoking in front of you, not because
-      they are smoking, but because (like you) they are smoking in public. How
-      do you reconcile such confusions of mind?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the horns of
-      a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to the habit.
-      And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to defend differential
-      smoking conditions for men and women. If the main position was surrendered
-      no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked in public then women could
-      smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and cigars then women could smoke
-      pipes and cigars. And at the thought of women smoking pipes on the top of
-      buses, I realised that I had not yet found a path out of the absurd bog in
-      which I had become mentally involved.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then something happened which suggested another solution. The young women
-      rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was wafted
-      with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown their
-      cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy,
-      languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial
-      fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man's
-      tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt the
-      woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and wear
-      rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity. The mind
-      revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered and be-ringed.
-      Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their cheeks. But Disraeli
-      was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort of belated tale from
-      the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of men universally revolts
-      against paint, powder, and perfume. And asking myself why a habit, which
-      custom had made tolerable in the case of women, became grotesque and
-      offensive if imagined in connection with men, I saw a way out of my
-      puzzle. I dismissed the view that the difference of sex accounted for the
-      different emotions awakened. It was the habit itself which was
-      objectionable. Familiarity with it in the case of women had dulled our
-      perceptions to the reality. It was only when we conceived the habit in an
-      unusual connection&mdash;imagined men going about with painted and
-      powdered faces, with rings in their ears and heavy scents on their clothes&mdash;that
-      its essential vulgarity and uncleanness were freshly and intensely
-      presented to the mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And that, said I, is the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit in
-      the abstract which is vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in the
-      case of man has deadened our sense of the fact, but the adoption of the
-      habit by women, coupled with the fact that there is no logical
-      halting-place between the cigarette indoors and a pipe on the top of the
-      bus, gives us what the Americans call a new view-point. From that new
-      view-point we are bound to admit that there is much to be said against
-      tobacco and not much to be said for it&mdash;except, of course, that we
-      like it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk to
-      the men as well as to the women.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then perhaps we will see what can be done. For myself, I make no promise.
-      After forty, says Meredith, we are wedded to our habits. And I, alas, am
-      long past forty....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0066" id="linkimage-0066"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0207m.jpg" alt="0207m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0207.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0067" id="linkimage-0067"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0208m.jpg" alt="0208m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0208.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      DOWN TOWN
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>hrough the grey
-      mists that hang over the water in the late autumn afternoon there emerges
-      a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of a distant range of
-      mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with a precision that
-      suggests the work of man rather than the careless architecture of Nature
-      The mass is compact and isolated. It rises from the level of the water,
-      sheer on either side, in bold precipitous cliffs, broken by horizontal
-      lines, and dominated by one kingly, central peak that might be the
-      Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the spire of some cathedral
-      fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race. As the vessel from afar
-      moves slowly through the populous waters and between the vaguely defined
-      shores of the harbour, another shadow emerges ahead, rising out of the sea
-      in front of the mountain mass. It is a colossal statue, holding up a torch
-      to the open Atlantic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition. It turns
-      to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable windows. Even
-      the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of myriad windows. The
-      day begins to darken and a swift transformation takes place. Points of
-      light begin to shine from the windows like stars in the darkening
-      firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters with thousands of
-      tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy palace, glowing with
-      illuminations from the foundations to the topmost height of the giddy
-      precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in the scintillating pinnacle
-      of the slender cathedral spire. The first daylight impression was of
-      something as solid and enduring as the foundations of the earth; the
-      second, in the gathering twilight, is of something slight and fanciful,
-      of' towering proportions but infinitely fragile structure, a spectacle as
-      airy and dream-like as a tale from the &ldquo;Arabian Nights.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is &ldquo;down town.&rdquo; It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its
-      astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that
-      lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest
-      group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over the
-      tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable maze
-      of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion of the
-      London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its direction,
-      but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east and west,
-      crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to the Harlem
-      River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing island of
-      Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the noble Fifth
-      Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty buildings that
-      shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to gild the upper
-      storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many churches and the
-      gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving, on a sunny
-      afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you move in the
-      shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the air above. And
-      around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the architectural
-      glories of &ldquo;up town&rdquo; New York, the great hotels stand like mighty
-      fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great terminus. And
-      in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled to the
-      twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you are
-      summoned.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it is in &ldquo;down town,&rdquo; on the tip of the tongue that is put out to the
-      Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the stranger.
-      It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no doubt, that make
-      an equally striking appeal to the eye&mdash;Salzburg, Innsbruck,
-      Edinburgh, Tunis&mdash;but it is the appeal of nature supplemented by art.
-      Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not an
-      approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of
-      surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind,
-      that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous,
-      and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New
-      York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you land.
-      It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It ascends
-      its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation over the
-      Atlantic. &ldquo;Down town&rdquo; stands like a strong man on the shore of the ocean,
-      asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind these terrific
-      battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to the skies. Look at
-      this muscular development. And I am only the advance agent. I am only the
-      symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste of the power that heaves
-      and throbs through the veins of the giant that bestrides this continent
-      for three thousand miles, from his gateway to the Atlantic to his gateway,
-      to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this
-      terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from within,
-      stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway ends, a
-      street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned between
-      two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more' lofty than the
-      cross of St Paul's Cathedral&mdash;square towers, honeycombed with
-      thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying up in
-      lifts&mdash;called &ldquo;elevators&rdquo; for short&mdash;clicking at typewriters,
-      performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns at
-      the threshold of the giant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which he
-      rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon is
-      Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure in
-      the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the high
-      priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds are
-      shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on the kerbstone
-      of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its sovereigns wilting
-      away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you stand, in devout
-      respect before the modest threshold of the high priest a babel of strange
-      sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn towards it and come
-      suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange than anything
-      pictured by Hogarth&mdash;in the street a jostling mass of human beings,
-      fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like jockeys or
-      pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended high as if in
-      prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working with frantic symbols,
-      their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at a hundred windows in the
-      great buildings on either side of the street little groups of men and
-      women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob below. It is the outside
-      market of Mammon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
-      great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements
-      like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender and
-      beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle nearly
-      twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the temple of St
-      Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth acquired in his
-      sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most significant building in
-      America and the first turret to catch the noose of light that the dawn
-      flings daily over the Atlantic from the East. You enter its marble halls
-      and take an express train to the forty-ninth floor, flashing in your
-      journey past visions of crowded offices, tier after tier, offices of banks
-      and publishers and merchants and jewellers, like a great street,
-      Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skywards by
-      some violent geological &ldquo;fault.&rdquo; And at the forty-ninth floor you get out
-      and take another &ldquo;local&rdquo; train to the top, and from thence you look
-      giddily down, far down even upon the great precipices of the Grand Canon,
-      down to the streets where the moving throng you left a few minutes ago
-      looks like a colony of ants or black-beetles wandering uncertainly over
-      the pavement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
-      with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to be
-      large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
-      churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are
-      swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that loom
-      above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George Washington
-      still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the original union.
-      Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted world an inverted
-      civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the vision of the great
-      dome that seems to float in the heavens over the secular activities of
-      another city, still holding aloft, to however negligent and indifferent a
-      generation, the symbol of the supremacy of spiritual things. And you will
-      wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below you, in which the
-      temples of the ancient worship crouch at the porch of these Leviathan
-      temples of commerce, there is the unconscious expression of another
-      philosophy of life in which St Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to
-      the stars.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the scene
-      below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so near that
-      you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open Atlantic,
-      with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million a year, that
-      has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of hopes, past the
-      statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the harbour, to be
-      swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that lies behind you.
-      You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught in the arms of its
-      two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before you, with its overflow
-      of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream, and its overflow of Jersey City
-      on the far bank of the other. In the brilliant sunshine and the clear,
-      smokeless atmosphere the eye travels far over this incredible vista of
-      human activity. And beyond the vision of the eye, the mind carries the
-      thought onward to the great lakes and the seething cities by their shores,
-      and over the illimitable plains westward to sunny lands more remote than
-      Europe, but still obedient to the stars and stripes, and southward by the
-      great rivers to the tropic sea.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the far
-      horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings. They will
-      not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those horizons,
-      after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields of activity,
-      you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the contrary, they
-      will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense of power unlike
-      anything else the world has to offer&mdash;the power of immeasurable
-      resources, still only in the infancy of their development, of
-      inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the mind, of
-      a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one&mdash;one in a certain
-      fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident prime of
-      their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of the day before
-      them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its crudeness and
-      freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as to something avuncular
-      and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late afternoon, a little tired and
-      more than a little disillusioned and battered by the journey. For him the
-      light has left the morning hills, but here it still clothes those hills
-      with hope and spurs on to adventure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
-      his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
-      &ldquo;the goods.&rdquo; He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
-      power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the
-      inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the
-      tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and the
-      squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the
-      chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction
-      at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush,
-      and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism has
-      shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American interests,
-      and the &ldquo;100 per cent. American&rdquo; in every disguise of designing
-      self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything that is
-      significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not a moment when
-      the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the harbour, can feel
-      very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no longer lit to invite
-      the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the contrary, she turns her
-      back on America and warns the alien away. Her torch has become a
-      policeman's baton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
-      breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous
-      waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back upon
-      the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun floods the
-      land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near his setting,
-      but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his morning prime, so
-      vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of your first
-      impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud pinnacle that
-      looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the temple of primeval
-      gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And as you gaze you are
-      conscious of a great note of interrogation taking shape in the mind. Is
-      that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic expression of the soul of
-      America, or has this mighty power you are leaving another gospel for
-      mankind? And as the light fades and battlements and pinnacle merge into
-      the encompassing dark there sounds in the mind the echoes of an immortal
-      voice&mdash;&ldquo;Let us here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
-      died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
-      freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people
-      shall not perish from the earth!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell to
-      America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of
-      Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0068" id="linkimage-0068"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0217m.jpg" alt="0217m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0217.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0069" id="linkimage-0069"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0208m.jpg" alt="0208m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0208.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON KEYHOLE MORALS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">M</span>y neighbour at the
-      breakfast table complained that he had had a bad night. What with the gale
-      and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of the timbers of the ship and
-      the pair in the next cabin&mdash;especially the pair in the next cabin....
-      How they talked! It was two o'clock before they sank into silence. And
-      such revelations! He couldn't help overhearing them. He was alone in his
-      cabin, and what was he to do? He couldn't talk to himself to let them know
-      they were being overheard. And he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And,
-      in short, there was nothing for it but to overhear. And the things he
-      heard&mdash;well.... And with a gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he
-      left it to me to imagine the worst. I suggested that he might cure the
-      trouble by telling the steward to give the couple a hint that the next
-      cabin was occupied. He received the idea as a possible way out of a
-      painful and delicate situation. Strange, he said, it had not occurred to
-      him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very
-      important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man. It
-      would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper, and
-      there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are not to
-      be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper enough
-      when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not our public
-      hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only indicates the
-      kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We want the world's
-      good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company manners as we put
-      on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would put his ear to a
-      keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole behind him watching
-      him in the act. The true estimate of your character (and mine) depends on
-      what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole behind us. It depends,
-      not on whether you are chivalrous to some one else's wife in public, but
-      whether you are chivalrous to your own wife in private. The eminent judge
-      who, checking himself in a torrent of abuse of his partner at whist,
-      contritely observed, &ldquo;I beg your pardon, madam; I thought you were my
-      wife,&rdquo; did not improve matters. He only lifted the curtain of a rather
-      shabby private cabin. He white-washed himself publicly out of his dirty
-      private pail.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the
-      quiet and undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps you
-      have accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the pockets
-      bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental concern is
-      awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own son. It is
-      natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing and weighty
-      reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that all those
-      respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard young John's
-      step approaching. You know that this very reasonable display of paternal
-      interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying of which you would be
-      ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is miles off&mdash;perhaps
-      down in the city, perhaps far away in the country. You are left alone with
-      his letters and your own sense of decency. You can read the letters in
-      perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you can share them. Not a
-      soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled to know those secrets,
-      and young John may be benefited by your knowing them. What do you do in
-      these circumstances? The answer will provide you with a fairly reliable
-      tape measure for your own spiritual contents.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next Cabin.
-      We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of &ldquo;Le Diable
-      Boiteux,&rdquo; Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one house to
-      another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside, with very
-      surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the guise of a very
-      civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and offered to do the same
-      for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and lift with magic and
-      inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the mysteries and
-      privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should have the decency to
-      thank him and send him away. The amusement would be purchased at too high
-      a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm, but it would do me a lot
-      of harm. For, after all, the important thing is not that we should be
-      able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the whole world in the face, but
-      that we should be able to look ourselves in the face. And it is our
-      private standard of conduct and not our public standard of conduct which
-      gives or denies us that privilege. We are merely counterfeit coin if our
-      respect for the Eleventh Commandment only applies to being found out by
-      other people. It is being found out by ourselves that ought to hurt us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass a
-      tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never committed
-      a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or forged a cheque.
-      But these things are not evidence of good character. They may only mean
-      that I never had enough honest indignation to commit a murder, nor enough
-      courage to break into a house. They may only mean that I never needed to
-      forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may only mean that I am afraid of
-      the police. Respect for the law is a testimonial that will not go far in
-      the Valley of Jehosophat. The question that will be asked of me there is
-      not whether I picked my neighbour's lock, but whether I put my ear to his
-      keyhole; not whether I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but
-      whether I read his letters when his back was turned&mdash;in short, not
-      whether I had respect for the law, but whether I had respect for myself
-      and the sanctities that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is
-      what went on in my private cabin which will probably be my undoing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0070" id="linkimage-0070"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0222m.jpg" alt="0222m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0222.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0071" id="linkimage-0071"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0223m.jpg" alt="0223m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0223.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      FLEET STREET NO MORE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>o-day I am among
-      the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a lifetime and am a person
-      at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that is told, a rumour on the
-      wind; a memory of far-off things and battles long ago. At this hour I
-      fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm. There is the thunder of
-      machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above, the click-click-click of
-      the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph operators, the tinkling of
-      telephones, the ringing of bells for messengers who tarry, reporters
-      coming in with &ldquo;stories&rdquo; or without &ldquo;stories,&rdquo; leader-writers writing for
-      dear life and wondering whether they will beat the clock and what will
-      happen if they don't, night editors planning their pages as a shopman
-      dresses his shop window, sub-editors breasting the torrent of &ldquo;flimsies&rdquo;
-       that flows in from the ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and
-      the other. I hear the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit
-      might hear the murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as
-      a policeman must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the
-      Strand submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his
-      glory departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the
-      middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible
-      embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong
-      arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and the
-      waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a
-      personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could
-      stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the
-      street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to
-      the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety. His
-      cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of the Constitution,
-      and his truncheon was as indispensable as a field-marshal's baton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on
-      the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make a
-      pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk
-      across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers.
-      Even &ldquo;J. B.,&rdquo; who has never been known to pass a policeman without a
-      gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived
-      under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly
-      Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates or
-      in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished
-      magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free,
-      independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He
-      can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand, but
-      he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting, or
-      Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in the shop
-      windows, or turn into the &ldquo;pictures&rdquo; or go home to tea. He can light his
-      pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as he pleases.
-      He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a realm where the
-      clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes without stirring
-      his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will not care.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock and
-      take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous
-      thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me as my
-      own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life until I
-      have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have heard its
-      chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the swanking
-      swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its unceasing life
-      during every hour of the twenty-four&mdash;in the afternoon when the
-      pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are crossing
-      to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air is shrill
-      with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide of the day's
-      life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work, and the telegraph
-      boys flit from door to door with their tidings of the world's happenings;
-      in the small hours when the great lorries come thundering up the side
-      streets with their mountains of papers and rattle through the sleeping
-      city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag of morn in sovereign
-      state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral that looks down so
-      grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. &ldquo;I see it arl so plainly as I
-      saw et, long ago.&rdquo; I have worn its paving stones as industriously as
-      Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as one who had the run
-      of the estate and the freeman's right. I have known its <i>habitues</i> as
-      familiarly as if they had belonged to my own household, and its
-      multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have drunk the solemn toast
-      with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken counsel with the lawyers
-      in the Temple, and wandered in its green and cloistered calm in the hot
-      afternoons, and written thousands of leaders and millions of words on
-      this, that, and the other, wise words and foolish words, and words without
-      any particular quality at all, except that they filled up space, and have
-      had many friendships and fought many battles, winning some and losing
-      others, and have seen the generations go by, and the young fellows grow
-      into old fellows who scan a little severely the new race of ardent boys
-      that come along so gaily to the enchanted street and are doomed to grow
-      old and weary in its service also. And at the end it has come to be a
-      street of ghosts&mdash;a street of memories, with faces that I knew
-      lurking in its shadows and peopling its rooms and mingling with the moving
-      pageant that seems like a phantom too.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like
-      the Chambered Nautilus, I
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      ... seal up the idle door,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape at
-      its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no more.
-      No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual footsteps.
-      No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had always &ldquo;gone out
-      to supper, sir,&rdquo; or been called to the news-room or sent on an errand. No
-      more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous clock that ticked so much
-      faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will come down from above like
-      snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults of the world will boil in like
-      the roar of many waters, but I shall not hear them. For I have come into
-      the inheritance of leisure. Time, that has lorded it over me so long, is
-      henceforth my slave, and the future stretches before me like an infinite
-      green pasture in which I can wander till the sun sets. I shall let the
-      legions thunder by while I tend my bees and water my plants, and mark how
-      my celery grows and how the apples ripen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the
-      chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great
-      noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him a
-      tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his orchard
-      when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys, bearing an
-      urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in the
-      Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to their
-      plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water, took a
-      sponge <i>and washed out his ears.</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0072" id="linkimage-0072"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0228m.jpg" alt="0228m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0228.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0073" id="linkimage-0073"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0229m.jpg" alt="0229m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0229.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON WAKING UP
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>hen I awoke this
-      morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the valley and the beech woods
-      glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and heard the ducks clamouring for
-      their breakfast, and felt all the kindly intimacies of life coming back in
-      a flood for the new day, I felt, as the Americans say, &ldquo;good.&rdquo; Waking up
-      is always&mdash;given a clear conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy
-      faculty of sleep&mdash;a joyous experience. It has the pleasing excitement
-      with which the tuning up of the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the
-      symphony affects you. It is like starting out for a new adventure, or
-      coming into an unexpected inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling
-      suddenly upon some author whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes
-      to your heart like a brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden
-      and beautiful and full of promise.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is now
-      that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of
-      consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has
-      happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and
-      realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The
-      fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does not
-      diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into the
-      future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking to
-      each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over, that the
-      years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining and the
-      birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going forth to
-      their labour until the evening without fear and without hate. As the day
-      advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find it is very
-      much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment when you step
-      over the threshold of sleep into the living world the revelation is
-      simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed. The devil is dead.
-      The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the earth. You recall
-      the far different emotions of a few brief months ago when the morning sun
-      woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling of the birds seemed
-      pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the paper spoiled your
-      breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the Kaiser. Poor wretch, he
-      is waking, too, probably about this time and wondering what will happen to
-      him before nightfall, wondering where he will spend the miserable remnant
-      of his days, wondering whether his great ancestor's habit of carrying a
-      dose of poison was not after all a practice worth thinking about. He
-      wanted the whole, earth, and now he is discovering that he is entitled to
-      just six feet of it&mdash;the same as the lowliest peasant in his land.
-      &ldquo;The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests,&rdquo; but there is
-      neither hole nor nest where he will be welcome. There is not much joy for
-      him in waking to a new day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has &ldquo;murdered
-      Sleep,&rdquo; and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose a
-      crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to enter
-      the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease of life
-      after our present lease had run out and were told that we could nominate
-      our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor an earldom,
-      nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my childhood when I
-      thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin man, eternally
-      perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a basket on my head and
-      shouting &ldquo;Muffins,&rdquo; in the ears of a delighted populace. I loved muffins
-      and I loved bells, and here was a man who had those joys about him all day
-      long and every day. But now my ambitions are more restrained. I would no
-      more wish to be born a muffin man than a poet or an Archbishop. The first
-      gift I should ask would be something modest. It would be the faculty of
-      sleeping eight solid hours every night, and waking each morning with the
-      sense of unfathomable and illimitable content with which I opened my eyes
-      to the world to-day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to
-      their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put
-      eating first, &ldquo;for,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;there is no other pleasure that comes three
-      times a day and lasts an hour each time.&rdquo; But sleep lasts eight hours. It
-      fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it fills it up with
-      the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom of democracy. &ldquo;All equal
-      are within the church's gate,&rdquo; said George Herbert. It may have been so in
-      George Herbert's parish; but it is hardly so in most parishes. It is true
-      of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you enter its portals all discriminations
-      vanish, and Hodge and his master, the prince and the pauper, are alike
-      clothed in the royal purple and inherit the same golden realm. There is
-      more harmony and equality in life than wre are apt to admit. For a good
-      twenty-five years of our seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an
-      agreement that is simply wonderful.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What delight
-      is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing the
-      sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of the
-      birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or the
-      cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or (as
-      now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the day
-      will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as any that
-      have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there is eternal
-      renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best that is still
-      to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot stale nor
-      familiarity make tame.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note of
-      the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that all
-      must feel on this exultant morning&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Good morning, Life&mdash;and all
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Things glad and beautiful.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      My pockets nothing hold,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      But he that owns the gold,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      The Sun, is my great friend&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      His spending has no end.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the bells.
-      There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of
-      sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain
-      perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we can
-      hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall get
-      through it. We shall not &ldquo;get through it,&rdquo; of course, but speech is only
-      fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have had a
-      sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror of a
-      dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of
-      consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite
-      mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of
-      immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than
-      from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose love
-      and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this perplexity
-      the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of happy
-      awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not being. I
-      can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      To dream as I may,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      And awake when I will,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      With the song of the bird,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      And the sun on the hill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in which,
-      once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, &ldquo;Are you there, beloved?&rdquo;
-       and hear the reply, &ldquo;Yes, beloved, I am here,&rdquo; and with that sweet
-      assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The tenderness and
-      beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred Austin, whom some
-      one in a jest made Poet Laureate. &ldquo;For my part,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I should like
-      to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of another victory for the
-      British Empire.&rdquo; It would not be easy to invent a more perfect contrast
-      between the feeling of a poet and the simulated passion of a professional
-      patriot. He did not really think that, of course. He was simply a timid,
-      amiable little man who thought it was heroic and patriotic to think that.
-      He had so habituated his tiny talent to strutting about in the grotesque
-      disguise of a swashbuckler that it had lost all touch with the primal
-      emotions of poetry. Forgive me for intruding him upon the theme. The happy
-      awakenings of eternity must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings
-      and its vulgar patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to
-      sleep on.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0074" id="linkimage-0074"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0235m.jpg" alt="0235m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0235.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0075" id="linkimage-0075"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0236m.jpg" alt="0236m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0236.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON RE-READING
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> weekly paper has
-      been asking well-known people what books they re-read. The most pathetic
-      reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. &ldquo;I seldom
-      re-read now,&rdquo; says that unhappy man. &ldquo;Time is so short and literature so
-      vast and unexplored.&rdquo; What a desolating picture! It is like saying, &ldquo;I
-      never meet my old friends now. Time is so short and there are so many
-      strangers I have not yet shaken hands with.&rdquo; I see the poor man, hot and
-      breathless, scurrying over the &ldquo;vast and unexplored&rdquo; fields of literature,
-      shaking hands and saying, &ldquo;How d'ye do?&rdquo; to everybody he meets and
-      reaching the end of his journey, impoverished and pitiable, like the
-      peasant in Tolstoi's &ldquo;How much land does a man need?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with strangers.
-      I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North Pole and the
-      South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson said of the
-      Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should not like <i>to
-      go</i> to see them. And so with books. Time is so short that I have none
-      to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library. I could almost
-      say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is published I read
-      an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion, and a book has to
-      weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I embark on it. When it has
-      proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but meanwhile the old ships are
-      good enough for me. I know the captain and the crew, the fare I shall get
-      and the port I shall make and the companionship I shall have by the way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write&mdash;Boswell, &ldquo;The
-      Bible in Spain,&rdquo; Pepys, Horace, &ldquo;Elia,&rdquo; Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, &ldquo;Travels
-      with a Donkey,&rdquo; Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, &ldquo;The Early Life of
-      Charles James Fox,&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Under the Greenwood Tree,&rdquo; and so on. Do not call them books.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Camerado, this is no book.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Who touches this, touches a man,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      as Walt Whitman said of his own &ldquo;Leaves of Grass.&rdquo; They are not books.
-      They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on my
-      pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was worth making
-      the great adventure of life to find such company. Come revolutions and
-      bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace, gain or loss&mdash;these
-      friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes of the journey. The
-      friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are estranged, die, but these
-      friends of the spirit are not touched with mortality. They were not born
-      for death, no hungry generations tread them down, and with their immortal
-      wisdom and laughter they give us the password to the eternal. You can no
-      more exhaust them than you can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the
-      joyous melody of Mozart or Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or
-      any other thing of beauty. They are a part of ourselves, and through their
-      noble fellowship we are made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      ... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion
-      with these spirits.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old
-      friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever and
-      went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he sits in
-      his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale. It is a way
-      Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph captive. They
-      cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern flight without
-      thinking that they are going to breathe the air that Horace breathed, and
-      asking them to carry some such message as John Marshall's:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      Tell him, bird,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      One man at least seeks not admittance there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss the
-      figure of Horace&mdash;short and fat, according to Suetonius&mdash;in the
-      fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with equal
-      animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry. Meanwhile,
-      so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would say, is
-      imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading the books in
-      which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored tracts of the
-      desert to those who like deserts.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> correspondent
-      asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve Books that he
-      ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not know what he
-      had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs were, and even
-      with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for another. But I
-      compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed that for some
-      offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a desert island out in
-      the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for twelve months, or
-      perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a mitigation of the
-      penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve books of my own
-      choosing. On what principles should I set about so momentous a choice?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the first place I decided that they must be books of the inexhaustible
-      kind. Rowland Hill said that &ldquo;the love of God was like a generous roast of
-      beef&mdash;you could cut and come again.&rdquo; That must be the first quality
-      of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could go on reading and
-      re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in Borrow went on
-      reading &ldquo;Moll Flanders.&rdquo; If only her son had known that immortal book, she
-      said, he would never have got transported for life. That was the sort of
-      book I must have with me on my desert island. But my choice would be
-      different from that of the old apple-woman of Old London Bridge. I
-      dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the best of novels are
-      exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my bundle of books would be
-      complete before I had made a start with the essentials, for I should want
-      &ldquo;Tristram Shandy&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tom Jones,&rdquo; two or three of Scott's, Gogol's &ldquo;Dead
-      Souls,&rdquo; &ldquo;David Copperfield,&rdquo; &ldquo;Evan Harrington,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Brothers Karamazoff,&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Père Goriot,&rdquo; &ldquo;War and Peace,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Three Musketeers,&rdquo; all of Hardy's,
-      &ldquo;Treasure Island,&rdquo; &ldquo;Robinson Crusoe,&rdquo; &ldquo;Silas Marner,&rdquo; &ldquo;Don Quixote,&rdquo; the
-      &ldquo;Cloister and the Hearth,&rdquo; &ldquo;Esmond&rdquo;&mdash;no, no, it would never do to
-      include novels. They must be left behind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but these
-      had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not come in
-      the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale, so that I
-      can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have no doubt about
-      my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first among the
-      historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him by the
-      lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and understanding
-      that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf of twenty-three
-      centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and fro, as it were,
-      from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty drama of ancient
-      Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the same ambitions,
-      the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and the same heroes.
-      Yes, Thucydides of course.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is there
-      to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history and
-      philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come to the
-      story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned Mommsen, or
-      the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard choice. I shut my
-      eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well, I make no complaint. And
-      then I will have those three fat volumes of Motley's, &ldquo;Rise of the Dutch
-      Republic&rdquo; (4) put in my boat, please, and&mdash;yes, Carlyle's &ldquo;French
-      Revolution&rdquo; (5), which is history and drama and poetry and fiction all in
-      one. And, since I must take the story of my own land with me, just throw
-      in Green's &ldquo;Short History&rdquo; (6). It is lovable for its serene and gracious
-      temper as much as for its story.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the more
-      personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep the
-      fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course, there
-      is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition, for
-      there only is the real Samuel revealed &ldquo;wart and all&rdquo;). I should like to
-      take &ldquo;Elia&rdquo; and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit my
-      personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place must
-      be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that frank,
-      sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to these good
-      fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality of open-air
-      romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more I choose
-      indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a choice
-      between the &ldquo;Bible in Spain,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Romany Rye,&rdquo; &ldquo;Lavengro,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Wild
-      Wales.&rdquo; But I rejoice when I find that &ldquo;Lavengro&rdquo; (10) is in the boat.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could have
-      had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is
-      Wordsworth (11) <i>contra mundum</i>, I have no doubt. He is the man who
-      will &ldquo;soothe and heal and bless.&rdquo; My last selection shall be given to a
-      work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's
-      &ldquo;Voyages&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Voyage of the Beagle,&rdquo; and while I am balancing their
-      claims the &ldquo;Beagle&rdquo; (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library is
-      complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the Pacific.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0076" id="linkimage-0076"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0243m.jpg" alt="0243m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0243.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      FEBRUARY DAYS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he snow has gone
-      from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of setting, has got round to
-      the wood that crowns the hill on the other side of the valley. Soon it
-      will set on the slope of the hill and then down on the plain. Then we
-      shall know that spring has come. Two days ago a blackbird, from the
-      paddock below the orchard, added his golden baritone to the tenor of the
-      thrush who had been shouting good news from the beech tree across the road
-      for weeks past. I don't know why the thrush should glimpse the dawn of the
-      year before the blackbird, unless it is that his habit of choosing the
-      topmost branches of the tree gives him a better view of the world than
-      that which the golden-throated fellow gets on the lower branches that he
-      always affects. It may be the same habit of living in the top storey that
-      accounts for the early activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours,
-      but never so noisy as in these late February days, when they are breaking
-      up into families and quarrelling over their slatternly household
-      arrangements in the topmost branches of the elm trees. They are comic
-      ruffians who wash all their dirty linen in public, and seem almost as
-      disorderly and bad-tempered as the human family itself. If they had only a
-      little of our ingenuity in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my
-      friend the farmer to light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive
-      the female from the eggs and save his crops.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his
-      modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but he
-      is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden and the
-      pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is as
-      industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the
-      starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been
-      observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two
-      minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that
-      deserves encouragement&mdash;a bird that loves caterpillars and does not
-      love cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So
-      hang out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no
-      unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape the
-      general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been
-      agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below
-      the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting
-      industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with that
-      innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just in front of
-      you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of hide-and-seek. But not
-      now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in the best of us. Now he
-      reminds us that he too is a part of that nature which feeds so
-      relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing about in his own
-      erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that the coast is
-      clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his beak. He skips
-      away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper of the hive
-      comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops the great tit
-      and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in spite of his air
-      of innocence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the
-      starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months
-      hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's &ldquo;Oh,
-      that the Romans had only one neck!&rdquo; For then he will come out of the beech
-      woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive against my
-      cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an obscene
-      picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and the
-      stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I can be
-      just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not all bad
-      any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See him on
-      autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his forages in
-      the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in the sky that
-      are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud approaches like
-      a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting, changing formation,
-      breaking up into battalions, merging into columns, opening out on a wide
-      front, throwing out flanks and advance guards and rear guards, every
-      complication unravelled in perfect order, every movement as serene and
-      assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat of some invisible
-      conductor below&mdash;a very symphony of the air, in which motion merges
-      into music, until it seems that you are not watching a flight of birds,
-      but listening with the inner ear to great waves of soundless harmony. And
-      then, the overture over, down the cloud descends upon the fields, and the
-      farmers' pests vanish before the invasion. And if you will follow them
-      into the fields you will find infinite tiny holes that they have drilled
-      and from which they have extracted the lurking enemy of the drops, and you
-      will remember that it is to their beneficial activities that we owe the
-      extermination of the May beetle, whose devastations were so menacing a
-      generation ago. And after the flock has broken up and he has paired, and
-      the responsibilities of housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy
-      labours. When spring has come you can see him dart from his nest in the
-      hollow of the tree and make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field,
-      returning each time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other
-      succulent, but pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at
-      home. That acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted
-      eighteen such journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for
-      a fellow of such benignant spirit?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and
-      see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration.
-      Sufficient unto the day&mdash;&mdash; And to-day I will think only good of
-      the sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the
-      brave news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as
-      this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that
-      all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, &ldquo;according to
-      plan,&rdquo; and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score of hives
-      in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its perils. We
-      saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay on the
-      ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had come from a
-      neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there was no
-      admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he came.
-      Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness and
-      great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him
-      trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh,
-      these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the garden the news is coming up from below, borne by those unfailing
-      outriders of the spring, the snowdrop and the winter aconite. A modest
-      company; but in their pennons is the assurance of the many-coloured host
-      that is falling unseen into the vast pageant of summer and will fill the
-      woods with the trumpets of the harebell and the wild hyacinth, and make
-      the hedges burst into foam, and the orchard a glory of pink and white, and
-      the ditches heavy with the scent of the meadowsweet, and the fields golden
-      with harvest and the gardens a riot of luxuriant life. I said it was all
-      right, chirps little red waistcoat from the fence&mdash;all the winter
-      I've told you that there was a good time coming and now you see for
-      yourself. Look at those flowers. Ain't they real? The philosopher in the
-      red waistcoat is perfectly right. He has kept his end up all through the
-      winter, and has taken us into his fullest confidence. Formerly he never
-      came beyond the kitchen, but this winter when the snow was about he
-      advanced to the parlour where he pottered about like one of the family.
-      Now, however, with the great news outside and the earth full of good
-      things to pick up, he has no time to call.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save for
-      the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the
-      message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of the
-      spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the sunrise
-      is unlike the spirit of the sunset. It is the lusty breath of life coming
-      back to the dead earth, and making these February days the most thrilling
-      of the year. For in these expanding skies and tremors of life and
-      unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and hope, and
-      nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes that the joy
-      of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The cherry blossom
-      comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the spring with it,
-      and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent of the lime trees
-      and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days of birth when
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      &ldquo;Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      there is no hint of mortality and no reverted glance. The curtain is
-      rising and the pageant is all before us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0077" id="linkimage-0077"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0249m.jpg" alt="0249m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0249.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0078" id="linkimage-0078"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0250m.jpg" alt="0250m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0250.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>mong my letters
-      this morning was one requesting that if I were in favour of &ldquo;the
-      reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the Jewish people,&rdquo; I
-      should sign the enclosed declaration and return it in the envelope
-      (unstamped), also enclosed. I dislike unstamped envelopes. I also dislike
-      stamped envelopes. You can ignore an unstamped enveloped but a stamped
-      envelope compels you to write a letter, when perhaps you don't want to
-      write a letter. My objection to unstamped envelopes is that they show a
-      meagre spirit and a lack of confidence in you. They suggest that you are
-      regarded with suspicion as a person who will probably steam off the stamp
-      and use it to receipt a bill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I waived the objection, signed the declaration, stamped the envelope
-      and put it in the post. I did all this because I am a Zionist. I am so
-      keen a Zionist that I would use a whole bookful of stamps in the cause. I
-      am a Zionist, not on sentimental grounds, but on very practical grounds. I
-      want the Jews to have Palestine, so that the English may have England and
-      the Germans Germany and the Russians Russia. I want them to have a home of
-      their own so that the rest of us can have a home of our own. By this I do
-      not mean that I am an anti-Semite. I loathe Jew-baiting, and regard the
-      Jew-baiter as a very unlovely person. But I want the Jew to be able to
-      decide whether he is an alien or a citizen. I want him to shed the dualism
-      that makes him such an affliction to himself and to other people. I want
-      him to possess Palestine so that he may cease to want to possess the
-      earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am therefore fiercely on the side of the Zionist Jews, and fiercely
-      against their opponents. These people want to be Jews, but they do not
-      want Jewry. They do not want to be compelled to make a choice between
-      being Jews and being Englishmen or Americans, Germans or French. They want
-      the best of both worlds. We are not a nation, they say; we are Englishmen,
-      or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, or Russians, or
-      Japanese &ldquo;of the Jewish persuasion.&rdquo; We are a religious community like the
-      Catholics, or the Presbyterians, or the Unitarians, or the Plymouth
-      Brethren. Indeed! And what is your religion, pray? <i>It is the religion
-      of the Chosen People</i>. Great heavens! You deny that you are a nation,
-      and in the same breath claim that you are the Chosen Nation. The very
-      foundation of your religion is that Jehovah has picked you out from all
-      the races of men as his own. Over you his hand is spread in everlasting
-      protection. For you the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night; for
-      the rest of us the utter darkness of the breeds that have not the
-      signature of Jehovah. We cannot enter your kingdom by praying or fasting,
-      by bribe or entreaty. Every other nation is accessible to us on its own
-      conditions; every other religion is eager to welcome us, sends its
-      missionaries to us to implore us to come in. But you, the rejected of
-      nations, yourself reject all nations and forbid your sacraments to those
-      who are not bom of your household. You are the Chosen People, whose
-      religion is the nation and whose nationhood is religion.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Why, my dear sir, history offers no parallel to your astounding claim to
-      nationality&mdash;the claim that has held your race together through
-      nearly two thousand years of dispersion and wandering, of persecution and
-      pride, of servitude and supremacy&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Slaves in eternal Egypts, baking your strawless bricks;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      At ease in successive Zions, prating your politics.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All nations are afflicted with egoism. It is the national egoism of
-      Prussia that has just brought it to such catastrophic ruin. The Frenchman
-      entertains the firm conviction that civilisation ends at the French
-      frontier. Being a polite person, he does his best not to betray the
-      conviction to us, and sometimes almost succeeds. The Englishman, being
-      less sophisticated, does not try to conceal the fact that he has a similar
-      conviction. It does not occur to him that anyone can doubt his claim. He
-      knows that every foreigner would like to be an Englishman if he knew how.
-      The pride of the Spaniard is a legend, and you have only to see Arab
-      salute Arab to understand what a low person the European must seem in
-      their eyes. In short, national egoism is a folly which is pretty equally
-      distributed among all of us. But your national egoism is unlike any other
-      brand on earth. In the humility of Shylock is the pride of the most
-      arrogant racial aristocracy the world has ever seen. God appeared to you
-      in the burning bush and spoke to you in the thunders of Sinai, and set you
-      apart as his own exclusive household. And when one of your prophets
-      declared that all nations were one in the sight of God, you rejected his
-      gospel and slew the prophet. By comparison with you we are a humble
-      people. We know we are a mixed race and that we have no more divine origin&mdash;and
-      no less&mdash;than anybody else. Mr Kipling, it is true, has caught your
-      arrogant note:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      For the Lord our God Most High,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      He hath made the deep as dry,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But that is because Mr Kipling seems to be one of those who believe we are
-      one of the lost tribes of your Chosen race. I gather that is so from
-      another of his poems in which he cautions us against
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Such boastings as the Gentiles use
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      And lesser breeds without the law.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But Mr Kipling is only a curiosity among us. We are much more modest than
-      that. But you are like that. You are not only a nation. You are, except
-      the Chinese, the most isolated, the most tenacious, the most exclusive
-      nation in history. Other races have changed through the centuries beyond
-      recognition or have disappeared altogether. Where are the Persians of the
-      spacious days of Cyrus? Who finds in the Egyptians of to-day the spirit
-      and genius of the mighty people who built the Pyramids and created the art
-      of the Third Dynasty? What trace is there in the modern Cretans of the
-      imperial race whose seapower had become a legend before Homer sang? Can we
-      find in the Greeks of our time any reminiscence of the Athens of Pericles?
-      Or in the Romans any kinship with the sovereign people that conquered the
-      world from Parthia to Britain, and stamped it with the signature of its
-      civilisation as indelibly as it stamped it with its great highways? The
-      nations chase each other across the stage of time, and vanish as the
-      generations of men chase each other and vanish. You and the Chinese alone
-      seem indestructible. It is no extravagant fancy that foresees that when
-      the last fire is lit on this expiring planet it will be a Chinaman and a
-      Jew who will stretch their hands to its warmth, drink in the last breath
-      of air, and write the final epitaph of earth. No, it is too late by many a
-      thousand years to deny your nationhood, for it is the most enduring fact
-      in human records. And being a nation without a fatherland, you run like a
-      disturbing immiscible fluid through the blood of all the nations. You need
-      a home for your own peace and for the world's peace. I am going to try and
-      help you to get one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0079" id="linkimage-0079"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0254m.jpg" alt="0254m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0254.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0080" id="linkimage-0080"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> think, on the
-      whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good display of moral
-      fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen (and admired) I propose
-      to let them off in public. When I awoke in the morning I made a good
-      resolution.... At this point, if I am not mistaken, I observe a slight
-      shudder on your part, madam. &ldquo;How Victorian!&rdquo; I think I hear you remark.
-      You compel me, madam, to digress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year's resolutions
-      nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we
-      elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No
-      one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian
-      England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This
-      querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like the
-      scorn of youth for its elders.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I
-      should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as it is
-      to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the
-      Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as
-      we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren will be
-      as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of yesterday.
-      The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered poison gas, and
-      have invented submarines and guns that will kill a churchful of people
-      seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding the Nineteenth Century
-      as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good things as well as very bad
-      things about our old Victorian England. It did not go to the Ritz to dance
-      in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz did not exist, and the modern hotel
-      life had not been invented. It used to go instead to the watch-night
-      service, and it was not above making good resolutions, which for the most
-      part, no doubt, it promptly proceeded to break.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of
-      watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I had
-      my way I would be as &ldquo;merry&rdquo; as Pepys, if in a different fashion. &ldquo;Merry&rdquo;
-       is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that merriment
-      is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a mere spasm,
-      whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy of life. But
-      the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other, and an occasional
-      burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for anybody&mdash;even for
-      an Archbishop&mdash;especially for an Archbishop. The trouble with an
-      Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take himself too
-      seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad for him. He
-      needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally that his virtue is
-      not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary humanity. At least once
-      a year he should indulge in a certain liveliness, wear the cap and bells,
-      dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe, not too publicly, but just publicly
-      enough so that there should be nothing furtive about it. If not done on
-      the village green it might at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and
-      chronicled in the local newspapers. &ldquo;Last evening His Grace the Archbishop
-      attended the servants' ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the
-      chief scullery-maid.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0081" id="linkimage-0081"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0257m.jpg" alt="0257m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0257.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its
-      good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you &ldquo;A Merry Christmas
-      and a Happy New Year.&rdquo; Nowadays the formula is &ldquo;A Happy Christmas and a
-      Prosperous New Year.&rdquo; It is a priggish, sophisticated change&mdash;a sort
-      of shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being &ldquo;merry.&rdquo;
-       There isn't. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a Merry
-      Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a Happy
-      New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making
-      good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that virtue is
-      a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride Victorian
-      England because it went to watch-night services it is not because I think
-      there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is because, in the
-      words of the old song, I think &ldquo;It is good to be merry <i>and</i> wise.&rdquo; I
-      like a festival of foolishness and I like good resolutions, too. Why
-      shouldn't I? Lewis Carrol's gift for mathematics was not less admirable
-      because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at doing sums in his head.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution.
-      The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New
-      Year's morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is that
-      you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn't call you an intolerant
-      fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow. Perhaps to put
-      the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous reaction to events is a
-      little too immediate. I don't want to be unpleasant, but I think you see
-      what I mean. Do not suppose that I am asking you to be a cold-blooded,
-      calculating person. God forbid. But it would do you no harm to wear a
-      snaffle bar and a tightish rein&mdash;or, as we used to say in our
-      Victorian England, to &ldquo;count ten.&rdquo; I accepted the criticism with approval.
-      For though we do not like to hear of our failings from other people, that
-      does not mean that we are unconscious of them. The more conscious we are
-      of them, the less we like to hear of them from others and the more we hear
-      of them from ourselves. So I said &ldquo;Agreed. We will adopt 'Second thoughts'
-      as our New Year policy and begin the campaign at once.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And then came my letters&mdash;nice letters and nasty letters and
-      indifferent letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say,
-      &ldquo;raised the waters.&rdquo; No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters
-      which anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I
-      might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting
-      assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of
-      writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different. As
-      I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding
-      expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I
-      said &ldquo;Second thoughts,&rdquo; and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as
-      the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect to
-      dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old
-      imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to have
-      a periodical brush with one's habits, even if one knows one is pretty sure
-      to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a reminder that we
-      are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of the imperfections of
-      others. And that, I think, is the case for our old Victorian habit of New
-      Year's Day commandments.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite <i>pianissimo</i> and
-      nice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0082" id="linkimage-0082"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0261m.jpg" alt="0261m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0261.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A GRECIAN PROFILE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> see that the
-      ghouls have descended upon George Meredith, and are desecrating his
-      remains. They have learned from the life of him just published that he did
-      not get on well with his father, or his eldest son, and that he did not
-      attend his first wife's funeral. Above all, he was a snob. He was ashamed
-      of the tailoring business from which he sprang, concealed the fact that he
-      was bom at Portsmouth, and generally turned his Grecian profile to the
-      world and left it to be assumed that his pedigree was wrapped in mystery
-      and magnificence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay it is all true. Many of us have an indifferent record at home
-      and most of us like to turn our Grecian profiles to the world, if we have
-      Grecian profiles. We are like the girl in Hardy's story who always managed
-      to walk on the right side of her lover, because she fancied that the left
-      side of her face was her strong point. The most distinguished and, I
-      think, the noblest American of our time always turns his profile to the
-      camera&mdash;and a beautiful profile it is&mdash;for reasons quite obvious
-      and quite pardonable to those who have seen the birth-mark that disfigures
-      the other cheek. I suspect that I do not myself object to being caught
-      unaware in favourable attitudes or pleasing situations that dispose the
-      observer to agreeable impressions. And, indeed, why should I (or you) be
-      ashamed to give-a pleasant thrill to anybody if it is in our power. If we
-      pretend we are above these human frailties, what is the meaning of the
-      pains we take about choosing a hat, or about the cut of a coat, or the
-      colour of a cloth for the new suit? Why do we so seldom find pleasure in a
-      photograph of ourselves&mdash;so seldom feel that it does justice to that
-      benignant and Olympian ideal of ourselves which we cherish secretly in our
-      hearts? I should have to admit, if I went into the confession box, that I
-      had never seen a photograph of myself that had satisfied me. And I fancy
-      you would do the same if you were honest. We may pretend to ourselves that
-      it is only abstract beauty or absolute truth that we are concerned about,
-      but we know better. We are thinking of our Grecian profile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is no doubt regrettable to find that great men are so often afflicted
-      with little weaknesses. There are some people who delight in pillorying
-      the immortals and shying dead cats and rotten eggs at them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They enjoy the discovery that no one is better than he should be. It gives
-      them a comfortable feeling to discover that the austere outside of the
-      lord Angelo conceals the libertine. If you praise Caesar they will remind
-      you that after dinner he took emetics; if Brutus, they will say he made an
-      idol of his public virtue. They like to remember that Lamb was not quite
-      the St Charles he is represented to be, but took far too much wine at
-      dinner and dosed beautifully, but alcoholically, afterwards, as you may
-      read in De Quincey. They like to recall that Scott was something of a
-      snob, and put the wine-glass that the Prince Regent had used at dinner in
-      his pocket, sitting down on it afterwards in a moment of happy
-      forgetfulness. In short, they go about like Alcibiades mutilating the
-      statues of Hermes (if he was indeed the culprit), and will leave us
-      nothing in human nature that we can entirely reverence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I suppose they are right enough on the facts. Considering what
-      multitudinous persons we are it would be a miracle if, when we button up
-      ourselves in the morning we did not button up some individual of
-      unpleasant propensities, whom we pretend we do not know. I have never been
-      interested in my pedigree. I am sure it is a very ancient one, and I leave
-      it at that. But I once made a calculation&mdash;based on the elementary
-      fact that I had two parents and they had each two parents, and so on&mdash;and
-      came to the conclusion that about the time of the Norman Conquest my
-      ancestors were much more numerous than the population then inhabiting this
-      island. I am aware that this proves rather too much&mdash;that it is an
-      example of the fact that you can prove anything by statistics, including
-      the impossible. But the truth remains that I am the temporary embodiment
-      of a very large number of people&mdash;of millions of millions of people,
-      if you trace me back to my ancestors who used to sharpen flints some six
-      hundred thousand years ago. It would be singular if in such a crowd there
-      were not some ne'er-do-wells jostling about among the nice, reputable
-      persons who, I flatter myself, constitute my Parliamentary majority.
-      Sometimes I fancy that, in a snap election taken at a moment of public
-      excitement within myself, the ne'er-do-wells get on top. These accidents
-      will happen, and the best I can hope is that the general trend of policy
-      in the multitudinous kingdom that I carry under my hat is in the hands of
-      the decent people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And that is the best we can expect from anybody&mdash;the great as well as
-      the least. If we demand of the supreme man that he shall be a perfect
-      whole we shall have no supreme man&mdash;only a plaster saint. Certainly
-      we shall have no great literature. Shakespeare did not sit aloof like a
-      perfect god imagining the world of imperfect creatures that he created.
-      The world was within him and he was only the vehicle of his enormous
-      ancestry and of the tumultuous life that they reproduced in the theatre of
-      his mind. In him was the mirth of a roystering Falstaff of long ago, the
-      calculating devilry of some Warwickshire Iago, the pity of Hubert, the
-      perplexity of some village Hamlet, the swagger of Ancient Pistol, the
-      bucolic simplicity of Cousin Silence, the mingled nobleness and baseness
-      of Macbeth, the agony of Lear, the sweetness of many a maiden who walked
-      by Avon's banks in ancient days and lived again in the Portias and
-      Rosalinds of his mind. All these people dwelt in Shakespeare. They were
-      the ghosts of his ancestors. He was, like the rest of us, not a man, but
-      multitudes of men. He created all these people because he was all these
-      people, contained in a larger measure than any man who ever lived all the
-      attributes, good and bad, of humanity. Each character was a peep into the
-      gallery of his ancestors. Meredith, himself, recognised the ancestral
-      source of creative power. When Lady Butcher asked him to explain his
-      insight into the character of women he replied, &ldquo;It is the spirit of my
-      mother in me.&rdquo; It was indeed the spirit of many mothers working in and
-      through him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it
-      so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never more
-      difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along the Embankment
-      last evening with a friend&mdash;a man known alike for his learning and
-      character&mdash;when he turned to me and said, &ldquo;I will never have a hero
-      again.&rdquo; We had been speaking of the causes of the catastrophe of Paris,
-      and his remark referred especially to his disappointment with President
-      Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair to the President. He did not make
-      allowance for the devil's broth of intrigue and ambitions into which the
-      President was plunged on this side of the Atlantic. But, leaving that
-      point aside, his remark expressed a very common feeling. There has been a
-      calamitous slump in heroes. They have fallen into as much disrepute as
-      kings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the
-      fabulous offspring of comfortable times&mdash;supermen reigning on Olympus
-      and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the storm
-      and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy and prove
-      that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they are discovered
-      to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind, feeble folk like
-      you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as helpless as any of us.
-      Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and their feet have come down
-      from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of clay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of the
-      Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron
-      expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      I want a hero: an uncommon want,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      When every year and month sends forth a new one.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The age discovers he is not the true one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that &ldquo;no man is a
-      hero to his valet.&rdquo; To be a hero you must be remote in time or
-      circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and
-      fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities and
-      angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is privileged
-      to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the tricks you
-      have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a faithful
-      secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture he gives of
-      Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome loathing for
-      that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name thunders down
-      the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his contemporaries. It
-      was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom he had just appointed to
-      the choicest command in his gift, who went to Caesar's house on that March
-      morning, two thousand years ago, to bring him to the slaughter.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men I
-      should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely than
-      anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance in secondary
-      things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and tenderness with
-      resolution and strength, he stands alone in history. But even he was not a
-      hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too near&mdash;near enough to
-      note his frailties, for he was human, too near to realise the grand and
-      significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was not until he was dead
-      that the world realised what a leader had fallen in Israel. Motley thanked
-      heaven, as for something unusual, that he had been privileged to
-      appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed him to men. Stanton
-      fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end, and it was only when
-      life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur of the force that had
-      been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. &ldquo;There lies the most perfect
-      ruler of men the world has ever seen,&rdquo; he said, as he stood with other
-      colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had breathed his last. But the
-      point here is that, sublime though the sum of the man was, his heroic
-      profile had its abundant human warts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of
-      reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It
-      will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have made
-      the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not find
-      them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are these the
-      men&mdash;these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards&mdash;the
-      demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the
-      microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than
-      demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and then
-      you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto
-      Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless
-      picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its
-      arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion
-      to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is a
-      painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never
-      will be such a being. The best of us is woven of &ldquo;mingled yarn, good and
-      ill together.&rdquo; And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and the
-      ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he &ldquo;contained
-      multitudes&rdquo; too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful
-      for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects of
-      that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0083" id="linkimage-0083"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0269m.jpg" alt="0269m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0269.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0084" id="linkimage-0084"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0270m.jpg" alt="0270m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0270.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON TAKING A HOLIDAY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> hope the two
-      ladies from the country who have been writing to the newspapers to know
-      what sights they ought to see in London during their Easter holiday will
-      have a nice time. I hope they will enjoy the tube and have fine weather
-      for the Monument, and whisper to each other successfully in the whispering
-      gallery of St Paul's, and see the dungeons at the Tower and the seats of
-      the mighty at Westminster, and return home with a harvest of joyful
-      memories. But I can promise them that there is one sight they will not
-      see. They will not see me. Their idea of a holiday is London. My idea of a
-      holiday is forgetting there is such a place as London.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not that I dislike London. I should like to see it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have long promised myself that I would see it. Some day, I have said, I
-      will surely have a look at this place. It is a shame, I have said, to have
-      lived in it so long and never to have seen it. I suppose I am not much
-      worse than other Londoners. Do you, sir, who have been taking the morning
-      bus from Balham for heaven knows how many years&mdash;do you, when you are
-      walking down Fleet Street, stand still with a shock of delight as the dome
-      of St Paul's and its cross of gold burst on your astonished sight? Do you
-      go on a fine afternoon and take your stand on Waterloo Bridge to see that
-      wondrous river façade that stretches with its cloud-capped towers and
-      gorgeous palaces from Westminster to St Paul's? Do you know the spot where
-      Charles was executed, or the church where there are the best Grinling
-      Gibbons carvings? Did you ever go into Somerset House to see the will of
-      William Shakespeare, or&mdash;in short, did you ever see London? Did you
-      ever see it, not with your eyes merely, hut with your mind, with the sense
-      of revelation, of surprise, of discovery? Did you ever see it as those two
-      ladies from the country will see it this Easter as they pass breathlessly
-      from wonder to wonder? Of course not. You need a holiday in London as I
-      do. You need to set out with young Tom (aged ten) on a voyage of discovery
-      and see all the sights of this astonishing city as though you had come to
-      it from a far country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That is how I hope to visit it&mdash;some day. But not this Easter, not
-      when I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the
-      cherry blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the
-      chestnut tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long
-      and the April meadows are &ldquo;smoored wi' new grass,&rdquo; as they say in the
-      Yorkshire dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at
-      the magic casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn
-      to the fringe of Dartmoor and let loose&mdash;shall it be from Okehampton
-      or Bovey Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? what matter the gate by which we
-      enter the sanctuary?&mdash;let loose, I say, into the vast spaces of earth
-      and sky where the moorland streams sing their ancient runes over the
-      boulders and the great tors stand out like castles of the gods against the
-      horizon and the Easter sun dances, as the legend has it, overhead and
-      founders gloriously in the night beyond Plymouth Sound.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or, perhaps, ladies, if you come from the North, I may pass you unawares,
-      and just about the time when you are cracking your breakfast egg in the
-      boarding house at Russell Square&mdash;heavens, Russell Square!&mdash;and
-      discussing whether you shall first go down the deepest lift or up the
-      highest tower, or stand before the august ugliness of Buckingham Palace,
-      or see the largest station or the smallest church, I shall be stepping out
-      from Keswick, by the lapping waters of Derwent water, hailing the old
-      familiar mountains as they loom into sight, looking down again&mdash;think
-      of it!&mdash;into the' Jaws of Borrowdale, having a snack at Rosthwaite,
-      and then, hey for Styehead! up, up ever the rough mountain track, with the
-      buzzard circling with slow flapping wings about the mountain flanks, with
-      glorious Great Gable for my companion on the right hand and no less
-      glorious Scafell for my companion on the left hand, and at the rocky turn
-      in the track&mdash;lo! the great amphitheatre of Wasdale, the last
-      Sanctuary of lakeland.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And at this point, ladies, you may as you crane your neck to see the Duke
-      of York at the top of his column&mdash;wondering all the while who the
-      deuce the fellow was that he should stand so high&mdash;you may, I say, if
-      you like, conceive me standing at the top of the pass, taking my hat from
-      my head and pronouncing a terrific curse on the vandals who would
-      desecrate the last temple of solitude by driving a road over this fastness
-      of the mountains in order that the gross tribe of motorists may come with
-      their hoots and their odours, their hurry and vulgarity, and chase the
-      spirit of the mountains away from us for ever.... And then by the screes
-      of Great Gable to the hollow among the mountains. Or perchance, I may turn
-      by Sprinkling Tam and see the Pikes of Langdale come into view and stumble
-      down Rossett Ghyll and so by the green pastures of Langdale to Grasmere.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In short, ladies, I may be found in many places. But I shall not tell you
-      where. I am not quite sure that I could tell you where at this moment, for
-      I am like a fellow who has come into great riches and is doubtful how he
-      can squander them most gloriously. But, I repeat, ladies, that you will
-      not find me in London. I leave London to you. May you enjoy it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0085" id="linkimage-0085"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      UNDER THE SYCAMORE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>n odd question was
-      put to me the other day which I think I may venture to pass on to a wider
-      circle. It was this: What is the best dish that life has set before you?
-      At first blush it seems an easy question to answer. It was answered gaily
-      enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked what was the best thing that
-      had ever happened to him. &ldquo;The best thing that ever happened to me was to
-      be born,&rdquo; he replied. But that is not an answer: it is an evasion. It
-      belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether life is worth living. Life may
-      be worth living or not worth living on balance, but in either case we can
-      still say what was the thing in it that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a
-      dinner on the whole and yet make an exception of the trout, or the braised
-      ham and spinach or the dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and
-      still admit that he has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift
-      and many more, have cursed the day you were born and still remember many
-      pleasant things that have happened to you&mdash;falling in love, making
-      friends, climbing mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs,
-      watching the sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You
-      may write off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush
-      outside. It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very
-      sad heart who has never had anything to thank his stars for.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it grows
-      difficult on reflection.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily
-      answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over
-      and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things
-      that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long
-      sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and
-      agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree&mdash;sycamore or
-      chestnut for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because
-      their generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade&mdash;to sit, I
-      say, and think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball
-      which the Blessèd Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven
-      near by, sees &ldquo;spinning like a midge&rdquo; below.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and asked
-      us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play to which
-      we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped away so
-      quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we should make
-      now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will be there)
-      will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer. That glorious
-      contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool million&mdash;come
-      now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair to remember your
-      journey by. You will have to think of something better than that as the
-      splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to confess to a very
-      complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser pleasures seemed so
-      important, you will not like to admit, even to yourself, that your most
-      rapturous memory of earth centres round the grillroom at the Savoy. You
-      will probably find that the things best worth remembering are the things
-      you rejected.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose pleasures
-      were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of life, after
-      all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers in money, and
-      traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those occupations to
-      hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon under that
-      sycamore tree&mdash;which of them, now that it is all over, will have most
-      joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one and a
-      gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the earth as
-      a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the mountains,
-      and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and where season
-      followed season with a processional glory that never grew dim. And Mozart
-      will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and Turner as a panorama
-      of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect, with what delight they
-      will look back on the great moments of life&mdash;Columbus seeing the new
-      world dawning on his vision, Copernicus feeling the sublime architecture
-      of the universe taking shape in his mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal
-      mystery of the human frame, Darwin thrilling with the birth pangs of the
-      immense secret that he wrung from Nature. These men will be able to answer
-      the question grandly. The banquet they had on earth will bear talking
-      about even in Heaven.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the
-      scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will, I
-      fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and
-      humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we won
-      the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or shook
-      hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our name in
-      the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament. It will
-      be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human comradeship we
-      had on the journey&mdash;the friendships of the spirit, whether made in
-      the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or art. We shall
-      remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its affections&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The fates some recompense have sent&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Thrice blessed are the things that last,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The things that are more excellent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0086" id="linkimage-0086"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0278m.jpg" alt="0278m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0278.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0087" id="linkimage-0087"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0279m.jpg" alt="0279m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0279.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> met an old
-      gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with whom I have a
-      slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he asked me whether I
-      remembered Walker of <i>The Daily News</i>. No, said I, he was before my
-      time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the 'seventies.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Before that,&rdquo; said the old gentleman. &ldquo;Must have been in the 'sixties.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Probably,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Did you know him in the 'sixties?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh, I knew him before then,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, warming to his
-      subject. &ldquo;I knew him in the 'forties.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman
-      enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Heavens!&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;the 'forties!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a better
-      view across the ages. &ldquo;No.... It must have been in the 'thirties.... Yes,
-      it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school together in the 'thirties.
-      We called him Sawney Walker.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I had
-      paid him the one compliment that appealed to him&mdash;the compliment of
-      astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety
-      not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked &ldquo;well
-      set&rdquo; for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance
-      as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his hundred
-      at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement was mixed
-      with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent vanity is the
-      last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last infirmity that
-      humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that rages around Dean
-      Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the angels. I want to
-      feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are moving upwards in the
-      scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round and round and biting our
-      tail. I think the case for the ascent of man is stronger than the Dean
-      admits. A creature that has emerged from the primordial slime and evolved
-      a moral law has progressed a good way. It is not unreasonable to think
-      that he has a future. Give him time&mdash;and it may be that the world is
-      still only in its rebellious childhood&mdash;and he will go far.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a
-      time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant
-      and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first
-      knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We are
-      vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of his
-      acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all the
-      year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes at
-      the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots and his
-      cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of mine who,
-      in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing boots to the
-      children at a London school, heard one day a little child pattering behind
-      her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of the beneficiaries
-      &ldquo;keeping up&rdquo; with her. She turned and recognised the wearer. &ldquo;So you've
-      got your new boots on, Mary?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said little Mary grandly.
-      &ldquo;Don't they squeak beautiful, mum.&rdquo; And though, as we grow older, we cease
-      to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we find other material to
-      keep the flame of vanity alive. &ldquo;What for should I ride in a carriage if
-      the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?&rdquo; said the Fifer, putting his
-      head out of the window. He spoke for all of us. We are all a little like
-      that. I confess that I cannot ride in a motor-car that whizzes past other
-      motor-cars without an absurd and irrational vanity. I despise the emotion,
-      but it is there in spite of me. And I remember that when I was young I
-      could hardly free-wheel down a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior
-      to the man who was grinding his way up with heavings and perspiration. I
-      have no shame in making these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that
-      you, sir (or madam), will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite
-      audible echo of yourself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we are vain
-      of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our neighbours as
-      we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our neighbours. We are
-      like the old maltster in &ldquo;Far from the Madding Crowd,&rdquo; when Henery Fray
-      claimed to be &ldquo;a strange old piece, goodmen.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;A strange old piece, ye say!&rdquo; interposed the maltster in a querulous
-      voice. &ldquo;Ye be no old man worth naming&mdash;no old man at all. Yer teeth
-      bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
-      bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis a
-      poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore&mdash;a
-      boast weak as water.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences
-      when the maltster had to be pacified.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Weak as water, yes,&rdquo; said Jan Coggan. &ldquo;Malter, we feel ye to be a
-      wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; said Joseph Poorgrass. &ldquo;Ye be a very rare old spectacle, malter,
-      and we all respect ye for that gift.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in being
-      &ldquo;a very rare old spectacle.&rdquo; We count the reigns we've lived in and exalt
-      the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes at midnight.
-      Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite early, as in the
-      case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of Cicero who was only
-      in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as an old man and wrote
-      his &ldquo;De Senectute,&rdquo; exalting the pleasures of old age. In the eyes of the
-      maltster he would never have been an old man worth naming, for he was only
-      sixty-four when he was murdered. I have noticed in my own case of late a
-      growing tendency to flourish my antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure
-      in recalling the 'seventies to those who can remember, say, only the
-      'nineties, that my fine old friend in the lane had in talking to me about
-      the 'thirties. I met two nice boys the other day at a country house, and
-      they were full, as boys ought to be, of the subject of the cricket. And
-      when they found I was worth talking to on that high theme, they submitted
-      their ideal team to me for approval, and I launched out about the giants
-      that lived in the days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds
-      of &ldquo;W. G.&rdquo; and Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G.
-      Steel, and many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their
-      stature did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those
-      memories as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I
-      shall be proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning
-      nurse. She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope
-      and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our
-      toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant vanity
-      we are soothed to sleep.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0088" id="linkimage-0088"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0284m.jpg" alt="0284m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0284.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0089" id="linkimage-0089"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0285m.jpg" alt="0285m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0285.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON SIGHTING LAND
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was in the midst
-      of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me to my feet with a
-      leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a doughty fellow, who
-      wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and had trained it to stand
-      up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of interrogation. &ldquo;I offer you a
-      draw,&rdquo; I said with a regal wave of the hand, as though I was offering him
-      Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or something substantial like that.
-      &ldquo;Accepted,&rdquo; he cried with a gesture no less reckless and comprehensive.
-      And then we bolted for the top deck. For the cry we had heard was &ldquo;Land in
-      sight!&rdquo; And if there are three more comfortable words to hear when you
-      have been tossing about on the ocean for a week or two, I do not know
-      them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the Atlantic
-      is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely facetious
-      when he said he was &ldquo;disappointed with the Atlantic.&rdquo; But now I am
-      disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way I knew
-      it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order to know
-      what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until he was a
-      middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to his conception
-      of the sea because &ldquo;we have in us the glance of the universe.&rdquo; But though
-      the actual experience of the ocean adds little to the broad imaginative
-      conception of it formed by the mind, we are not prepared for the effect of
-      sameness, still less for the sense of smallness. It is as though we are
-      sitting day after day in the geometrical centre of a very round table-top.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are told
-      that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before yesterday
-      and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility to the
-      fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured by and
-      here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is perfectly
-      flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn by
-      compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have &ldquo;a drop
-      into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.&rdquo; You conceive
-      yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth which hangs
-      over the sides.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its
-      appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue cloth,
-      with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption of
-      transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey cloth;
-      sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth and
-      tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the table,
-      and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth flinging
-      itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an
-      incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion
-      and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under the
-      impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment suspended
-      in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like a wrestler
-      fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning, every joint
-      creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful strain. A gleam of
-      sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching the clouds of spray
-      turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling ship with the glamour
-      of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there is nothing but the
-      raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler in their midst, and
-      far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the horizon, as if it were a
-      pencil of white flame, to a spectral and unearthly beauty.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are moveless
-      in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our magic carpet
-      (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or Europe, as the
-      case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we are standing still
-      for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers progress to the mind.
-      The circle we looked out on last night is indistinguishable from the
-      circle we look out on this morning. Even the sky and cloud effects are
-      lost on this flat contracted stage, with its hard horizon and its thwarted
-      vision. There is a curious absence of the sense of distance, even of
-      distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as abruptly as the sea at that
-      severely drawn circumference and there is no vague merging of the seen
-      into the unseen, which alone gives the imagination room for flight. To
-      live in this world is to be imprisoned in a double sense&mdash;in the
-      physical sense that Johnson had in mind in his famous retort, and in the
-      emotional sense that I have attempted to describe. In my growing list of
-      undesirable occupations&mdash;sewermen, lift-men, stokers,
-      tram-conductors, and so on&mdash;I shall henceforth include ships'
-      stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being shot like a shuttle
-      in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New York and back from New
-      York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the ill-humour of the ocean and
-      to play the sick nurse to a never-ending mob of strangers, is as dreary a
-      part as one could be cast for. I would rather navigate a barge on the
-      Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet,
-      on second thoughts, they have their joys. They hear, every fortnight or
-      so, that thrilling cry, &ldquo;Land in sight!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and
-      however familiar it may be.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example.
-      Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the
-      first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some
-      unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively,
-      comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment
-      seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination.
-      Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the monotonous
-      rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with the emotion of
-      the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of the sea. Such a
-      cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three hundred years
-      ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of that immortal
-      little company of the <i>Mayflower</i> caught sight of the land where,
-      they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down through the
-      centuries that cry of &ldquo;Land in sight!&rdquo; has been sounded in the ears of
-      generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to the new land
-      of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see that land
-      shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great drama of the
-      ages.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English eyes
-      as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this sunny
-      morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the sight there
-      is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself heaving with a
-      hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders. I have a fleeting
-      vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling down there amid a
-      glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to sea, and standing
-      on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home to the Ark that is
-      for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is a
-      rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his hills
-      hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager comes from,
-      whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic from the Cape,
-      or round the Cape from Australia, or through the Mediterranean from India,
-      this is the first glimpse of the homeland that greets him, carrying his
-      mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the journey's end. And that
-      vision links him up with the great pageant of history. Drake, sailing in
-      from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and knew he was once more in his
-      Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck beside me with a wisp of hair,
-      curled and questioning, on his baldish forehead, and I mark the shine in
-      his eyes....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0090" id="linkimage-0090"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0291m.jpg" alt="0291m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0291.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0091" id="linkimage-0091"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0294m.jpg" alt="0294m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0294.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <div style="height: 6em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-***** This file should be named 47429-h.htm or 47429-h.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/7/4/2/47429/
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
-will be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
-one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
-(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
-permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
-set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
-copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
-protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
-Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
-charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
-do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
-rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
-such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
-research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
-practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
-subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
-redistribution.
-
-
-
-*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
-Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-  www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works
-
-1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
-all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
-If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
-
-1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
-paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
- or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
-collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
-copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
-works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
-are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
-Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
-freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
-this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
-the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
-keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
-a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
-Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
-States.
-
-1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
-access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
-whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
-phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
-Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
-copied or distributed:
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
-from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
-posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
-and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
-or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
-with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
-work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
-through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
-Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
-1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
-terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
-to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
-permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
-word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
-&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
-you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
-copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
-request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
-form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
-that
-
-- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
-     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
-     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
-     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
-     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
-     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
-     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
-     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
-     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
-     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
-
-- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-     License.  You must require such a user to return or
-     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
-     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
-     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
-     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
-     of receipt of the work.
-
-- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
-forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
-both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
-collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
-&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
-corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
-property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
-computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
-your equipment.
-
-1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
-of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
-your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
-refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
-opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
-the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
-Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
-
-
-Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
-people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
-To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
-and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
-and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
-Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
-permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
-Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
-throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
-North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
-contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
-Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-     Chief Executive and Director
-     gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
-SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
-particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
-To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-
-Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
-with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
-Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
-unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
-keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
-
-     www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-  </body>
-</html>
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h.zip b/47429/old/47429-h.zip
deleted file mode 100644
index 97ba3fa..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h.zip
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/47429-h.htm b/47429/old/47429-h/47429-h.htm
deleted file mode 100644
index 408103b..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/47429-h.htm
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,8545 +0,0 @@
-<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html
-   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
-   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
-
-<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
-  <head>
-    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
-    <title>
-      Windfalls, by By Alfred George Gardiner
-    </title>
-    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
-    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
-
-    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
-    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
-    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
-    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
-    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
-    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
-    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
-    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
-    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
-    .indent5   { margin-left: 5%;}
-    .indent10  { margin-left: 10%;}
-    .indent15  { margin-left: 15%;}
-    .indent20  { margin-left: 20%;}
-    .indent30  { margin-left: 30%;}
-    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
-    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
-    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
-    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
-    .pagenum   {position: absolute; right: 1%; font-size: 0.6em;
-                font-variant: normal; font-style: normal;
-                text-align: right; background-color: #FFFACD;
-                border: 1px solid; padding: 0.3em;text-indent: 0em;}
-    .side      { float: left; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
-               border-left: dashed thin; text-align: left;
-               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
-               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
-    p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
-    span.dropcap         { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 }
-    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
-
-</style>
-  </head>
-  <body>
-
-
-<pre>
-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Windfalls
-
-Author: (AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-Illustrator: Clive Gardiner
-
-Release Date: November 22, 2014 [EBook #47429]
-Last Updated: March 15, 2018
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-    <div style="height: 8em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h1>
-      WINDFALLS
-    </h1>
-    <h2>
-      By Alfred George Gardiner
-</h2>
-<h3>
-(Alpha of the Plough)
-    </h3>
-
-<h3>Illustrations by Clive Gardiner
-</h3>
-    <h4>
-      J. M. Dent &amp; Sons, Ltd.
-    </h4>
-    <h5>
-      1920
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0002m.jpg" alt="0002m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0002.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0008m.jpg" alt="0008m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0008.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0009m.jpg" alt="0009m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0009.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <h3>
-      TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      I think this book belongs to you because, if it can be said to be about
-      anything in particular&mdash;which it cannot&mdash;it is, in spite of its
-      delusive title, about bees, and as I cannot dedicate it to them, I offer
-      it to those who love them most.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0015m.jpg" alt="0015m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0015.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> JEMIMA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> ON BEING IDLE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> ON HABITS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> IN DEFENCE OF WASPS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> ON PILLAR ROCK </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> TWO VOICES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> ON BEING TIDY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> AN EPISODE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> ON POSSESSION </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> ON BORES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> A LOST SWARM </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> YOUNG AMERICA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> ON GREAT REPLIES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> ON HEREFORD BEACON </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> CHUM </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> ON MATCHES AND THINGS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> ON BEING REMEMBERED </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> ON DINING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> TWO DRINKS OF MILK </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> ON GREAT MEN </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> ON SWEARING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> ON A HANSOM CAB </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> ON MANNERS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> ON A FINE DAY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> DOWN TOWN </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> ON KEYHOLE MORALS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> FLEET STREET NO MORE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> ON WAKING UP </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> ON RE-READING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> FEBRUARY DAYS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> ON A GRECIAN PROFILE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> ON TAKING A HOLIDAY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> UNDER THE SYCAMORE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> ON SIGHTING LAND </a>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a> <br /><br /><a
-      name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0013m.jpg" alt="0013m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0013.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      PREFACE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>n offering a third
-      basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is hoped that the fruit will
-      not be found to have deteriorated. If that is the case, I shall hold
-      myself free to take another look under the trees at my leisure. But I
-      fancy the three baskets will complete the garnering. The old orchard from
-      which the fruit has been so largely gathered is passing from me, and the
-      new orchard to which I go has not yet matured. Perhaps in the course of
-      years it will furnish material for a collection of autumn leaves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0021m.jpg" alt="0021m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0021.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      JEMIMA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> took a garden
-      fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes. When Jemima saw me
-      crossing the orchard with a fork he called a committee meeting, or rather
-      a general assembly, and after some joyous discussion it was decided <i>nem.
-      con</i>. that the thing was worth looking into. Forthwith, the whole
-      family of Indian runners lined up in single file, and led by Jemima
-      followed faithfully in my track towards the artichoke bed, with a gabble
-      of merry noises. Jemima was first into the breach. He always is...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But before I proceed it is necessary to explain. You will have observed
-      that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless,
-      you said, &ldquo;How careless of the printer. Once might be forgiven; but twice&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
-       Dear madam' (or sir), the printer is on this occasion blameless. It seems
-      incredible, but it's so. The truth is that Jemima was the victim of an
-      accident at the christening ceremony. He was one of a brood who, as they
-      came like little balls of yellow fluff out of the shell, received names of
-      appropriate ambiguity&mdash;all except Jemima. There were Lob and Lop, Two
-      Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?, Greedy and Baby, and so on. Every
-      name as safe as the bank, equal to all contingencies&mdash;except Jemima.
-      What reckless impulse led us to call him Jemima I forget. But regardless
-      of his name, he grew up into a handsome drake&mdash;a proud and gaudy
-      fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you call him so long as you call
-      him to the Diet of Worms.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And here he is, surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble, gobble,
-      and crowd in on me so that I have to scare them off in order to drive in
-      the fork. Jemima keeps his eye on the fork as a good batsman keeps his eye
-      on the ball. The flash of a fork appeals to him like the sound of a
-      trumpet to the warhorse. He will lead his battalion through fire and water
-      in pursuit of it. He knows that a fork has some mystical connection with
-      worms, and doubtless regards it as a beneficent deity. The others are
-      content to grub in the new-turned soil, but he, with his larger reasoning
-      power, knows that the fork produces the worms and that the way to get the
-      fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the way he watches it I
-      rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the fork. Look at him now. He
-      cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating fork, expecting to see large,
-      squirming worms dropping from it, and Greedy nips in under his nose and
-      gobbles a waggling beauty. My excellent friend, I say, addressing Jemima,
-      you know both too much and too little. If you had known a little more you
-      would have had that worm; if you had known a little less you would have
-      had that worm. Let me commend to you the words of the poet:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      A little learning is a dangerous thing:
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I've known many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too
-      much but don't know enough. Now Greedy&mdash;&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But clear off all of you. What ho! there.... The scales!... Here is a
-      bumper root.... Jemima realises that something unusual has happened,
-      assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with great animation. It
-      is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners such agreeable
-      companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian runners about.
-      Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the orchard without an
-      idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in a perpetual gossip. The
-      world is full of such a number of things that they hardly ever leave off
-      talking, and though they all talk together they are so amiable about it
-      that it makes you feel cheerful to hear them.... But here are the
-      scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do you say to that,
-      Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am
-      enveloped once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful
-      risks in his attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be
-      ungracious to complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it, I
-      said, but you are feasting to-day in order that others may feast tomorrow.
-      You devour the worm, and a larger and more cunning animal will devour you.
-      He cocks up his head and fixes me with that beady eye that gleams with
-      such artless yet searching intelligence.... You are right, Jemima. That,
-      as you observe, is only half the tale. You eat the worm, and the large,
-      cunning animal eats you, but&mdash;yes, Jemima, the crude fact has to be
-      faced that the worm takes up the tale again where Man the Mighty leaves
-      off:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      His heart is builded
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      For pride, for potency, infinity,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Arrased with purple like the house of kings,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      <i>To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm</i>
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      <i>Statelily lodge...</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I accept your reminder, Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like you,
-      am only a link in the chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries, who creates
-      to devour and devours to create. I thank you, Jemima. And driving in the
-      fork and turning up the soil I seized a large fat worm. I present you with
-      this, Jemima, I said, as a mark of my esteem...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0025m.jpg" alt="0025m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0025.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING IDLE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> have long
-      laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person. It is an
-      entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in conversation, I
-      do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am idle, in fact, to
-      prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art of defence is attack. I
-      defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a verdict of not guilty by
-      the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm you by laying down my
-      arms. &ldquo;Ah, ah,&rdquo; I expect you to say. &ldquo;Ah, ah, you an idle person. Well,
-      that is good.&rdquo; And if you do not say it I at least give myself the
-      pleasure of believing that you think it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things about
-      ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about us. We
-      say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way some
-      people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their early
-      decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as remote as
-      it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating the sorrow it
-      will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be missed. We all
-      like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember a nice old
-      gentleman whose favourite topic was &ldquo;When I am gone.&rdquo; One day he was
-      telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee, what would
-      happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up cheerfully and
-      said, &ldquo;When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at the funeral?&rdquo; It was
-      a devastating question, and it was observed that afterwards the old
-      gentleman never discussed his latter end with his formidable grandchild.
-      He made it too painfully literal.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were to
-      express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad as the
-      old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and I daresay
-      I should take care not to lay myself open again to such <i>gaucherie</i>.
-      But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling self-deception.
-      I can speak the plain truth about &ldquo;Alpha of the Plough&rdquo; without asking for
-      any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how he suffers. And I
-      say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was never more satisfied
-      of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has been engaged in the
-      agreeable task of dodging his duty to <i>The Star</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It began quite early this morning&mdash;for you cannot help being about
-      quite early now that the clock has been put forward&mdash;or is it back?&mdash;for
-      summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and there
-      at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved to write
-      an article <i>en plein air</i>, as Corot used to paint his pictures&mdash;an
-      article that would simply carry the intoxication of this May morning into
-      Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare carolling with larks, and
-      make it green with the green and dappled wonder of the beech woods. But
-      first of all he had to saturate himself with the sunshine. You cannot give
-      out sunshine until you have taken it in. That, said he, is plain to the
-      meanest understanding. So he took it in. He just lay on his back and
-      looked at the clouds sailing serenely in the blue. They were well worth
-      looking at&mdash;large, fat, lazy, clouds that drifted along silently and
-      dreamily, like vast bales of wool being wafted from one star to another.
-      He looked at them &ldquo;long and long&rdquo; as Walt Whitman used to say. How that
-      loafer of genius, he said, would have loved to lie and look at those
-      woolly clouds.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
-      another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not have a
-      picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began enumerating
-      the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the wings of the
-      west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could hear if one gave
-      one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin whisper of the breeze
-      in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of the woodland behind, the
-      dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech near by, the boom of a
-      bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of the meadow pipit rising
-      from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo sailing up the valley, the
-      clatter of magpies on the hillside, the &ldquo;spink-spink&rdquo; of the chaffinch,
-      the whirr of a tractor in a distant field, the crowing of a far-off cock,
-      the bark of a sheep dog, the ring of a hammer reverberating from a remote
-      clearing in the beech woods, the voices of children who were gathering
-      violets and bluebells in the wooded hollow on the other side of the hill.
-      All these and many other things he heard, still lying on his back and
-      looking at the heavenly bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him;
-      their billowy softness invited to slumber....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
-      Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and the
-      best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the blossoms
-      falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you preaching
-      the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He would catch
-      something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did not lie about
-      on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds. To them, life was
-      real, life was earnest. They were always &ldquo;up and doing.&rdquo; It was true that
-      there were the drones, impostors who make ten times the buzz of the
-      workers, and would have you believe they do all the work because they make
-      most of the noise. But the example of these lazy fellows he would ignore.
-      Under the cherry tree he would labour like the honey bee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came out
-      to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives alone,
-      but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put on a veil
-      and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time flies when you
-      are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do and see. You
-      always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure that she is
-      there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took more time
-      than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one of the
-      hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other hives,
-      and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was visible. The
-      frames were turned over industriously without reward. At last, on the
-      floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found. This deepened
-      the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason, rejected her
-      sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne appeared and
-      given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last the new queen
-      was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of her subjects. She
-      had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped notice when the brood
-      frames were put in and, according to the merciless law of the hive, had
-      slain her senior. All this took time, and before he had finished, the
-      cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard announced another
-      interruption of his task.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
-      of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article about
-      how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one virtue. It
-      exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0030m.jpg" alt="0030m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0030.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0031m.jpg" alt="0031m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0031.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON HABITS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> sat down to write
-      an article this morning, but found I could make no progress. There was
-      grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels refused to revolve. I was
-      writing with a pen&mdash;a new fountain pen that someone had been good
-      enough to send me, in commemoration of an anniversary, my interest in
-      which is now very slight, but of which one or two well-meaning friends are
-      still in the habit of reminding me. It was an excellent pen, broad and
-      free in its paces, and capable of a most satisfying flourish. It was a
-      pen, you would have said, that could have written an article about
-      anything. You had only to fill it with ink and give it its head, and it
-      would gallop away to its journey's end without a pause. That is how I felt
-      about it when I sat down. But instead of galloping, the thing was as
-      obstinate as a mule. I could get no more speed out of it than Stevenson
-      could get out of his donkey in the Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried
-      the bastinado, equally without effect on my Modestine.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
-      practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without my
-      using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
-      there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
-      thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
-      extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
-      bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a whole
-      forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to me what
-      his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke of Cambridge,
-      or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to Jackson or&mdash;in
-      short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my hand, seat me
-      before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as they say of the
-      children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an eight-day clock.
-      I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten. But the magic wand
-      must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen in my hand, and the whole
-      complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an atmosphere of strangeness. The
-      pen kept intruding between me and my thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the
-      touch. It seemed to write a foreign language in which nothing pleased me.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
-      better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
-      of his school days. &ldquo;There was,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a boy in my class at school who
-      stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant him. Day
-      came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would; till at
-      length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always fumbled
-      with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
-      waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in an
-      evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know the
-      success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was again
-      questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not to be
-      found. In his distress he looked down for it&mdash;it was to be seen no
-      more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
-      place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was the
-      author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him smote me as
-      I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some reparation;
-      but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance
-      with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior office in one of
-      the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe he is dead, he took
-      early to drinking.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
-      regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
-      and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come. to
-      grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits, so long
-      as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little more than
-      bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take away our
-      habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about. We could
-      not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life. They enable
-      us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we had to give
-      fresh and original thought to them each time, would make existence an
-      impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our commonplace
-      activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more leisure we
-      command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but not so large
-      as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up your own hat
-      and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long time it was my
-      practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant hook and to take
-      no note of the place. When I sought them I found it absurdly difficult to
-      find them in the midst of so many similar hats and coats. Memory did not
-      help me, for memory refused to burden itself with such trumpery things,
-      and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering forlornly and vacuously
-      between the rows and rows of clothes in search of my own garments
-      murmuring, &ldquo;Where <i>did</i> I put my hat?&rdquo; Then one day a brilliant
-      inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on a certain
-      peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to it. It needed
-      a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked like a charm. I
-      can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding them. I go to them
-      as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to its mark. It is one of
-      the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
-      ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally break
-      them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ them,
-      without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once saw Mr
-      Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial breach of
-      habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of Trinity
-      House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House. It is his
-      custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the most
-      comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms about in
-      a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief and the body in
-      repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no lapels, and when the
-      hands went up in search of them they wandered about pathetically like a
-      couple of children who had lost their parents on Blackpool sands. They
-      fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung to each other in a
-      visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed the search for the lost
-      lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with the glasses on the table,
-      sought again for the lapels, did everything but take refuge in the pockets
-      of the trousers. It was a characteristic omission. Mr Balfour is too
-      practised a speaker to come to disaster as the boy in Scott's story did;
-      but his discomfiture was apparent. He struggled manfully through his
-      speech, but all the time it was obvious that he was at a loss what to do
-      with his hands, having no lapels on which to hang them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out a
-      pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit, ticked
-      away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I hope)
-      pardonable result.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0036m.jpg" alt="0036m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0036.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      IN DEFENCE OF WASPS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t is time, I
-      think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He is no saint, but he
-      is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been unusually prolific this
-      summer, and agitated correspondents have been busy writing to the
-      newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how by holding your breath
-      you may miraculously prevent him stinging you. Now the point about the
-      wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He is, in spite of his military
-      uniform and his formidable weapon, not a bad fellow, and if you leave him
-      alone he will leave you alone. He is a nuisance of course. He likes jam
-      and honey; but then I am bound to confess that I like jam and honey too,
-      and I daresay those correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam
-      and honey. We shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like
-      jam and honey. But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the
-      plate, and he is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no
-      doubt. He is an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously
-      helpless condition from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness
-      for beer. In the language of America, he is a &ldquo;wet.&rdquo; He cannot resist
-      beer, and having rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully
-      tight and staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that
-      he won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
-      Belloc&mdash;not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so
-      waspishly about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about
-      beer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty beer
-      bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets out. He is
-      indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings. He is
-      excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody and nothing,
-      and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of things; but a
-      wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin that he is, and
-      will never have the sense to walk out the way he went in. And on your
-      plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You can descend on
-      him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight for anything above
-      him, and no sense of looking upward.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
-      fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
-      glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
-      familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
-      the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he cuts
-      a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
-      poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its time
-      in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night during
-      its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and for future
-      generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow stripes just
-      lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank you. Let us
-      eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow&mdash;&mdash;. He runs
-      through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time in
-      August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving only
-      the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of 20,000 or
-      so next summer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
-      you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
-      it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet he
-      could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than the bee,
-      for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel competent to
-      speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for I've been living
-      in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the orchard, with an
-      estimated population of a quarter of a million bees and tens of thousands
-      of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never deliberately attacked
-      by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around me I flee for shelter.
-      There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp, the bee's hatred is
-      personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some obscure reason, and is
-      always ready to die for the satisfaction of its anger. And it dies very
-      profusely. The expert, who has been taking sections from the hives, showed
-      me her hat just now. It had nineteen stings in it, planted in as neatly as
-      thorns in a bicycle tyre.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
-      him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
-      nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
-      devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked, and I
-      like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little joint,
-      usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real virtue, and
-      this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean fellow, and
-      is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of that supreme
-      abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is very cunning.
-      I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He got the blow fly
-      down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed off one of the
-      creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape, and then with a
-      huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away. And I confess he
-      carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a whole generation
-      of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
-      help a fellow in distress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to one
-      that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was continued
-      for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to stroke gently
-      the injured wings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
-      who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
-      carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp as
-      an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
-      sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to kill
-      her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
-      preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we wish
-      ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for their
-      enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0012" id="linkimage-0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0040m.jpg" alt="0040m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0040.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0041m.jpg" alt="0041m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0041.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON PILLAR ROCK
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>hose, we are told,
-      who have heard the East a-calling &ldquo;never heed naught else.&rdquo; Perhaps it is
-      so; but they can never have heard the call of Lakeland at New Year. They
-      can never have scrambled up the screes of the Great Gable on winter days
-      to try a fall with the Arrow Head and the Needle, the Chimney and Kern
-      Knotts Crack; never have seen the mighty Pillar Rock beckoning them from
-      the top of Black Sail Pass, nor the inn lights far down in the valley
-      calling them back from the mountains when night has fallen; never have sat
-      round the inn fire and talked of the jolly perils of the day, or played
-      chess with the landlord&mdash;and been beaten&mdash;or gone to bed with
-      the refrain of the climbers' chorus still challenging the roar of the wind
-      outside&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Come, let us tie the rope, the rope, the rope,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Come, let us link it round, round, round.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And he that will not climb to-day
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Why&mdash;leave him on the ground, the ground, the ground.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you have done these things you will not make much of the call of the
-      temple bells and the palm trees and the spicy garlic smells&mdash;least of
-      all at New Year. You will hear instead the call of the Pillar Rock and the
-      chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your oldest clothes and wind the
-      rope around you&mdash;singing meanwhile &ldquo;the rope, the rope,&rdquo;&mdash;and
-      take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will step out at
-      that gateway of the enchanted land&mdash;Keswick. Keswick! Wastdale!...
-      Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to whom they
-      open the magic casements at a breath.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And at Keswick you call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go to
-      Keswick without calling on George Abraham. You might as well go to
-      Wastdale Head without calling on the Pillar Rock. And George tells you
-      that of course he will be over at Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will
-      climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle with you on New Year's Day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave adieus, and are soon jolting
-      down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where every object is an old
-      friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the Bowder Stone and
-      there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow of Cat Bells.
-      (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and picking wimberries and
-      waking the echoes of Grisedale.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the
-      billowy summits of Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky
-      sentinels of the valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name.
-      Perhaps you jump down at Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to
-      Rosthwaite and lunch.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street is a myth
-      and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of the sanctuary and
-      the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling your rucksack on your
-      back and your rope over your shoulder and set out on the three hours'
-      tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is dark when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and these
-      December days are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by the
-      landlord and landlady&mdash;heirs of Auld Will Ritson&mdash;and in the
-      flagged entrance you see coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of
-      climbers' boots&mdash;boots that make the heart sing to look upon, boots
-      that have struck music out of many a rocky breast, boots whose missing
-      nails has each a story of its own. You put your own among them, don your
-      slippers, and plunge among your old companions of the rocks with jolly
-      greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it is&mdash;a master
-      from a school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a young
-      clergyman, a barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham,
-      and so on. But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and
-      the eternal boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Who shall tell of the days and nights that follow?&mdash;of the songs that
-      are sung, and the &ldquo;traverses&rdquo; that are made round the billiard room and
-      the barn, of the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous
-      climb, of the letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and the
-      departures for the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich with new
-      memories, you all foregather again&mdash;save only, perhaps, the jolly
-      lawyer and his fellows who have lost their way back from Scafell, and for
-      whom you are about to send out a search party when they turn up out of the
-      darkness with new material for fireside tales.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's Day&mdash;clear and
-      bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost in the air.
-      In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up ropes, putting on
-      putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for boots (the boots
-      are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing nails). We separate
-      at the threshold&mdash;this group for the Great Gable, that for Scafell,
-      ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock. It is a two and
-      a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and as daylight is short
-      there is no time to waste. We follow the water course up the valley,
-      splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice, cross the stream where
-      the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount the steep ascent of Black
-      Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down lonely Ennerdale, where,
-      springing from the flank of the Pillar mountain, is the great Rock we have
-      come to challenge. It stands like a tower, gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600
-      feet from its northern base to its summit, split on the south side by
-      Jordan Gap that divides the High Man or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser
-      rock.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have been overtaken by another party of three from the inn&mdash;one in
-      a white jersey which, for reasons that will appear, I shall always
-      remember. Together we follow the High Level Traverse, the track that leads
-      round the flank of the mountain to the top of Walker's Gully, the grim
-      descent to the valley, loved by the climber for the perils to which it
-      invites him. Here wre lunch and here we separate. We, unambitious (having
-      three passengers in our party of five), are climbing the East face by the
-      Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending by the New West route, one
-      of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here; theirs is from the other
-      side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I wish to speak, but of
-      theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will find the Slab and Notch
-      route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it is held in little esteem.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      With five on the rope, however, our progress is slow, and it is two
-      o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring and triumphant, and
-      stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar Rock, where the wind
-      blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over half the peaks of
-      Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in the book that lies
-      under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on the West face for
-      signs of our late companions. The sound of their voices comes up from
-      below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a glimpse of their forms.
-      &ldquo;They're going to be late,&rdquo; says George Abraham&mdash;the discoverer of
-      the New West&mdash;and then he indicates the closing stages of the climb
-      and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the most thrilling
-      escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock&mdash;two men falling,
-      and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of those three,
-      two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the next year on the
-      Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and turn cheerfully to
-      descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route which ends on the slope
-      of the mountain near to the starting point of the New West route.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in the East sheds no
-      light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are quite distinct,
-      coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the directions and
-      distinguish the speakers. &ldquo;Can't understand why those lads are cutting it
-      so fine,&rdquo; says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace down cracks and
-      grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and safety. And now we
-      look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one thing is visible&mdash;a
-      figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at full stretch. There it
-      hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the rocks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0047m.jpg" alt="0047m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0047.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The party, then, are only just making the traverse from the chimney to the
-      right, the most difficult manoeuvre of the climb&mdash;a manoeuvre in
-      which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain stationary while his
-      fellows pass him. &ldquo;This is bad,&rdquo; says George Abraham and he prepares for a
-      possible emergency. &ldquo;Are you in difficulties? Shall we wait?&rdquo; he cries.
-      &ldquo;Yes, wait.&rdquo; The words rebound from the cliff in the still air like
-      stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white jersey, still
-      moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every word they speak
-      echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board. You hear the
-      iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds on the ringing
-      wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if both feet are
-      dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a hold. I fancy one
-      or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look at each other in
-      silent comment. And all the time the figure in white, now growing dim, is
-      impaled on the face of the darkness, and the voices come down to us in
-      brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon is sailing into the
-      clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery &ldquo;All right&rdquo;
-       drops down from above. The difficult operation is over, the scattered
-      rocks are reached and nothing remains but the final slabs, which in the
-      absence of ice offer no great difficulty. Their descent by the easy Jordan
-      route will be quick. We turn to go with the comment that it is perhaps
-      more sensational to watch a climb than to do one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And then we plunge over the debris behind Pisgah, climb up the Great Doup,
-      where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we reach the friendly fence that
-      has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down to the top of Black Sail
-      Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours later we have
-      rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one to
-      his office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem
-      prosaic and ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say
-      only the word &ldquo;Wastdale&rdquo; to them and you shall awake its echoes; then you
-      shall see their faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable things.
-      They are no longer men of the world; they are spirits of the mountains.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0049m.jpg" alt="0049m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0049.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0050m.jpg" alt="0050m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0050.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      TWO VOICES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">Y</span>es,&rdquo; said the man
-      with the big voice, &ldquo;I've seen it coming for years. Years.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Have you?&rdquo; said the man with the timid voice. He had taken his seat on
-      the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of the tube strike
-      that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of London.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, years,&rdquo; said big voice, crowding as much modesty into the admission
-      as possible. &ldquo;I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long way off. Suppose
-      I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit psychic.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning of the
-      word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it meant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George&mdash;that's the man that up
-      to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and property and
-      things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.' Why, his
-      speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's it's come
-      back. I always said it would. I said we should pay for it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you, though?&rdquo; observed timid voice&mdash;not questioningly, but as an
-      assurance that he was listening attentively.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for years&mdash;years, I did.
-      And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in no time. In the
-      first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000 aeroplanes and
-      train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what I said. But
-      was it done?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why, but
-      there it is. I'm not much at the platform business&mdash;tub-thumping, I
-      call it&mdash;but for seeing things far off&mdash;well, I'm a bit psychic,
-      you know.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said timid voice, mournfully, &ldquo;it's a pity some of those talking
-      fellows are not psychic, too.&rdquo; He'd got the word firmly now.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Them psychic!&rdquo; said big voice, with scorn. &ldquo;We know what they are. You
-      see that Miss Asquith is marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word, he'll
-      turn out to be a German, that's what he'll turn out to be. It's German
-      money all round. Same with these strikes. There's German money behind
-      them.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Shouldn't wonder at all,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;I've a way of seeing things. The same in the
-      Boer War. I saw that coming for years.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you, indeed?&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to some of my friends. There it was
-      in black and white. They said it was wonderful how it all turned out&mdash;two
-      years, I said, 250 millions of money, and 20,000 casualties. That's what I
-      said, and that's what it was. I said the Boers would win, and I claim they
-      did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave them all they asked for.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You were about right,&rdquo; assented timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round his
-      finger&mdash;that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his finger.
-      Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building a
-      fleet as big as ours.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Never did like that man,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the armistice
-      means. They've escaped&mdash;and just when we'd got them down.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's a shame,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;This war ought to have gone on longer,&rdquo; continued big voice. &ldquo;My opinion
-      is that the world wanted thinning out. People are too crowded. That's what
-      they are&mdash;they're too crowded.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I agree there,&rdquo; said timid voice. &ldquo;We wanted thinning.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It ought to have
-      gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should like to know
-      his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says <i>John Bull</i>, and
-      that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a case
-      down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building society&mdash;regular
-      chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building society went
-      smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I don't like those goody-goody people,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what that
-      man knew. 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women players,' he
-      said. Strordinary how he knew things.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Wonderful,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;There's never been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare
-      knew&mdash;not one-half.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No doubt about it,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I consider that William Shakespeare was the most psychic man that ever
-      lived. I don't suppose there was ever such a long-sighted man before <i>or</i>
-      since. He could see through anything. He'd have seen through Wilson and
-      he'd have seen this war didn't stop before the job was done. It's a pity
-      we haven't a William Shakespeare now. Lloyd George and Asquith are not in
-      it with him. They're simply duds beside William Shakespeare. Couldn't hold
-      a candle to him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Seems to me,&rdquo; said timid voice, &ldquo;that there's nobody, as you might say,
-      worth anything to-day.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;We've gone right off. There used to be men. Old
-      Dizzy, he was a man. So was Joseph Chamberlain. He was right about Tariff
-      Reform. I saw it years before he did. Free Trade I said was all right
-      years ago, when we were manufacturing for the world. But it's out of date.
-      I saw it was out of date long before Joseph Chamberlain. It's the result
-      of being long-sighted. I said to my father, 'If we stick to Free Trade
-      this country is done.' That's what I said, and it's true. We <i>are</i>
-      done. Look at these strikes. We stick to things too long. I believe in
-      looking ahead. When I was in America before the war they wouldn't believe
-      I came from England. Wouldn't believe it. 'But the English are so slow,'
-      they said, 'and you&mdash;why you want to be getting on in front of us.'
-      That's my way. I look ahead and don't stand still.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's the best way too,&rdquo; said timid voice. &ldquo;We want more of it. We're too
-      slow.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And so on. When I came to the end of my journey I rose so that the light
-      of a lamp shone on the speakers as I passed. They were both well-dressed,
-      ordinary-looking men. If I had passed them in the street I should have
-      said they were intelligent men of the well-to-do business class. I have
-      set down their conversation, which I could not help overhearing, and which
-      was carried on by the big voice in a tone meant for publication, as
-      exactly as I can recall it. There was a good deal more of it, all of the
-      same character. You will laugh at it, or weep over it, according to your
-      humour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0055m.jpg" alt="0055m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0055.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING TIDY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>ny careful
-      observer of my habits would know that I am on the eve of an adventure&mdash;a
-      holiday, or a bankruptcy, or a fire, or a voluntary liquidation (whatever
-      that may be), or an elopement, or a duel, or a conspiracy, or&mdash;in
-      short, of something out of the normal, something romantic or dangerous,
-      pleasurable or painful, interrupting the calm current of my affairs. Being
-      the end of July, he would probably say: That fellow is on the brink of the
-      holiday fever. He has all the symptoms of the epidemic. Observe his
-      negligent, abstracted manner. Notice his slackness about business&mdash;how
-      he just comes and looks in and goes out as though he were a visitor paying
-      a call, or a person who had been left a fortune and didn't care twopence
-      what happened. Observe his clothes, how they are burgeoning into
-      unaccustomed gaiety, even levity. Is not his hat set on at just a shade of
-      a sporting angle? Does not his stick twirl with a hint of irresponsible
-      emotions? Is there not the glint of far horizons in his eye? Did you not
-      hear him humming as he came up the stairs? Yes, assuredly the fellow is
-      going for a holiday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Your suspicions would be confirmed when you found me ransacking my private
-      room and clearing up my desk. The news that I am clearing up my desk has
-      been an annual sensation for years. I remember a colleague of mine once
-      coming in and finding me engaged in that spectacular feat. His face fell
-      with apprehension. His voice faltered. &ldquo;I hope you are not leaving us,&rdquo; he
-      said. He, poor fellow, could not think of anything else that could account
-      for so unusual an operation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For I am one of those people who treat their desks with respect. We do not
-      believe in worrying them about their contents. We do not bully them into
-      disclosing their secrets. We stuff the drawers full of papers and
-      documents, and leave them to mellow and ripen. And when the drawers are
-      full we pile up other papers and documents on either side of us; and the
-      higher the pile gets the more comfortable and cosy we feel. We would not
-      disturb them for worlds. Why should we set our sleeping dogs barking at us
-      when they are willing to go on sleeping if we leave them alone? And
-      consider the show they make. No one coming to see us can fail to be
-      impressed by such piles of documents. They realise how busy we are. They
-      understand that we have no time for idle talk. They see that we have all
-      these papers to dispose of&mdash;otherwise, why are they there? They get
-      their business done and go away quickly, and spread the news of what
-      tremendous fellows we are for work.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am told by one who worked with him, that old Lord Strathcona knew the
-      trick quite well, and used it unblushingly. When a visitor was announced
-      he tumbled his papers about in imposing confusion and was discovered
-      breasting the mighty ocean of his labours, his chin resolutely out of the
-      water. But he was a supreme artist in this form of amiable imposture. On
-      one occasion he was entertained at a great public dinner in a provincial
-      city. In the midst of the proceedings a portly flunkey was observed
-      carrying a huge envelope, with seals and trappings, on a salver. For whom
-      was this momentous document intended? Ah, he has paused behind the grand
-      old man with the wonderful snowy head. It is for him. The company looks on
-      in respectful silence. Even here this astonishing old man cannot escape
-      the cares of office. As he takes the envelope his neighbour at the table
-      looks at the address. It was in Strathcona's own hand-writing!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we of the rank and file are not dishevelled by artifice, like this
-      great man. It is a natural gift. And do not suppose that our disorder
-      makes us unhappy. We like it. We follow our vocation, as Falstaff says.
-      Some people are born tidy and some are born untidy. We were bom untidy,
-      and if good people, taking pity on us, try to make us tidy we get lost. It
-      was so with George Crabbe. He lived in magnificent disorder, papers and
-      books and letters all over the floor, piled on every chair, surging up to
-      the ceiling. Once, in his absence, his niece tidied up for him. When he
-      came back he found himself like a stranger in a strange land. He did not
-      know his way about in this desolation of tidiness, and he promptly
-      restored the familiar disorder, so that he could find things. It sounds
-      absurd, of course, but we people with a genius for untidiness must always
-      seem absurd to the tidy people. They cannot understand that there is a
-      method in our muddle, an order in our disorder, secret paths through the
-      wilderness known only to our feet, that, in short, we are rather like cats
-      whose perceptions become more acute the darker it gets. It is not true
-      that we never find things. We often find things.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And consider the joy of finding things you don't hope to find. You, sir,
-      sitting at your spotless desk, with your ordered and labelled shelves
-      about you, and your files and your letter-racks, and your card indexes and
-      your cross references, and your this, that, and the other&mdash;what do
-      you know of the delights of which I speak? You do not come suddenly and
-      ecstatically upon the thing you seek. You do not know the shock of
-      delighted discovery. You do not shout &ldquo;Eureka,&rdquo; and summon your family
-      around you to rejoice in the miracle that has happened. No star swims into
-      your ken out of the void. You cannot be said to find things at all, for
-      you never lose them, and things must be lost before they can be truly
-      found. The father of the Prodigal had to lose his son before he could
-      experience the joy that has become an immortal legend of the world. It is
-      we who lose things, not you, sir, who never find them, who know the Feast
-      of the Fatted Calf.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not a plea for untidiness. I am no hot gospeller of disorder. I
-      only seek to make the best, of a bad job, and to show that we untidy
-      fellows are not without a case, have our romantic compensations, moments
-      of giddy exaltation unknown to those who are endowed with the pedestrian
-      and profitable virtue of tidiness. That is all. I would have the
-      pedestrian virtue if I could. In other days, before I had given up hope of
-      reforming myself, and when I used to make good resolutions as piously as
-      my neighbours, I had many a spasm of tidiness. I looked with envy on my
-      friend Higginson, who was a miracle of order, could put his hand on
-      anything he wanted in the dark, kept his documents and his files and
-      records like regiments of soldiers obedient to call, knew what he had
-      written on 4th March 1894, and what he had said on 10th January 1901, and
-      had a desk that simply perspired with tidiness. And in a spirit of
-      emulation I bought a roll-top desk. I believed that tidiness was a
-      purchasable commodity. You went to a furniture dealer and bought a large
-      roll-top desk, and when it came home the genius of order came home with
-      it. The bigger the desk, the more intricate its devices, the larger was
-      the measure of order bestowed on you. My desk was of the first magnitude.
-      It had an inconceivable wealth of drawers and pigeon-holes. It was a desk
-      of many mansions. And I labelled them all, and gave them all separate jobs
-      to perform.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And then I sat back and looked the future boldly in the face. Now, said I,
-      the victory is won. Chaos and old night are banished. Order reigns in
-      Warsaw. I have but to open a drawer and every secret I seek will leap
-      magically to light. My articles will write themselves, for every reference
-      will come to my call, obedient as Ariel to the bidding of Prospero.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;Approach, my Ariel; come,&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I shall say, and from some remote fastness the obedient spirit will appear
-      with&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      To swim, to dive into the sea, to ride
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      On the curl'd clouds.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I shall know where Aunt Jane's letters are, and where my bills are, and my
-      cuttings about this, that, and the other, and my diaries and notebooks,
-      and the time-table and the street guide. I shall never be short of a match
-      or a spare pair of spectacles, or a pencil, or&mdash;in short, life will
-      henceforth be an easy amble to old age. For a week it worked like a charm.
-      Then the demon of disorder took possession of the beast. It devoured
-      everything and yielded up nothing. Into its soundless deeps my merchandise
-      sank to oblivion. And I seemed to sink with it. It was not a desk, but a
-      tomb. One day I got a man to take it away to a second-hand shop.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Since then I have given up being tidy. I have realised that the quality of
-      order is not purchasable at furniture shops, is not a quality of external
-      things, but an indwelling spirit, a frame of mind, a habit that perhaps
-      may be acquired but cannot be bought.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have a smaller desk with fewer drawers, all of them nicely choked up
-      with the litter of the past. Once a year I have a gaol delivery of the
-      incarcerated. The ghosts come out into the daylight, and I face them
-      unflinching and unafraid. They file past, pointing minatory fingers at me
-      as they go into the waste-paper basket. They file past now. But I do not
-      care a dump; for to-morrow I shall seek fresh woods and pastures new.
-      To-morrow the ghosts of that old untidy desk will have no terrors for my
-      emancipated spirit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0061m.jpg" alt="0061m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0061.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0062m.jpg" alt="0062m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0062.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      AN EPISODE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e were talking of
-      the distinction between madness and sanity when one of the company said
-      that we were all potential madmen, just as every gambler was a potential
-      suicide, or just as every hero was a potential coward.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I mean,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that the difference between the sane and the insane is
-      not that the sane man never has mad thoughts. He has, but he recognises
-      them as mad, and keeps his hand on the rein of action. He thinks them, and
-      dismisses them. It is so with the saint and the sinner. The saint is not
-      exempt from evil thoughts, but he knows they are evil, is master of
-      himself, and puts them away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I speak with experience,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;for the potential madman in me
-      once nearly got the upper hand. I won, but it was a near thing, and if I
-      had gone down in that struggle I should have been branded for all time as
-      a criminal lunatic, and very properly put away in some place of safety.
-      Yet I suppose no one ever suspected me of lunacy.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tell us about it,&rdquo; we said in chorus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It was one evening in New York,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I had had a very exhausting
-      time, and was no doubt mentally tired. I had taken tea with two friends at
-      the Belmont Hotel, and as we found we were all disengaged that evening we
-      agreed to spend it together at the Hippodrome, where a revue, winding up
-      with a great spectacle that had thrilled New York, was being presented.
-      When we went to the box office we found that we could not get three seats
-      together, so we separated, my friends going to the floor of the house and
-      I to the dress circle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;If you are familiar with the place you will know its enormous dimensions
-      and the vastness of the stage. When I took my seat next but one to one of
-      the gangways the house was crowded and the performance had begun. It was
-      trivial and ordinary enough, but it kept me amused, and between the acts I
-      went out to see the New Yorkers taking 'soft' drinks in the promenades. I
-      did not join them in that mild indulgence, nor did I speak to anyone.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;After the interval before the concluding spectacle I did not return to my
-      seat until the curtain was up. The transformation hit me like a blow. The
-      huge stage had been converted into a lake, and behind the lake through
-      filmy draperies there was the suggestion of a world in flames. I passed to
-      my seat and sat down. I turned from the blinding glow of the conflagration
-      in front and cast my eye over the sea of faces that filled the great
-      theatre from floor to ceiling. 'Heavens! if there were a fire in this
-      place,' I thought. At that thought the word 'Fire' blazed in my brain like
-      a furnace. 'What if some madman cried Fire?' flashed through my mind, and
-      then '<i>What if I cried Fire?</i>'
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;At that hideous suggestion, the demon word that suffused my brain leapt
-      like a shrieking maniac within me and screamed and fought for utterance. I
-      felt it boiling in my throat, I felt it on my tongue. I felt myself to be
-      two persons engaged in a deadly grapple&mdash;a sane person struggling to
-      keep his feet against the mad rush of an insane monster. I clenched my
-      teeth. So long as I kept my teeth tight&mdash;tight&mdash;tight the raging
-      madman would fling himself at the bars in vain. But could I keep up the
-      struggle till he fell exhausted? I gripped the arms of my seat. I felt
-      beads of perspiration breaking out on my right brow. How singular that in
-      moments of strain the moisture always broke out at that spot. I could
-      notice these things with a curious sense of detachment as if there were a
-      third person within me watching the frenzied conflict. And still that
-      titanic impulse lay on my tongue and hammered madly at my clenched teeth.
-      Should I go out? That would look odd, and be an ignominious surrender. I
-      must fight this folly down honestly and not run away from it. If I had a
-      book I would try to read. If I had a friend beside me I would talk. But
-      both these expedients were denied me. Should I turn to my unknown
-      neighbour and break the spell with an inconsequent remark or a request for
-      his programme? I looked at him out of the tail of my eye. He was a
-      youngish man, in evening dress, and sitting alone as I was. But his eyes
-      were fixed intently on the stage. He was obviously gripped by the
-      spectacle. Had I spoken to him earlier in the evening the course would
-      have been simple; but to break the ice in the midst of this tense silence
-      was impossible. Moreover, I had a programme on my knees and what was there
-      to say?...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I turned my eyes from the stage. What was going on there I could not
-      tell. It was a blinding blur of Fire that seemed to infuriate the monster
-      within me. I looked round at the house. I looked up at the ceiling and
-      marked its gilded ornaments. I turned and gazed intensely at the occupants
-      of the boxes, trying to turn the current of my mind into speculations
-      about their dress, their faces, their characters. But the tyrant was too
-      strong to be overthrown by such conscious effort. I looked up at the
-      gallery; I looked down at the pit; I tried to busy my thoughts with
-      calculations about the numbers present, the amount of money in the house,
-      the cost of running the establishment&mdash;anything. In vain. I leaned
-      back in my seat, my teeth still clenched, my hands still gripping the arms
-      of the chair. How still the house was! How enthralled it seemed!... I was
-      conscious that people about me were noticing my restless inattention. If
-      they knew the truth.... If they could see the raging torment that was
-      battering at my teeth.... Would it never go? How long would this wild
-      impulse burn on my tongue? Was there no distraction that would
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Cleanse the stuffed bosom of this perilous stuff
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That feeds upon the brain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I recalled the reply&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Therein the patient must minister to himself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How fantastic it seemed. Here was that cool observer within me quoting
-      poetry over my own delirium without being able to allay it. What a mystery
-      was the brain that could become the theatre of such wild drama. I turned
-      my glance to the orchestra. Ah, what was that they were playing?... Yes,
-      it was a passage from Dvorak's American Symphony. How familiar it was! My
-      mind incontinently leapt to a remote scene, I saw a well-lit room and
-      children round the hearth and a figure at the piano....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It was as though the madman within me had fallen stone dead. I looked at
-      the stage coolly, and observed that someone was diving into the lake from
-      a trapeze that seemed a hundred feet high. The glare was still behind, but
-      I knew it for a sham glare. What a fool I had been.... But what a hideous
-      time I had had.... And what a close shave.... I took out my handkerchief
-      and drew it across my forehead.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0066m.jpg" alt="0066m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0066.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0067m.jpg" alt="0067m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0067.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <h3>
-      ON SUPERSTITIONS
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was inevitable
-      that the fact that a murder has taken place at a house with the number 13
-      in a street, the letters of whose name number 13, would not pass
-      unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that have been committed, I
-      suppose we should find that as many have taken place at No. 6 or No. 7, or
-      any other number you choose, as at No. 13&mdash;that the law of averages
-      is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But this consideration does not
-      prevent the world remarking on the fact when No. 13 has its turn. Not that
-      the world believes there is anything in the superstition. It is quite sure
-      it is a mere childish folly, of course. Few of us would refuse to take a
-      house because its number was 13, or decline an invitation to dinner
-      because there were to be 13 at table. But most of us would be just a shade
-      happier if that desirable residence were numbered 11, and not any the less
-      pleased with the dinner if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept
-      him away. We would not confess this little weakness to each other. We
-      might even refuse to admit it to ourselves, but it is there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are numerous
-      streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which there is no
-      house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a bed in a
-      hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though it has
-      worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations of a
-      discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house, and
-      into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of a
-      bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession to
-      the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery is a
-      matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow on the
-      mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat recovery.
-      Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers in the sick
-      bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of a certain state of
-      mind in the patient. There are few more curious revelations in that moving
-      record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences during the war, than the case
-      of the man who died of a pimple on his nose. He had been hideously
-      mutilated in battle and was brought into hospital a sheer wreck; but he
-      was slowly patched up and seemed to have been saved when a pimple appeared
-      on his nose. It was nothing in itself, but it was enough to produce a
-      mental state that checked the flickering return of life. It assumed a
-      fantastic importance in the mind of the patient who, having survived the
-      heavy blows of fate, died of something less than a pin prick. It is not
-      difficult to understand that so fragile a hold of life might yield to the
-      sudden discovery that you were lying in No. 13 bed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
-      wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of all
-      the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that I
-      constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have associated
-      the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had anything but the
-      most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved a bus, and as free
-      from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I would not change its
-      number if I had the power to do so. But there are other circumstances of
-      which I should find it less easy to clear myself of suspicion under cross
-      examination. I never see a ladder against a house side without feeling
-      that it is advisable to walk round it rather than under it. I say to
-      myself that this is not homage to a foolish superstition, but a duty to my
-      family. One must think of one's family. The fellow at the top of the
-      ladder may drop anything. He may even drop himself. He may have had too
-      much to drink. He may be a victim of epileptic fits, and epileptic fits,
-      as everyone knows, come on at the most unseasonable times and places. It
-      is a mere measure of ordinary safety to walk round the ladder. No man is
-      justified in inviting danger in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle
-      fancy. Moreover, probably that fancy has its roots in the common-sense
-      fact that a man on a ladder does occasionally drop things. No doubt many
-      of our superstitions have these commonplace and sensible origins. I
-      imagine, for example, that the Jewish objection to pork as unclean on
-      religious grounds is only due to the fact that in Eastern climates it is
-      unclean on physical grounds.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather glad
-      that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing so. Even
-      if&mdash;conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to myself&mdash;I
-      walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not done so as a
-      kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have challenged it
-      rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way of dodging the
-      absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the ladder. This is not easy.
-      In the same way I am sensible of a certain satisfaction when I see the new
-      moon in the open rather than through glass, and over my right shoulder
-      rather than my left. I would not for any consideration arrange these
-      things consciously; but if they happen so I fancy I am better pleased than
-      if they do not. And on these occasions I have even caught my hand&mdash;which
-      chanced to be in my pocket at the time&mdash;turning over money, a little
-      surreptitiously I thought, but still undeniably turning it. Hands have
-      habits of their own and one can't always be watching them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover in
-      ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a creed
-      outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the laws of
-      the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
-      superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and man
-      seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
-      neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of their
-      hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
-      inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
-      misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon of
-      life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of battles
-      being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more relation to
-      the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When Pompey was
-      afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as prætor he shouted to the
-      Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election postponed, for
-      the Romans would never transact business after it had thundered. Alexander
-      surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took counsel with them as a
-      modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers. Even so great a man as
-      Cæsar and so modern and enlightened a man as Cicero left their fate to
-      augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were right and sometimes they were
-      wrong, but whether right or wrong they were equally meaningless. Cicero
-      lost his life by trusting to the wisdom of crows. When he was in flight
-      from Antony and Cæsar Augustus he put to sea and might have escaped. But
-      some crows chanced to circle round his vessel, and he took the
-      circumstance to be unfavourable to his action, returned to shore and was
-      murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece consulted the omens and the
-      oracles where the farmer to-day is only careful of his manures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I should have liked to have seen Cæsar and I should have liked to have
-      heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later day and
-      who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the better end
-      of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad. We do not
-      know much more of the Power that
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Turns the handle of this idle show
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      than our forefathers did, but at least we have escaped the grotesque
-      shadows that enveloped them. We do not look for divine guidance in the
-      entrails of animals or the flight of crows, and the House of Commons does
-      not adjourn at a clap of thunder.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0072m.jpg" alt="0072m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0072.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0073m.jpg" alt="0073m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0073.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON POSSESSION
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> met a lady the
-      other day who had travelled much and seen much, and who talked with great
-      vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one peculiarity about her.
-      If I happened to say that I too had been, let us say, to Tangier, her
-      interest in Tangier immediately faded away and she switched the
-      conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not been, and where
-      therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about the Honble. Ulick
-      de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had the honour of meeting
-      that eminent personage. And so with books and curiosities, places and
-      things&mdash;she was only interested in them so long as they were her
-      exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and when she ceased to
-      possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have Tangier all to herself
-      she did not want it at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
-      people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
-      not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
-      exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
-      countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else in
-      the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching that
-      appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he was getting
-      something that no one else had got, and when he found that someone else
-      had got it its value ceased to exist.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything in
-      the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
-      material thing. I do not own&mdash;to take an example&mdash;that wonderful
-      picture by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his
-      grandchild. I have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own
-      room I could not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for
-      years. It is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries
-      of the mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have
-      read, and beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it
-      whenever I like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the
-      painter saw in the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the
-      bottle nose as he stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long
-      centuries ago. The pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may
-      share this spiritual ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine,
-      or the shade of a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or
-      the song of the lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is
-      common to all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
-      woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of solitude
-      which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient Britons
-      hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense a certain
-      noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether he has seen
-      these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the little hamlet
-      know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them for a perpetual
-      playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but we could not have a
-      richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on every tree. For the
-      pleasure of things is not in their possession but in their use.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised long
-      ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who scurried
-      through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to say that
-      they had done something that other people had not done. Even so great a
-      man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive possession.
-      De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at the mountains,
-      he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene, whereupon
-      Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone else to
-      praise <i>his</i> mountains. He was the high priest of nature, and had
-      something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of revelation, and
-      anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence, except through him,
-      was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to nature.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
-      possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and Bernard
-      Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy of the free
-      human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of communism. On this
-      point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's doctrine and pointed out
-      that the State is not a mere individual, but a body composed of dissimilar
-      parts whose unity is to be drawn &ldquo;ex dissimilium hominum consensu.&rdquo; I am
-      as sensitive as anyone about my title to my personal possessions. I
-      dislike having my umbrella stolen or my pocket picked, and if I found a
-      burglar on my premises I am sure I shouldn't be able to imitate the
-      romantic example of the good bishop in &ldquo;Les Misérables.&rdquo; When I found the
-      other day that some young fruit trees I had left in my orchard for
-      planting had been removed in the night I was sensible of a very
-      commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean Valjean was I shouldn't have
-      asked him to come and take some more trees. I should have invited him to
-      return what he had removed or submit to consequences that follow in such
-      circumstances.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
-      necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
-      society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who ventured
-      to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or two hence.
-      Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control and the range
-      of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If mankind finds that
-      it can live more conveniently and more happily without private property it
-      will do so. In spite of the Decalogue private property is only a human
-      arrangement, and no reasonable observer of the operation of the
-      arrangement will pretend that it executes justice unfailingly in the
-      affairs of men. But because the idea of private property has been
-      permitted to override with its selfishness the common good of humanity, it
-      does not follow that there are not limits within which that idea can
-      function for the general convenience and advantage. The remedy is not in
-      abolishing it altogether, but in subordinating it to the idea of equal
-      justice and community of purpose. It will, reasonably understood, deny me
-      the right to call the coal measures, which were laid with the foundations
-      of the earth, my private property or to lay waste a countryside for deer
-      forests, but it will still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of
-      ownership. And the more true the equation of private and public rights is,
-      the more secure shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and
-      common interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the
-      grotesque and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of
-      private property which to some minds make the idea of private property
-      itself inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea
-      of private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
-      the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger of
-      attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard without
-      any apprehensions as to their safety.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
-      ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
-      things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment. I
-      do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
-      experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
-      mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. &ldquo;I do not
-      know how it is,&rdquo; said a very rich man in my hearing, &ldquo;but when I am in
-      London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I want to
-      be in London.&rdquo; He was not wanting to escape from London or the country,
-      but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions and was
-      bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher &ldquo;his hands were full but his
-      soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world.&rdquo; There was wisdom
-      as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that &ldquo;he who was born first
-      has the greatest number of old clothes.&rdquo; It is not a bad rule for the
-      pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage to those
-      who take a pride in its abundance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0078m.jpg" alt="0078m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0078.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0079m.jpg" alt="0079m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0079.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BORES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was talking in
-      the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat blunt manner when
-      Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and began:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, I think America is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; &ldquo;Now, do you mind giving
-      us two minutes?&rdquo; broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom,
-      unabashed and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group.
-      Poor Blossom! I had almost said &ldquo;Dear Blossom.&rdquo; For he is really an
-      excellent fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that
-      he is a bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable
-      company. You feel that you could love Blossom if he would only keep away.
-      If you heard of his death you would be genuinely grieved and would send a
-      wreath to his grave and a nice letter of condolence to his wife and
-      numerous children.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it is only absence that makes the heart grow fond of Blossom. When he
-      appears all your affection for him withers. You hope that he will not see
-      you. You shrink to your smallest dimensions. You talk with an air of
-      intense privacy. You keep your face averted. You wonder whether the back
-      of your head is easily distinguishable among so many heads. All in vain.
-      He approacheth with the remorselessness of fate. He putteth his hand upon
-      your shoulder. He remarketh with the air of one that bringeth new new's
-      and good news&mdash;&ldquo;Well, I think that America is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
-       And then he taketh a chair and thou lookest at the clock and wonderest how
-      soon thou canst decently remember another engagement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Blossom is the bore courageous. He descends on the choicest company
-      without fear or parley. Out, sword, and at 'em, is his motto. He advances
-      with a firm voice and a confident air, as of one who knows he is welcome
-      everywhere and has only to choose his company. He will have nothing but
-      the best, and as he enters the room you may see his eye roving from table
-      to table, not in search of the glad eye of recognition, but of the most
-      select companionship, and having marked down his prey he goes forward
-      boldly to the attack. Salutes the circle with easy familiarity, draw's up
-      his chair with assured and masterful authority, and plunges into the
-      stream of talk with the heavy impact of a walrus or hippopotamus taking a
-      bath. The company around him melts away, but he is not dismayed. Left
-      alone with a circle of empty chairs, he riseth like a giant refreshed,
-      casteth his eye abroad, noteth another group that whetteth his appetite
-      for good fellowship, moveth towards it with bold and resolute front. You
-      may see him put to flight as many as three circles inside an hour, and
-      retire at the end, not because he is beaten, but because there is nothing
-      left worth crossing swords with. &ldquo;A very good club to-night,&rdquo; he says to
-      Mrs B. as he puts on his slippers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not so Trip. He is the bore circumspect. He proceeds by sap and mine where
-      Blossom charges the battlements sword in hand. He enters timidly as one
-      who hopes that he will be unobserved. He goes to the table and examines
-      the newspapers, takes one and seats himself alone. But not so much alone
-      that he is entirely out of the range of those fellows in the corner who
-      keep up such a cut-and-thrust of wit. Perchance one of them may catch his
-      eye and open the circle to him. He readeth his paper sedulously, but his
-      glance passeth incontinently outside the margin or over the top of the
-      page to the coveted group. No responsive eye meets his. He moveth just a
-      thought nearer along the sofa by the wall. Now he is well within hearing.
-      Now he is almost of the company itself. But still unseen&mdash;noticeably
-      unseen. He puts down his paper, not ostentatiously but furtively. He
-      listens openly to the conversation, as one who has been enmeshed in it
-      unconsciously, accidentally, almost unwillingly, for was he not absorbed
-      in his paper until this conversation disturbed him? And now it would be
-      almost uncivil not to listen. He waits for a convenient opening and then
-      gently insinuates a remark like one venturing on untried ice. And the ice
-      breaks and the circle melts. For Trip, too, is a bore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I remember in those wonderful submarine pictures of the brothers
-      Williamson, which we saw in London some time ago, a strange fish at whose
-      approach all the other fish turned tail. It was not, I think, that they
-      feared him, nor that he was less presentable in appearance than any other
-      fish, but simply that there was something about him that made them
-      remember things. I forget what his name was, or whether he even had a
-      name. But his calling was obvious. He was the Club Bore. He was the fish
-      who sent the other fish about their business. I thought of Blossom as I
-      saw that lonely creature whisking through the water in search of some
-      friendly ear into which he could remark&mdash;&ldquo;Well, I think that America
-      is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; or words to that effect. I thought how superior
-      an animal is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish
-      did. He hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn
-      lamb. He looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth
-      even to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his
-      feelings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of
-      sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists
-      on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but this
-      is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. And the humour must not be
-      that counterfeit currency which consists in the retailing of borrowed
-      stories. &ldquo;Of all bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang, and Heaven
-      in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate its species,&rdquo; says De
-      Quincey, &ldquo;the most insufferable is the teller of good stories.&rdquo; It is an
-      over hard saying, subject to exceptions; but it contains the essential
-      truth, for the humour of good company must be an authentic emanation of
-      personality and not a borrowed tale. It is no discredit to be a bore. Very
-      great men have been bores! I fancy that Macaulay, with all his
-      transcendent gifts, was a bore. My head aches even at the thought of an
-      evening spent in the midst of the terrific torrent of facts and
-      certainties that poured from that brilliant and amiable man. I find myself
-      in agreement for once with Melbourne who wished that he was &ldquo;as cocksure
-      of one thing as Macaulay was of everything.&rdquo; There is pretty clear
-      evidence that Wordsworth was a bore and that Coleridge was a bore, and I
-      am sure Bob Southey must have been an intolerable bore. And Neckar's
-      daughter was fortunate to escape Gibbon for he was assuredly a prince of
-      bores. He took pains to leave posterity in no doubt on the point. He wrote
-      his &ldquo;Autobiography&rdquo; which, as a wit observed, showed that &ldquo;he did not know
-      the difference between himself and the Roman Empire. He has related his
-      'progressions from London to Bariton and from Bariton to London' in the
-      same monotonous, majestic periods that he recorded the fall of states and
-      empires.&rdquo; Yes, an indubitable bore. Yet these were all admirable men and
-      even great men. Let not therefore the Blossoms and the Trips be
-      discomfited. It may be that it is not they who are not fit company for us,
-      but we who are not fit company for them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0084m.jpg" alt="0084m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0084.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0027" id="linkimage-0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0085m.jpg" alt="0085m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0085.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      A LOST SWARM
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e were busy with
-      the impossible hen when the alarm came. The impossible hen is sitting on a
-      dozen eggs in the shed, and, like the boy on the burning deck, obstinately
-      refuses to leave the post of duty. A sense of duty is an excellent thing,
-      but even a sense of duty can be carried to excess, and this hen's sense of
-      duty is simply a disease. She is so fiercely attached to her task that she
-      cannot think of eating, and resents any attempt to make her eat as a
-      personal affront or a malignant plot against her impending family. Lest
-      she should die at her post, a victim to a misguided hunger strike, we were
-      engaged in the delicate process of substituting a more reasonable hen, and
-      it was at this moment that a shout from the orchard announced that No. 5
-      was swarming.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had
-      been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells
-      visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around
-      the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the
-      thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more
-      exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You pass
-      it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched
-      within. The next, the whole colony roars out like a cataract, envelops the
-      hive in a cloud of living dust until the queen has emerged and gives
-      direction to the masses that slowly cohere around her as she settles on
-      some branch. The excitement is contagious. It is a call to adventure with
-      the unknown, an adventure sharpened by the threat of loss and tense with
-      the instancy of action. They have the start. It is your wit against their
-      impulse, your strategy against their momentum. The cloud thins and expands
-      as it moves away from the hive and you are puzzled to know whither the
-      main stream is moving in these ever widening folds of motion. The first
-      indeterminate signs of direction to-day were towards the beech woods
-      behind the cottage, but with the aid of a syringe we put up a barrage of
-      water in that direction, and headed them off towards a row of chestnuts
-      and limes at the end of the paddock beyond the orchard. A swift encircling
-      move, armed with syringe and pail, brought them again under the improvised
-      rainstorm. They concluded that it was not such a fine day as they had
-      thought after all, and that they had better take shelter at once, and to
-      our entire content the mass settled in a great blob on a conveniently low
-      bough of a chestnut tree. Then, by the aid of a ladder and patient
-      coaxing, the blob was safely transferred to a skep, and carried off
-      triumphantly to the orchard.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0028" id="linkimage-0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0089m.jpg" alt="0089m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0089.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And now, but for the war, all would have been well. For, but for the war,
-      there would have been a comfortable home in which the adventurers could
-      have taken up their new quarters. But hives are as hard to come by in
-      these days as petrol or matches, or butter or cheese, or most of the other
-      common things of life. We had ransacked England for hives and the
-      neighbourhood for wood with which to make hives; but neither could be had,
-      though promises were plenty, and here was the beginning of the swarms of
-      May, each of them worth a load of hay according to the adage, and never a
-      hive to welcome them with. Perhaps to-morrow something would arrive, if
-      not from Gloucester, then from Surrey. If only the creatures would make
-      themselves at home in the skep for a day or two....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But no. For two hours or so all seemed well. Then perhaps they found the
-      skep too hot, perhaps they detected the odour of previous tenants, perhaps&mdash;but
-      who can read the thoughts of these inscrutable creatures? Suddenly the
-      skep was enveloped in a cyclone of bees, and again the orchard sang with
-      the exciting song of the wings. For a moment the cloud seemed to hover
-      over an apple tree near by, and once more the syringe was at work
-      insisting, in spite of the sunshine, that it was a dreadfully wet day on
-      which to be about, and that a dry skep, even though pervaded by the smell
-      of other bees, had points worth considering. In vain. This time they had
-      made up their minds. It may be that news had come to them, from one of the
-      couriers sent out to prospect for fresh quarters, of a suitable home
-      elsewhere, perhaps a deserted hive, perhaps a snug hollow in some porch or
-      in the bole of an ancient tree. Whatever the goal, the decision was final.
-      One moment the cloud was about us; the air was filled with the
-      high-pitched roar of thirty thousand pair of wings. The next moment the
-      cloud had gone&mdash;gone sailing high over the trees in the paddock and
-      out across the valley. We burst through the paddock fence into the
-      cornfield beyond; but we might as well have chased the wind. Our first
-      load of hay had taken wings and gone beyond recovery. For an hour or two
-      there circled round the deserted skep a few hundred odd bees who had
-      apparently been out when the second decision to migrate was taken, and
-      found themselves homeless and queenless. I saw some of them try to enter
-      other hives, but they were promptly ejected as foreigners by the sentries
-      who keep the porch and admit none who do not carry the authentic odour of
-      the hive. Perhaps the forlorn creatures got back to No. 5, and the young
-      colony left in possession of that tenement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full of hope,
-      for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's bench under the
-      pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and plane, and before
-      nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And it never rains
-      but it pours&mdash;here is a telegram telling us of three hives on the
-      way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We will harvest our
-      loads of hay before they take wing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0029" id="linkimage-0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0090m.jpg" alt="0090m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0090.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0030" id="linkimage-0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0091m.jpg" alt="0091m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0091.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      YOUNG AMERICA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>f you want to
-      understand America,&rdquo; said my host, &ldquo;come and see her young barbarians at
-      play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at Princeton. It will be a great
-      game. Come and see it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured victory
-      in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but consider the
-      record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was as much ahead of
-      Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of Cambridge on the
-      river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It was like a Derby
-      Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the great hall of that
-      magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated men and women, wearing
-      the favours of the rival colleges&mdash;yellow for Princeton and red for
-      Harvard&mdash;passed through the gateways to the platform, filling train
-      after train, that dipped under the Hudson and, coming out into the
-      sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered away with its jolly
-      load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country, through historic
-      Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off towers of Princeton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges, such
-      a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
-      &ldquo;how-d'ye-do's&rdquo; and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
-      times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
-      haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured in
-      the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some terrific
-      memorial of antiquity&mdash;seen from without a mighty circular wall of
-      masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval, or
-      rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the level of
-      the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand spectators&mdash;on
-      this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side, with the sunlight
-      full upon them, the yellows.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
-      playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings&mdash;-for this American
-      game is much more complicated than English Rugger&mdash;its goal-posts and
-      its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
-      minute record of the game.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
-      there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
-      music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
-      like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
-      horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
-      opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
-      Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
-      greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war. Three
-      flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They shout
-      through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line, they wave
-      their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with that leap
-      there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of cheers
-      roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
-      demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of a
-      tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey&mdash;the growl rising
-      to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell, roar
-      for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of us,
-      and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their limbs
-      we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I cannot
-      hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off with the
-      battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand lusty pairs
-      of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid, we rise like
-      one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our cheer-leaders,
-      gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad dervishes, we shout
-      back the song of &ldquo;Har-vard! Har-vard!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into the
-      field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson, that in
-      the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and helmeted so
-      that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic muscular
-      development and horrific visage. At their entrance the megaphones opposite
-      are heard again, and the enemy host rises and repeats its wonderful cheer
-      and tiger growl. We rise and heave the challenge back. And now the teams
-      are in position, the front lines, with the ball between, crouching on the
-      ground for the spring. In the silence that has suddenly fallen on the
-      scene, one hears short, sharp cries of numbers. &ldquo;Five!&rdquo; &ldquo;Eleven!&rdquo; &ldquo;Three!&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Six!&rdquo; &ldquo;Ten!&rdquo; like the rattle of musketry. Then&mdash;crash! The front
-      lines have leapt on each other. There is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs
-      and bodies. The swirl clears and men are seen lying about all over the
-      line as though a shell had burst in their midst, while away to the right a
-      man with the ball is brought down with a crash to the ground by another,
-      who leaps at him like a projectile that completes its trajectory at his
-      ankles.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
-      thrilling minutes&mdash;which, with intervals and stoppages for the
-      attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours&mdash;how the
-      battle surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the
-      tension of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how
-      Harvard scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm
-      of victory, how Princeton drew level&mdash;a cyclone from the other side!&mdash;and
-      forged ahead&mdash;another cyclone&mdash;how man after man went down like
-      an ox, was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how
-      another brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last
-      hardly a man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every
-      convenient interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we
-      jumped up and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how
-      the match ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of
-      victory that is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters&mdash;all
-      this is recorded in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives
-      in my mind as a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous &ldquo;rag&rdquo; in which young and
-      old, gravity and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly
-      confounded.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And what did you think of it?&rdquo; asked my host as we rattled back to New
-      York in the darkness that night. &ldquo;I think it has helped me to understand
-      America,&rdquo; I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
-      explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0031" id="linkimage-0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0095m.jpg" alt="0095m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0095.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0032" id="linkimage-0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0096m.jpg" alt="0096m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0096.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GREAT REPLIES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>t a dinner table
-      the other night, the talk turned upon a certain politician whose cynical
-      traffic in principles and loyalties has eclipsed even the record of
-      Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one defender, an amiable and rather
-      portentous gentleman who did not so much talk as lecture, and whose habit
-      of looking up abstractedly and fixedly at some invisible altitude gave him
-      the impression of communing with the Almighty. He was profuse in his
-      admissions and apologies, but he wound up triumphantly with the remark:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;So was Madame de Pompadour,&rdquo; said a voice from the other side of the
-      table.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
-      replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician with
-      a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of democracy who,
-      like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things for ambition and
-      power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through the dull, solemn man
-      on the other side of the table like a rapier. There was no reply. There
-      was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash of lightning. It
-      revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift, searching intelligence,
-      equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that went with deadly certainty
-      to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed on the whole landscape of
-      discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that gave it larger significance
-      and range.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour and
-      finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
-      absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and personality.
-      There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning phrase that has
-      leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental things. I do not
-      know much about the military genius or the deeds of Augureau, but I know
-      the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon about the celebration
-      at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial ambitions of the First Consul.
-      Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought of the ceremony. &ldquo;Oh, it was very
-      fine,&rdquo; replied the general; &ldquo;there was nothing wanting, <i>except the
-      million of men who have perished in pulling down what you are setting up</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
-      the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
-      make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
-      bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
-      him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian,
-      a poor peasant's son&mdash;a miserable friar of a country town&mdash;was
-      prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
-      Christendom.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; said the Cardinal at last to him, &ldquo;do you think the Pope cares for
-      the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger than
-      all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend <i>you&mdash;you</i>,
-      a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you be then&mdash;where
-      will you be then?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Then, as now,&rdquo; replied Luther. &ldquo;Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
-      God.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
-      venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
-      century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man&mdash;one of
-      the profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
-      country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
-      brilliant author of the papers on &ldquo;The Crisis,&rdquo; that kept the flame of the
-      rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of the
-      United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the Bastille
-      for presentation to Washington. The true character of this great
-      Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had discoursed
-      &ldquo;On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.&rdquo; And Paine answered,
-      &ldquo;God did not make rich and poor. God made male and female and gave the
-      earth for their inheritance."</b>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
-      this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
-      to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
-      Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
-      boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
-      remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo;
-       said the President. &ldquo;Then whose boots do they black?&rdquo; There was the same
-      mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
-      inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. &ldquo;I do not know,
-      madam,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
-      when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
-      dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
-      disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
-      using his department to further his ambitions. &ldquo;Raymond,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you
-      were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
-      is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving the
-      horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he rushed
-      across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely keep pace
-      with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an enormous chin fly
-      fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother asked me what I did
-      that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse bitten in that way.
-      'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him go!' Now, if Mr Chase
-      has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm not going to knock it
-      off, if it will only make his department <i>go!</i>&rdquo; If one were asked to
-      name the most famous answer in history, one might, not unreasonably, give
-      the palm to a woman&mdash;a poor woman, too, who has been dust for three
-      thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke six words that
-      gave her immortality. They have been recalled on thousands of occasions
-      and in all lands, but never more memorably than by John Bright when he was
-      speaking of the hesitation with which he accepted cabinet office: &ldquo;I
-      should have preferred much,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to have remained in the common rank
-      of citizenship in which heretofore I have lived. There is a passage in the
-      Old Testament that has often struck me as being one of great beauty. Many
-      of you will recollect that the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very
-      hospitably entertained by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make
-      her some amends, and he called her to him and asked her what there was he
-      should do for her. 'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to
-      the captain of the host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the
-      Shunamite woman returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the
-      prophet's offer, 'I dwell among mine own people.'&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
-      point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
-      babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if by magic,
-      from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the spiritual, from
-      the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty replies, are another
-      matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp tongue and a quick mind. But
-      great replies are not dependent on wit or cleverness. If they were Cicero
-      would have made many, whereas he never made one. His repartees are perfect
-      of their kind, but they belong to the debating club and the law court.
-      They raise a laugh and score a point, but they are summer lightnings. The
-      great reply does not come from witty minds, but from rare and profound
-      souls. The brilliant adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that
-      reply of Augereau than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it
-      because with all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a
-      great part on the world's stage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0033" id="linkimage-0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0101m.jpg" alt="0101m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0101.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0034" id="linkimage-0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0102m.jpg" alt="0102m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0102.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> went recently to
-      an industrial town in the North on some business, and while there had
-      occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and engines and machinery
-      of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers and engines and machinery of
-      all sorts, and I did my best to appear interested and understanding. But I
-      was neither one nor the other. I was only bored. Boilers and engines, I
-      know, are important things. Compared with a boiler, the finest lyric that
-      was ever written is only a perfume on the gale. There is a practical
-      downrightness about a boiler that makes &ldquo;Drink to me only with thine
-      eyes,&rdquo; or &ldquo;O mistress mine, where are you roaming?&rdquo; or even &ldquo;Twelfth
-      Night&rdquo; itself, a mere idle frivolity. All you can say in favour of
-      &ldquo;Twelfth Night,&rdquo; from the strictly business point of view, is that it
-      doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank heaven for that.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
-      never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought to
-      be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How, for
-      example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of a
-      boiler? How&mdash;and this was still more important&mdash;how could I hope
-      to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
-      gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
-      great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it as
-      much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
-      discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no bowels
-      of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the symbol of
-      brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional values. In
-      Dante's &ldquo;Inferno&rdquo; each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted to give him
-      the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room for me, and
-      there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever among wheels and
-      pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying amidst the thud and din
-      of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily &ldquo;waste&rdquo; to catch those perfumes
-      on the gale, those frivolous rhythms to which I had devoted so much of
-      that life' which should be &ldquo;real and earnest&rdquo; and occupied with serious
-      things like boilers. And so it came about that as my friend talked I
-      spiritually wilted away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
-      learned and articulate boiler.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
-      boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
-      inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a &ldquo;b&rdquo; in
-      boilers and a &ldquo;b&rdquo; in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect was
-      miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit. The
-      light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if I were
-      a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved brother.
-      Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come, I must see
-      his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could whisk us to his
-      house in the suburbs, and there in a great room, surrounded with hundreds
-      of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from the ends of the earth,
-      butterflies from the forests of Brazil and butterflies from the plains of
-      India, and butterflies from the veldt of South Africa and butterflies from
-      the bush of Australia, all arranged in the foliage natural to their
-      habitat to show how their scheme of coloration conformed to their setting.
-      Some of them had their wings folded back and were indistinguishable from
-      the leaves among which they lay. And as my friend, with growing
-      excitement, revealed his treasure, he talked of his adventures in the
-      pursuit of them, and of the law of natural selection and all its bearing
-      upon the mystery of life, its survivals and its failures. This hobby of
-      his was, in short, the key of his world. The boiler house was the prison
-      where he did time. At the magic word &ldquo;butterflies&rdquo; the prison door opened,
-      and out he sailed on the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the
-      mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
-      something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a ship
-      without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair that most
-      of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the end of the
-      journey without ever having found a path and a sense of direction. But a
-      hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial a thing, but it
-      supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm outside the mere
-      routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it will lead. You may
-      begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in continents. You may
-      collect coins, and find that the history of man is written on them. You
-      may begin with bees, and end with the science of life. Ruskin began with
-      pictures and found they led to economics and everything else. For as every
-      road was said to lead to Rome, so every hobby leads out into the universe,
-      and supplies us with a compass for the adventure. It saves us from the
-      humiliation of being merely smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in
-      general, for the world is too full of things to permit us to be anything
-      else, but one field of intensive culture will give even our smattering a
-      respectable foundation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who knows
-      even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might be when
-      he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not know them
-      and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of measurement
-      which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters. He will have,
-      above all, an attachment to life which will make him at home in the world.
-      Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged into this bewildering
-      whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of circumstance. We have in us
-      the genius of speculation, but the further our speculations penetrate the
-      profounder becomes the mystery that baffles us. We are caught in the toils
-      of affections that crumble to dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither
-      like grass, beaten about by storms that shatter our stoutest battlements
-      like spray blown upon the wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little
-      more than dreams within a dream&mdash;or as Carlyle puts it, &ldquo;exhalations
-      that are and then are not.&rdquo; And we share the poet's sense of exile&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      In this house with starry dome,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Shall I never be at home?
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Never wholly at my ease?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
-      stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
-      hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
-      that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
-      without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
-      find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come and
-      go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always renewed.
-      Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with Horace or
-      Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the sense of the
-      mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden of the mind,
-      self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of intractible
-      circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the spirit and
-      endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman in &ldquo;Romany Rye,&rdquo;
-       you will remember, found his deliverance in studying Chinese. His
-      bereavement had left him without God and without hope in the world,
-      without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the things that
-      reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly before him,
-      when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and he thought he
-      heard a voice say, &ldquo;The marks! the marks! cling to the marks! or&mdash;&mdash;-&rdquo;
-       And from this beginning&mdash;but the story is too fruity, too rich with
-      the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book down, turn to the
-      episode, and thank me for sending you again into the enchanted Borrovian
-      realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in books. It is enough
-      for the purpose here to recall this perfect example of the healing power
-      of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little world of our own where we
-      can be at ease, and from whose warmth and friendliness we can look out on
-      the vast conundrum without expecting an answer or being much troubled
-      because we do not get one. It was a hobby that poor Pascal needed to allay
-      that horror of the universe which he expressed in the desolating phrase,
-      &ldquo;Le silence étemel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.&rdquo; For on the wings of
-      the butterfly one can not only outrange the boiler, but can adventure into
-      the infinite in the spirit of happy and confident adventure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0035" id="linkimage-0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0108m.jpg" alt="0108m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0108.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0036" id="linkimage-0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0109m.jpg" alt="0109m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0109.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON HEREFORD BEACON
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">J</span>enny Lind sleeps
-      in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she died is four miles
-      away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble range of the Malverns
-      that marches north and south from Worcester beacon to Gloucester beacon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way up from
-      Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its descent into
-      the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
-      range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the deep
-      trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as this, the
-      Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman legions.
-      Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural ramparts; but
-      the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the work to&mdash;&mdash;.
-      But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell his own story.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
-      conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
-      the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
-      slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of the
-      district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up the steep
-      road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the Cotswolds,
-      Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and the other
-      features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the road,
-      Hereford beacon came in view.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Killed?&rdquo; said I, a little stunned.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
-      from about here you know, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he wasn't
-      killed at all. He died in his bed.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
-      captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
-      sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard tell
-      as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but the
-      capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
-      Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must be
-      fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;He blowed
-      away Little Malvern Church down yonder.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
-      visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
-      ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of Piers
-      Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Left the tower standing he did, sir,&rdquo; pursued the historian. &ldquo;Now, why
-      should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought us
-      to Wynd's Point.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an old
-      gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the little
-      arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out on the
-      beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently declined to
-      go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred to disturb. It was
-      the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and singer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of a
-      vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
-      roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
-      chalet, &ldquo;the golden cage,&rdquo; of the singer fronting the drawing-room bowered
-      in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter pictures
-      of saints, that hang upon the walls&mdash;all speak with mute eloquence of
-      the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres, whose life was an
-      anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet simplicity of her name.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Why did you leave the stage?&rdquo; asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
-      like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
-      surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for the
-      sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for charity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Because,&rdquo; she said, touching the Bible, &ldquo;it left me so little time for
-      this, and&rdquo; (looking at the sunset) &ldquo;none for that.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
-      cuckoo&mdash;his voice failing slightly in these hot June days&mdash;wakes
-      you in the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the
-      shadows lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
-      against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
-      deepening gloom of the vast plain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
-      unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the road,
-      with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the broom to
-      the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come out on the
-      path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the green summits that
-      march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of Worcester beacon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon to
-      Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these ten
-      miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled at your
-      feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of exhilaration
-      that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It is a cheerful
-      solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of the twin shout
-      of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and look out over
-      half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills, Birmingham
-      stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where southward the
-      shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the imagination away with
-      Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you may see our rough island
-      story traced in characters of city, hill, and plain. These grass-grown
-      trenches, where to-day the young lambs are grazing, take us back to the
-      dawn of things and the beginnings of that ancient tragedy of the Celtic
-      race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see
-      Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of the Roses, of &ldquo;false, fleeting,
-      perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the field at Tewkesbury,&rdquo; and of
-      Ancient Pistol, whose &ldquo;wits were thick as Tewkesbury mustard.&rdquo; There is
-      the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and far away Edgehill carries the
-      mind forward to the beginning of that great struggle for a free England
-      which finished yonder at Worcester, where the clash of arms was heard for
-      the last time in our land and where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword
-      for ever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to cast
-      its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the wide
-      plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing here
-      through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to Oxford
-      and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are coming
-      up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom. Now is
-      the moment to turn westward, where
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Bleeds upon the road to Wales.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun, and in
-      the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the far battlements
-      of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of alabaster, and in the
-      woods of the castle that clothe these western slopes a pheasant rends the
-      golden silence with the startled noise and flurry of its flight.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
-      the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
-      suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and a
-      late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through the
-      twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great sycamore
-      by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads of insects
-      has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an unfaltering
-      bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all save a pied
-      wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its graceful tail by the
-      rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come those intimate murmurs of
-      the birds, half chatter, half song, that close the day. Even these grow
-      few and faint until the silence is unbroken.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0037" id="linkimage-0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0115m.jpg" alt="0115m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0115.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0038" id="linkimage-0038"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0116m.jpg" alt="0116m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0116.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHUM
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>hen I turned the
-      key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a familiar sound. It was
-      the &ldquo;thump, thump, thump,&rdquo; of a tail on the floor at the foot of the
-      stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place was vacant. Chum had gone,
-      and he would not return. I knew that the veterinary must have called,
-      pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him away, and that I should hear
-      no more his &ldquo;welcome home!&rdquo; at midnight. No matter what the labours of the
-      day had been or how profound his sleep, he never failed to give me a cheer
-      with the stump of his tail and to blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him
-      &ldquo;Good dog&rdquo; and a pat on the head. Then with a huge sigh of content he
-      would lapse back into slumber, satisfied that the last duty of the day was
-      done, and that all was well with the world for the night. Now he has
-      lapsed into sleep altogether.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will pay
-      my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and in
-      any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that I
-      enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he enjoyed
-      my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom he went,
-      and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to go with,
-      unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person. It was not
-      that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned after a longish
-      absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would leap round and
-      round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent her to the
-      floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's schoolmaster
-      who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and explained that &ldquo;he
-      didn't know his own strength.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and I was
-      the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the woodlands,
-      and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his reddish-brown
-      coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan, and his head
-      down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there was more than a
-      hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was precisely no one
-      ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up. His fine liquid brown
-      eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but he had a nobler head
-      than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain of the Irish terrier in
-      him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat was all his own. And all
-      his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and his genius for friendship.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he was
-      reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had been
-      sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
-      grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin, and
-      he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
-      schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
-      eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
-      something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
-      when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
-      abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
-      ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
-      You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about his
-      affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to the
-      forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled to any
-      good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and watchful,
-      his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury and pity for
-      the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the qualities of a
-      rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into an unspeakable
-      abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your voice and all the
-      world was young and full of singing birds again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
-      that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
-      For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or his
-      colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more than a
-      little of the spirit of the flunkey. &ldquo;A man's a man, for a' that,&rdquo; was not
-      his creed. He discriminated between the people who came to the front door
-      and the people who came to the side door. To the former he was
-      systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly hostile. &ldquo;The poor in a
-      loomp is bad,&rdquo; was his fixed principle, and any one carrying a basket,
-      wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was <i>ipso facto</i> suspect. He
-      held, in short, to the servile philosophy of clothes as firmly as any
-      waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair. Familiarity never altered
-      his convictions. No amount of correction affected his stubborn dislike of
-      postmen. They offended him in many ways. They wore uniforms; they came,
-      nevertheless, to the front door; they knocked with a challenging violence
-      that revolted his sense of propriety. In the end, the burden of their
-      insults was too much for him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of
-      trousers. Perhaps that incident was not unconnected with his passing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
-      Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in leaping
-      a stile&mdash;he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow&mdash;or
-      had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
-      latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
-      for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted. But
-      whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all the
-      veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to the revels
-      in his native woods&mdash;for he had come to us as a pup from a cottage in
-      the heart of the woodland country&mdash;no longer made him tense as a
-      drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and left
-      his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the hill
-      to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into the
-      house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to be
-      forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a place
-      he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream of the
-      happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there waiting to
-      scour the woods with me as of old.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0039" id="linkimage-0039"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0120m.jpg" alt="0120m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0120.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0040" id="linkimage-0040"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0121m.jpg" alt="0121m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0121.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON MATCHES AND THINGS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> had an agreeable
-      assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I went-into a tea-shop and
-      sat down. There were several young waitresses by the counter engaged in
-      animated conversation. They eyed me with that cold aloofness which is the
-      ritual of the order, and which, I take it, is intended to convey to you
-      the fact that they are princesses in disguise who only serve in shops for
-      a pastime. When I had taken out my watch twice with an appearance of
-      ostentatious urgency, one of the princesses came towards me, took my order
-      (looking meanwhile out of the window to remind me that she was not really
-      aware of me, but only happened to be there by chance), and moved
-      languorously away. When she returned she brought tea&mdash;and sugar. In
-      that moment her disdain was transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel
-      who under the disguise of indifference went about scattering benedictions
-      among her customers and assuring them that the spring had come back to the
-      earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future became
-      suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine) had passed
-      magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be sweetened
-      thrice a day by honest sugar.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised how
-      I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my friends
-      through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump person, but
-      in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the spoon and
-      stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer did the spoon
-      seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere survival of an
-      antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the back of your coat.
-      It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the tea-table. To stir your
-      tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It keeps tune with your thoughts
-      if you are alone, and it keeps time with your tongue if you are talking.
-      It helps out the argument, fills up the gaps, provides the animated
-      commentary on your discourse. There are people I shall always remember in
-      the attitude of standing, cup in hand, and stirring, stirring, stirring as
-      the current of talk flowed on. Such a one was that fine old tea-drinker,
-      Prince Kropotkin&mdash;rest his gentle soul if he indeed be among the
-      slain.... With what universal benevolence his patriarchal face used to
-      gleam as he stood stirring and talking, talking and stirring, with the
-      hurry of his teeming thoughts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
-      for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
-      little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
-      of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
-      solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
-      with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon the
-      grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all the
-      pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious than you
-      had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days knitting up your
-      severed friendships with things. You slip into the National Gallery just
-      to see what old favourites have come up from the darkness of the cellars.
-      You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in the great moon that shines
-      again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that chimes gives you a pleasant
-      emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds like the salutation of an old
-      friend who had been given up as lost. And matches.... There was a time
-      when I thought nothing of a match. I would strike a match as thoughtlessly
-      as I would breathe. And for the same reason, that matches were as
-      plentiful as air. I would strike a match and let the wind puff it out;
-      another and let it burn out before using it, simply because I was too busy
-      talking or listening or thinking or doing nothing. I would try to light a
-      pipe in a gale of wind on a mountain top, crouching behind a boulder,
-      getting inside my hat, lying on the ground under my coat, and wasting
-      matches by the dozen. I would get rid of a box of matches a day, and not
-      care a dump. The world was simply choked with matches, and it was almost a
-      duty to go on striking them to make room for the rest. You could get a
-      dozen boxes for a penny or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see
-      great bags of matches with boxes bursting out at the top, and simply
-      asking to be taken. If by some accident you found yourself without a box
-      in your pocket you asked the stranger for a light as confidently as you
-      would ask him for the time o' day. You were asking for something that cost
-      him nothing except a commonplace civility.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
-      Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
-      away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, &ldquo;No; we haven't any.&rdquo; They
-      simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
-      smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the habit
-      and just go on in their sleep. &ldquo;Oh, you funny people,&rdquo; they seem to say,
-      dreamily. &ldquo;Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach you that
-      there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years and years;
-      never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let the other fools
-      follow on.&rdquo; And you go away, feeling much as though you had been caught
-      trying to pass a bad half-crown.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, &ldquo;Can you oblige me
-      with a light, sir?&rdquo; You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or a
-      pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
-      wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
-      fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting to
-      pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket, preparing
-      to have &ldquo;After you, sir,&rdquo; on your lips at the exact moment when he has lit
-      his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out the precious flame.
-      Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps the fellow is only
-      waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting for what the other
-      hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which I
-      can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips I know
-      that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that excellent
-      fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine, and I have
-      had more lights from him in these days than from any other man on earth. I
-      never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it quite boldly,
-      fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me&mdash;but not so often, not
-      nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If&mdash;having borrowed
-      a little too recklessly from him of late&mdash;I go into his room and
-      begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the Peace
-      Conference, or things like that&mdash;is he deceived? Not at all. He knows
-      that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has one left
-      it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his pipe because he
-      knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man Higginson is. I
-      cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
-      tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
-      authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
-      before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
-      welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
-      Lords and the Oval.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning, Your
-      young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is sailing
-      home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds instead of
-      khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters who are
-      strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on historic
-      battlefields and now ask you whether you will have &ldquo;thick or clear,&rdquo; with
-      the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your galley proof is
-      brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you look at with a
-      shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he is that pale,
-      thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago, and who in the
-      interval has been fighting in many lands near and far, in France and
-      Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing the burnished
-      livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a stoutish fellow
-      who turns out to be the old professional released from Germany after long
-      months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one &ldquo;of the lucky ones;
-      nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and lived with the
-      farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir, nothing to
-      complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men and
-      things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those who
-      will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound of Big
-      Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we enter the
-      new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the stimulus of the
-      princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the credit side of
-      things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We have left the deathly
-      solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the moraine is rough and
-      toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we can hear the pleasant
-      tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old pastures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0041" id="linkimage-0041"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0127m.jpg" alt="0127m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0127.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0042" id="linkimage-0042"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0128m.jpg" alt="0128m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0128.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING REMEMBERED
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>s I lay on the
-      hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods watching the
-      harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows chasing each other
-      across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were looking down with me.
-      For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an old school book is scored
-      with the names of generations of scholars. Near by are the earthworks of
-      the ancient Britons, and on the face of the hill is a great white horse
-      carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those white marks, that look like sheep
-      feeding on the green hill-side, are reminders of the great war. How long
-      ago it seems since the recruits from the valley used to come up here to
-      learn the art of trench-digging, leaving these memorials behind them
-      before they marched away to whatever fate awaited them! All over the
-      hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit by merry parties on happy
-      holidays. One scorched and blackened area, more spacious than the rest,
-      marks the spot where the beacon fire was lit to celebrate the signing of
-      Peace. And on the boles of the beech trees are initials carved deep in the
-      bark&mdash;some linked like those of lovers, some freshly cut, some old
-      and covered with lichen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and
-      school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is as
-      ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school desks
-      of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of the
-      schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted them.
-      There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood or
-      scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled. And the
-      joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found pleasure in
-      whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice white ceiling above
-      me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's hankering for a
-      charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies. But at the back of
-      it all, the explanation of those initials on the boles of the beeches is a
-      desire for some sort of immortality&mdash;terrestrial if not celestial.
-      Even the least of us would like to be remembered, and so we carve our
-      names on tree trunks and tombstones to remind later generations that we
-      too once passed this way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great. One of
-      the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will trumpet
-      its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries to take care
-      that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's &ldquo;Exegi monumentum ære
-      perennius&rdquo; is one of many confident assertions that he knew he would be
-      among the immortals. &ldquo;I have raised a monument,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;more enduring
-      than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings; a monument which shall
-      not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by the rage of the north wind,
-      nor by the countless years and the flight of ages.&rdquo; The same magnificent
-      confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud declaration&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had
-      written a song of a sparrow&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Of which I sang one song that will not die.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was &ldquo;writ in water,&rdquo; but behind
-      the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for immortality.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable confidence.
-      &ldquo;I'll be more respected,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a hundred years after I am dead than I
-      am at present;&rdquo; and even John Knox had his eye on an earthly as well as a
-      heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus. &ldquo;Theologians there will always
-      be in abundance,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;the like of me comes but once in centuries.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
-      their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
-      conceit on the subject. &ldquo;What I write,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is not written on slate
-      and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of years can
-      efface it.&rdquo; And again, &ldquo;I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be
-      well-lighted, the guests few and select.&rdquo; A proud fellow, if ever there
-      was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le Brun-Pindare,
-      cherished his dream of immortality. &ldquo;I do not die,&rdquo; he said grandly; &ldquo;<i>I
-      quit the time</i>.&rdquo; And beside this we may put Victor Hugo's rather
-      truculent, &ldquo;It is time my name ceased to fill the world.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
-      that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. &ldquo;Do you suppose,&rdquo; he
-      said, &ldquo;to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
-      should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
-      service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
-      Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
-      toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has ever
-      looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life, then at
-      last it would begin to live.&rdquo; The context, it is true, suggests that a
-      celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a terrestrial; but
-      earthly glory was never far from his mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject is one
-      of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in books. I
-      must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable terms. In the
-      preface to his &ldquo;Account of Corsica&rdquo; he says:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <i>For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
-      ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine
-      literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish
-      a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a
-      respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having the
-      character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. (</i>Oh, you
-      rogue!<i>) To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day
-      is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a
-      perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural
-      disposition an easy play (&rdquo;</i>You were drunk last night, you dog<i>&ldquo;),
-      and yet indulge the pride of superior genius when he considers that by
-      those who know him only as an author he never ceases to be respected. Such
-      an author in his hours of gloom and discontent may have the consolation to
-      think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers,
-      and such an author may cherish the hope of being remembered after death,
-      which has been a great object of the noblest minds in all ages.</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition. Most
-      of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of Gray's
-      depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the &ldquo;dull cold ear of
-      death.&rdquo; In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy and
-      immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of &ldquo;Alpha of
-      the Plough&rdquo; an agreeable fancy something like this. In the year two
-      thousand&mdash;or it may be three thousand&mdash;yes, let us do the thing
-      handsomely and not stint the centuries&mdash;in the year three thousand
-      and ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and
-      the Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe
-      for democracy&mdash;at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer
-      who has been swished that morning from the British Isles across the
-      Atlantic to the Patagonian capital&mdash;swished, I need hardly remark,
-      being the expression used to describe the method of flight which consists
-      in being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made to
-      complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be desired&mdash;bursts
-      in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered by him in the
-      course of some daring investigations of the famous subterranean passages
-      of the ancient British capital&mdash;those passages which have so long
-      perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the Patagonian savants,
-      some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers, and some that they
-      were the roadways of a people who had become so afflicted with photophobia
-      that they had to build their cities underground. The trophy is a book by
-      one &ldquo;Alpha of the Plough.&rdquo; It creates an enormous sensation. It is put
-      under a glass case in the Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is
-      translated into every Patagonian dialect. It is read in schools. It is
-      referred to in pulpits. It is discussed in learned societies. Its author,
-      dimly descried across the ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0043" id="linkimage-0043"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0134m.jpg" alt="0134m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0134.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
-      celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
-      assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
-      marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha&mdash;a gentleman with a flowing
-      beard and a dome-like brow&mdash;that overlooks the market-place, and
-      places wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of
-      bells and a salvo of artillery.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you, my
-      dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in the
-      New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved for most,
-      even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world to-day. And
-      yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who writes has the
-      best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox, who among the
-      statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But Wordsworth and
-      Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb, even
-      second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the temple
-      of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military feats of
-      Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza of the
-      poem in which he poured out his creed&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      He either fears his fate too much,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Or his deserts are small.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That dares not put it to the touch
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      To win or lose it all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship with
-      Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he befriended
-      a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the name of his
-      benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of Ægina is full
-      of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would like to be
-      remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went to Pindar
-      and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his praise.
-      Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. &ldquo;Why, for so much
-      money,&rdquo; said Pytheas, &ldquo;I can erect a statue of bronze in the temple.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Very likely.&rdquo; On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And
-      now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the statues
-      of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples
-      themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the ode
-      of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer paths
-      to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of the Earl
-      of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of Shakespeare
-      live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their dedication. But
-      one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise you to go and give
-      Mr &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; £200 and a commission to send your name
-      echoing down the corridors of time.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; (you
-      will fill in the blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them.
-      It would be safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a
-      rose, or an overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can
-      confer a modest immortality. They have done so for many. A certain
-      Maréchal Neil is wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which
-      is as enviable a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr
-      Mackintosh is talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of
-      rain, and even Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his
-      battles. It would not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone
-      will be thought of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just
-      as Archimedes is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the
-      healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps
-      one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of
-      forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike, and
-      we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as if the
-      world babbles about us for ever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0044" id="linkimage-0044"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0137m.jpg" alt="0137m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0137.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0045" id="linkimage-0045"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0138m.jpg" alt="0138m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0138.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON DINING
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>here are people
-      who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can hoard it not for the
-      sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy, for the satisfaction of
-      feeling that they have got something locked up that they could spend if
-      they chose without being any the poorer and that other people would enjoy
-      knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending what they can afford to spend.
-      It is a pleasure akin to the economy of the Scotsman, which, according to
-      a distinguished member of that race, finds its perfect expression in
-      taking the tube when you can afford a cab. But the gift of secrecy is
-      rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the sake of telling them. We spend our
-      secrets as Lamb's spendthrift spent his money&mdash;while they are fresh.
-      The joy of creating an emotion in other people is too much for us. We like
-      to surprise them, or shock them, or please them as the case may be, and we
-      give away the secret with which we have been entrusted with a liberal hand
-      and a solemn request &ldquo;to say nothing about it.&rdquo; We relish the luxury of
-      telling the secret, and leave the painful duty of keeping it to the other
-      fellow. We let the horse out and then solemnly demand that the stable door
-      shall be shut so that it shan't escape, I have done it myself&mdash;often.
-      I have no doubt that I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret
-      to reveal, but I shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely
-      selfish reasons, which will appear later. You may conceive me going about
-      choking with mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years
-      have I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can dine
-      wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the atmosphere
-      restful, and the prices moderate&mdash;in short, the happy mean between
-      the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the uncompromising
-      cheapness of Lockhart's. In those extremes I find no satisfaction.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its
-      ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to a
-      good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren't many
-      families that enjoyed their &ldquo;vittles&rdquo; more than her's did, and I can claim
-      the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that I count
-      good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I could join
-      very heartily in Peacock's chorus:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;How can a man, in his life of a span,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Do anything better than dine.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Give me a satisfactory' dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel
-      themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads the
-      landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who insisted
-      that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life. That, I think,
-      is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few things more
-      revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by taking emetics.
-      But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise for enjoying a good
-      dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good dinners. I see no
-      necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and a holy mind. There was
-      a saintly man once in this city&mdash;a famous man, too&mdash;who was
-      afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out to dinner, he
-      had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to enable him to
-      start even with the other guests. And it is on record that when the
-      ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with Cardinal
-      Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses that
-      hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season of
-      fasting, &ldquo;I fear,&rdquo; said one of them, &ldquo;that there is a lobster salad side
-      to the Cardinal.&rdquo; I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side too. A
-      hot day and a lobster salad&mdash;what happier conjunction can we look for
-      in a plaguey world?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, in making this confession, I am neither <i>gourmand</i> nor <i>gourmet</i>.
-      Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic
-      conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and
-      the great language of the <i>menu</i> does not stir my pulse. I do not ask
-      for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt
-      would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for
-      talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was
-      pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have for
-      supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as the
-      shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right
-      spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes&mdash;eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
-      smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke
-      approvingly of Sancho's choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way with
-      him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against his
-      rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with
-      conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the
-      matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to
-      follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart's desire at the
-      Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel when I
-      enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things. I stroke
-      the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and rises, purring
-      with dignity, under my caress. I say &ldquo;Good evening&rdquo; to the landlord who
-      greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once cordial and
-      restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of his hand. No
-      frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a neat-handed
-      Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress and white
-      cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility and aloofness
-      that establishes the perfect relationship&mdash;obliging, but not
-      familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The napery
-      makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a mirror,
-      and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced dish of
-      hors d'ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the modest
-      four-course table d'hôte begins, and when at the end you light your
-      cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only dined,
-      but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement, touched with
-      the subtle note of a personality.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall not
-      tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It may be
-      in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn, or it
-      may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you because I
-      sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it I shall shatter
-      the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the Mermaid and find its
-      old English note of kindly welcome and decorous moderation gone, and that
-      in its place there will be a noisy, bustling, popular restaurant with a
-      band, from which I shall flee. When it is &ldquo;discovered&rdquo; it will be lost, as
-      the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so I shall keep its secret. I only
-      purr it to the cat who arches her back and purrs understanding in
-      response. It is the bond of freemasonry between us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0046" id="linkimage-0046"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0142m.jpg" alt="0142m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0142.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0047" id="linkimage-0047"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0143m.jpg" alt="0143m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0143.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was leaning over
-      the rails of the upper deck idly watching the Chinese whom, to the number
-      of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre and were to disgorge at Halifax,
-      when the bugle sounded for lunch. A mistake, I thought, looking at my
-      watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon hour was one. Then I remembered. I
-      had not corrected my watch that morning by the ship's clock. In our
-      pursuit of yesterday across the Atlantic we had put on another
-      three-quarters of an hour. Already on this journey we had outdistanced
-      to-day by two and a half hours. By the time we reached Halifax we should
-      have gained perhaps six hours. In thought I followed the Chinamen
-      thundering across Canada to Vancouver, and thence onward across the
-      Pacific on the last stage of their voyage. And I realised that by the time
-      they reached home they would have caught yesterday up.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
-      this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
-      years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
-      thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always the
-      same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of it than
-      I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind as
-      insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
-      beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we were
-      overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by sea and
-      land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight across the
-      plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it was neither
-      yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a confusion of
-      all three.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
-      absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom&mdash;a parochial illusion
-      of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
-      axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
-      light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that they
-      were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
-      numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away on
-      the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length of
-      light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
-      meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
-      and dark&mdash;what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for
-      ever and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark&mdash;not many
-      days, but just one day and that always midday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
-      itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck of
-      dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A few
-      hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of dark, I
-      should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo sky&mdash;specks
-      whose strip of daylight was many times the length of ours, and whose year
-      would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the astronomers tell us that
-      Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years? Think of it&mdash;our
-      Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round a single solar year
-      of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and live to a green old
-      age according to our reckoning, and still never see the glory of
-      midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our ideas of Time
-      have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune&mdash;if, that is,
-      there be any dwellers on Neptune.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts of
-      other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this regal orb
-      above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and numbered
-      their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons by the
-      illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of other
-      systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to have any
-      fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the unthinkable
-      void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time: there was only
-      duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of fable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As I reached this depressing conclusion&mdash;not a novel or original one,
-      but always a rather cheerless one&mdash;a sort of orphaned feeling stole
-      over me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
-      from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
-      eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly in
-      the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a gay time
-      on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during yesterday's
-      storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of his comrades at
-      an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges before him, was
-      crying something that sounded like &ldquo;Al-lay! Al-lay!&rdquo; counting the money in
-      his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he doubted whether it was
-      all there, but because he liked the feel and the look of it. A sprightly
-      young rascal, dressed as they all were in a grotesque mixture of garments,
-      French and English and German, picked up on the battlefields of France,
-      where they had been working for three years, stole up behind the
-      orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me as he did so) snatched an
-      orange and bolted. There followed a roaring scrimmage on deck, in the
-      midst of which the orange-seller's coppers were sent flying along the
-      boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and scuffling, and from which the
-      author of the mischief emerged riotously happy and, lighting a cigarette,
-      flung himself down with an air of radiant good humour, in which he
-      enveloped me with a glance of his bold and merry eye.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
-      illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass, not
-      intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The experiences
-      were always associated with great physical weariness and the sense of the
-      endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the Dauphiné coming down
-      from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other experience in the Lake
-      District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a companion in the doorway
-      of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain. We had come to the end of
-      our days in the mountains, and now we were going back to Keswick, climbing
-      Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was robed in clouds, and the rain was
-      of that determined kind that admits of no hope. And so, after a long wait,
-      we decided that Helvellyn &ldquo;would not go,&rdquo; as the climber would say, and,
-      putting on our mackintoshes and shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for
-      Keswick by the lower slopes of the mountains&mdash;by the track that
-      skirts Great Dodd and descends by the moorlands into the Vale of St John.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung low
-      over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
-      booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
-      tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
-      struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to be
-      without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious loneliness
-      of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the late afternoon
-      we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the Vale of St John
-      and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the road. What with
-      battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the dripping mackintosh
-      and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked myself into that
-      passive mental state which is like a waking dream, in which your voice
-      sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your thoughts seem to play
-      irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering consciousness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember that
-      it is what Mr Chesterton calls &ldquo;a rolling road, a reeling road.&rdquo; It is
-      like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it is going
-      down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for Penrith,
-      then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that goal, only to
-      give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so on, and all the time
-      it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or to Penrith, but is sidling
-      crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road which is like the
-      whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of his signature, thus:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0048" id="linkimage-0048"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0148m.jpg" alt="0148m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0148.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw through
-      the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that fine
-      mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses that sustain
-      the southern face were visible. They looked like the outstretched fingers
-      of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds and clutching the
-      earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The image fell in with
-      the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the similitude out to my
-      companion as we paced along the muddy road.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and we
-      went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As we
-      did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds and
-      clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere, far
-      off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same mist
-      of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
-      gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been years
-      ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might have
-      been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was this
-      evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the impression
-      remained of something outside the confines of time. I had passed into a
-      static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished, and Time was
-      only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I had walked
-      through the shadow into the deeps.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when I
-      reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very earnestly
-      in order to discover the time of the trains for London next day. And the
-      recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings brought my
-      thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just below me, was
-      happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread, one of those
-      long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck from the shore
-      at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed along a rope
-      connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of the man as he
-      devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the brown crust
-      reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had gone for lunch
-      long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this time. I turned
-      hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch back
-      three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the fiction
-      of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0049" id="linkimage-0049"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0150m.jpg" alt="0150m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0150.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0050" id="linkimage-0050"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0151m.jpg" alt="0151m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0151.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      TWO DRINKS OF MILK
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he cabin lay a
-      hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between Sneam and
-      Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and out to the
-      open Atlantic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down
-      the rocks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to the
-      cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milk? Yes. Would we come in?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade of
-      the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother of the
-      girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and having
-      done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen floor out
-      into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and on a bench by
-      the ingle sat the third member of the family.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her
-      eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and
-      untroubled as a child's. She paused in her knitting to make room for me on
-      the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she played
-      the hostess.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you have travelled in Kerry you don't need to be told of the charm of
-      the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful
-      country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of
-      Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the look
-      of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a spring
-      morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and to know
-      them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of Kerry,
-      O'Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities of a
-      poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always warm with
-      the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted with
-      wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving pleasure to
-      others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every peasant you meet
-      is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted if you will stop to
-      talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be your guide. It is like
-      being back in the childhood of the world, among elemental things and an
-      ancient, unhasting people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess in
-      disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that a
-      duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of Sneam,
-      five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin and among
-      these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she had caught
-      something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out there through
-      the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of exiles had gone to
-      far lands. Some few had returned and some had been for ever silent. As I
-      sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle accents all the tale of
-      a stricken people and of a deserted land. There was no word of complaint&mdash;only
-      a cheerful acceptance of the decrees of Fate. There is the secret of the
-      fascination of the Kérry temperament&mdash;the happy sunlight playing
-      across the sorrow of things.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost
-      to the brim, and a couple of mugs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to
-      pay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sure, there's nothing to pay,&rdquo; said the old lady with just a touch of
-      pride in her sweet voice. &ldquo;There's not a cabin in Kerry where you'll not
-      be welcome to a drink of milk.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed
-      in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane, and
-      as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they added a
-      benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague M'Carty's
-      hotel&mdash;Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker, whose
-      rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits among
-      the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with
-      many-coloured flies&mdash;we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville
-      and heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take the
-      northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much better
-      made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before the
-      coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a day
-      of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the lake we
-      dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage&mdash;neat and
-      well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense of
-      plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark of a
-      dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged
-      interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and
-      leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before
-      us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt that
-      we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver affairs
-      than thirsty travelers to attend to.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back to
-      the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed suddenly
-      less friendly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two
-      glasses&mdash;a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of
-      feature. While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the
-      doorstep, looking away across the lake to where the noble form of
-      Schiehallion dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time
-      was money and talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty
-      haste.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What have we to pay, please?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sixpence.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked
-      something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant
-      memory.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0051" id="linkimage-0051"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0155m.jpg" alt="0155m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0155.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0052" id="linkimage-0052"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0156m.jpg" alt="0156m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0156.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was my fortune
-      the other evening to be at dinner with a large company of doctors. While
-      we were assembling I fell into conversation with an eminent physician,
-      and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked that we English seasoned our
-      dishes far too freely. We scattered salt and pepper and vinegar over our
-      food so recklessly that we destroyed the delicacy of our taste, and did
-      ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was especially unfriendly to the use
-      of salt. He would not admit even that it improved the savour of things. It
-      destroyed our sense of their natural flavour, and substituted a coarser
-      appeal to the palate. From the hygienic point of view, the habit was all
-      wrong. All the salts necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat,
-      and the use of salt independently is entirely harmful.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Take the egg, for example,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It contains in it all the elements
-      necessary for the growth of a chicken&mdash;salt among the rest. That is
-      sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article of food.
-      Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise its delicate
-      flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.&rdquo; And he concluded, as
-      we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example of the Japanese
-      in this matter. &ldquo;They,&rdquo; he said laughingly, &ldquo;only take salt when they want
-      to die.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
-      and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
-      applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
-      who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with great
-      energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we eat contain
-      the salt required by the human body. &ldquo;Not even the egg?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;No, not
-      even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our foods, and even if
-      the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw state they tend to lose
-      their character cooked.&rdquo; He admitted that that was an argument for eating
-      things <i>au naturel</i> more than is the practice. But he was firm in his
-      conviction that the separate use of salt is essential. &ldquo;And as for
-      flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw, with or without salt. What
-      comparison is there?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about the
-      Japanese), &ldquo;are there not races who do not use salt?&rdquo; &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; said
-      he, &ldquo;the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of salt is
-      supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of the prime
-      essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause or another, is
-      seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute exactness in the
-      mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of salt to eat with
-      their food they die.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening in
-      examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt I
-      should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the face
-      of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have quoted,
-      especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians. Yet I
-      daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the facts.
-      For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice, the
-      Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the world,
-      and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat their fish
-      in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would go far to
-      explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
-      the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about which
-      there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be a
-      commonplace thing like the use of salt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random&mdash;men whose
-      whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its requirements&mdash;whose
-      views on the subject were in violent antagonism. They approached their
-      subject from contrary angles and with contrary sets of facts, and the
-      truth they were in search of took a wholly different form for each.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
-      judicious manipulation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our air
-      service. He was very confident that we were &ldquo;simply out of it&mdash;that
-      was all, simply out of it.&rdquo; And he was full of facts on the subject. <b>I
-      don't like people who brim over with facts&mdash;who lead facts about, as
-      Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few people
-      so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His conclusions
-      are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot sort them out and
-      add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès called &ldquo;loose,
-      unstitched minds.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
-      facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember whether
-      the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her husband had
-      told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so bad as that,
-      but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact away in the
-      chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not infrequently,
-      that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something chipped off, and I
-      can never trust it until I have verified my references.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was that,
-      so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell you how
-      many English machines had failed to return on each day of the week, and
-      how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to descend. And
-      judging from his figures he was quite right. &ldquo;We were out of it&mdash;simply
-      out of it.&rdquo; Yet the truth is that while his facts were right, his
-      deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken account of some
-      facts, but had left other equally important facts out of consideration.
-      For example, through all this time the German airmen had been on the
-      defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen had taken great
-      risks for a great object. They had gone miles over the enemy's lines&mdash;as
-      much as fifty miles over&mdash;and had come back with priceless
-      information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but the whole
-      truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this time the most
-      victorious element of our Army.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are not
-      always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is often composed
-      of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to contradict each
-      other. Take the handkerchief incident in &ldquo;Othello.&rdquo; Poor Desdemona could
-      not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that the Moor saw.
-      Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello believed she had
-      given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio wipe his beard
-      with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the catastrophe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them in
-      real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
-      free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
-      report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
-      knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
-      knife discovered&mdash;also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of
-      pawntickets for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he
-      was a thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
-      his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
-      clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of the trousers
-      was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt uncomfortable. He
-      took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was doing so he saw a
-      steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a timid person he
-      furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches came on, and when he
-      had got his &ldquo;take&rdquo; he left to transcribe it, having forgotten all about
-      the knife. The rest followed as stated. The pawntickets, which seemed so
-      strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were of course not his at all. They
-      belonged to the owner of the suit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You remember that Browning in &ldquo;The Ring and the Book,&rdquo; tells the story of
-      the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before he
-      feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
-      annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
-      different aspects of one truth. &ldquo;Mostly,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;matters of any
-      consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself, I
-      am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
-      contradicted myself three times.&rdquo; I fancy it is this discovery of the
-      falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less cocksure
-      as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts that belong
-      to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that &ldquo;a lie that is only
-      half a truth is ever the blackest of lies&rdquo;; but he is wrong. It is the
-      fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter) which is the most
-      dangerous lie&mdash;for a fact seems so absolute, so incontrovertible.
-      Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts, their arrangement
-      and concealment. It was never better stated than by a famous business man
-      in an action for libel which I have referred to in another connection. He
-      was being examined about the visit of Government experts to his works, and
-      the instructions he gave to his manager. And this, as I remember it, was
-      the dialogue between counsel and witness:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you tell him to tell them the facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The whole facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;<i>Selected facts</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the midst
-      of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody bearing his
-      name.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to a
-      scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things, we
-      cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of politics
-      and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a speech in which
-      there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of which was a
-      colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is so easy to make
-      the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in the realm that lies
-      outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation is denounced as the
-      heresy of another. Justification by &ldquo;works&rdquo; is displaced by justification
-      by faith, and that in turn is superseded by justification by &ldquo;service&rdquo;
-       which is &ldquo;works&rdquo; in new terms. Which is truth and which error? Or is that
-      the real alternative? May they not be different facets of one truth. The
-      prism breaks up the sunlight into many different colours and facts are
-      only the broken lights of truth. In this perplexing world we must be
-      prepared to find the same truth demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die
-      because they take salt, and the fact that Indians die because they don't
-      take it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0053" id="linkimage-0053"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0163m.jpg" alt="0163m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0163.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0054" id="linkimage-0054"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0164m.jpg" alt="0164m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0164.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GREAT MEN
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was reading just
-      now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of him expressed by
-      Macaulay who declared him to be &ldquo;the greatest man since Milton.&rdquo; I paused
-      over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally enough to ask myself
-      who were the great Englishmen in history&mdash;for the sake of argument,
-      the six greatest. I found the question so exciting that I had reached the
-      end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time) almost before I had reached
-      the end of my list. I began by laying down my premises or principles. I
-      would not restrict the choice to men of action. The only grievance I have
-      against Plutarch is that he followed that course. His incomparable
-      &ldquo;Lives,&rdquo; would be still more satisfying, a still more priceless treasury
-      of the ancient world, if, among his crowd of statesmen and warriors, we
-      could make friends with Socrates and Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus,
-      with the men whose work survived them as well as with the men whose work
-      is a memory. And I rejected the blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I
-      would not have in my list a mere homicidal genius. My great man may have
-      been a great killer of his kind, but he must have some better claim to
-      inclusion than the fact that he had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On
-      the other hand, I would not exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to
-      be a bad man. Henry Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad
-      men. &ldquo;Greatness,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;consists in bringing all manner of mischief
-      upon mankind, and goodness in removing it from them.&rdquo; And it was to
-      satirise the traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific
-      satire &ldquo;The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,&rdquo; probably having in mind the
-      Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
-      traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad man.
-      I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that he was
-      a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful ogre, a
-      sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless, ruthless
-      jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent, merciless as
-      a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a sort of
-      mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought of nature.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
-      governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
-      mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was a
-      great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about Cæsar,
-      but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds down twenty
-      centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must have design. It
-      must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere accident, emotion or
-      effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured by its influence on the
-      current of the world, on its extension of the kingdom of the mind, on its
-      contribution to the riches of living. Applying tests like these, who are
-      our six greatest Englishmen? For our first choice there would be a
-      unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the greatest thing we have done. He is our
-      challenger in the fists of the world, and there is none to cross swords
-      with him. Like Sirius, he has a magnitude of his own. Take him away from
-      our heavens, conceive him never to have been born, and the imaginative
-      wealth of fife shrinks to a lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's
-      phrase, &ldquo;poor indeed.&rdquo; There is nothing English for which we would
-      exchange him. &ldquo;Indian Empire or no Indian Empire,&rdquo; we say with Carlyle,
-      &ldquo;we cannot do without our Shakespeare.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
-      indisputably to him who had
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;... a voice whose sound was like the sea.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
-      harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of the
-      sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
-      intangible, indestructible. With him stands his &ldquo;chief of men&rdquo;&mdash;the
-      &ldquo;great bad man&rdquo; of Burke&mdash;the one man of action in our annals capable
-      of measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
-      Bismarck in the realm of the spirit&mdash;the man at whose name the cheek
-      of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
-      death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
-      these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda) first
-      made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as the
-      bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning eternally
-      with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his soul to tatters,
-      and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding eloquence, and Burke,
-      the prose Milton, to whose deep well all statesmanship goes with its pail,
-      and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court in his brown wig, and Newton
-      plumbing the ultimate secrets of this amazing universe, and deep-browed
-      Darwin unravelling the mystery of life, and Wordsworth giving &ldquo;to weary
-      feet the gift of rest,&rdquo; and Dickens bringing with him a world of creative
-      splendour only less wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these
-      and a host of others aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip
-      him of all the legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name,
-      and he is still one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic,
-      enlightened man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first
-      great Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
-      quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be Roger&mdash;there
-      by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range of his
-      adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through which he
-      ploughed his lonely way to truth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a woman,
-      Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic &ldquo;lady of the lamp,&rdquo; but
-      as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the adventurer into
-      a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by a will of iron, a
-      terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful and creative woman
-      this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not because she is unworthy,
-      but because she must head a companion fist of great Englishwomen. I
-      hurriedly summon up two candidates from among our English saints&mdash;Sir
-      Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the intolerance (incredible to
-      modern ears) that could jest so diabolically at the martyrdom of the
-      &ldquo;heretic,&rdquo; Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his place as the most fragrant
-      flower of English culture, but if greatness be measured by achievement and
-      enduring influence he must yield place to the astonishing revivalist of
-      the eighteenth century who left a deeper mark upon the spiritual life of
-      England than any man in our history.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is my list&mdash;Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
-      Bacon, John Wesley&mdash;and anybody can make out another who cares and a
-      better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
-      unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is not
-      a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the kibe of
-      Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
-      contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher. If
-      the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness cannot
-      be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left out of any
-      list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature, we are poor
-      in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see the great
-      name of Turner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0055" id="linkimage-0055"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0169m.jpg" alt="0169m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0169.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0056" id="linkimage-0056"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0170m.jpg" alt="0170m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0170.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON SWEARING
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> young officer in
-      the flying service was describing to me the other day some of his recent
-      experiences in France. They were both amusing and sensational, though told
-      with that happy freedom from vanity and self-consciousness which is so
-      pleasant a feature of the British soldier of all ranks. The more he has
-      done and seen the less disposed he seems to regard himself as a hero. It
-      is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging is a sham currency. It is the base
-      coin with which the fraudulent pay their way. F. C. Selous was the
-      greatest big game hunter of modern times, but when he talked about his
-      adventures he gave the impression of a man who had only been out in the
-      back garden killing slugs. And Peary, who found the North Pole, writes as
-      modestly as if he had only found a new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr
-      Cook, who didn't find the North Pole and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who
-      does the boasting. And the man who talks most about patriotism is usually
-      the man who has least of that commodity, just as the man who talks most
-      about his honesty is rarely to be trusted with your silver spoons. A man
-      who really loves his country would no more brag about it than he would
-      brag about loving his mother.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to write of
-      him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
-      good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
-      seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It was
-      just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
-      convolvulus overgrows my garden. &ldquo;Hell&rdquo; was his favourite expletive, and
-      he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
-      scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
-      he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it as
-      a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear that
-      he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only secular
-      quality it possesses&mdash;the quality of emphasis. It is speech breaking
-      bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the dictionary and
-      the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord in music that in
-      shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music which is all discord
-      is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is deadly dull.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
-      emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
-      habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. &ldquo;When I have said
-      'Malaga,'&rdquo; says Plancus, in the &ldquo;Vicomte de Bragelonne,&rdquo; &ldquo;I am no longer a
-      man.&rdquo; He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his imprecations
-      for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils swell and his
-      eyes flash fire as he cries, &ldquo;Malaga.&rdquo; It is a good swear word. It has the
-      advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely what a swear word
-      should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying nothing. It should be
-      incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the passion that evokes it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If &ldquo;Malaga&rdquo; has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was that
-      defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. &ldquo;'Damns' have had
-      their day,&rdquo; he said, and when he swore he used the &ldquo;oath referential.&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Odds hilts and blades,&rdquo; he said, or &ldquo;Odds slanders and lies,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Odds
-      bottles and glasses.&rdquo; But when he sat down to write his challenge to
-      Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him. &ldquo;Do, Sir
-      Lucius, let me begin with a damme,&rdquo; he said. He had to give up artificial
-      swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to something which had
-      a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it is the idea of being
-      a little wicked that is one of the attractions of swearing. It is a
-      symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so. For in its origin
-      always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates spoke &ldquo;By the Gods,&rdquo;
-       he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest reverence he could
-      command. But the oaths of to-day are not the expression of piety, but of
-      violent passion, and the people who indulge in a certain familiar
-      expletive would not find half so much satisfaction in it if they felt
-      that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration of faith&mdash;&ldquo;By
-      our Lady.&rdquo; That is the way our ancestors used to swear, and we have
-      corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith and meaning.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of life
-      breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is the
-      prerogative of the soldier to be &ldquo;full of strange oaths.&rdquo; In this respect
-      Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used &ldquo;strange oaths.&rdquo; He
-      stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most industrious in
-      it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that have come down
-      to us which are not garnished with &ldquo;damns&rdquo; or &ldquo;By Gods.&rdquo; Hear him on the
-      morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to gossip Creevey&mdash;&ldquo;It
-      has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It
-      has been a damned nice thing&mdash;the nearest run thing you ever saw in
-      your life.&rdquo; Or when some foolish Court flunkey appeals to him to support
-      his claim to ride in the carriage with the young Queen on some public
-      occasion&mdash;&ldquo;Her Majesty can make you ride on the box or inside the
-      carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's dog.&rdquo; But in this he
-      followed not only the practice of soldiers in all times, but the
-      fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to have regarded
-      himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at the language of
-      the Prince Regent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,&rdquo; he remarks,
-      speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. &ldquo;Then he speaks and swears so like
-      old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the room with
-      him.&rdquo; This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices, but whose
-      recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It suggests also
-      that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of his own
-      comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and swore as
-      naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that other
-      famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy, as when,
-      speaking of Grant, he said, &ldquo;I'll tell you where he beats me, and where he
-      beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his
-      sight, but it scares me like Hell.&rdquo; Two centuries ago, according to Uncle
-      Toby, our men &ldquo;swore terribly in Flanders,&rdquo; and they are swearing terribly
-      there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time that the Flanders mud,
-      which has been watered for centuries by English blood, will ensanguine the
-      speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant young airman will talk a
-      good deal less about &ldquo;Hell&rdquo; when he escapes from it to a cleaner world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0057" id="linkimage-0057"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0174m.jpg" alt="0174m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0174.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0058" id="linkimage-0058"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0175m.jpg" alt="0175m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0175.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A HANSOM CAB
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> saw a surprising
-      spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a hansom cab. Not a
-      derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally see, with an
-      obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the box, crawling
-      along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has escaped from a
-      cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way back&mdash;no, but
-      a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting in the shafts
-      and tossing its head as though it were full of beans and importance, and a
-      slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as a sandboy as he flicked and
-      flourished his whip, and, still more astonishing, a real passenger, a
-      lady, inside the vehicle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the
-      driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of the
-      poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas of
-      the past&mdash;sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the
-      quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there
-      flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs, the
-      London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King Petrol,
-      when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and the
-      two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place then,
-      of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a
-      formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took
-      your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver, you
-      settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and the
-      bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins of that
-      &ldquo;orf horse,&rdquo; the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of the
-      police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse joke to
-      a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in the revelry. The
-      conductor would stroll up to him and continue a conversation that had
-      begun early in the morning and seemed to go on intermittently all day&mdash;a
-      conversation of that jolly sort in which, as Washington Irving says, the
-      jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside the
-      bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It was an
-      act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the top
-      alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes. And
-      even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been quite
-      above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The hansom was a
-      rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the thing for a lady to
-      be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested romance, mysteries,
-      elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of wickednesses. A staid,
-      respectable &ldquo;growler&rdquo; was much more fitting for so delicate an exotic as
-      Woman. If she began riding in hansoms alone anything might happen. She
-      might want to go to public dinners next&mdash;think of it!&mdash;she might
-      be wanting to ride a bicycle&mdash;horrors!&mdash;she might discover a
-      shameless taste for cigarettes, or demand a living wage, or University
-      degrees, or a vote, just for all the world as though she was the equal of
-      Man, the Magnificent....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and
-      challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to the
-      coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy, and
-      impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable, mighty, but
-      blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets, reeling from right
-      to left like a drunken giant, encountering the kerb-stone, skimming the
-      lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of boorish revolt, standing
-      obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the street or across the street
-      amidst the derision and rejoicing of those whose empire he threatened, and
-      who saw in these pranks the assurance of his ultimate failure. Memory went
-      back to the old One a.m. from the Law Courts, and to one night that sums
-      up for me the spirit of those days of the great transition....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to start
-      from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew his power.
-      He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along the Edgeware
-      Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men who wrote him
-      down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />=
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      (from Our Peking Correspondent)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
-      chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was &ldquo;full
-      up&rdquo; hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded in
-      with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen&mdash;yes,
-      cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the
-      One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only
-      cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end of
-      the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the tipsy
-      gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at Baker
-      Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is being swept
-      on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are exchanged, what
-      jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the top hat, under the
-      impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the floor&mdash;oh, then
-      the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy gentleman opens his
-      dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these revels soon are ended.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      First a shiver, and then a thrill,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Then something decidedly like a spill&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      O. W. Holmes,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      <i>The Deacon's Masterpiece</i> (DW)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      and we are left sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with the
-      clock over the shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the spirit of Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting
-      himself. He disapproves of the passengers having all the fun. Is he not a
-      humorist too? May he not be merry in the dawn of this May morning?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We take our fate like Englishmen, bravely, even merrily.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment. This is worth living
-      for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base betrayer of the
-      innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though it is two or
-      three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the morning! Who
-      cares?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Only the gentleman with the big bag in the corner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?&rdquo; he asks the conductor with tears in
-      his voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help the driver. They busy
-      themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn handles, they work
-      pumps, they probe here and thump there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They come out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They have
-      the cheerful philosophy of people who meddle with things that move&mdash;cab
-      drivers, bus-drivers, engine-drivers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      If, when looking well won't move thee.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      Looking ill prevail?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So they take a breather, light cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Meanwhile all the hansoms in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us,
-      like sharks upon the dead whale. Up they rattle from this side and that,
-      and every cabman flings a jibe as he passes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Look 'ere,&rdquo; says one, pulling up. &ldquo;Why don't yer take the genelmen where
-      they want to go? That's what I asks yer. Why&mdash;don't&mdash;yer&mdash;take&mdash;the&mdash;genelmen&mdash;where&mdash;they&mdash;want&mdash;to
-      go? It's only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't
-      want to go.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      For the cabman is like &ldquo;the wise thrush who sings his song twice over.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!&rdquo; cries another.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We can't 'elp larfin', yer know,&rdquo; says a third feelingly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, you keep on larfin',&rdquo; says the chauffeur looking up from the inside
-      of One a.m. &ldquo;It suits your style o' beauty.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      A mellow voice breaks out:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      We won't go home till morning,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Till daylight does appear.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen in comic chorus. Those
-      who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither sing nor whistle,
-      croak.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We sit inside patiently. We even joke too. All but the man with the big
-      bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his life-long enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He appeals again to the conductor, who laughs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back, puts his
-      head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and says:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We think better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is that
-      of the politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart. He is
-      like Dick Steele&mdash;&ldquo;when he was sober he was delightful; when he was
-      drunk he was irresistible.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;She won't go any more to-night,&rdquo; says the conductor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal away. All but
-      the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a problem
-      that looks insoluble.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Two of us jump into a hansom that still prowls around, the last of the
-      shoal of sharks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Drive up West End Lane.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Right, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's face, wreathed in smiles,
-      beams down on us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I see what was coming all the way from Baker Street,&rdquo; he savs. &ldquo;I see the
-      petrol was on fire.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yus,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Thought I should pick you up about 'ere.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No good, motors,&rdquo; he goes on, cheerfully. &ldquo;My opinion is they'll go out
-      as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the aristocracy are giving
-      'em up and goin' back to 'orses.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Hope they'll get better horses than this,&rdquo; for we are crawling painfully
-      up the tortuous reaches of West End Lane.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's overworked. 'E ain't earned more
-      than three bob to-night. That's jest what' e's earned. Three bob. It's the
-      cold weather, you know. That's what it is. It's the cold weather as makes
-      'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And 'e does go after all, even
-      if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't say of that there
-      motor-bus.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We had no reply to this thrust, and the lid dropped down with a sound of
-      quiet triumph.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And so home. And my dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge
-      Monster, reeking with strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious
-      laughter and standing for ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road with
-      the clock opposite pointing to a quarter to two, a rueful face in the
-      corner staring fixedly at a big bag and a tipsy gentleman in a tall hat
-      finding his way back to Baker Street in happy converse with a policeman.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Gone is the old London over which the shade of Mr Hansom presided like a
-      king. Gone is the &ldquo;orf horse&rdquo; with all its sins; gone is the rosy-cheeked
-      driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent whip and his tales of the
-      streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you your ticket, talked to
-      you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about the weather, the Boat Race,
-      or the latest clue to the latest mystery. We amble no more. We have
-      banished laughter and leisure from the streets, and the face of the
-      motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the symbol of the change. We have
-      passed into a breathless world, a world of wonderful mechanical
-      contrivances that have quickened the tempo of life and will soon have made
-      the horse as much a memory as the bow and arrow or the wherry that used to
-      be the principal vehicle of Elizabethan London. As I watched the hansom
-      bowling along Regent Street until it was lost in the swirl of motor-buses
-      and taxis I seemed to see in it the last straggler of an epoch passing
-      away into oblivion. I am glad it went so gallantly, and I am half sorry I
-      did not give the driver a parting cheer as he flicked his whip in the face
-      of the night.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0059" id="linkimage-0059"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0183m.jpg" alt="0183m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0183.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0060" id="linkimage-0060"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0184m.jpg" alt="0184m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0184.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON MANNERS
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t is always
-      surprising, if not always agreeable, <b>to see ourselves as others see us</b>.
-      The picture we present to others is never the picture we present to
-      ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally it is a much plainer
-      picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always a strange picture.
-      Just now we English are having our portrait painted by an American lady,
-      Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been appearing in the press. It is
-      not a flattering portrait, and it seems to have angered a good many people
-      who deny the truth of the likeness very passionately. The chief accusation
-      seems to be that we have no manners, are lacking in the civilities and
-      politenesses of life, and so on, and are inferior in these things to the
-      French, the Americans, and other peoples. It is not an uncommon charge,
-      and it comes from many quarters. It came to me the other day in a letter
-      from a correspondent, French or Belgian, who has been living in this
-      country during the war, and who wrote bitterly about the manners of the
-      English towards foreigners. In the course of his letter he quoted with
-      approval the following cruel remark of Jean Carrière, written, needless to
-      say, before the war:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal élevé du fait
-      qu'il manque de manières; il ignore encore la politesse, voilà tout.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the
-      whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have
-      enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken
-      up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and we
-      suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should be
-      told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At the
-      same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's warning about
-      the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty millions of us,
-      and we have some forty million different manners, and it is not easy to
-      get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will take this &ldquo;copy&rdquo; to
-      the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who preceded him was a
-      monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all civility; another is all
-      bad temper, and between the two extremes you will get every shade of good
-      and bad manners. And so through every phase of society.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the widest
-      differences of manner in different parts of the country. In Lancashire and
-      Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There is a deep-seated
-      distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the code of conduct
-      differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral town as the manner
-      of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But even here you will find
-      behind the general bearing infinite shades of difference that make your
-      generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more you know of any people the less
-      you feel able to sum them up in broad categories.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our
-      ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete
-      darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting&mdash;apropos of the
-      Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because of
-      the strangeness of his appearance&mdash;lamenting the deplorable manners
-      of the people. &ldquo;Lord!&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;to see the absurd nature of Englishmen
-      that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks strange.&rdquo;
-       Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him describing the
-      English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
-      earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. &ldquo;To mention but a single
-      attraction,&rdquo; he says in one of his letters, &ldquo;the English girls are
-      divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses. They
-      have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go anywhere on
-      a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive, they kiss
-      you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you return. Go where
-      you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if you had once tasted
-      how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish to spend your life
-      there.&rdquo; Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens a good deal changed
-      to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a cigarette.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing and
-      less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the saying of
-      O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good criticism. Our lack
-      of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but more probably it is
-      traceable not to a physical but to a social source. Unlike the Celtic and
-      the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have not the ease that comes
-      from the ingrained tradition of human equality. The French have that ease.
-      So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So have the Americans. But the
-      English are class conscious. The dead hand of feudalism is still heavy
-      upon our souls. If it were not, the degrading traffic in titles would long
-      since have been abolished as an insult to our intelligence. But we not
-      only tolerate it: we delight in this artificial scheme of relationship. It
-      is not human values, but social discriminations that count. And while
-      human values are cohesive in their effect, social discriminations are
-      separatist. They break society up into castes, and permeate it with the
-      twin vices of snobbery and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is
-      subdivided into infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious
-      restraints of a people uncertain of their social relationships create a
-      defensive manner which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true
-      root is a timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his
-      ground tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is
-      proud: it may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away
-      from this fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners
-      for independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from a
-      sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented to
-      keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression that
-      he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he had
-      more <i>abandon</i>. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical
-      politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the
-      spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which makes
-      the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably what
-      Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the impression
-      that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good manners that
-      they exist most where they do not exist at all&mdash;that is to say, where
-      conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told James Hogg that no
-      man who was content to be himself, without either diffidence or egotism,
-      would fail to be at home in any company, and I do not know a better recipe
-      for good manners.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      I was riding in a bus yesterday afternoon when I overheard a conversation
-      between a couple of smartly dressed young people&mdash;a youth and a
-      maiden&mdash;at the other end of the vehicle. It was not an amusing
-      conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about. Indeed, I
-      could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be about
-      anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which consist
-      chiefly of &ldquo;Awfullys&rdquo; and &ldquo;Reallys!&rdquo; and &ldquo;Don't-you-knows&rdquo; and tattle
-      about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and similar
-      common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter but because
-      of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the speakers were
-      alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of wind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to hear, while
-      others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not of approval.
-      They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved an air of being
-      unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of not being aware
-      that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact, their manner
-      indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings. They were
-      really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the bus. If they
-      had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in quite reasonable
-      tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly and defiantly to an
-      empty bus. They would have made no impression on an empty bus. But they
-      were happily sensible of making quite a marked impression on a full bus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it was not the impression they imagined. It was another impression
-      altogether. There are few more unpleasing and vulgar habits than that of
-      loud, aggressive conversation in public places. It is an impertinence to
-      inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who do not want to know about
-      them, and who may want to read or doze or think or look out of the window
-      at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The assumption behind
-      the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is an announcement to
-      the world that we are someone in particular and can talk as loudly as we
-      please whenever we please. It is a sort of social Prussianism that
-      presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by a superior egotism.
-      The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in the world is mistaken.
-      On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an inverted self-consciousness.
-      These young people were talking loudly, not because they were unconscious
-      of themselves in relation to their fellows, but because they were much too
-      conscious and were not content to be just quiet, ordinary people like the
-      rest of us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I hesitate to say that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not lived
-      abroad sufficiently to judge. But it is a common experience of those who
-      travel to find, as I have often found, their country humiliated by this
-      habit of aggressive bearing in public places. It is unlovely at home, but
-      it is much more offensive abroad, for then it is not only the person who
-      is brought into disrepute, but the country he (and not less frequently
-      she) is supposed to represent. We in the bus could afford to bear the
-      affliction of that young couple with tolerance and even amusement, for
-      they only hurt themselves. We could discount them. But the same bearing in
-      a foreign capital gives the impression that we are all like this, just as
-      the rather crude boasting of certain types of American grossly
-      misrepresent a people whose general conduct, as anyone who sees them at
-      home will agree, is unaffected, unpretentious, and good-natured.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, I suspect, is that every country sends abroad a
-      disproportionate number of its &ldquo;bounders.&rdquo; It is inevitable that it should
-      be so, for the people who can afford to travel are the people who have
-      made money, and while many admirable qualities may be involved in the
-      capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain coarse
-      assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got so
-      hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are better
-      than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot attune his
-      voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second generation, this
-      congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high school it is
-      apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the bus
-      yesterday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So far from being representative of the English, they are violently
-      unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take an
-      average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust the
-      sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted with
-      egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and
-      monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract attention
-      without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy mean
-      between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the overbearing
-      note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk of our
-      affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without desiring
-      to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without wishing to
-      be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we have achieved
-      that social ease which consists in the adjustment of a reasonable
-      confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the sensibilities of
-      others.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0061" id="linkimage-0061"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0192m.jpg" alt="0192m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0192.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0062" id="linkimage-0062"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0193m.jpg" alt="0193m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0193.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A FINE DAY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t's just like
-      summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have forgotten to say
-      it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it from the orchard
-      with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery. There are some
-      people of penurious emotions and speech, like the Drumtochty farmer in Ian
-      Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of this iteration. They would find
-      it wasteful and frivolous. They do not understand that we go on saying it
-      over and over again, like the birds, for the sheer joy of saying it.
-      Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice. There he goes skipping from
-      branch to branch and twig to twig, and after each skip he pauses to say,
-      &ldquo;It's just like summer,&rdquo; and from a neighbouring tree his mate twitters
-      confirmation in perfect time. I've listened to them for half an hour and
-      they've talked about nothing else.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great
-      baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the
-      paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully and
-      tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well aired
-      before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows his
-      score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has only
-      one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the world,
-      but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer, and not a
-      conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who seems never
-      to forget the listening world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
-      There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along the
-      turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football match, I
-      fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the cheerful
-      outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens and the
-      fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of hammering; from
-      the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor voice that comes up
-      from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I have not heard it for
-      four years or more; but it has been heard in many lands and by many rivers
-      from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would rather be singing in the
-      allotment with his young brother Sam (the leader of the trebles in the
-      village choir) than anywhere else in the vide world. &ldquo;Yes, I've been to
-      Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the 'Oly Land,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I don't care
-      if I never see the 'Oly Land again. Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far
-      as I'm concerned. This is good enough for me&mdash;that is, if there's a
-      place for a chap that wants to get married to live in.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at
-      her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. &ldquo;Well, this is all
-      right, ain't it, mother?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; says the old lady, &ldquo;it's just like summer.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And to think,&rdquo; continues the voice, &ldquo;that there was a thick layer o' snow
-      a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to come
-      yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar, and it
-      stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though it do seem
-      like it, don't it?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, it's just like summer,&rdquo; repeats the old lady tranquilly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
-      sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
-      like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we are
-      here. Weather in town is only an incident&mdash;a pleasurable incident or
-      a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella,
-      whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a
-      mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or outside.
-      It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your visit to the
-      theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for this reason the
-      incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as an acquaintance of
-      a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he is in a good humour
-      and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven. It is
-      politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual diversion. You
-      study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and watch the change
-      of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the mood of the public.
-      When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a fine day, or has been a
-      cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a conventional civility. It is
-      the formal opening of the discussion of weighty matters. It involves the
-      prospects of potatoes and the sowing of onions, the blossoms on the trees,
-      the effects of weather on the poultry and the state of the hives. I do not
-      suppose that there is a moment of his life when Jim is unconscious of the
-      weather or indifferent to it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not
-      care what happens to the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands
-      and secular interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is
-      a stem Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the
-      chapel in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always
-      trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi'
-      work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to
-      dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. &ldquo;I don't hold wi'
-      work on Sundays,&rdquo; he would repeat inflexibly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0063" id="linkimage-0063"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0197m.jpg" alt="0197m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0197.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other
-      end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the
-      weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call
-      her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward. It
-      is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants hens. If
-      the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an unerring instinct
-      to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin of feathers. The hard
-      frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes when everybody else's
-      escaped, and it was her hive that brought the &ldquo;Isle of Wight&rdquo; into our
-      midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds that the last was a
-      visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a death in the family&mdash;true,
-      it was only a second cousin, but it was &ldquo;in the family&rdquo;&mdash;and had
-      neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive. And of course they
-      died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow Walsh has no patience
-      with people who fly in the face of Providence in this way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is the most
-      unremittingly malevolent. It is either &ldquo;smarty hot&rdquo; or &ldquo;smarty cold.&rdquo; If
-      it isn't giving her a touch of &ldquo;brownchitis,&rdquo; or &ldquo;a blowy feeling all up
-      the back,&rdquo; or making her feel &ldquo;blubbed all over,&rdquo; it is dripping through
-      her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke,
-      or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary life. I
-      think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the hill-side
-      like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even smiles, but
-      his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the bottom he is a
-      terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country woman no end of
-      work, and makes her life a burden.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
-      When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that &ldquo;it is a
-      bit better to-day.&rdquo; This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays to
-      the weather. And we translate it for her into &ldquo;Yes, it's just like
-      summer.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
-      damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most part
-      the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees are
-      white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees which fill
-      the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note of an aerial
-      violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of his double bass
-      to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way from blossom to
-      blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is as full of the gossip of
-      summer as the peacock butterfly that comes flitting back across the
-      orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old Benjy, who saluted me over the
-      hedge just now with the remark that he didn't recall the like of this for
-      a matter o' seventy year. Yes, seventy year if 'twas a day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy years
-      ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks about
-      anything in the memory of this generation. &ldquo;I be nearer a 'underd,&rdquo; he
-      says, &ldquo;than seventy,&rdquo; by which I think he means that he is eighty-six. He
-      longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see no reason why he
-      shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old boy, still does a good
-      day's gardening and has come up the lane on this hot day at a nimble
-      speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to have made his coffin
-      and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from any morbid yearning
-      for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding him off, just as the
-      rest of us &ldquo;touch wood&rdquo; lest evil befall. &ldquo;It's just like summer,&rdquo; he
-      says.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty....&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0064" id="linkimage-0064"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0200m.jpg" alt="0200m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0200.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0065" id="linkimage-0065"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> see that Mr
-      Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to women very
-      seriously on the subject of smoking. &ldquo;Would you like to see your mother
-      smoke?&rdquo; asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he was addressing, and
-      Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face
-      of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed feelings on this
-      subject, and in order to find out what I really think I will write about
-      it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby. I do not want to
-      see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the baby. But neither do I
-      want to see father doing so. If father is smoking when he nurses the baby
-      he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs out his smoke. Do not let
-      us drag in the baby.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The real point is in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your
-      affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would
-      not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be
-      absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because he
-      smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of
-      disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of taste
-      which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is wasteful and
-      unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the habit regardless
-      of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that <i>women</i> must not smoke because
-      the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that <i>men</i> may. He would no
-      more say this than he would say that it is right for men to live in stuffy
-      rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right for men to get
-      drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of drunkenness there is
-      no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel that it is more tragic in
-      the case of the woman, but it is equally disgusting in both sexes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men is
-      vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up
-      morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women not
-      smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom been
-      otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle, for
-      example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he would have answered the
-      question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their pipes
-      together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and eternity, and no
-      one who has read his letters will doubt his love for her. There are no
-      such letters from son to mother in all literature. And of course Mr Hicks
-      knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be surprised to know
-      that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of some women who smoke,
-      and that he will be as cordial with them as with those who do not smoke.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet.... Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of a
-      bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to smoke.
-      And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these now not
-      infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I had been
-      smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If smoking is
-      an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the case of women
-      as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women smoking outdoors
-      while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an irrational fellow, said
-      I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I replied. We are all irrational
-      fellows. If we were brought to the judgment seat of pure reason how few of
-      us would escape the cells.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young
-      women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke
-      was a flag&mdash;the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got
-      perplexed again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women&mdash;this
-      universal claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous
-      fact of the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag.
-      Yet when I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it
-      myself), flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I
-      rejoice, I felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I
-      came to the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These
-      young women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men
-      smoked on the top of the bus they must smoke too&mdash;not perhaps because
-      they liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them
-      on an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge of
-      servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the symbols
-      of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of women, but
-      preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to their finer
-      perceptions and traditions.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But here my perplexity returned. It is not the fact of those young women
-      smoking that offends you, I said addressing myself. It is the fact of
-      their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you agree that the habit of
-      smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of women as of men, why
-      should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised in their case,
-      while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself are smoking at
-      this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged in defending the
-      propriety of women smoking, and at the same time mentally reprobating the
-      conduct of the young women who are smoking in front of you, not because
-      they are smoking, but because (like you) they are smoking in public. How
-      do you reconcile such confusions of mind?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the horns of
-      a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to the habit.
-      And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to defend differential
-      smoking conditions for men and women. If the main position was surrendered
-      no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked in public then women could
-      smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and cigars then women could smoke
-      pipes and cigars. And at the thought of women smoking pipes on the top of
-      buses, I realised that I had not yet found a path out of the absurd bog in
-      which I had become mentally involved.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then something happened which suggested another solution. The young women
-      rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was wafted
-      with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown their
-      cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy,
-      languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial
-      fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man's
-      tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt the
-      woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and wear
-      rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity. The mind
-      revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered and be-ringed.
-      Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their cheeks. But Disraeli
-      was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort of belated tale from
-      the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of men universally revolts
-      against paint, powder, and perfume. And asking myself why a habit, which
-      custom had made tolerable in the case of women, became grotesque and
-      offensive if imagined in connection with men, I saw a way out of my
-      puzzle. I dismissed the view that the difference of sex accounted for the
-      different emotions awakened. It was the habit itself which was
-      objectionable. Familiarity with it in the case of women had dulled our
-      perceptions to the reality. It was only when we conceived the habit in an
-      unusual connection&mdash;imagined men going about with painted and
-      powdered faces, with rings in their ears and heavy scents on their clothes&mdash;that
-      its essential vulgarity and uncleanness were freshly and intensely
-      presented to the mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And that, said I, is the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit in
-      the abstract which is vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in the
-      case of man has deadened our sense of the fact, but the adoption of the
-      habit by women, coupled with the fact that there is no logical
-      halting-place between the cigarette indoors and a pipe on the top of the
-      bus, gives us what the Americans call a new view-point. From that new
-      view-point we are bound to admit that there is much to be said against
-      tobacco and not much to be said for it&mdash;except, of course, that we
-      like it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk to
-      the men as well as to the women.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then perhaps we will see what can be done. For myself, I make no promise.
-      After forty, says Meredith, we are wedded to our habits. And I, alas, am
-      long past forty....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0066" id="linkimage-0066"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0207m.jpg" alt="0207m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0207.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0067" id="linkimage-0067"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0208m.jpg" alt="0208m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0208.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      DOWN TOWN
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>hrough the grey
-      mists that hang over the water in the late autumn afternoon there emerges
-      a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of a distant range of
-      mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with a precision that
-      suggests the work of man rather than the careless architecture of Nature
-      The mass is compact and isolated. It rises from the level of the water,
-      sheer on either side, in bold precipitous cliffs, broken by horizontal
-      lines, and dominated by one kingly, central peak that might be the
-      Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the spire of some cathedral
-      fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race. As the vessel from afar
-      moves slowly through the populous waters and between the vaguely defined
-      shores of the harbour, another shadow emerges ahead, rising out of the sea
-      in front of the mountain mass. It is a colossal statue, holding up a torch
-      to the open Atlantic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition. It turns
-      to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable windows. Even
-      the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of myriad windows. The
-      day begins to darken and a swift transformation takes place. Points of
-      light begin to shine from the windows like stars in the darkening
-      firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters with thousands of
-      tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy palace, glowing with
-      illuminations from the foundations to the topmost height of the giddy
-      precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in the scintillating pinnacle
-      of the slender cathedral spire. The first daylight impression was of
-      something as solid and enduring as the foundations of the earth; the
-      second, in the gathering twilight, is of something slight and fanciful,
-      of' towering proportions but infinitely fragile structure, a spectacle as
-      airy and dream-like as a tale from the &ldquo;Arabian Nights.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is &ldquo;down town.&rdquo; It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its
-      astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that
-      lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest
-      group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over the
-      tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable maze
-      of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion of the
-      London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its direction,
-      but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east and west,
-      crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to the Harlem
-      River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing island of
-      Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the noble Fifth
-      Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty buildings that
-      shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to gild the upper
-      storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many churches and the
-      gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving, on a sunny
-      afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you move in the
-      shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the air above. And
-      around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the architectural
-      glories of &ldquo;up town&rdquo; New York, the great hotels stand like mighty
-      fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great terminus. And
-      in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled to the
-      twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you are
-      summoned.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it is in &ldquo;down town,&rdquo; on the tip of the tongue that is put out to the
-      Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the stranger.
-      It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no doubt, that make
-      an equally striking appeal to the eye&mdash;Salzburg, Innsbruck,
-      Edinburgh, Tunis&mdash;but it is the appeal of nature supplemented by art.
-      Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not an
-      approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of
-      surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind,
-      that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous,
-      and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New
-      York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you land.
-      It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It ascends
-      its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation over the
-      Atlantic. &ldquo;Down town&rdquo; stands like a strong man on the shore of the ocean,
-      asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind these terrific
-      battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to the skies. Look at
-      this muscular development. And I am only the advance agent. I am only the
-      symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste of the power that heaves
-      and throbs through the veins of the giant that bestrides this continent
-      for three thousand miles, from his gateway to the Atlantic to his gateway,
-      to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this
-      terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from within,
-      stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway ends, a
-      street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned between
-      two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more' lofty than the
-      cross of St Paul's Cathedral&mdash;square towers, honeycombed with
-      thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying up in
-      lifts&mdash;called &ldquo;elevators&rdquo; for short&mdash;clicking at typewriters,
-      performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns at
-      the threshold of the giant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which he
-      rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon is
-      Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure in
-      the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the high
-      priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds are
-      shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on the kerbstone
-      of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its sovereigns wilting
-      away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you stand, in devout
-      respect before the modest threshold of the high priest a babel of strange
-      sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn towards it and come
-      suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange than anything
-      pictured by Hogarth&mdash;in the street a jostling mass of human beings,
-      fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like jockeys or
-      pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended high as if in
-      prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working with frantic symbols,
-      their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at a hundred windows in the
-      great buildings on either side of the street little groups of men and
-      women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob below. It is the outside
-      market of Mammon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
-      great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements
-      like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender and
-      beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle nearly
-      twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the temple of St
-      Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth acquired in his
-      sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most significant building in
-      America and the first turret to catch the noose of light that the dawn
-      flings daily over the Atlantic from the East. You enter its marble halls
-      and take an express train to the forty-ninth floor, flashing in your
-      journey past visions of crowded offices, tier after tier, offices of banks
-      and publishers and merchants and jewellers, like a great street,
-      Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skywards by
-      some violent geological &ldquo;fault.&rdquo; And at the forty-ninth floor you get out
-      and take another &ldquo;local&rdquo; train to the top, and from thence you look
-      giddily down, far down even upon the great precipices of the Grand Canon,
-      down to the streets where the moving throng you left a few minutes ago
-      looks like a colony of ants or black-beetles wandering uncertainly over
-      the pavement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
-      with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to be
-      large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
-      churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are
-      swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that loom
-      above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George Washington
-      still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the original union.
-      Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted world an inverted
-      civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the vision of the great
-      dome that seems to float in the heavens over the secular activities of
-      another city, still holding aloft, to however negligent and indifferent a
-      generation, the symbol of the supremacy of spiritual things. And you will
-      wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below you, in which the
-      temples of the ancient worship crouch at the porch of these Leviathan
-      temples of commerce, there is the unconscious expression of another
-      philosophy of life in which St Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to
-      the stars.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the scene
-      below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so near that
-      you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open Atlantic,
-      with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million a year, that
-      has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of hopes, past the
-      statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the harbour, to be
-      swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that lies behind you.
-      You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught in the arms of its
-      two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before you, with its overflow
-      of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream, and its overflow of Jersey City
-      on the far bank of the other. In the brilliant sunshine and the clear,
-      smokeless atmosphere the eye travels far over this incredible vista of
-      human activity. And beyond the vision of the eye, the mind carries the
-      thought onward to the great lakes and the seething cities by their shores,
-      and over the illimitable plains westward to sunny lands more remote than
-      Europe, but still obedient to the stars and stripes, and southward by the
-      great rivers to the tropic sea.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the far
-      horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings. They will
-      not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those horizons,
-      after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields of activity,
-      you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the contrary, they
-      will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense of power unlike
-      anything else the world has to offer&mdash;the power of immeasurable
-      resources, still only in the infancy of their development, of
-      inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the mind, of
-      a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one&mdash;one in a certain
-      fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident prime of
-      their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of the day before
-      them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its crudeness and
-      freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as to something avuncular
-      and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late afternoon, a little tired and
-      more than a little disillusioned and battered by the journey. For him the
-      light has left the morning hills, but here it still clothes those hills
-      with hope and spurs on to adventure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
-      his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
-      &ldquo;the goods.&rdquo; He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
-      power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the
-      inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the
-      tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and the
-      squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the
-      chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction
-      at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush,
-      and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism has
-      shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American interests,
-      and the &ldquo;100 per cent. American&rdquo; in every disguise of designing
-      self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything that is
-      significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not a moment when
-      the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the harbour, can feel
-      very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no longer lit to invite
-      the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the contrary, she turns her
-      back on America and warns the alien away. Her torch has become a
-      policeman's baton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
-      breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous
-      waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back upon
-      the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun floods the
-      land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near his setting,
-      but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his morning prime, so
-      vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of your first
-      impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud pinnacle that
-      looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the temple of primeval
-      gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And as you gaze you are
-      conscious of a great note of interrogation taking shape in the mind. Is
-      that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic expression of the soul of
-      America, or has this mighty power you are leaving another gospel for
-      mankind? And as the light fades and battlements and pinnacle merge into
-      the encompassing dark there sounds in the mind the echoes of an immortal
-      voice&mdash;&ldquo;Let us here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
-      died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
-      freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people
-      shall not perish from the earth!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell to
-      America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of
-      Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0068" id="linkimage-0068"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0217m.jpg" alt="0217m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0217.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0069" id="linkimage-0069"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0208m.jpg" alt="0208m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0208.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON KEYHOLE MORALS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">M</span>y neighbour at the
-      breakfast table complained that he had had a bad night. What with the gale
-      and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of the timbers of the ship and
-      the pair in the next cabin&mdash;especially the pair in the next cabin....
-      How they talked! It was two o'clock before they sank into silence. And
-      such revelations! He couldn't help overhearing them. He was alone in his
-      cabin, and what was he to do? He couldn't talk to himself to let them know
-      they were being overheard. And he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And,
-      in short, there was nothing for it but to overhear. And the things he
-      heard&mdash;well.... And with a gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he
-      left it to me to imagine the worst. I suggested that he might cure the
-      trouble by telling the steward to give the couple a hint that the next
-      cabin was occupied. He received the idea as a possible way out of a
-      painful and delicate situation. Strange, he said, it had not occurred to
-      him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very
-      important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man. It
-      would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper, and
-      there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are not to
-      be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper enough
-      when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not our public
-      hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only indicates the
-      kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We want the world's
-      good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company manners as we put
-      on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would put his ear to a
-      keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole behind him watching
-      him in the act. The true estimate of your character (and mine) depends on
-      what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole behind us. It depends,
-      not on whether you are chivalrous to some one else's wife in public, but
-      whether you are chivalrous to your own wife in private. The eminent judge
-      who, checking himself in a torrent of abuse of his partner at whist,
-      contritely observed, &ldquo;I beg your pardon, madam; I thought you were my
-      wife,&rdquo; did not improve matters. He only lifted the curtain of a rather
-      shabby private cabin. He white-washed himself publicly out of his dirty
-      private pail.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the
-      quiet and undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps you
-      have accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the pockets
-      bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental concern is
-      awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own son. It is
-      natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing and weighty
-      reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that all those
-      respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard young John's
-      step approaching. You know that this very reasonable display of paternal
-      interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying of which you would be
-      ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is miles off&mdash;perhaps
-      down in the city, perhaps far away in the country. You are left alone with
-      his letters and your own sense of decency. You can read the letters in
-      perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you can share them. Not a
-      soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled to know those secrets,
-      and young John may be benefited by your knowing them. What do you do in
-      these circumstances? The answer will provide you with a fairly reliable
-      tape measure for your own spiritual contents.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next Cabin.
-      We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of &ldquo;Le Diable
-      Boiteux,&rdquo; Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one house to
-      another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside, with very
-      surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the guise of a very
-      civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and offered to do the same
-      for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and lift with magic and
-      inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the mysteries and
-      privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should have the decency to
-      thank him and send him away. The amusement would be purchased at too high
-      a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm, but it would do me a lot
-      of harm. For, after all, the important thing is not that we should be
-      able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the whole world in the face, but
-      that we should be able to look ourselves in the face. And it is our
-      private standard of conduct and not our public standard of conduct which
-      gives or denies us that privilege. We are merely counterfeit coin if our
-      respect for the Eleventh Commandment only applies to being found out by
-      other people. It is being found out by ourselves that ought to hurt us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass a
-      tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never committed
-      a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or forged a cheque.
-      But these things are not evidence of good character. They may only mean
-      that I never had enough honest indignation to commit a murder, nor enough
-      courage to break into a house. They may only mean that I never needed to
-      forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may only mean that I am afraid of
-      the police. Respect for the law is a testimonial that will not go far in
-      the Valley of Jehosophat. The question that will be asked of me there is
-      not whether I picked my neighbour's lock, but whether I put my ear to his
-      keyhole; not whether I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but
-      whether I read his letters when his back was turned&mdash;in short, not
-      whether I had respect for the law, but whether I had respect for myself
-      and the sanctities that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is
-      what went on in my private cabin which will probably be my undoing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0070" id="linkimage-0070"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0222m.jpg" alt="0222m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0222.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0071" id="linkimage-0071"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0223m.jpg" alt="0223m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0223.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      FLEET STREET NO MORE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>o-day I am among
-      the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a lifetime and am a person
-      at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that is told, a rumour on the
-      wind; a memory of far-off things and battles long ago. At this hour I
-      fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm. There is the thunder of
-      machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above, the click-click-click of
-      the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph operators, the tinkling of
-      telephones, the ringing of bells for messengers who tarry, reporters
-      coming in with &ldquo;stories&rdquo; or without &ldquo;stories,&rdquo; leader-writers writing for
-      dear life and wondering whether they will beat the clock and what will
-      happen if they don't, night editors planning their pages as a shopman
-      dresses his shop window, sub-editors breasting the torrent of &ldquo;flimsies&rdquo;
-       that flows in from the ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and
-      the other. I hear the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit
-      might hear the murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as
-      a policeman must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the
-      Strand submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his
-      glory departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the
-      middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible
-      embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong
-      arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and the
-      waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a
-      personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could
-      stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the
-      street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to
-      the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety. His
-      cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of the Constitution,
-      and his truncheon was as indispensable as a field-marshal's baton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on
-      the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make a
-      pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk
-      across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers.
-      Even &ldquo;J. B.,&rdquo; who has never been known to pass a policeman without a
-      gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived
-      under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly
-      Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates or
-      in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished
-      magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free,
-      independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He
-      can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand, but
-      he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting, or
-      Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in the shop
-      windows, or turn into the &ldquo;pictures&rdquo; or go home to tea. He can light his
-      pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as he pleases.
-      He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a realm where the
-      clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes without stirring
-      his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will not care.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock and
-      take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous
-      thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me as my
-      own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life until I
-      have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have heard its
-      chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the swanking
-      swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its unceasing life
-      during every hour of the twenty-four&mdash;in the afternoon when the
-      pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are crossing
-      to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air is shrill
-      with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide of the day's
-      life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work, and the telegraph
-      boys flit from door to door with their tidings of the world's happenings;
-      in the small hours when the great lorries come thundering up the side
-      streets with their mountains of papers and rattle through the sleeping
-      city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag of morn in sovereign
-      state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral that looks down so
-      grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. &ldquo;I see it arl so plainly as I
-      saw et, long ago.&rdquo; I have worn its paving stones as industriously as
-      Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as one who had the run
-      of the estate and the freeman's right. I have known its <i>habitues</i> as
-      familiarly as if they had belonged to my own household, and its
-      multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have drunk the solemn toast
-      with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken counsel with the lawyers
-      in the Temple, and wandered in its green and cloistered calm in the hot
-      afternoons, and written thousands of leaders and millions of words on
-      this, that, and the other, wise words and foolish words, and words without
-      any particular quality at all, except that they filled up space, and have
-      had many friendships and fought many battles, winning some and losing
-      others, and have seen the generations go by, and the young fellows grow
-      into old fellows who scan a little severely the new race of ardent boys
-      that come along so gaily to the enchanted street and are doomed to grow
-      old and weary in its service also. And at the end it has come to be a
-      street of ghosts&mdash;a street of memories, with faces that I knew
-      lurking in its shadows and peopling its rooms and mingling with the moving
-      pageant that seems like a phantom too.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like
-      the Chambered Nautilus, I
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      ... seal up the idle door,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape at
-      its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no more.
-      No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual footsteps.
-      No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had always &ldquo;gone out
-      to supper, sir,&rdquo; or been called to the news-room or sent on an errand. No
-      more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous clock that ticked so much
-      faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will come down from above like
-      snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults of the world will boil in like
-      the roar of many waters, but I shall not hear them. For I have come into
-      the inheritance of leisure. Time, that has lorded it over me so long, is
-      henceforth my slave, and the future stretches before me like an infinite
-      green pasture in which I can wander till the sun sets. I shall let the
-      legions thunder by while I tend my bees and water my plants, and mark how
-      my celery grows and how the apples ripen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the
-      chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great
-      noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him a
-      tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his orchard
-      when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys, bearing an
-      urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in the
-      Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to their
-      plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water, took a
-      sponge <i>and washed out his ears.</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0072" id="linkimage-0072"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0228m.jpg" alt="0228m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0228.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0073" id="linkimage-0073"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0229m.jpg" alt="0229m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0229.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON WAKING UP
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>hen I awoke this
-      morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the valley and the beech woods
-      glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and heard the ducks clamouring for
-      their breakfast, and felt all the kindly intimacies of life coming back in
-      a flood for the new day, I felt, as the Americans say, &ldquo;good.&rdquo; Waking up
-      is always&mdash;given a clear conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy
-      faculty of sleep&mdash;a joyous experience. It has the pleasing excitement
-      with which the tuning up of the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the
-      symphony affects you. It is like starting out for a new adventure, or
-      coming into an unexpected inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling
-      suddenly upon some author whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes
-      to your heart like a brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden
-      and beautiful and full of promise.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is now
-      that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of
-      consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has
-      happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and
-      realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The
-      fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does not
-      diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into the
-      future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking to
-      each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over, that the
-      years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining and the
-      birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going forth to
-      their labour until the evening without fear and without hate. As the day
-      advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find it is very
-      much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment when you step
-      over the threshold of sleep into the living world the revelation is
-      simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed. The devil is dead.
-      The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the earth. You recall
-      the far different emotions of a few brief months ago when the morning sun
-      woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling of the birds seemed
-      pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the paper spoiled your
-      breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the Kaiser. Poor wretch, he
-      is waking, too, probably about this time and wondering what will happen to
-      him before nightfall, wondering where he will spend the miserable remnant
-      of his days, wondering whether his great ancestor's habit of carrying a
-      dose of poison was not after all a practice worth thinking about. He
-      wanted the whole, earth, and now he is discovering that he is entitled to
-      just six feet of it&mdash;the same as the lowliest peasant in his land.
-      &ldquo;The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests,&rdquo; but there is
-      neither hole nor nest where he will be welcome. There is not much joy for
-      him in waking to a new day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has &ldquo;murdered
-      Sleep,&rdquo; and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose a
-      crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to enter
-      the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease of life
-      after our present lease had run out and were told that we could nominate
-      our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor an earldom,
-      nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my childhood when I
-      thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin man, eternally
-      perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a basket on my head and
-      shouting &ldquo;Muffins,&rdquo; in the ears of a delighted populace. I loved muffins
-      and I loved bells, and here was a man who had those joys about him all day
-      long and every day. But now my ambitions are more restrained. I would no
-      more wish to be born a muffin man than a poet or an Archbishop. The first
-      gift I should ask would be something modest. It would be the faculty of
-      sleeping eight solid hours every night, and waking each morning with the
-      sense of unfathomable and illimitable content with which I opened my eyes
-      to the world to-day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to
-      their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put
-      eating first, &ldquo;for,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;there is no other pleasure that comes three
-      times a day and lasts an hour each time.&rdquo; But sleep lasts eight hours. It
-      fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it fills it up with
-      the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom of democracy. &ldquo;All equal
-      are within the church's gate,&rdquo; said George Herbert. It may have been so in
-      George Herbert's parish; but it is hardly so in most parishes. It is true
-      of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you enter its portals all discriminations
-      vanish, and Hodge and his master, the prince and the pauper, are alike
-      clothed in the royal purple and inherit the same golden realm. There is
-      more harmony and equality in life than wre are apt to admit. For a good
-      twenty-five years of our seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an
-      agreement that is simply wonderful.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What delight
-      is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing the
-      sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of the
-      birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or the
-      cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or (as
-      now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the day
-      will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as any that
-      have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there is eternal
-      renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best that is still
-      to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot stale nor
-      familiarity make tame.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note of
-      the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that all
-      must feel on this exultant morning&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Good morning, Life&mdash;and all
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Things glad and beautiful.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      My pockets nothing hold,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      But he that owns the gold,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      The Sun, is my great friend&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      His spending has no end.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the bells.
-      There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of
-      sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain
-      perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we can
-      hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall get
-      through it. We shall not &ldquo;get through it,&rdquo; of course, but speech is only
-      fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have had a
-      sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror of a
-      dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of
-      consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite
-      mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of
-      immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than
-      from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose love
-      and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this perplexity
-      the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of happy
-      awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not being. I
-      can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      To dream as I may,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      And awake when I will,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      With the song of the bird,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      And the sun on the hill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in which,
-      once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, &ldquo;Are you there, beloved?&rdquo;
-       and hear the reply, &ldquo;Yes, beloved, I am here,&rdquo; and with that sweet
-      assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The tenderness and
-      beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred Austin, whom some
-      one in a jest made Poet Laureate. &ldquo;For my part,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I should like
-      to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of another victory for the
-      British Empire.&rdquo; It would not be easy to invent a more perfect contrast
-      between the feeling of a poet and the simulated passion of a professional
-      patriot. He did not really think that, of course. He was simply a timid,
-      amiable little man who thought it was heroic and patriotic to think that.
-      He had so habituated his tiny talent to strutting about in the grotesque
-      disguise of a swashbuckler that it had lost all touch with the primal
-      emotions of poetry. Forgive me for intruding him upon the theme. The happy
-      awakenings of eternity must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings
-      and its vulgar patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to
-      sleep on.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0074" id="linkimage-0074"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0235m.jpg" alt="0235m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0235.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0075" id="linkimage-0075"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0236m.jpg" alt="0236m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0236.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON RE-READING
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> weekly paper has
-      been asking well-known people what books they re-read. The most pathetic
-      reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. &ldquo;I seldom
-      re-read now,&rdquo; says that unhappy man. &ldquo;Time is so short and literature so
-      vast and unexplored.&rdquo; What a desolating picture! It is like saying, &ldquo;I
-      never meet my old friends now. Time is so short and there are so many
-      strangers I have not yet shaken hands with.&rdquo; I see the poor man, hot and
-      breathless, scurrying over the &ldquo;vast and unexplored&rdquo; fields of literature,
-      shaking hands and saying, &ldquo;How d'ye do?&rdquo; to everybody he meets and
-      reaching the end of his journey, impoverished and pitiable, like the
-      peasant in Tolstoi's &ldquo;How much land does a man need?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with strangers.
-      I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North Pole and the
-      South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson said of the
-      Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should not like <i>to
-      go</i> to see them. And so with books. Time is so short that I have none
-      to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library. I could almost
-      say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is published I read
-      an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion, and a book has to
-      weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I embark on it. When it has
-      proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but meanwhile the old ships are
-      good enough for me. I know the captain and the crew, the fare I shall get
-      and the port I shall make and the companionship I shall have by the way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write&mdash;Boswell, &ldquo;The
-      Bible in Spain,&rdquo; Pepys, Horace, &ldquo;Elia,&rdquo; Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, &ldquo;Travels
-      with a Donkey,&rdquo; Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, &ldquo;The Early Life of
-      Charles James Fox,&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Under the Greenwood Tree,&rdquo; and so on. Do not call them books.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Camerado, this is no book.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Who touches this, touches a man,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      as Walt Whitman said of his own &ldquo;Leaves of Grass.&rdquo; They are not books.
-      They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on my
-      pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was worth making
-      the great adventure of life to find such company. Come revolutions and
-      bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace, gain or loss&mdash;these
-      friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes of the journey. The
-      friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are estranged, die, but these
-      friends of the spirit are not touched with mortality. They were not born
-      for death, no hungry generations tread them down, and with their immortal
-      wisdom and laughter they give us the password to the eternal. You can no
-      more exhaust them than you can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the
-      joyous melody of Mozart or Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or
-      any other thing of beauty. They are a part of ourselves, and through their
-      noble fellowship we are made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      ... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion
-      with these spirits.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old
-      friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever and
-      went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he sits in
-      his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale. It is a way
-      Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph captive. They
-      cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern flight without
-      thinking that they are going to breathe the air that Horace breathed, and
-      asking them to carry some such message as John Marshall's:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      Tell him, bird,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      One man at least seeks not admittance there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss the
-      figure of Horace&mdash;short and fat, according to Suetonius&mdash;in the
-      fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with equal
-      animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry. Meanwhile,
-      so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would say, is
-      imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading the books in
-      which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored tracts of the
-      desert to those who like deserts.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> correspondent
-      asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve Books that he
-      ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not know what he
-      had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs were, and even
-      with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for another. But I
-      compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed that for some
-      offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a desert island out in
-      the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for twelve months, or
-      perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a mitigation of the
-      penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve books of my own
-      choosing. On what principles should I set about so momentous a choice?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the first place I decided that they must be books of the inexhaustible
-      kind. Rowland Hill said that &ldquo;the love of God was like a generous roast of
-      beef&mdash;you could cut and come again.&rdquo; That must be the first quality
-      of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could go on reading and
-      re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in Borrow went on
-      reading &ldquo;Moll Flanders.&rdquo; If only her son had known that immortal book, she
-      said, he would never have got transported for life. That was the sort of
-      book I must have with me on my desert island. But my choice would be
-      different from that of the old apple-woman of Old London Bridge. I
-      dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the best of novels are
-      exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my bundle of books would be
-      complete before I had made a start with the essentials, for I should want
-      &ldquo;Tristram Shandy&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tom Jones,&rdquo; two or three of Scott's, Gogol's &ldquo;Dead
-      Souls,&rdquo; &ldquo;David Copperfield,&rdquo; &ldquo;Evan Harrington,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Brothers Karamazoff,&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Père Goriot,&rdquo; &ldquo;War and Peace,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Three Musketeers,&rdquo; all of Hardy's,
-      &ldquo;Treasure Island,&rdquo; &ldquo;Robinson Crusoe,&rdquo; &ldquo;Silas Marner,&rdquo; &ldquo;Don Quixote,&rdquo; the
-      &ldquo;Cloister and the Hearth,&rdquo; &ldquo;Esmond&rdquo;&mdash;no, no, it would never do to
-      include novels. They must be left behind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but these
-      had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not come in
-      the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale, so that I
-      can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have no doubt about
-      my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first among the
-      historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him by the
-      lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and understanding
-      that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf of twenty-three
-      centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and fro, as it were,
-      from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty drama of ancient
-      Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the same ambitions,
-      the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and the same heroes.
-      Yes, Thucydides of course.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is there
-      to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history and
-      philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come to the
-      story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned Mommsen, or
-      the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard choice. I shut my
-      eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well, I make no complaint. And
-      then I will have those three fat volumes of Motley's, &ldquo;Rise of the Dutch
-      Republic&rdquo; (4) put in my boat, please, and&mdash;yes, Carlyle's &ldquo;French
-      Revolution&rdquo; (5), which is history and drama and poetry and fiction all in
-      one. And, since I must take the story of my own land with me, just throw
-      in Green's &ldquo;Short History&rdquo; (6). It is lovable for its serene and gracious
-      temper as much as for its story.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the more
-      personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep the
-      fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course, there
-      is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition, for
-      there only is the real Samuel revealed &ldquo;wart and all&rdquo;). I should like to
-      take &ldquo;Elia&rdquo; and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit my
-      personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place must
-      be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that frank,
-      sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to these good
-      fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality of open-air
-      romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more I choose
-      indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a choice
-      between the &ldquo;Bible in Spain,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Romany Rye,&rdquo; &ldquo;Lavengro,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Wild
-      Wales.&rdquo; But I rejoice when I find that &ldquo;Lavengro&rdquo; (10) is in the boat.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could have
-      had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is
-      Wordsworth (11) <i>contra mundum</i>, I have no doubt. He is the man who
-      will &ldquo;soothe and heal and bless.&rdquo; My last selection shall be given to a
-      work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's
-      &ldquo;Voyages&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Voyage of the Beagle,&rdquo; and while I am balancing their
-      claims the &ldquo;Beagle&rdquo; (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library is
-      complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the Pacific.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0076" id="linkimage-0076"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0243m.jpg" alt="0243m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0243.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      FEBRUARY DAYS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he snow has gone
-      from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of setting, has got round to
-      the wood that crowns the hill on the other side of the valley. Soon it
-      will set on the slope of the hill and then down on the plain. Then we
-      shall know that spring has come. Two days ago a blackbird, from the
-      paddock below the orchard, added his golden baritone to the tenor of the
-      thrush who had been shouting good news from the beech tree across the road
-      for weeks past. I don't know why the thrush should glimpse the dawn of the
-      year before the blackbird, unless it is that his habit of choosing the
-      topmost branches of the tree gives him a better view of the world than
-      that which the golden-throated fellow gets on the lower branches that he
-      always affects. It may be the same habit of living in the top storey that
-      accounts for the early activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours,
-      but never so noisy as in these late February days, when they are breaking
-      up into families and quarrelling over their slatternly household
-      arrangements in the topmost branches of the elm trees. They are comic
-      ruffians who wash all their dirty linen in public, and seem almost as
-      disorderly and bad-tempered as the human family itself. If they had only a
-      little of our ingenuity in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my
-      friend the farmer to light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive
-      the female from the eggs and save his crops.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his
-      modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but he
-      is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden and the
-      pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is as
-      industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the
-      starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been
-      observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two
-      minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that
-      deserves encouragement&mdash;a bird that loves caterpillars and does not
-      love cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So
-      hang out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no
-      unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape the
-      general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been
-      agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below
-      the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting
-      industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with that
-      innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just in front of
-      you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of hide-and-seek. But not
-      now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in the best of us. Now he
-      reminds us that he too is a part of that nature which feeds so
-      relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing about in his own
-      erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that the coast is
-      clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his beak. He skips
-      away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper of the hive
-      comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops the great tit
-      and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in spite of his air
-      of innocence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the
-      starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months
-      hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's &ldquo;Oh,
-      that the Romans had only one neck!&rdquo; For then he will come out of the beech
-      woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive against my
-      cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an obscene
-      picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and the
-      stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I can be
-      just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not all bad
-      any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See him on
-      autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his forages in
-      the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in the sky that
-      are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud approaches like
-      a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting, changing formation,
-      breaking up into battalions, merging into columns, opening out on a wide
-      front, throwing out flanks and advance guards and rear guards, every
-      complication unravelled in perfect order, every movement as serene and
-      assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat of some invisible
-      conductor below&mdash;a very symphony of the air, in which motion merges
-      into music, until it seems that you are not watching a flight of birds,
-      but listening with the inner ear to great waves of soundless harmony. And
-      then, the overture over, down the cloud descends upon the fields, and the
-      farmers' pests vanish before the invasion. And if you will follow them
-      into the fields you will find infinite tiny holes that they have drilled
-      and from which they have extracted the lurking enemy of the drops, and you
-      will remember that it is to their beneficial activities that we owe the
-      extermination of the May beetle, whose devastations were so menacing a
-      generation ago. And after the flock has broken up and he has paired, and
-      the responsibilities of housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy
-      labours. When spring has come you can see him dart from his nest in the
-      hollow of the tree and make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field,
-      returning each time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other
-      succulent, but pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at
-      home. That acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted
-      eighteen such journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for
-      a fellow of such benignant spirit?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and
-      see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration.
-      Sufficient unto the day&mdash;&mdash; And to-day I will think only good of
-      the sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the
-      brave news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as
-      this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that
-      all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, &ldquo;according to
-      plan,&rdquo; and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score of hives
-      in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its perils. We
-      saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay on the
-      ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had come from a
-      neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there was no
-      admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he came.
-      Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness and
-      great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him
-      trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh,
-      these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the garden the news is coming up from below, borne by those unfailing
-      outriders of the spring, the snowdrop and the winter aconite. A modest
-      company; but in their pennons is the assurance of the many-coloured host
-      that is falling unseen into the vast pageant of summer and will fill the
-      woods with the trumpets of the harebell and the wild hyacinth, and make
-      the hedges burst into foam, and the orchard a glory of pink and white, and
-      the ditches heavy with the scent of the meadowsweet, and the fields golden
-      with harvest and the gardens a riot of luxuriant life. I said it was all
-      right, chirps little red waistcoat from the fence&mdash;all the winter
-      I've told you that there was a good time coming and now you see for
-      yourself. Look at those flowers. Ain't they real? The philosopher in the
-      red waistcoat is perfectly right. He has kept his end up all through the
-      winter, and has taken us into his fullest confidence. Formerly he never
-      came beyond the kitchen, but this winter when the snow was about he
-      advanced to the parlour where he pottered about like one of the family.
-      Now, however, with the great news outside and the earth full of good
-      things to pick up, he has no time to call.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save for
-      the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the
-      message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of the
-      spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the sunrise
-      is unlike the spirit of the sunset. It is the lusty breath of life coming
-      back to the dead earth, and making these February days the most thrilling
-      of the year. For in these expanding skies and tremors of life and
-      unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and hope, and
-      nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes that the joy
-      of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The cherry blossom
-      comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the spring with it,
-      and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent of the lime trees
-      and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days of birth when
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      &ldquo;Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      there is no hint of mortality and no reverted glance. The curtain is
-      rising and the pageant is all before us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0077" id="linkimage-0077"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0249m.jpg" alt="0249m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0249.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0078" id="linkimage-0078"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0250m.jpg" alt="0250m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0250.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>mong my letters
-      this morning was one requesting that if I were in favour of &ldquo;the
-      reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the Jewish people,&rdquo; I
-      should sign the enclosed declaration and return it in the envelope
-      (unstamped), also enclosed. I dislike unstamped envelopes. I also dislike
-      stamped envelopes. You can ignore an unstamped enveloped but a stamped
-      envelope compels you to write a letter, when perhaps you don't want to
-      write a letter. My objection to unstamped envelopes is that they show a
-      meagre spirit and a lack of confidence in you. They suggest that you are
-      regarded with suspicion as a person who will probably steam off the stamp
-      and use it to receipt a bill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I waived the objection, signed the declaration, stamped the envelope
-      and put it in the post. I did all this because I am a Zionist. I am so
-      keen a Zionist that I would use a whole bookful of stamps in the cause. I
-      am a Zionist, not on sentimental grounds, but on very practical grounds. I
-      want the Jews to have Palestine, so that the English may have England and
-      the Germans Germany and the Russians Russia. I want them to have a home of
-      their own so that the rest of us can have a home of our own. By this I do
-      not mean that I am an anti-Semite. I loathe Jew-baiting, and regard the
-      Jew-baiter as a very unlovely person. But I want the Jew to be able to
-      decide whether he is an alien or a citizen. I want him to shed the dualism
-      that makes him such an affliction to himself and to other people. I want
-      him to possess Palestine so that he may cease to want to possess the
-      earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am therefore fiercely on the side of the Zionist Jews, and fiercely
-      against their opponents. These people want to be Jews, but they do not
-      want Jewry. They do not want to be compelled to make a choice between
-      being Jews and being Englishmen or Americans, Germans or French. They want
-      the best of both worlds. We are not a nation, they say; we are Englishmen,
-      or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, or Russians, or
-      Japanese &ldquo;of the Jewish persuasion.&rdquo; We are a religious community like the
-      Catholics, or the Presbyterians, or the Unitarians, or the Plymouth
-      Brethren. Indeed! And what is your religion, pray? <i>It is the religion
-      of the Chosen People</i>. Great heavens! You deny that you are a nation,
-      and in the same breath claim that you are the Chosen Nation. The very
-      foundation of your religion is that Jehovah has picked you out from all
-      the races of men as his own. Over you his hand is spread in everlasting
-      protection. For you the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night; for
-      the rest of us the utter darkness of the breeds that have not the
-      signature of Jehovah. We cannot enter your kingdom by praying or fasting,
-      by bribe or entreaty. Every other nation is accessible to us on its own
-      conditions; every other religion is eager to welcome us, sends its
-      missionaries to us to implore us to come in. But you, the rejected of
-      nations, yourself reject all nations and forbid your sacraments to those
-      who are not bom of your household. You are the Chosen People, whose
-      religion is the nation and whose nationhood is religion.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Why, my dear sir, history offers no parallel to your astounding claim to
-      nationality&mdash;the claim that has held your race together through
-      nearly two thousand years of dispersion and wandering, of persecution and
-      pride, of servitude and supremacy&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Slaves in eternal Egypts, baking your strawless bricks;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      At ease in successive Zions, prating your politics.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All nations are afflicted with egoism. It is the national egoism of
-      Prussia that has just brought it to such catastrophic ruin. The Frenchman
-      entertains the firm conviction that civilisation ends at the French
-      frontier. Being a polite person, he does his best not to betray the
-      conviction to us, and sometimes almost succeeds. The Englishman, being
-      less sophisticated, does not try to conceal the fact that he has a similar
-      conviction. It does not occur to him that anyone can doubt his claim. He
-      knows that every foreigner would like to be an Englishman if he knew how.
-      The pride of the Spaniard is a legend, and you have only to see Arab
-      salute Arab to understand what a low person the European must seem in
-      their eyes. In short, national egoism is a folly which is pretty equally
-      distributed among all of us. But your national egoism is unlike any other
-      brand on earth. In the humility of Shylock is the pride of the most
-      arrogant racial aristocracy the world has ever seen. God appeared to you
-      in the burning bush and spoke to you in the thunders of Sinai, and set you
-      apart as his own exclusive household. And when one of your prophets
-      declared that all nations were one in the sight of God, you rejected his
-      gospel and slew the prophet. By comparison with you we are a humble
-      people. We know we are a mixed race and that we have no more divine origin&mdash;and
-      no less&mdash;than anybody else. Mr Kipling, it is true, has caught your
-      arrogant note:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      For the Lord our God Most High,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      He hath made the deep as dry,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But that is because Mr Kipling seems to be one of those who believe we are
-      one of the lost tribes of your Chosen race. I gather that is so from
-      another of his poems in which he cautions us against
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Such boastings as the Gentiles use
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      And lesser breeds without the law.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But Mr Kipling is only a curiosity among us. We are much more modest than
-      that. But you are like that. You are not only a nation. You are, except
-      the Chinese, the most isolated, the most tenacious, the most exclusive
-      nation in history. Other races have changed through the centuries beyond
-      recognition or have disappeared altogether. Where are the Persians of the
-      spacious days of Cyrus? Who finds in the Egyptians of to-day the spirit
-      and genius of the mighty people who built the Pyramids and created the art
-      of the Third Dynasty? What trace is there in the modern Cretans of the
-      imperial race whose seapower had become a legend before Homer sang? Can we
-      find in the Greeks of our time any reminiscence of the Athens of Pericles?
-      Or in the Romans any kinship with the sovereign people that conquered the
-      world from Parthia to Britain, and stamped it with the signature of its
-      civilisation as indelibly as it stamped it with its great highways? The
-      nations chase each other across the stage of time, and vanish as the
-      generations of men chase each other and vanish. You and the Chinese alone
-      seem indestructible. It is no extravagant fancy that foresees that when
-      the last fire is lit on this expiring planet it will be a Chinaman and a
-      Jew who will stretch their hands to its warmth, drink in the last breath
-      of air, and write the final epitaph of earth. No, it is too late by many a
-      thousand years to deny your nationhood, for it is the most enduring fact
-      in human records. And being a nation without a fatherland, you run like a
-      disturbing immiscible fluid through the blood of all the nations. You need
-      a home for your own peace and for the world's peace. I am going to try and
-      help you to get one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0079" id="linkimage-0079"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0254m.jpg" alt="0254m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0254.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0080" id="linkimage-0080"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> think, on the
-      whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good display of moral
-      fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen (and admired) I propose
-      to let them off in public. When I awoke in the morning I made a good
-      resolution.... At this point, if I am not mistaken, I observe a slight
-      shudder on your part, madam. &ldquo;How Victorian!&rdquo; I think I hear you remark.
-      You compel me, madam, to digress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year's resolutions
-      nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we
-      elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No
-      one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian
-      England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This
-      querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like the
-      scorn of youth for its elders.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I
-      should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as it is
-      to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the
-      Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as
-      we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren will be
-      as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of yesterday.
-      The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered poison gas, and
-      have invented submarines and guns that will kill a churchful of people
-      seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding the Nineteenth Century
-      as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good things as well as very bad
-      things about our old Victorian England. It did not go to the Ritz to dance
-      in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz did not exist, and the modern hotel
-      life had not been invented. It used to go instead to the watch-night
-      service, and it was not above making good resolutions, which for the most
-      part, no doubt, it promptly proceeded to break.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of
-      watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I had
-      my way I would be as &ldquo;merry&rdquo; as Pepys, if in a different fashion. &ldquo;Merry&rdquo;
-       is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that merriment
-      is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a mere spasm,
-      whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy of life. But
-      the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other, and an occasional
-      burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for anybody&mdash;even for
-      an Archbishop&mdash;especially for an Archbishop. The trouble with an
-      Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take himself too
-      seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad for him. He
-      needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally that his virtue is
-      not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary humanity. At least once
-      a year he should indulge in a certain liveliness, wear the cap and bells,
-      dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe, not too publicly, but just publicly
-      enough so that there should be nothing furtive about it. If not done on
-      the village green it might at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and
-      chronicled in the local newspapers. &ldquo;Last evening His Grace the Archbishop
-      attended the servants' ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the
-      chief scullery-maid.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0081" id="linkimage-0081"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0257m.jpg" alt="0257m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0257.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its
-      good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you &ldquo;A Merry Christmas
-      and a Happy New Year.&rdquo; Nowadays the formula is &ldquo;A Happy Christmas and a
-      Prosperous New Year.&rdquo; It is a priggish, sophisticated change&mdash;a sort
-      of shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being &ldquo;merry.&rdquo;
-       There isn't. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a Merry
-      Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a Happy
-      New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making
-      good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that virtue is
-      a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride Victorian
-      England because it went to watch-night services it is not because I think
-      there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is because, in the
-      words of the old song, I think &ldquo;It is good to be merry <i>and</i> wise.&rdquo; I
-      like a festival of foolishness and I like good resolutions, too. Why
-      shouldn't I? Lewis Carrol's gift for mathematics was not less admirable
-      because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at doing sums in his head.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution.
-      The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New
-      Year's morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is that
-      you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn't call you an intolerant
-      fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow. Perhaps to put
-      the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous reaction to events is a
-      little too immediate. I don't want to be unpleasant, but I think you see
-      what I mean. Do not suppose that I am asking you to be a cold-blooded,
-      calculating person. God forbid. But it would do you no harm to wear a
-      snaffle bar and a tightish rein&mdash;or, as we used to say in our
-      Victorian England, to &ldquo;count ten.&rdquo; I accepted the criticism with approval.
-      For though we do not like to hear of our failings from other people, that
-      does not mean that we are unconscious of them. The more conscious we are
-      of them, the less we like to hear of them from others and the more we hear
-      of them from ourselves. So I said &ldquo;Agreed. We will adopt 'Second thoughts'
-      as our New Year policy and begin the campaign at once.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And then came my letters&mdash;nice letters and nasty letters and
-      indifferent letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say,
-      &ldquo;raised the waters.&rdquo; No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters
-      which anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I
-      might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting
-      assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of
-      writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different. As
-      I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding
-      expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I
-      said &ldquo;Second thoughts,&rdquo; and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as
-      the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect to
-      dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old
-      imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to have
-      a periodical brush with one's habits, even if one knows one is pretty sure
-      to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a reminder that we
-      are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of the imperfections of
-      others. And that, I think, is the case for our old Victorian habit of New
-      Year's Day commandments.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite <i>pianissimo</i> and
-      nice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0082" id="linkimage-0082"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0261m.jpg" alt="0261m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0261.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A GRECIAN PROFILE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> see that the
-      ghouls have descended upon George Meredith, and are desecrating his
-      remains. They have learned from the life of him just published that he did
-      not get on well with his father, or his eldest son, and that he did not
-      attend his first wife's funeral. Above all, he was a snob. He was ashamed
-      of the tailoring business from which he sprang, concealed the fact that he
-      was bom at Portsmouth, and generally turned his Grecian profile to the
-      world and left it to be assumed that his pedigree was wrapped in mystery
-      and magnificence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay it is all true. Many of us have an indifferent record at home
-      and most of us like to turn our Grecian profiles to the world, if we have
-      Grecian profiles. We are like the girl in Hardy's story who always managed
-      to walk on the right side of her lover, because she fancied that the left
-      side of her face was her strong point. The most distinguished and, I
-      think, the noblest American of our time always turns his profile to the
-      camera&mdash;and a beautiful profile it is&mdash;for reasons quite obvious
-      and quite pardonable to those who have seen the birth-mark that disfigures
-      the other cheek. I suspect that I do not myself object to being caught
-      unaware in favourable attitudes or pleasing situations that dispose the
-      observer to agreeable impressions. And, indeed, why should I (or you) be
-      ashamed to give-a pleasant thrill to anybody if it is in our power. If we
-      pretend we are above these human frailties, what is the meaning of the
-      pains we take about choosing a hat, or about the cut of a coat, or the
-      colour of a cloth for the new suit? Why do we so seldom find pleasure in a
-      photograph of ourselves&mdash;so seldom feel that it does justice to that
-      benignant and Olympian ideal of ourselves which we cherish secretly in our
-      hearts? I should have to admit, if I went into the confession box, that I
-      had never seen a photograph of myself that had satisfied me. And I fancy
-      you would do the same if you were honest. We may pretend to ourselves that
-      it is only abstract beauty or absolute truth that we are concerned about,
-      but we know better. We are thinking of our Grecian profile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is no doubt regrettable to find that great men are so often afflicted
-      with little weaknesses. There are some people who delight in pillorying
-      the immortals and shying dead cats and rotten eggs at them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They enjoy the discovery that no one is better than he should be. It gives
-      them a comfortable feeling to discover that the austere outside of the
-      lord Angelo conceals the libertine. If you praise Caesar they will remind
-      you that after dinner he took emetics; if Brutus, they will say he made an
-      idol of his public virtue. They like to remember that Lamb was not quite
-      the St Charles he is represented to be, but took far too much wine at
-      dinner and dosed beautifully, but alcoholically, afterwards, as you may
-      read in De Quincey. They like to recall that Scott was something of a
-      snob, and put the wine-glass that the Prince Regent had used at dinner in
-      his pocket, sitting down on it afterwards in a moment of happy
-      forgetfulness. In short, they go about like Alcibiades mutilating the
-      statues of Hermes (if he was indeed the culprit), and will leave us
-      nothing in human nature that we can entirely reverence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I suppose they are right enough on the facts. Considering what
-      multitudinous persons we are it would be a miracle if, when we button up
-      ourselves in the morning we did not button up some individual of
-      unpleasant propensities, whom we pretend we do not know. I have never been
-      interested in my pedigree. I am sure it is a very ancient one, and I leave
-      it at that. But I once made a calculation&mdash;based on the elementary
-      fact that I had two parents and they had each two parents, and so on&mdash;and
-      came to the conclusion that about the time of the Norman Conquest my
-      ancestors were much more numerous than the population then inhabiting this
-      island. I am aware that this proves rather too much&mdash;that it is an
-      example of the fact that you can prove anything by statistics, including
-      the impossible. But the truth remains that I am the temporary embodiment
-      of a very large number of people&mdash;of millions of millions of people,
-      if you trace me back to my ancestors who used to sharpen flints some six
-      hundred thousand years ago. It would be singular if in such a crowd there
-      were not some ne'er-do-wells jostling about among the nice, reputable
-      persons who, I flatter myself, constitute my Parliamentary majority.
-      Sometimes I fancy that, in a snap election taken at a moment of public
-      excitement within myself, the ne'er-do-wells get on top. These accidents
-      will happen, and the best I can hope is that the general trend of policy
-      in the multitudinous kingdom that I carry under my hat is in the hands of
-      the decent people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And that is the best we can expect from anybody&mdash;the great as well as
-      the least. If we demand of the supreme man that he shall be a perfect
-      whole we shall have no supreme man&mdash;only a plaster saint. Certainly
-      we shall have no great literature. Shakespeare did not sit aloof like a
-      perfect god imagining the world of imperfect creatures that he created.
-      The world was within him and he was only the vehicle of his enormous
-      ancestry and of the tumultuous life that they reproduced in the theatre of
-      his mind. In him was the mirth of a roystering Falstaff of long ago, the
-      calculating devilry of some Warwickshire Iago, the pity of Hubert, the
-      perplexity of some village Hamlet, the swagger of Ancient Pistol, the
-      bucolic simplicity of Cousin Silence, the mingled nobleness and baseness
-      of Macbeth, the agony of Lear, the sweetness of many a maiden who walked
-      by Avon's banks in ancient days and lived again in the Portias and
-      Rosalinds of his mind. All these people dwelt in Shakespeare. They were
-      the ghosts of his ancestors. He was, like the rest of us, not a man, but
-      multitudes of men. He created all these people because he was all these
-      people, contained in a larger measure than any man who ever lived all the
-      attributes, good and bad, of humanity. Each character was a peep into the
-      gallery of his ancestors. Meredith, himself, recognised the ancestral
-      source of creative power. When Lady Butcher asked him to explain his
-      insight into the character of women he replied, &ldquo;It is the spirit of my
-      mother in me.&rdquo; It was indeed the spirit of many mothers working in and
-      through him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it
-      so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never more
-      difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along the Embankment
-      last evening with a friend&mdash;a man known alike for his learning and
-      character&mdash;when he turned to me and said, &ldquo;I will never have a hero
-      again.&rdquo; We had been speaking of the causes of the catastrophe of Paris,
-      and his remark referred especially to his disappointment with President
-      Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair to the President. He did not make
-      allowance for the devil's broth of intrigue and ambitions into which the
-      President was plunged on this side of the Atlantic. But, leaving that
-      point aside, his remark expressed a very common feeling. There has been a
-      calamitous slump in heroes. They have fallen into as much disrepute as
-      kings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the
-      fabulous offspring of comfortable times&mdash;supermen reigning on Olympus
-      and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the storm
-      and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy and prove
-      that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they are discovered
-      to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind, feeble folk like
-      you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as helpless as any of us.
-      Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and their feet have come down
-      from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of clay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of the
-      Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron
-      expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      I want a hero: an uncommon want,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      When every year and month sends forth a new one.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The age discovers he is not the true one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that &ldquo;no man is a
-      hero to his valet.&rdquo; To be a hero you must be remote in time or
-      circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and
-      fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities and
-      angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is privileged
-      to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the tricks you
-      have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a faithful
-      secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture he gives of
-      Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome loathing for
-      that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name thunders down
-      the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his contemporaries. It
-      was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom he had just appointed to
-      the choicest command in his gift, who went to Caesar's house on that March
-      morning, two thousand years ago, to bring him to the slaughter.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men I
-      should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely than
-      anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance in secondary
-      things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and tenderness with
-      resolution and strength, he stands alone in history. But even he was not a
-      hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too near&mdash;near enough to
-      note his frailties, for he was human, too near to realise the grand and
-      significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was not until he was dead
-      that the world realised what a leader had fallen in Israel. Motley thanked
-      heaven, as for something unusual, that he had been privileged to
-      appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed him to men. Stanton
-      fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end, and it was only when
-      life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur of the force that had
-      been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. &ldquo;There lies the most perfect
-      ruler of men the world has ever seen,&rdquo; he said, as he stood with other
-      colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had breathed his last. But the
-      point here is that, sublime though the sum of the man was, his heroic
-      profile had its abundant human warts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of
-      reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It
-      will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have made
-      the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not find
-      them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are these the
-      men&mdash;these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards&mdash;the
-      demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the
-      microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than
-      demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and then
-      you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto
-      Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless
-      picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its
-      arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion
-      to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is a
-      painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never
-      will be such a being. The best of us is woven of &ldquo;mingled yarn, good and
-      ill together.&rdquo; And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and the
-      ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he &ldquo;contained
-      multitudes&rdquo; too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful
-      for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects of
-      that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0083" id="linkimage-0083"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0269m.jpg" alt="0269m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0269.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0084" id="linkimage-0084"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0270m.jpg" alt="0270m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0270.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON TAKING A HOLIDAY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> hope the two
-      ladies from the country who have been writing to the newspapers to know
-      what sights they ought to see in London during their Easter holiday will
-      have a nice time. I hope they will enjoy the tube and have fine weather
-      for the Monument, and whisper to each other successfully in the whispering
-      gallery of St Paul's, and see the dungeons at the Tower and the seats of
-      the mighty at Westminster, and return home with a harvest of joyful
-      memories. But I can promise them that there is one sight they will not
-      see. They will not see me. Their idea of a holiday is London. My idea of a
-      holiday is forgetting there is such a place as London.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not that I dislike London. I should like to see it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have long promised myself that I would see it. Some day, I have said, I
-      will surely have a look at this place. It is a shame, I have said, to have
-      lived in it so long and never to have seen it. I suppose I am not much
-      worse than other Londoners. Do you, sir, who have been taking the morning
-      bus from Balham for heaven knows how many years&mdash;do you, when you are
-      walking down Fleet Street, stand still with a shock of delight as the dome
-      of St Paul's and its cross of gold burst on your astonished sight? Do you
-      go on a fine afternoon and take your stand on Waterloo Bridge to see that
-      wondrous river façade that stretches with its cloud-capped towers and
-      gorgeous palaces from Westminster to St Paul's? Do you know the spot where
-      Charles was executed, or the church where there are the best Grinling
-      Gibbons carvings? Did you ever go into Somerset House to see the will of
-      William Shakespeare, or&mdash;in short, did you ever see London? Did you
-      ever see it, not with your eyes merely, hut with your mind, with the sense
-      of revelation, of surprise, of discovery? Did you ever see it as those two
-      ladies from the country will see it this Easter as they pass breathlessly
-      from wonder to wonder? Of course not. You need a holiday in London as I
-      do. You need to set out with young Tom (aged ten) on a voyage of discovery
-      and see all the sights of this astonishing city as though you had come to
-      it from a far country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That is how I hope to visit it&mdash;some day. But not this Easter, not
-      when I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the
-      cherry blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the
-      chestnut tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long
-      and the April meadows are &ldquo;smoored wi' new grass,&rdquo; as they say in the
-      Yorkshire dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at
-      the magic casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn
-      to the fringe of Dartmoor and let loose&mdash;shall it be from Okehampton
-      or Bovey Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? what matter the gate by which we
-      enter the sanctuary?&mdash;let loose, I say, into the vast spaces of earth
-      and sky where the moorland streams sing their ancient runes over the
-      boulders and the great tors stand out like castles of the gods against the
-      horizon and the Easter sun dances, as the legend has it, overhead and
-      founders gloriously in the night beyond Plymouth Sound.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or, perhaps, ladies, if you come from the North, I may pass you unawares,
-      and just about the time when you are cracking your breakfast egg in the
-      boarding house at Russell Square&mdash;heavens, Russell Square!&mdash;and
-      discussing whether you shall first go down the deepest lift or up the
-      highest tower, or stand before the august ugliness of Buckingham Palace,
-      or see the largest station or the smallest church, I shall be stepping out
-      from Keswick, by the lapping waters of Derwent water, hailing the old
-      familiar mountains as they loom into sight, looking down again&mdash;think
-      of it!&mdash;into the' Jaws of Borrowdale, having a snack at Rosthwaite,
-      and then, hey for Styehead! up, up ever the rough mountain track, with the
-      buzzard circling with slow flapping wings about the mountain flanks, with
-      glorious Great Gable for my companion on the right hand and no less
-      glorious Scafell for my companion on the left hand, and at the rocky turn
-      in the track&mdash;lo! the great amphitheatre of Wasdale, the last
-      Sanctuary of lakeland.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And at this point, ladies, you may as you crane your neck to see the Duke
-      of York at the top of his column&mdash;wondering all the while who the
-      deuce the fellow was that he should stand so high&mdash;you may, I say, if
-      you like, conceive me standing at the top of the pass, taking my hat from
-      my head and pronouncing a terrific curse on the vandals who would
-      desecrate the last temple of solitude by driving a road over this fastness
-      of the mountains in order that the gross tribe of motorists may come with
-      their hoots and their odours, their hurry and vulgarity, and chase the
-      spirit of the mountains away from us for ever.... And then by the screes
-      of Great Gable to the hollow among the mountains. Or perchance, I may turn
-      by Sprinkling Tam and see the Pikes of Langdale come into view and stumble
-      down Rossett Ghyll and so by the green pastures of Langdale to Grasmere.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In short, ladies, I may be found in many places. But I shall not tell you
-      where. I am not quite sure that I could tell you where at this moment, for
-      I am like a fellow who has come into great riches and is doubtful how he
-      can squander them most gloriously. But, I repeat, ladies, that you will
-      not find me in London. I leave London to you. May you enjoy it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0085" id="linkimage-0085"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      UNDER THE SYCAMORE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>n odd question was
-      put to me the other day which I think I may venture to pass on to a wider
-      circle. It was this: What is the best dish that life has set before you?
-      At first blush it seems an easy question to answer. It was answered gaily
-      enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked what was the best thing that
-      had ever happened to him. &ldquo;The best thing that ever happened to me was to
-      be born,&rdquo; he replied. But that is not an answer: it is an evasion. It
-      belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether life is worth living. Life may
-      be worth living or not worth living on balance, but in either case we can
-      still say what was the thing in it that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a
-      dinner on the whole and yet make an exception of the trout, or the braised
-      ham and spinach or the dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and
-      still admit that he has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift
-      and many more, have cursed the day you were born and still remember many
-      pleasant things that have happened to you&mdash;falling in love, making
-      friends, climbing mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs,
-      watching the sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You
-      may write off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush
-      outside. It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very
-      sad heart who has never had anything to thank his stars for.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it grows
-      difficult on reflection.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily
-      answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over
-      and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things
-      that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long
-      sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and
-      agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree&mdash;sycamore or
-      chestnut for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because
-      their generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade&mdash;to sit, I
-      say, and think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball
-      which the Blessèd Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven
-      near by, sees &ldquo;spinning like a midge&rdquo; below.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and asked
-      us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play to which
-      we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped away so
-      quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we should make
-      now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will be there)
-      will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer. That glorious
-      contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool million&mdash;come
-      now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair to remember your
-      journey by. You will have to think of something better than that as the
-      splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to confess to a very
-      complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser pleasures seemed so
-      important, you will not like to admit, even to yourself, that your most
-      rapturous memory of earth centres round the grillroom at the Savoy. You
-      will probably find that the things best worth remembering are the things
-      you rejected.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose pleasures
-      were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of life, after
-      all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers in money, and
-      traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those occupations to
-      hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon under that
-      sycamore tree&mdash;which of them, now that it is all over, will have most
-      joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one and a
-      gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the earth as
-      a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the mountains,
-      and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and where season
-      followed season with a processional glory that never grew dim. And Mozart
-      will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and Turner as a panorama
-      of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect, with what delight they
-      will look back on the great moments of life&mdash;Columbus seeing the new
-      world dawning on his vision, Copernicus feeling the sublime architecture
-      of the universe taking shape in his mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal
-      mystery of the human frame, Darwin thrilling with the birth pangs of the
-      immense secret that he wrung from Nature. These men will be able to answer
-      the question grandly. The banquet they had on earth will bear talking
-      about even in Heaven.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the
-      scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will, I
-      fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and
-      humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we won
-      the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or shook
-      hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our name in
-      the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament. It will
-      be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human comradeship we
-      had on the journey&mdash;the friendships of the spirit, whether made in
-      the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or art. We shall
-      remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its affections&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The fates some recompense have sent&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Thrice blessed are the things that last,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The things that are more excellent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0086" id="linkimage-0086"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0278m.jpg" alt="0278m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0278.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0087" id="linkimage-0087"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0279m.jpg" alt="0279m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0279.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> met an old
-      gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with whom I have a
-      slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he asked me whether I
-      remembered Walker of <i>The Daily News</i>. No, said I, he was before my
-      time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the 'seventies.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Before that,&rdquo; said the old gentleman. &ldquo;Must have been in the 'sixties.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Probably,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Did you know him in the 'sixties?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh, I knew him before then,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, warming to his
-      subject. &ldquo;I knew him in the 'forties.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman
-      enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Heavens!&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;the 'forties!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a better
-      view across the ages. &ldquo;No.... It must have been in the 'thirties.... Yes,
-      it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school together in the 'thirties.
-      We called him Sawney Walker.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I had
-      paid him the one compliment that appealed to him&mdash;the compliment of
-      astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety
-      not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked &ldquo;well
-      set&rdquo; for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance
-      as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his hundred
-      at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement was mixed
-      with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent vanity is the
-      last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last infirmity that
-      humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that rages around Dean
-      Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the angels. I want to
-      feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are moving upwards in the
-      scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round and round and biting our
-      tail. I think the case for the ascent of man is stronger than the Dean
-      admits. A creature that has emerged from the primordial slime and evolved
-      a moral law has progressed a good way. It is not unreasonable to think
-      that he has a future. Give him time&mdash;and it may be that the world is
-      still only in its rebellious childhood&mdash;and he will go far.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a
-      time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant
-      and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first
-      knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We are
-      vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of his
-      acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all the
-      year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes at
-      the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots and his
-      cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of mine who,
-      in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing boots to the
-      children at a London school, heard one day a little child pattering behind
-      her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of the beneficiaries
-      &ldquo;keeping up&rdquo; with her. She turned and recognised the wearer. &ldquo;So you've
-      got your new boots on, Mary?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said little Mary grandly.
-      &ldquo;Don't they squeak beautiful, mum.&rdquo; And though, as we grow older, we cease
-      to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we find other material to
-      keep the flame of vanity alive. &ldquo;What for should I ride in a carriage if
-      the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?&rdquo; said the Fifer, putting his
-      head out of the window. He spoke for all of us. We are all a little like
-      that. I confess that I cannot ride in a motor-car that whizzes past other
-      motor-cars without an absurd and irrational vanity. I despise the emotion,
-      but it is there in spite of me. And I remember that when I was young I
-      could hardly free-wheel down a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior
-      to the man who was grinding his way up with heavings and perspiration. I
-      have no shame in making these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that
-      you, sir (or madam), will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite
-      audible echo of yourself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we are vain
-      of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our neighbours as
-      we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our neighbours. We are
-      like the old maltster in &ldquo;Far from the Madding Crowd,&rdquo; when Henery Fray
-      claimed to be &ldquo;a strange old piece, goodmen.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;A strange old piece, ye say!&rdquo; interposed the maltster in a querulous
-      voice. &ldquo;Ye be no old man worth naming&mdash;no old man at all. Yer teeth
-      bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
-      bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis a
-      poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore&mdash;a
-      boast weak as water.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences
-      when the maltster had to be pacified.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Weak as water, yes,&rdquo; said Jan Coggan. &ldquo;Malter, we feel ye to be a
-      wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; said Joseph Poorgrass. &ldquo;Ye be a very rare old spectacle, malter,
-      and we all respect ye for that gift.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in being
-      &ldquo;a very rare old spectacle.&rdquo; We count the reigns we've lived in and exalt
-      the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes at midnight.
-      Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite early, as in the
-      case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of Cicero who was only
-      in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as an old man and wrote
-      his &ldquo;De Senectute,&rdquo; exalting the pleasures of old age. In the eyes of the
-      maltster he would never have been an old man worth naming, for he was only
-      sixty-four when he was murdered. I have noticed in my own case of late a
-      growing tendency to flourish my antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure
-      in recalling the 'seventies to those who can remember, say, only the
-      'nineties, that my fine old friend in the lane had in talking to me about
-      the 'thirties. I met two nice boys the other day at a country house, and
-      they were full, as boys ought to be, of the subject of the cricket. And
-      when they found I was worth talking to on that high theme, they submitted
-      their ideal team to me for approval, and I launched out about the giants
-      that lived in the days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds
-      of &ldquo;W. G.&rdquo; and Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G.
-      Steel, and many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their
-      stature did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those
-      memories as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I
-      shall be proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning
-      nurse. She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope
-      and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our
-      toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant vanity
-      we are soothed to sleep.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0088" id="linkimage-0088"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0284m.jpg" alt="0284m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0284.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0089" id="linkimage-0089"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0285m.jpg" alt="0285m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0285.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON SIGHTING LAND
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was in the midst
-      of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me to my feet with a
-      leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a doughty fellow, who
-      wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and had trained it to stand
-      up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of interrogation. &ldquo;I offer you a
-      draw,&rdquo; I said with a regal wave of the hand, as though I was offering him
-      Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or something substantial like that.
-      &ldquo;Accepted,&rdquo; he cried with a gesture no less reckless and comprehensive.
-      And then we bolted for the top deck. For the cry we had heard was &ldquo;Land in
-      sight!&rdquo; And if there are three more comfortable words to hear when you
-      have been tossing about on the ocean for a week or two, I do not know
-      them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the Atlantic
-      is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely facetious
-      when he said he was &ldquo;disappointed with the Atlantic.&rdquo; But now I am
-      disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way I knew
-      it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order to know
-      what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until he was a
-      middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to his conception
-      of the sea because &ldquo;we have in us the glance of the universe.&rdquo; But though
-      the actual experience of the ocean adds little to the broad imaginative
-      conception of it formed by the mind, we are not prepared for the effect of
-      sameness, still less for the sense of smallness. It is as though we are
-      sitting day after day in the geometrical centre of a very round table-top.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are told
-      that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before yesterday
-      and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility to the
-      fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured by and
-      here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is perfectly
-      flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn by
-      compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have &ldquo;a drop
-      into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.&rdquo; You conceive
-      yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth which hangs
-      over the sides.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its
-      appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue cloth,
-      with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption of
-      transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey cloth;
-      sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth and
-      tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the table,
-      and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth flinging
-      itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an
-      incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion
-      and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under the
-      impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment suspended
-      in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like a wrestler
-      fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning, every joint
-      creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful strain. A gleam of
-      sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching the clouds of spray
-      turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling ship with the glamour
-      of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there is nothing but the
-      raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler in their midst, and
-      far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the horizon, as if it were a
-      pencil of white flame, to a spectral and unearthly beauty.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are moveless
-      in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our magic carpet
-      (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or Europe, as the
-      case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we are standing still
-      for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers progress to the mind.
-      The circle we looked out on last night is indistinguishable from the
-      circle we look out on this morning. Even the sky and cloud effects are
-      lost on this flat contracted stage, with its hard horizon and its thwarted
-      vision. There is a curious absence of the sense of distance, even of
-      distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as abruptly as the sea at that
-      severely drawn circumference and there is no vague merging of the seen
-      into the unseen, which alone gives the imagination room for flight. To
-      live in this world is to be imprisoned in a double sense&mdash;in the
-      physical sense that Johnson had in mind in his famous retort, and in the
-      emotional sense that I have attempted to describe. In my growing list of
-      undesirable occupations&mdash;sewermen, lift-men, stokers,
-      tram-conductors, and so on&mdash;I shall henceforth include ships'
-      stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being shot like a shuttle
-      in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New York and back from New
-      York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the ill-humour of the ocean and
-      to play the sick nurse to a never-ending mob of strangers, is as dreary a
-      part as one could be cast for. I would rather navigate a barge on the
-      Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet,
-      on second thoughts, they have their joys. They hear, every fortnight or
-      so, that thrilling cry, &ldquo;Land in sight!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and
-      however familiar it may be.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example.
-      Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the
-      first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some
-      unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively,
-      comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment
-      seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination.
-      Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the monotonous
-      rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with the emotion of
-      the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of the sea. Such a
-      cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three hundred years
-      ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of that immortal
-      little company of the <i>Mayflower</i> caught sight of the land where,
-      they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down through the
-      centuries that cry of &ldquo;Land in sight!&rdquo; has been sounded in the ears of
-      generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to the new land
-      of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see that land
-      shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great drama of the
-      ages.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English eyes
-      as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this sunny
-      morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the sight there
-      is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself heaving with a
-      hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders. I have a fleeting
-      vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling down there amid a
-      glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to sea, and standing
-      on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home to the Ark that is
-      for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is a
-      rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his hills
-      hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager comes from,
-      whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic from the Cape,
-      or round the Cape from Australia, or through the Mediterranean from India,
-      this is the first glimpse of the homeland that greets him, carrying his
-      mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the journey's end. And that
-      vision links him up with the great pageant of history. Drake, sailing in
-      from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and knew he was once more in his
-      Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck beside me with a wisp of hair,
-      curled and questioning, on his baldish forehead, and I mark the shine in
-      his eyes....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0090" id="linkimage-0090"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0291m.jpg" alt="0291m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0291.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0091" id="linkimage-0091"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0294m.jpg" alt="0294m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0294.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <div style="height: 6em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-***** This file should be named 47429-h.htm or 47429-h.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/7/4/2/47429/
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
-will be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
-one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
-(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
-permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
-set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
-copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
-protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
-Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
-charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
-do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
-rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
-such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
-research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
-practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
-subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
-redistribution.
-
-
-
-*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
-Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-  www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works
-
-1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
-all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
-If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
-
-1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
-paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
- or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
-collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
-copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
-works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
-are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
-Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
-freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
-this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
-the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
-keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
-a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
-Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
-States.
-
-1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
-access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
-whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
-phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
-Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
-copied or distributed:
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
-from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
-posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
-and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
-or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
-with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
-work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
-through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
-Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
-1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
-terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
-to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
-permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
-word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
-&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
-you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
-copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
-request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
-form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
-that
-
-- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
-     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
-     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
-     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
-     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
-     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
-     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
-     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
-     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
-     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
-
-- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-     License.  You must require such a user to return or
-     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
-     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
-     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
-     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
-     of receipt of the work.
-
-- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
-forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
-both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
-collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
-&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
-corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
-property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
-computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
-your equipment.
-
-1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
-of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
-your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
-refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
-opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
-the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
-Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
-
-
-Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
-people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
-To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
-and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
-and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
-Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
-permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
-Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
-throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
-North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
-contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
-Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-     Chief Executive and Director
-     gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
-SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
-particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
-To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-
-Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
-with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
-Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
-unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
-keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
-
-     www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-  </body>
-</html>
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0001.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0001.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 71b1857..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0001.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0002.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0002.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index e54c016..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0002.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0002m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0002m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8fb333e..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0002m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0003.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0003.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index c48ab91..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0003.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0003m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0003m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 50902b9..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0003m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0008.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0008.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index d8577c5..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0008.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0008m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0008m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 0b4e00c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0008m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0009.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0009.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 78bbd3c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0009.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0009m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0009m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index b84369a..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0009m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0013.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0013.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index be463e3..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0013.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0013m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0013m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 6dbda94..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0013m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0015.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0015.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 7373f59..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0015.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0015m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0015m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 57061e8..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0015m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0017.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0017.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index f49cbc5..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0017.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0017m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0017m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 16ca92d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0017m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0021.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0021.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 55155dc..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0021.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0021m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0021m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 67bf87f..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0021m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0025.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0025.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8a65342..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0025.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0025m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0025m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 6cb96e1..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0025m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0030.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0030.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index fc4fa52..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0030.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0030m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0030m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 1aefbbb..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0030m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0031.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0031.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 4b73b04..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0031.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0031m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0031m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 47d8f19..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0031m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0036.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0036.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 2230a60..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0036.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0036m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0036m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8ee8d2a..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0036m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0040.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0040.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 3e44c11..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0040.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0040m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0040m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 4f5e90a..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0040m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0041.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0041.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 1c61cae..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0041.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0041m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0041m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 9d08df8..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0041m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0047.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0047.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 20e9ae1..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0047.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0047m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0047m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index e28b3f6..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0047m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0049.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0049.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8b00e47..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0049.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0049m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0049m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 69e30c9..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0049m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0050.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0050.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 42c2054..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0050.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0050m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0050m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8d83f34..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0050m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0055.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0055.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 96b6ab7..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0055.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0055m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0055m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 4c5cc8d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0055m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0061.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0061.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index adb0440..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0061.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0061m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0061m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 9df6081..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0061m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0062.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0062.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index a7fa705..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0062.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0062m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0062m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 4d53fb3..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0062m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0066.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0066.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 81c1a22..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0066.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0066m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0066m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index a572f00..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0066m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0067.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0067.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index a0b6d03..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0067.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0067m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0067m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index cc572c3..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0067m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0072.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0072.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index cd41436..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0072.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0072m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0072m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 668d18d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0072m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0073.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0073.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index d388371..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0073.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0073m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0073m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 4890503..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0073m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0078.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0078.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index c01940d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0078.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0078m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0078m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8f3e9ae..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0078m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0079.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0079.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 757ef31..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0079.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0079m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0079m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 77d6d2b..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0079m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0084.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0084.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 55414ec..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0084.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0084m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0084m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 545f5e0..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0084m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0085.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0085.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 5ce8a2f..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0085.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0085m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0085m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 18a09a5..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0085m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0089.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0089.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index f4fce23..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0089.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0089m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0089m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 0a3c835..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0089m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0090.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0090.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 7409a11..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0090.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0090m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0090m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index d46bf18..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0090m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0091.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0091.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 34497e4..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0091.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0091m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0091m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 08e9061..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0091m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0095.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0095.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index bd739ab..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0095.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0095m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0095m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 34c4fb3..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0095m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0096.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0096.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 43a0bbc..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0096.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0096m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0096m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index ee0c2b4..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0096m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0101.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0101.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index e535c8f..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0101.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0101m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0101m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index f2b574d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0101m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0102.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0102.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 196e0d1..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0102.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0102m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0102m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 91bc307..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0102m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0108.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0108.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 47d15c3..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0108.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0108m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0108m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index c8ef298..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0108m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0109.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0109.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 0d98201..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0109.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0109m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0109m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 20cf8e9..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0109m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0115.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0115.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index c2c9178..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0115.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0115m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0115m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 0c0f4a5..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0115m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0116.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0116.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 846e8b8..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0116.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0116m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0116m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 5e1ffff..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0116m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0120.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0120.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index a64fe27..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0120.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0120m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0120m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index f29e176..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0120m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0121.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0121.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 0f68fd5..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0121.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0121m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0121m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 80de712..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0121m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0127.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0127.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index c8ab594..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0127.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0127m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0127m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index beef4f2..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0127m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0128.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0128.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 46a5d50..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0128.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0128m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0128m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index f512531..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0128m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0134.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0134.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8ec6903..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0134.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0134m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0134m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 9f69d17..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0134m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0137.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0137.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 438e377..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0137.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0137m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0137m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index a66a594..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0137m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0138.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0138.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index ca53a2c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0138.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0138m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0138m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 170c30a..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0138m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0142.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0142.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index e736aef..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0142.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0142m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0142m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 3bb2e7c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0142m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0143.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0143.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index b34a2b2..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0143.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0143m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0143m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 1acee2c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0143m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0148.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0148.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 118ce69..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0148.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0148m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0148m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 7cf5d56..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0148m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0150.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0150.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 313dffd..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0150.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0150m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0150m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 5eba042..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0150m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0151.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0151.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index c3412e4..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0151.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0151m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0151m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 34bb338..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0151m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0155.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0155.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 69a07c5..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0155.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0155m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0155m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 3ee0d25..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0155m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0156.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0156.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 5c03774..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0156.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0156m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0156m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index b1c8c20..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0156m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0163.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0163.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index bf070dd..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0163.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0163m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0163m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 6bae771..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0163m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0164.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0164.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 9d62f81..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0164.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0164m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0164m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index c3462b5..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0164m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0169.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0169.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 1cfb615..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0169.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0169m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0169m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 175c2e8..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0169m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0170.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0170.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 0cbe5c8..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0170.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0170m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0170m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index a8fbff7..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0170m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0174.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0174.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index cd3a1d0..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0174.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0174m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0174m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 3b23194..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0174m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0175.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0175.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index eab1b3a..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0175.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0175m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0175m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index b2ae499..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0175m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0183.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0183.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index aa57e31..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0183.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0183m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0183m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index e376964..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0183m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0184.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0184.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 29c0631..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0184.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0184m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0184m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 15ea04d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0184m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0192.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0192.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 7704436..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0192.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0192m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0192m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index c1f4c3b..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0192m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0193.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0193.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8b6f78d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0193.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0193m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0193m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 05c794d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0193m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0197.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0197.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index ed44e53..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0197.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0197m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0197m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 42bb733..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0197m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0200.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0200.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 4874313..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0200.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0200m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0200m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 29737b4..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0200m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0201.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0201.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index b6c25c1..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0201.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0201m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0201m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 646182d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0201m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0207.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0207.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index d7ff672..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0207.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0207m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0207m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 18b523d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0207m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0208.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0208.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 230fd3d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0208.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0208m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0208m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 12dae4c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0208m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0217.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0217.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 00122a0..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0217.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0217m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0217m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 6c7260c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0217m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0218.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0218.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index d3b0d30..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0218.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0218m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0218m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 12bc6c7..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0218m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0222.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0222.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 5e3bc38..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0222.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0222m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0222m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 626a0f3..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0222m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0223.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0223.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 662cbe5..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0223.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0223m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0223m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 9f3388b..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0223m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0228.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0228.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 42fc900..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0228.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0228m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0228m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 56a9e2b..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0228m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0229.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0229.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index b8e50ee..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0229.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0229m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0229m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8505827..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0229m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0235.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0235.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 5f30f8b..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0235.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0235m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0235m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index c13525c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0235m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0236.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0236.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 7a2a34b..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0236.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0236m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0236m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 62fb04e..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0236m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0243.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0243.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index e4d4588..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0243.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0243m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0243m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index d15a718..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0243m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0249.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0249.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 415c896..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0249.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0249m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0249m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index aec5155..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0249m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0250.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0250.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 3d92688..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0250.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0250m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0250m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8d9268c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0250m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0254.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0254.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index e5a8c9e..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0254.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0254m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0254m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 673ae1a..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0254m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0255.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0255.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 891527c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0255.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0255m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0255m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 599d9ba..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0255m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0257.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0257.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index a5bb2bf..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0257.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0257m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0257m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 540e71c..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0257m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0261.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0261.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 7a6f9e1..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0261.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0261m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0261m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index b573eea..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0261m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0269.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0269.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index d35fe63..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0269.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0269m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0269m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 18af5d1..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0269m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0270.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0270.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 3d58e5f..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0270.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0270m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0270m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 6c65ce9..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0270m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0274.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0274.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 84640f3..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0274.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0274m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0274m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 8bfdaae..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0274m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0278.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0278.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 379fb17..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0278.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0278m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0278m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index dbff3e2..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0278m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0279.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0279.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 1a65808..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0279.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0279m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0279m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index e4941d1..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0279m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0284.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0284.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 2c8acd5..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0284.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0284m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0284m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 4c66792..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0284m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0285.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0285.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 590594e..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0285.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0285m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0285m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index be2477d..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0285m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0291.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0291.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 7c79e00..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0291.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0291m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0291m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 4dd3061..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0291m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0294.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0294.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 1a02f5f..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0294.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0294m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0294m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 863dcc0..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0294m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0295.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0295.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index a7ef2df..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0295.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0295m.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/0295m.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index a1a4588..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/0295m.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/47429-h/images/cover.jpg b/47429/old/47429-h/images/cover.jpg
deleted file mode 100644
index 1b30100..0000000
--- a/47429/old/47429-h/images/cover.jpg
+++ /dev/null
diff --git a/47429/old/old/47429-h.htm.2021-01-25 b/47429/old/old/47429-h.htm.2021-01-25
deleted file mode 100644
index dc7abff..0000000
--- a/47429/old/old/47429-h.htm.2021-01-25
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,8544 +0,0 @@
-<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
-
-<!DOCTYPE html
-   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
-   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
-
-<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
-  <head>
-    <title>
-      Windfalls, by By Alfred George Gardiner
-    </title>
-    <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
-    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
-
-    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
-    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
-    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
-    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
-    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
-    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
-    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
-    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
-    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
-    .indent5   { margin-left: 5%;}
-    .indent10  { margin-left: 10%;}
-    .indent15  { margin-left: 15%;}
-    .indent20  { margin-left: 20%;}
-    .indent30  { margin-left: 30%;}
-    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
-    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
-    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
-    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
-    .pagenum   {position: absolute; right: 1%; font-size: 0.6em;
-                font-variant: normal; font-style: normal;
-                text-align: right; background-color: #FFFACD;
-                border: 1px solid; padding: 0.3em;text-indent: 0em;}
-    .side      { float: left; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
-               border-left: dashed thin; text-align: left;
-               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
-               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
-    p.pfirst, p.noindent {text-indent: 0}
-    span.dropcap         { float: left; margin: 0 0.1em 0 0; line-height: 0.8 }
-    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
-
-</style>
-  </head>
-  <body>
-
-
-<pre>
-
-The Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most
-other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
-whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of
-the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at
-www.gutenberg.org.  If you are not located in the United States, you'll have
-to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook.
-
-
-
-Title: Windfalls
-
-Author: (AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-Illustrator: Clive Gardiner
-
-Release Date: November 22, 2014 [EBook #47429]
-Last Updated: March 15, 2018
-
-Language: English
-
-Character set encoding: UTF-8
-
-*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-
-
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-    <div style="height: 8em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h1>
-      WINDFALLS
-    </h1>
-    <h2>
-      By Alfred George Gardiner
-</h2>
-<h3>
-(Alpha of the Plough)
-    </h3>
-
-<h3>Illustrations by Clive Gardiner
-</h3>
-    <h4>
-      J. M. Dent &amp; Sons, Ltd.
-    </h4>
-    <h5>
-      1920
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0001" id="linkimage-0001"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0002m.jpg" alt="0002m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0002.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0002" id="linkimage-0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0008m.jpg" alt="0008m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0008.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0003" id="linkimage-0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0009m.jpg" alt="0009m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0009.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <h3>
-      TO GWEN AND PHYLLIS
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      I think this book belongs to you because, if it can be said to be about
-      anything in particular&mdash;which it cannot&mdash;it is, in spite of its
-      delusive title, about bees, and as I cannot dedicate it to them, I offer
-      it to those who love them most.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0005" id="linkimage-0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0015m.jpg" alt="0015m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0015.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_PREF"> PREFACE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> JEMIMA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> ON BEING IDLE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> ON HABITS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> IN DEFENCE OF WASPS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> ON PILLAR ROCK </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> TWO VOICES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> ON BEING TIDY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> AN EPISODE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> ON POSSESSION </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0011"> ON BORES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0012"> A LOST SWARM </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0013"> YOUNG AMERICA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0014"> ON GREAT REPLIES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0015"> ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0016"> ON HEREFORD BEACON </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0017"> CHUM </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0018"> ON MATCHES AND THINGS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0019"> ON BEING REMEMBERED </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0020"> ON DINING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0021"> IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0022"> TWO DRINKS OF MILK </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0023"> ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0024"> ON GREAT MEN </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0025"> ON SWEARING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0026"> ON A HANSOM CAB </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0027"> ON MANNERS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0028"> ON A FINE DAY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0029"> ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0030"> DOWN TOWN </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0031"> ON KEYHOLE MORALS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0032"> FLEET STREET NO MORE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0033"> ON WAKING UP </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0034"> ON RE-READING </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0035"> FEBRUARY DAYS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0036"> ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0037"> ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0038"> ON A GRECIAN PROFILE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0039"> ON TAKING A HOLIDAY </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0040"> UNDER THE SYCAMORE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0041"> ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE </a>
-    </p>
-    <p class="toc">
-      <a href="#link2H_4_0042"> ON SIGHTING LAND </a>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_PREF" id="link2H_PREF"> </a> <br /><br /><a
-      name="linkimage-0004" id="linkimage-0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0013m.jpg" alt="0013m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0013.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      PREFACE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>n offering a third
-      basket of windfalls from a modest orchard, it is hoped that the fruit will
-      not be found to have deteriorated. If that is the case, I shall hold
-      myself free to take another look under the trees at my leisure. But I
-      fancy the three baskets will complete the garnering. The old orchard from
-      which the fruit has been so largely gathered is passing from me, and the
-      new orchard to which I go has not yet matured. Perhaps in the course of
-      years it will furnish material for a collection of autumn leaves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0006" id="linkimage-0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0021m.jpg" alt="0021m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0021.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      JEMIMA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> took a garden
-      fork just now and went out to dig up the artichokes. When Jemima saw me
-      crossing the orchard with a fork he called a committee meeting, or rather
-      a general assembly, and after some joyous discussion it was decided <i>nem.
-      con</i>. that the thing was worth looking into. Forthwith, the whole
-      family of Indian runners lined up in single file, and led by Jemima
-      followed faithfully in my track towards the artichoke bed, with a gabble
-      of merry noises. Jemima was first into the breach. He always is...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But before I proceed it is necessary to explain. You will have observed
-      that I have twice referred to Jemima in the masculine gender. Doubtless,
-      you said, &ldquo;How careless of the printer. Once might be forgiven; but twice&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
-       Dear madam' (or sir), the printer is on this occasion blameless. It seems
-      incredible, but it's so. The truth is that Jemima was the victim of an
-      accident at the christening ceremony. He was one of a brood who, as they
-      came like little balls of yellow fluff out of the shell, received names of
-      appropriate ambiguity&mdash;all except Jemima. There were Lob and Lop, Two
-      Spot and Waddles, Puddle-duck and Why?, Greedy and Baby, and so on. Every
-      name as safe as the bank, equal to all contingencies&mdash;except Jemima.
-      What reckless impulse led us to call him Jemima I forget. But regardless
-      of his name, he grew up into a handsome drake&mdash;a proud and gaudy
-      fellow, who doesn't care twopence what you call him so long as you call
-      him to the Diet of Worms.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And here he is, surrounded by his household, who, as they gabble, gobble,
-      and crowd in on me so that I have to scare them off in order to drive in
-      the fork. Jemima keeps his eye on the fork as a good batsman keeps his eye
-      on the ball. The flash of a fork appeals to him like the sound of a
-      trumpet to the warhorse. He will lead his battalion through fire and water
-      in pursuit of it. He knows that a fork has some mystical connection with
-      worms, and doubtless regards it as a beneficent deity. The others are
-      content to grub in the new-turned soil, but he, with his larger reasoning
-      power, knows that the fork produces the worms and that the way to get the
-      fattest worms is to hang on to the fork. From the way he watches it I
-      rather fancy he thinks the worms come out of the fork. Look at him now. He
-      cocks his unwinking eye up at the retreating fork, expecting to see large,
-      squirming worms dropping from it, and Greedy nips in under his nose and
-      gobbles a waggling beauty. My excellent friend, I say, addressing Jemima,
-      you know both too much and too little. If you had known a little more you
-      would have had that worm; if you had known a little less you would have
-      had that worm. Let me commend to you the words of the poet:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      A little learning is a dangerous thing:
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I've known many people like you, who miss the worm because they know too
-      much but don't know enough. Now Greedy&mdash;&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But clear off all of you. What ho! there.... The scales!... Here is a
-      bumper root.... Jemima realises that something unusual has happened,
-      assembles the family, and discusses the mystery with great animation. It
-      is this interest in affairs that makes the Indian runners such agreeable
-      companions. You can never be lonely with a family of Indian runners about.
-      Unlike the poor solitary hens who go grubbing about the orchard without an
-      idea in their silly heads, these creatures live in a perpetual gossip. The
-      world is full of such a number of things that they hardly ever leave off
-      talking, and though they all talk together they are so amiable about it
-      that it makes you feel cheerful to hear them.... But here are the
-      scales.... Five pound three ounces.... Now what do you say to that,
-      Jemima? Let us turn to and see if we can beat it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The idea is taken up with acclamation, and as I resume digging I am
-      enveloped once more by the mob of ducks, Jemima still running dreadful
-      risks in his attachment to the fork. He is a nuisance, but it would be
-      ungracious to complain, for his days are numbered. You don't know it, I
-      said, but you are feasting to-day in order that others may feast tomorrow.
-      You devour the worm, and a larger and more cunning animal will devour you.
-      He cocks up his head and fixes me with that beady eye that gleams with
-      such artless yet searching intelligence.... You are right, Jemima. That,
-      as you observe, is only half the tale. You eat the worm, and the large,
-      cunning animal eats you, but&mdash;yes, Jemima, the crude fact has to be
-      faced that the worm takes up the tale again where Man the Mighty leaves
-      off:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      His heart is builded
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      For pride, for potency, infinity,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      All heights, all deeps, and all immensities,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Arrased with purple like the house of kings,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      <i>To stall the grey-rat, and the carrion-worm</i>
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      <i>Statelily lodge...</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I accept your reminder, Jemima. I remember with humility that I, like you,
-      am only a link in the chain of the Great Mother of Mysteries, who creates
-      to devour and devours to create. I thank you, Jemima. And driving in the
-      fork and turning up the soil I seized a large fat worm. I present you with
-      this, Jemima, I said, as a mark of my esteem...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0008" id="linkimage-0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0025m.jpg" alt="0025m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0025.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING IDLE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> have long
-      laboured under a dark suspicion that I am an idle person. It is an
-      entirely private suspicion. If I chance to mention it in conversation, I
-      do not expect to be believed. I announce that I am idle, in fact, to
-      prevent the idea spreading that I am idle. The art of defence is attack. I
-      defend myself by attacking myself, and claim a verdict of not guilty by
-      the candour of my confession of guilt. I disarm you by laying down my
-      arms. &ldquo;Ah, ah,&rdquo; I expect you to say. &ldquo;Ah, ah, you an idle person. Well,
-      that is good.&rdquo; And if you do not say it I at least give myself the
-      pleasure of believing that you think it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not, I imagine, an uncommon artifice. Most of us say things about
-      ourselves that we should not like to hear other people say about us. We
-      say them in order that they may not be believed. In the same way some
-      people find satisfaction in foretelling the probability of their early
-      decease. They like to have the assurance that that event is as remote as
-      it is undesirable. They enjoy the luxury of anticipating the sorrow it
-      will inflict on others. We all like to feel we shall be missed. We all
-      like to share the pathos of our own obsequies. I remember a nice old
-      gentleman whose favourite topic was &ldquo;When I am gone.&rdquo; One day he was
-      telling his young grandson, as the child sat on his knee, what would
-      happen when he was gone, and the young grandson looked up cheerfully and
-      said, &ldquo;When you are gone, grandfather, shall I be at the funeral?&rdquo; It was
-      a devastating question, and it was observed that afterwards the old
-      gentleman never discussed his latter end with his formidable grandchild.
-      He made it too painfully literal.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, after an assurance from me of my congenital idleness, you were to
-      express regret at so unfortunate an affliction I should feel as sad as the
-      old gentleman. I should feel that you were lacking in tact, and I daresay
-      I should take care not to lay myself open again to such <i>gaucherie</i>.
-      But in these articles I am happily free from this niggling self-deception.
-      I can speak the plain truth about &ldquo;Alpha of the Plough&rdquo; without asking for
-      any consideration for his feelings. I do not care how he suffers. And I
-      say with confidence that he is an idle person. I was never more satisfied
-      of the fact than at this moment. For hours he has been engaged in the
-      agreeable task of dodging his duty to <i>The Star</i>.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It began quite early this morning&mdash;for you cannot help being about
-      quite early now that the clock has been put forward&mdash;or is it back?&mdash;for
-      summer-time. He first went up on to the hill behind the cottage, and there
-      at the edge of the beech woods he lay down on the turf, resolved to write
-      an article <i>en plein air</i>, as Corot used to paint his pictures&mdash;an
-      article that would simply carry the intoxication of this May morning into
-      Fleet Street, and set that stuffy thoroughfare carolling with larks, and
-      make it green with the green and dappled wonder of the beech woods. But
-      first of all he had to saturate himself with the sunshine. You cannot give
-      out sunshine until you have taken it in. That, said he, is plain to the
-      meanest understanding. So he took it in. He just lay on his back and
-      looked at the clouds sailing serenely in the blue. They were well worth
-      looking at&mdash;large, fat, lazy, clouds that drifted along silently and
-      dreamily, like vast bales of wool being wafted from one star to another.
-      He looked at them &ldquo;long and long&rdquo; as Walt Whitman used to say. How that
-      loafer of genius, he said, would have loved to lie and look at those
-      woolly clouds.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And before he had thoroughly examined the clouds he became absorbed in
-      another task. There were the sounds to be considered. You could not have a
-      picture of this May morning without the sounds. So he began enumerating
-      the sounds that came up from the valley and the plain on the wings of the
-      west wind. He had no idea what a lot of sounds one could hear if one gave
-      one's mind to the task seriously. There was the thin whisper of the breeze
-      in the grass on which he lay, the breathings of the woodland behind, the
-      dry flutter of dead leaves from a dwarf beech near by, the boom of a
-      bumble-bee that came blustering past, the song of the meadow pipit rising
-      from the fields below, the shout of the cuckoo sailing up the valley, the
-      clatter of magpies on the hillside, the &ldquo;spink-spink&rdquo; of the chaffinch,
-      the whirr of a tractor in a distant field, the crowing of a far-off cock,
-      the bark of a sheep dog, the ring of a hammer reverberating from a remote
-      clearing in the beech woods, the voices of children who were gathering
-      violets and bluebells in the wooded hollow on the other side of the hill.
-      All these and many other things he heard, still lying on his back and
-      looking at the heavenly bales of wool. Their dreaminess affected him;
-      their billowy softness invited to slumber....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When he awoke he decided that it was too late to start an article then.
-      Moreover, the best time to write an article was the afternoon, and the
-      best place was the orchard, sitting under a cherry tree, with the blossoms
-      falling at your feet like summer snow, and the bees about you preaching
-      the stern lesson of labour. Yes, he would go to the bees. He would catch
-      something of their fervour, their devotion to duty. They did not lie about
-      on their backs in the sunshine looking at woolly clouds. To them, life was
-      real, life was earnest. They were always &ldquo;up and doing.&rdquo; It was true that
-      there were the drones, impostors who make ten times the buzz of the
-      workers, and would have you believe they do all the work because they make
-      most of the noise. But the example of these lazy fellows he would ignore.
-      Under the cherry tree he would labour like the honey bee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it happened that as he sat under the cherry tree the expert came out
-      to look at the hives. She was quite capable of looking at the hives alone,
-      but it seemed a civil thing to lend a hand at looking. So he put on a veil
-      and gloves and went and looked. It is astonishing how time flies when you
-      are looking in bee-hives. There are so many things to do and see. You
-      always like to find the queen, for example, to make sure that she is
-      there, and to find one bee in thousands, takes time. It took more time
-      than usual this afternoon, for there had been a tragedy in one of the
-      hives. It was a nucleus hive, made up of brood frames from other hives,
-      and provided with a queen of our best breed. But no queen was visible. The
-      frames were turned over industriously without reward. At last, on the
-      floor of the hive, below the frames, her corpse was found. This deepened
-      the mystery. Had the workers, for some obscure reason, rejected her
-      sovereignty and killed her, or had a rival to the throne appeared and
-      given her her quietus? The search was renewed, and at last the new queen
-      was run to earth in the act of being fed by a couple of her subjects. She
-      had been hatched from a queen cell that had escaped notice when the brood
-      frames were put in and, according to the merciless law of the hive, had
-      slain her senior. All this took time, and before he had finished, the
-      cheerful clatter of tea things in the orchard announced another
-      interruption of his task.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And to cut a long story short, the article he set out to write in praise
-      of the May morning was not written at all. But perhaps this article about
-      how it was not written will serve instead. It has at least one virtue. It
-      exhales a moral as the rose exhales a perfume.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0009" id="linkimage-0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0030m.jpg" alt="0030m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0030.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0010" id="linkimage-0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0031m.jpg" alt="0031m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0031.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON HABITS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> sat down to write
-      an article this morning, but found I could make no progress. There was
-      grit in the machine somewhere, and the wheels refused to revolve. I was
-      writing with a pen&mdash;a new fountain pen that someone had been good
-      enough to send me, in commemoration of an anniversary, my interest in
-      which is now very slight, but of which one or two well-meaning friends are
-      still in the habit of reminding me. It was an excellent pen, broad and
-      free in its paces, and capable of a most satisfying flourish. It was a
-      pen, you would have said, that could have written an article about
-      anything. You had only to fill it with ink and give it its head, and it
-      would gallop away to its journey's end without a pause. That is how I felt
-      about it when I sat down. But instead of galloping, the thing was as
-      obstinate as a mule. I could get no more speed out of it than Stevenson
-      could get out of his donkey in the Cevennes. I tried coaxing and I tried
-      the bastinado, equally without effect on my Modestine.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then it occurred to me that I was in conflict with a habit. It is my
-      practice to do my writing with a pencil. Days, even weeks, pass without my
-      using a pen for anything more than signing my name. On the other hand
-      there are not many hours of the day when I am without a pencil between
-      thumb and finger. It has become a part of my organism as it were, a mere
-      extension of my hand. There, at the top of my second finger, is a little
-      bump, raised in its service, a monument erected by the friction of a whole
-      forest of pencils that I have worn to the stump. A pencil is to me what
-      his sword was to D'Artagnan, or his umbrella was to the Duke of Cambridge,
-      or his cheroot was to Grant, or whittling a stick was to Jackson or&mdash;in
-      short, what any habit is to anybody. Put a pencil in my hand, seat me
-      before a blank writing pad in an empty room, and I am, as they say of the
-      children, as good as gold. I tick on as tranquilly as an eight-day clock.
-      I may be dismissed from the mind, ignored, forgotten. But the magic wand
-      must be a pencil. Here was I sitting with a pen in my hand, and the whole
-      complex of habit was disturbed. I was in an atmosphere of strangeness. The
-      pen kept intruding between me and my thoughts. It was unfamiliar to the
-      touch. It seemed to write a foreign language in which nothing pleased me.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This tyranny of little habits which is familiar to all of us is nowhere
-      better described than in the story which Sir Walter Scott told to Rogers
-      of his school days. &ldquo;There was,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a boy in my class at school who
-      stood always at the top, nor could I with all my effort, supplant him. Day
-      came after day and still he kept his place, do what I would; till at
-      length I observed that, when a question was asked him, he always fumbled
-      with his fingers at a particular button in the lower part of his
-      waistcoat. To remove it, therefore, became expedient in my eye, and in an
-      evil moment it was removed with a knife. Great was my anxiety to know the
-      success of my measure, and it succeeded too well. When the boy was again
-      questioned his fingers sought again for the button, but it was not to be
-      found. In his distress he looked down for it&mdash;it was to be seen no
-      more than to be felt. He stood confounded, and I took possession of his
-      place; nor did he ever recover it, or ever, I believe, suspect who was the
-      author of his wrong. Often in after-life has the sight of him smote me as
-      I passed by him, and often have I resolved to make him some reparation;
-      but it ended in good resolutions. Though I never renewed my acquaintance
-      with him, I often saw him, for he filled some inferior office in one of
-      the courts of law at Edinburgh. Poor fellow! I believe he is dead, he took
-      early to drinking.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was rather a shabby trick of young Scott's, and all one can say in
-      regard to its unhappy consequences is that a boy so delicately balanced
-      and so permanently undermined by a trifle would in any case have come. to
-      grief in this rough world. There is no harm in cultivating habits, so long
-      as they are not injurious habits. Indeed, most of us are little more than
-      bundles of habits neatly done up in coat and trousers. Take away our
-      habits and the residuum would hardly be worth bothering about. We could
-      not get on without them. They simplify the mechanism of life. They enable
-      us to do a multitude of things automatically which, if we had to give
-      fresh and original thought to them each time, would make existence an
-      impossible confusion. The more we can regularise our commonplace
-      activities by habit, the smoother our path and the more leisure we
-      command. To take a simple case. I belong to a club, large but not so large
-      as to necessitate attendants in the cloakroom. You hang up your own hat
-      and coat and take them down when you want them. For a long time it was my
-      practice to hang them anywhere where there was a vacant hook and to take
-      no note of the place. When I sought them I found it absurdly difficult to
-      find them in the midst of so many similar hats and coats. Memory did not
-      help me, for memory refused to burden itself with such trumpery things,
-      and so daily after lunch I might be seen wandering forlornly and vacuously
-      between the rows and rows of clothes in search of my own garments
-      murmuring, &ldquo;Where <i>did</i> I put my hat?&rdquo; Then one day a brilliant
-      inspiration seized me. I would always hang my coat and hat on a certain
-      peg, or if that were occupied, on the vacant peg nearest to it. It needed
-      a few days to form the habit, but once formed it worked like a charm. I
-      can find my hat and coat without thinking about finding them. I go to them
-      as unerringly as a bird to its nest, or an arrow to its mark. It is one of
-      the unequivocal triumphs of my life.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But habits should be a stick that we use, not a crutch to lean on. We
-      ought to make them for our convenience or enjoyment and occasionally break
-      them to assert our independence. We ought to be able to employ them,
-      without being discomposed when we cannot employ them. I once saw Mr
-      Balfour so discomposed, like Scott's school rival, by a trivial breach of
-      habit. Dressed, I think, in the uniform of an Elder Brother of Trinity
-      House he was proposing a toast at a dinner at the Mansion House. It is his
-      custom in speaking to hold the lapels of his coat. It is the most
-      comfortable habit in speaking, unless you want to fling your arms about in
-      a rhetorical fashion. It keeps your hands out of mischief and the body in
-      repose. But the uniform Mr Balfour was wearing had no lapels, and when the
-      hands went up in search of them they wandered about pathetically like a
-      couple of children who had lost their parents on Blackpool sands. They
-      fingered the buttons in nervous distraction, clung to each other in a
-      visible access of grief, broke asunder and resumed the search for the lost
-      lapels, travelled behind his back, fumbled with the glasses on the table,
-      sought again for the lapels, did everything but take refuge in the pockets
-      of the trousers. It was a characteristic omission. Mr Balfour is too
-      practised a speaker to come to disaster as the boy in Scott's story did;
-      but his discomfiture was apparent. He struggled manfully through his
-      speech, but all the time it was obvious that he was at a loss what to do
-      with his hands, having no lapels on which to hang them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I happily had a remedy for my disquietude. I put up my pen, took out a
-      pencil, and, launched once more into the comfortable rut of habit, ticked
-      away peacefully like the eight-day clock. And this is the (I hope)
-      pardonable result.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0011" id="linkimage-0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0036m.jpg" alt="0036m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0036.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      IN DEFENCE OF WASPS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t is time, I
-      think, that some one said a good word for the wasp. He is no saint, but he
-      is being abused beyond his deserts. He has been unusually prolific this
-      summer, and agitated correspondents have been busy writing to the
-      newspapers to explain how you may fight him and how by holding your breath
-      you may miraculously prevent him stinging you. Now the point about the
-      wasp is that he doesn't want to sting you. He is, in spite of his military
-      uniform and his formidable weapon, not a bad fellow, and if you leave him
-      alone he will leave you alone. He is a nuisance of course. He likes jam
-      and honey; but then I am bound to confess that I like jam and honey too,
-      and I daresay those correspondents who denounce him so bitterly like jam
-      and honey. We shouldn't like to be sent to the scaffold because we like
-      jam and honey. But let him have a reasonable helping from the pot or the
-      plate, and he is as civil as anybody. He has his moral delinquencies no
-      doubt. He is an habitual drunkard. He reels away, in a ludicrously
-      helpless condition from a debauch of honey and he shares man's weakness
-      for beer. In the language of America, he is a &ldquo;wet.&rdquo; He cannot resist
-      beer, and having rather a weak head for liquor he gets most disgracefully
-      tight and staggers about quite unable to fly and doubtless declaring that
-      he won't go home till morning. I suspect that his favourite author is Mr
-      Belloc&mdash;not because he writes so wisely about the war, nor so
-      waspishly about Puritans, but because he writes so boisterously about
-      beer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This weakness for beer is one of the causes of his undoing. An empty beer
-      bottle will attract him in hosts, and once inside he never gets out. He is
-      indeed the easiest creature to deal with that flies on wings. He is
-      excessively stupid and unsuspicious. A fly will trust nobody and nothing,
-      and has a vision that takes in the whole circumference of things; but a
-      wasp will walk into any trap, like the country bumpkin that he is, and
-      will never have the sense to walk out the way he went in. And on your
-      plate he simply waits for you to squeeze his thorax. You can descend on
-      him as leisurely as you like. He seems to have no sight for anything above
-      him, and no sense of looking upward.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His intelligence, in spite of the mathematical genius with which he
-      fashions his cells, is contemptible, and Fabre, who kept a colony under
-      glass, tells us that he cannot associate entrance and exit. If his
-      familiar exit is cut off, it does not occur to him that he can go out by
-      the way he always comes in. A very stupid fellow.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you compare his morals with those of the honey bee, of course, he cuts
-      a poor figure. The bee never goes on the spree. It avoids beer like
-      poison, and keeps decorously outside the house. It doesn't waste its time
-      in riotous living, but goes on ceaselessly working day and night during
-      its six brief weeks of life, laying up honey for the winter and for future
-      generations to enjoy. But the rascally fellow in the yellow stripes just
-      lives for the hour. No thought of the morrow for him, thank you. Let us
-      eat, drink, and be merry, he says, for to-morrow&mdash;&mdash;. He runs
-      through his little fortune of life at top speed, has a roaring time in
-      August, and has vanished from the scene by late September, leaving only
-      the queen behind in some snug retreat to raise a new family of 20,000 or
-      so next summer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I repeat that he is inoffensive if you let him alone. Of course, if
-      you hit him he will hit back, and if you attack his nest he will defend
-      it. But he will not go for you unprovoked as a bee sometimes will. Yet he
-      could afford this luxury of unprovoked warfare much better than the bee,
-      for, unlike the bee, he does not die when he stings. I feel competent to
-      speak of the relative dispositions of wasps and bees, for I've been living
-      in the midst of them. There are fifteen hives in the orchard, with an
-      estimated population of a quarter of a million bees and tens of thousands
-      of wasps about the cottage. I find that I am never deliberately attacked
-      by a wasp, but when a bee begins circling around me I flee for shelter.
-      There's nothing else to do. For, unlike the wasp, the bee's hatred is
-      personal. It dislikes you as an individual for some obscure reason, and is
-      always ready to die for the satisfaction of its anger. And it dies very
-      profusely. The expert, who has been taking sections from the hives, showed
-      me her hat just now. It had nineteen stings in it, planted in as neatly as
-      thorns in a bicycle tyre.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not only in his liking for beer that the wasp resembles man. Like
-      him, too, he is an omnivorous eater. If you don't pick your pears in the
-      nick of time he will devastate them nearly as completely as the starling
-      devastates the cherry tree. He loves butcher's meat, raw or cooked, and I
-      like to see the workman-like way in which he saws off his little joint,
-      usually fat, and sails away with it for home. But his real virtue, and
-      this is why I say a good word for him, is that he is a clean fellow, and
-      is the enemy of that unclean creature the fly, especially of that supreme
-      abomination, the blow fly. His method in dealing with it is very cunning.
-      I saw him at work on the table at lunch the other day. He got the blow fly
-      down, but did not kill it. With his mandibles he sawed off one of the
-      creature's wings to prevent the possibility of escape, and then with a
-      huge effort lifted it bodily and sailed heavily away. And I confess he
-      carried my enthusiastic approval with him. There goes a whole generation
-      of flies, said I, nipped in the bud.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And let this be said for him also: he has bowels of compassion. He will
-      help a fellow in distress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Fabre records that he once observed a number of wasps taking food to one
-      that was unable to fly owing to an injury to its wings. This was continued
-      for days, and the attendant wasps were frequently seen to stroke gently
-      the injured wings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is, of course, a contra account, especially in the minds of those
-      who keep bees and have seen a host of wasps raiding a weak stock and
-      carrying the hive by storm. I am far from wishing to represent the wasp as
-      an unmitigated blessing. He is not that, and when I see a queen wasp
-      sunning herself in the early spring days I consider it my business to kill
-      her. I am sure that there will be enough without that one. But in
-      preserving the equilibrium of nature the wasp has its uses, and if we wish
-      ill to flies we ought to have a reasonable measure of tolerance for their
-      enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0012" id="linkimage-0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0040m.jpg" alt="0040m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0040.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0013" id="linkimage-0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0041m.jpg" alt="0041m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0041.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON PILLAR ROCK
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>hose, we are told,
-      who have heard the East a-calling &ldquo;never heed naught else.&rdquo; Perhaps it is
-      so; but they can never have heard the call of Lakeland at New Year. They
-      can never have scrambled up the screes of the Great Gable on winter days
-      to try a fall with the Arrow Head and the Needle, the Chimney and Kern
-      Knotts Crack; never have seen the mighty Pillar Rock beckoning them from
-      the top of Black Sail Pass, nor the inn lights far down in the valley
-      calling them back from the mountains when night has fallen; never have sat
-      round the inn fire and talked of the jolly perils of the day, or played
-      chess with the landlord&mdash;and been beaten&mdash;or gone to bed with
-      the refrain of the climbers' chorus still challenging the roar of the wind
-      outside&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Come, let us tie the rope, the rope, the rope,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Come, let us link it round, round, round.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And he that will not climb to-day
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Why&mdash;leave him on the ground, the ground, the ground.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you have done these things you will not make much of the call of the
-      temple bells and the palm trees and the spicy garlic smells&mdash;least of
-      all at New Year. You will hear instead the call of the Pillar Rock and the
-      chorus from the lonely inn. You will don your oldest clothes and wind the
-      rope around you&mdash;singing meanwhile &ldquo;the rope, the rope,&rdquo;&mdash;and
-      take the night train, and at nine or so next morning you will step out at
-      that gateway of the enchanted land&mdash;Keswick. Keswick! Wastdale!...
-      Let us pause on the music of those words.... There are men to whom they
-      open the magic casements at a breath.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And at Keswick you call on George Abraham. It would be absurd to go to
-      Keswick without calling on George Abraham. You might as well go to
-      Wastdale Head without calling on the Pillar Rock. And George tells you
-      that of course he will be over at Wastdale on New Year's Eve and will
-      climb the Pillar Rock or Scafell Pinnacle with you on New Year's Day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The trap is at the door, you mount, you wave adieus, and are soon jolting
-      down the road that runs by Derwentwater, where every object is an old
-      friend, whom absence only makes more dear. Here is the Bowder Stone and
-      there across the Lake is Causey Pike, peeping over the brow of Cat Bells.
-      (Ah! the summer days on Causey Pike, scrambling and picking wimberries and
-      waking the echoes of Grisedale.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there before us are the dark Jaws of Borrowdale and, beyond, the
-      billowy summits of Great Gable and Scafell. And all around are the rocky
-      sentinels of the valley. You know everyone and hail him by his name.
-      Perhaps you jump down at Lodore and scramble up to the Falls. Then on to
-      Rosthwaite and lunch.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And here the last rags of the lower world are shed. Fleet Street is a myth
-      and London a frenzied dream. You are at the portals of the sanctuary and
-      the great peace of the mountains is yours. You sling your rucksack on your
-      back and your rope over your shoulder and set out on the three hours'
-      tramp over Styhead Pass to Wastdale.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is dark when you reach the inn yard for the way down is long and these
-      December days are short. And on the threshold you are welcomed by the
-      landlord and landlady&mdash;heirs of Auld Will Ritson&mdash;and in the
-      flagged entrance you see coils of rope and rucksacks and a noble array of
-      climbers' boots&mdash;boots that make the heart sing to look upon, boots
-      that have struck music out of many a rocky breast, boots whose missing
-      nails has each a story of its own. You put your own among them, don your
-      slippers, and plunge among your old companions of the rocks with jolly
-      greeting and pass words. What a mingled gathering it is&mdash;a master
-      from a school in the West, a jolly lawyer from Lancashire, a young
-      clergyman, a barrister from the Temple, a manufacturer from Nottingham,
-      and so on. But the disguises they wear to the world are cast aside, and
-      the eternal boy that refuses to grow up is revealed in all of them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Who shall tell of the days and nights that follow?&mdash;of the songs that
-      are sung, and the &ldquo;traverses&rdquo; that are made round the billiard room and
-      the barn, of the talk of handholds and footholds on this and that famous
-      climb, of the letting in of the New Year, of the early breakfasts and the
-      departures for the mountains, of the nights when, tired and rich with new
-      memories, you all foregather again&mdash;save only, perhaps, the jolly
-      lawyer and his fellows who have lost their way back from Scafell, and for
-      whom you are about to send out a search party when they turn up out of the
-      darkness with new material for fireside tales.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Let us take one picture from many. It is New Year's Day&mdash;clear and
-      bright, patches of snow on the mountains and a touch of frost in the air.
-      In the hall there is a mob of gay adventurers, tying up ropes, putting on
-      putties, filling rucksacks with provisions, hunting for boots (the boots
-      are all alike, but you recognise them by your missing nails). We separate
-      at the threshold&mdash;this group for the Great Gable, that for Scafell,
-      ours, which includes George Abraham, for the Pillar Rock. It is a two and
-      a half hour's tramp thither by Black Sail Pass, and as daylight is short
-      there is no time to waste. We follow the water course up the valley,
-      splash through marshes, faintly veneered with ice, cross the stream where
-      the boulders give a decent foothold, and mount the steep ascent of Black
-      Sail. From the top of the Pass we look down lonely Ennerdale, where,
-      springing from the flank of the Pillar mountain, is the great Rock we have
-      come to challenge. It stands like a tower, gloomy, impregnable, sheer, 600
-      feet from its northern base to its summit, split on the south side by
-      Jordan Gap that divides the High Man or main rock from Pisgah, the lesser
-      rock.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have been overtaken by another party of three from the inn&mdash;one in
-      a white jersey which, for reasons that will appear, I shall always
-      remember. Together we follow the High Level Traverse, the track that leads
-      round the flank of the mountain to the top of Walker's Gully, the grim
-      descent to the valley, loved by the climber for the perils to which it
-      invites him. Here wre lunch and here we separate. We, unambitious (having
-      three passengers in our party of five), are climbing the East face by the
-      Notch and Slab route; the others are ascending by the New West route, one
-      of the more difficult climbs. Our start is here; theirs is from the other
-      side of Jordan Gap. It is not of our climb that I wish to speak, but of
-      theirs. In the old literature of the Rock you will find the Slab and Notch
-      route treated as a difficult feat; but to-day it is held in little esteem.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      With five on the rope, however, our progress is slow, and it is two
-      o'clock when we emerge from the chimney, perspiring and triumphant, and
-      stand, first of the year, on the summit of the Pillar Rock, where the wind
-      blows thin and shrill and from whence you look out over half the peaks of
-      Lakeland. We take a second lunch, inscribe our names in the book that lies
-      under the cairn, and then look down the precipice on the West face for
-      signs of our late companions. The sound of their voices comes up from
-      below, but the drop is too sheer to catch a glimpse of their forms.
-      &ldquo;They're going to be late,&rdquo; says George Abraham&mdash;the discoverer of
-      the New West&mdash;and then he indicates the closing stages of the climb
-      and the slab where on another New Year's Day occurred the most thrilling
-      escape from death in the records of the Pillar rock&mdash;two men falling,
-      and held on the rope and finally rescued by the third. Of those three,
-      two, Lewis Meryon and the Rev. W. F. Wright, perished the next year on the
-      Grand Paradis. We dismiss the unhappy memory and turn cheerfully to
-      descend by Slingsby's Crack and the Old West route which ends on the slope
-      of the mountain near to the starting point of the New West route.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day is fading fast, and the moon that is rising in the East sheds no
-      light on this face of the great tower. The voices now are quite distinct,
-      coming to us from the left. We can almost hear the directions and
-      distinguish the speakers. &ldquo;Can't understand why those lads are cutting it
-      so fine,&rdquo; says George Abraham, and he hastens our pace down cracks and
-      grooves and over ledges until we reach the screes and safety. And now we
-      look up the great cliff and in the gathering dusk one thing is visible&mdash;a
-      figure in a white jersey, with arms extended at full stretch. There it
-      hangs minute by minute as if nailed to the rocks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0014" id="linkimage-0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0047m.jpg" alt="0047m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0047.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      The party, then, are only just making the traverse from the chimney to the
-      right, the most difficult manoeuvre of the climb&mdash;a manoeuvre in
-      which one, he in the white jersey, has to remain stationary while his
-      fellows pass him. &ldquo;This is bad,&rdquo; says George Abraham and he prepares for a
-      possible emergency. &ldquo;Are you in difficulties? Shall we wait?&rdquo; he cries.
-      &ldquo;Yes, wait.&rdquo; The words rebound from the cliff in the still air like
-      stones. We wait and watch. We can see nothing but the white jersey, still
-      moveless; but every motion of the other climbers and every word they speak
-      echoes down the precipice, as if from a sounding board. You hear the
-      iron-shod feet of the climbers feeling about for footholds on the ringing
-      wall of rock. Once there is a horrible clatter as if both feet are
-      dangling over the abyss and scraping convulsively for a hold. I fancy one
-      or two of us feel a little uncomfortable as we look at each other in
-      silent comment. And all the time the figure in white, now growing dim, is
-      impaled on the face of the darkness, and the voices come down to us in
-      brief, staccato phrases. Above the rock, the moon is sailing into the
-      clear winter sky and the stars are coming out.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At last the figure in white is seen to move and soon a cheery &ldquo;All right&rdquo;
-       drops down from above. The difficult operation is over, the scattered
-      rocks are reached and nothing remains but the final slabs, which in the
-      absence of ice offer no great difficulty. Their descent by the easy Jordan
-      route will be quick. We turn to go with the comment that it is perhaps
-      more sensational to watch a climb than to do one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And then we plunge over the debris behind Pisgah, climb up the Great Doup,
-      where the snow lies crisp and deep, until we reach the friendly fence that
-      has guided many a wanderer in the darkness down to the top of Black Sail
-      Pass. From thence the way is familiar, and two hours later we have
-      rejoined the merry party round the board at the inn.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a few days it is all over. This one is back in the Temple, that one to
-      his office, a third to his pulpit, another to his mill, and all seem
-      prosaic and ordinary. But they will carry with them a secret music. Say
-      only the word &ldquo;Wastdale&rdquo; to them and you shall awake its echoes; then you
-      shall see their faces light up with the emotion of incommunicable things.
-      They are no longer men of the world; they are spirits of the mountains.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0015" id="linkimage-0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0049m.jpg" alt="0049m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0049.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0016" id="linkimage-0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0050m.jpg" alt="0050m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0050.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      TWO VOICES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">Y</span>es,&rdquo; said the man
-      with the big voice, &ldquo;I've seen it coming for years. Years.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Have you?&rdquo; said the man with the timid voice. He had taken his seat on
-      the top of the bus beside the big voice and had spoken of the tube strike
-      that had suddenly paralysed the traffic of London.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, years,&rdquo; said big voice, crowding as much modesty into the admission
-      as possible. &ldquo;I'm a long-sighted man. I see things a long way off. Suppose
-      I'm a bit psychic. That's what I'm told. A bit psychic.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said timid voice, doubtful, I thought, as to the meaning of the
-      word, but firm in admiring acceptance of whatever it meant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, I saw it coming for years. Lloyd George&mdash;that's the man that up
-      to it before the war with his talk about the dukes and property and
-      things. I said then, 'You see if this don't make trouble.' Why, his
-      speeches got out to Russia and started them there. And now's it's come
-      back. I always said it would. I said we should pay for it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you, though?&rdquo; observed timid voice&mdash;not questioningly, but as an
-      assurance that he was listening attentively.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, the same with the war. I see it coming for years&mdash;years, I did.
-      And if they'd taken my advice it' ud have been over in no time. In the
-      first week I said: 'What we've got to do is to build 1000 aeroplanes and
-      train 10,000 pilots and make 2000 torpedo craft.' That's what I said. But
-      was it done?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Of course not,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I saw it all with my long sight. It's a way I have. I don't know why, but
-      there it is. I'm not much at the platform business&mdash;tub-thumping, I
-      call it&mdash;but for seeing things far off&mdash;well, I'm a bit psychic,
-      you know.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah,&rdquo; said timid voice, mournfully, &ldquo;it's a pity some of those talking
-      fellows are not psychic, too.&rdquo; He'd got the word firmly now.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Them psychic!&rdquo; said big voice, with scorn. &ldquo;We know what they are. You
-      see that Miss Asquith is marrying a Roumanian prince. Mark my word, he'll
-      turn out to be a German, that's what he'll turn out to be. It's German
-      money all round. Same with these strikes. There's German money behind
-      them.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Shouldn't wonder at all,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I know,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;I've a way of seeing things. The same in the
-      Boer War. I saw that coming for years.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you, indeed?&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes. I wrote it down, and showed it to some of my friends. There it was
-      in black and white. They said it was wonderful how it all turned out&mdash;two
-      years, I said, 250 millions of money, and 20,000 casualties. That's what I
-      said, and that's what it was. I said the Boers would win, and I claim they
-      did win, seeing old Campbell Bannerman gave them all they asked for.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;You were about right,&rdquo; assented timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And now look at Lloyd George. Why, Wilson is twisting him round his
-      finger&mdash;that's what he's doing. Just twisting him round his finger.
-      Wants a League of Nations, says Wilson, and then he starts building a
-      fleet as big as ours.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Never did like that man,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's him that has let the Germans escape. That's what the armistice
-      means. They've escaped&mdash;and just when we'd got them down.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's a shame,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;This war ought to have gone on longer,&rdquo; continued big voice. &ldquo;My opinion
-      is that the world wanted thinning out. People are too crowded. That's what
-      they are&mdash;they're too crowded.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I agree there,&rdquo; said timid voice. &ldquo;We wanted thinning.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I consider we haven't been thinned out half enough yet. It ought to have
-      gone on, and it would have gone on but for Wilson. I should like to know
-      his little game. 'Keep your eye on Wilson,' says <i>John Bull</i>, and
-      that's what I say. Seems to me he's one of the artful sort. I saw a case
-      down at Portsmouth. Secretary of a building society&mdash;regular
-      chapel-goer, teetotaller, and all that. One day the building society went
-      smash, and Mr Chapel-goer had got off with the lot.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I don't like those goody-goody people,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;William Shakespeare hit it oh. Wonderful what that
-      man knew. 'All the world's a stage, and all the men and women players,' he
-      said. Strordinary how he knew things.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Wonderful,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;There's never been a man since who knew half what William Shakespeare
-      knew&mdash;not one-half.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No doubt about it,&rdquo; said timid voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I consider that William Shakespeare was the most psychic man that ever
-      lived. I don't suppose there was ever such a long-sighted man before <i>or</i>
-      since. He could see through anything. He'd have seen through Wilson and
-      he'd have seen this war didn't stop before the job was done. It's a pity
-      we haven't a William Shakespeare now. Lloyd George and Asquith are not in
-      it with him. They're simply duds beside William Shakespeare. Couldn't hold
-      a candle to him.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Seems to me,&rdquo; said timid voice, &ldquo;that there's nobody, as you might say,
-      worth anything to-day.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; said big voice. &ldquo;We've gone right off. There used to be men. Old
-      Dizzy, he was a man. So was Joseph Chamberlain. He was right about Tariff
-      Reform. I saw it years before he did. Free Trade I said was all right
-      years ago, when we were manufacturing for the world. But it's out of date.
-      I saw it was out of date long before Joseph Chamberlain. It's the result
-      of being long-sighted. I said to my father, 'If we stick to Free Trade
-      this country is done.' That's what I said, and it's true. We <i>are</i>
-      done. Look at these strikes. We stick to things too long. I believe in
-      looking ahead. When I was in America before the war they wouldn't believe
-      I came from England. Wouldn't believe it. 'But the English are so slow,'
-      they said, 'and you&mdash;why you want to be getting on in front of us.'
-      That's my way. I look ahead and don't stand still.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's the best way too,&rdquo; said timid voice. &ldquo;We want more of it. We're too
-      slow.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And so on. When I came to the end of my journey I rose so that the light
-      of a lamp shone on the speakers as I passed. They were both well-dressed,
-      ordinary-looking men. If I had passed them in the street I should have
-      said they were intelligent men of the well-to-do business class. I have
-      set down their conversation, which I could not help overhearing, and which
-      was carried on by the big voice in a tone meant for publication, as
-      exactly as I can recall it. There was a good deal more of it, all of the
-      same character. You will laugh at it, or weep over it, according to your
-      humour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0017" id="linkimage-0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0055m.jpg" alt="0055m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0055.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING TIDY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>ny careful
-      observer of my habits would know that I am on the eve of an adventure&mdash;a
-      holiday, or a bankruptcy, or a fire, or a voluntary liquidation (whatever
-      that may be), or an elopement, or a duel, or a conspiracy, or&mdash;in
-      short, of something out of the normal, something romantic or dangerous,
-      pleasurable or painful, interrupting the calm current of my affairs. Being
-      the end of July, he would probably say: That fellow is on the brink of the
-      holiday fever. He has all the symptoms of the epidemic. Observe his
-      negligent, abstracted manner. Notice his slackness about business&mdash;how
-      he just comes and looks in and goes out as though he were a visitor paying
-      a call, or a person who had been left a fortune and didn't care twopence
-      what happened. Observe his clothes, how they are burgeoning into
-      unaccustomed gaiety, even levity. Is not his hat set on at just a shade of
-      a sporting angle? Does not his stick twirl with a hint of irresponsible
-      emotions? Is there not the glint of far horizons in his eye? Did you not
-      hear him humming as he came up the stairs? Yes, assuredly the fellow is
-      going for a holiday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Your suspicions would be confirmed when you found me ransacking my private
-      room and clearing up my desk. The news that I am clearing up my desk has
-      been an annual sensation for years. I remember a colleague of mine once
-      coming in and finding me engaged in that spectacular feat. His face fell
-      with apprehension. His voice faltered. &ldquo;I hope you are not leaving us,&rdquo; he
-      said. He, poor fellow, could not think of anything else that could account
-      for so unusual an operation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For I am one of those people who treat their desks with respect. We do not
-      believe in worrying them about their contents. We do not bully them into
-      disclosing their secrets. We stuff the drawers full of papers and
-      documents, and leave them to mellow and ripen. And when the drawers are
-      full we pile up other papers and documents on either side of us; and the
-      higher the pile gets the more comfortable and cosy we feel. We would not
-      disturb them for worlds. Why should we set our sleeping dogs barking at us
-      when they are willing to go on sleeping if we leave them alone? And
-      consider the show they make. No one coming to see us can fail to be
-      impressed by such piles of documents. They realise how busy we are. They
-      understand that we have no time for idle talk. They see that we have all
-      these papers to dispose of&mdash;otherwise, why are they there? They get
-      their business done and go away quickly, and spread the news of what
-      tremendous fellows we are for work.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am told by one who worked with him, that old Lord Strathcona knew the
-      trick quite well, and used it unblushingly. When a visitor was announced
-      he tumbled his papers about in imposing confusion and was discovered
-      breasting the mighty ocean of his labours, his chin resolutely out of the
-      water. But he was a supreme artist in this form of amiable imposture. On
-      one occasion he was entertained at a great public dinner in a provincial
-      city. In the midst of the proceedings a portly flunkey was observed
-      carrying a huge envelope, with seals and trappings, on a salver. For whom
-      was this momentous document intended? Ah, he has paused behind the grand
-      old man with the wonderful snowy head. It is for him. The company looks on
-      in respectful silence. Even here this astonishing old man cannot escape
-      the cares of office. As he takes the envelope his neighbour at the table
-      looks at the address. It was in Strathcona's own hand-writing!
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we of the rank and file are not dishevelled by artifice, like this
-      great man. It is a natural gift. And do not suppose that our disorder
-      makes us unhappy. We like it. We follow our vocation, as Falstaff says.
-      Some people are born tidy and some are born untidy. We were bom untidy,
-      and if good people, taking pity on us, try to make us tidy we get lost. It
-      was so with George Crabbe. He lived in magnificent disorder, papers and
-      books and letters all over the floor, piled on every chair, surging up to
-      the ceiling. Once, in his absence, his niece tidied up for him. When he
-      came back he found himself like a stranger in a strange land. He did not
-      know his way about in this desolation of tidiness, and he promptly
-      restored the familiar disorder, so that he could find things. It sounds
-      absurd, of course, but we people with a genius for untidiness must always
-      seem absurd to the tidy people. They cannot understand that there is a
-      method in our muddle, an order in our disorder, secret paths through the
-      wilderness known only to our feet, that, in short, we are rather like cats
-      whose perceptions become more acute the darker it gets. It is not true
-      that we never find things. We often find things.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And consider the joy of finding things you don't hope to find. You, sir,
-      sitting at your spotless desk, with your ordered and labelled shelves
-      about you, and your files and your letter-racks, and your card indexes and
-      your cross references, and your this, that, and the other&mdash;what do
-      you know of the delights of which I speak? You do not come suddenly and
-      ecstatically upon the thing you seek. You do not know the shock of
-      delighted discovery. You do not shout &ldquo;Eureka,&rdquo; and summon your family
-      around you to rejoice in the miracle that has happened. No star swims into
-      your ken out of the void. You cannot be said to find things at all, for
-      you never lose them, and things must be lost before they can be truly
-      found. The father of the Prodigal had to lose his son before he could
-      experience the joy that has become an immortal legend of the world. It is
-      we who lose things, not you, sir, who never find them, who know the Feast
-      of the Fatted Calf.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not a plea for untidiness. I am no hot gospeller of disorder. I
-      only seek to make the best, of a bad job, and to show that we untidy
-      fellows are not without a case, have our romantic compensations, moments
-      of giddy exaltation unknown to those who are endowed with the pedestrian
-      and profitable virtue of tidiness. That is all. I would have the
-      pedestrian virtue if I could. In other days, before I had given up hope of
-      reforming myself, and when I used to make good resolutions as piously as
-      my neighbours, I had many a spasm of tidiness. I looked with envy on my
-      friend Higginson, who was a miracle of order, could put his hand on
-      anything he wanted in the dark, kept his documents and his files and
-      records like regiments of soldiers obedient to call, knew what he had
-      written on 4th March 1894, and what he had said on 10th January 1901, and
-      had a desk that simply perspired with tidiness. And in a spirit of
-      emulation I bought a roll-top desk. I believed that tidiness was a
-      purchasable commodity. You went to a furniture dealer and bought a large
-      roll-top desk, and when it came home the genius of order came home with
-      it. The bigger the desk, the more intricate its devices, the larger was
-      the measure of order bestowed on you. My desk was of the first magnitude.
-      It had an inconceivable wealth of drawers and pigeon-holes. It was a desk
-      of many mansions. And I labelled them all, and gave them all separate jobs
-      to perform.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And then I sat back and looked the future boldly in the face. Now, said I,
-      the victory is won. Chaos and old night are banished. Order reigns in
-      Warsaw. I have but to open a drawer and every secret I seek will leap
-      magically to light. My articles will write themselves, for every reference
-      will come to my call, obedient as Ariel to the bidding of Prospero.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;Approach, my Ariel; come,&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I shall say, and from some remote fastness the obedient spirit will appear
-      with&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;All hail, great master; grave sir, hail! I come
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      To answer thy best pleasure; be 't to fly,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      To swim, to dive into the sea, to ride
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      On the curl'd clouds.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I shall know where Aunt Jane's letters are, and where my bills are, and my
-      cuttings about this, that, and the other, and my diaries and notebooks,
-      and the time-table and the street guide. I shall never be short of a match
-      or a spare pair of spectacles, or a pencil, or&mdash;in short, life will
-      henceforth be an easy amble to old age. For a week it worked like a charm.
-      Then the demon of disorder took possession of the beast. It devoured
-      everything and yielded up nothing. Into its soundless deeps my merchandise
-      sank to oblivion. And I seemed to sink with it. It was not a desk, but a
-      tomb. One day I got a man to take it away to a second-hand shop.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Since then I have given up being tidy. I have realised that the quality of
-      order is not purchasable at furniture shops, is not a quality of external
-      things, but an indwelling spirit, a frame of mind, a habit that perhaps
-      may be acquired but cannot be bought.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have a smaller desk with fewer drawers, all of them nicely choked up
-      with the litter of the past. Once a year I have a gaol delivery of the
-      incarcerated. The ghosts come out into the daylight, and I face them
-      unflinching and unafraid. They file past, pointing minatory fingers at me
-      as they go into the waste-paper basket. They file past now. But I do not
-      care a dump; for to-morrow I shall seek fresh woods and pastures new.
-      To-morrow the ghosts of that old untidy desk will have no terrors for my
-      emancipated spirit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0018" id="linkimage-0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0061m.jpg" alt="0061m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0061.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0019" id="linkimage-0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0062m.jpg" alt="0062m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0062.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      AN EPISODE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e were talking of
-      the distinction between madness and sanity when one of the company said
-      that we were all potential madmen, just as every gambler was a potential
-      suicide, or just as every hero was a potential coward.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I mean,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that the difference between the sane and the insane is
-      not that the sane man never has mad thoughts. He has, but he recognises
-      them as mad, and keeps his hand on the rein of action. He thinks them, and
-      dismisses them. It is so with the saint and the sinner. The saint is not
-      exempt from evil thoughts, but he knows they are evil, is master of
-      himself, and puts them away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I speak with experience,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;for the potential madman in me
-      once nearly got the upper hand. I won, but it was a near thing, and if I
-      had gone down in that struggle I should have been branded for all time as
-      a criminal lunatic, and very properly put away in some place of safety.
-      Yet I suppose no one ever suspected me of lunacy.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Tell us about it,&rdquo; we said in chorus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It was one evening in New York,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I had had a very exhausting
-      time, and was no doubt mentally tired. I had taken tea with two friends at
-      the Belmont Hotel, and as we found we were all disengaged that evening we
-      agreed to spend it together at the Hippodrome, where a revue, winding up
-      with a great spectacle that had thrilled New York, was being presented.
-      When we went to the box office we found that we could not get three seats
-      together, so we separated, my friends going to the floor of the house and
-      I to the dress circle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;If you are familiar with the place you will know its enormous dimensions
-      and the vastness of the stage. When I took my seat next but one to one of
-      the gangways the house was crowded and the performance had begun. It was
-      trivial and ordinary enough, but it kept me amused, and between the acts I
-      went out to see the New Yorkers taking 'soft' drinks in the promenades. I
-      did not join them in that mild indulgence, nor did I speak to anyone.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;After the interval before the concluding spectacle I did not return to my
-      seat until the curtain was up. The transformation hit me like a blow. The
-      huge stage had been converted into a lake, and behind the lake through
-      filmy draperies there was the suggestion of a world in flames. I passed to
-      my seat and sat down. I turned from the blinding glow of the conflagration
-      in front and cast my eye over the sea of faces that filled the great
-      theatre from floor to ceiling. 'Heavens! if there were a fire in this
-      place,' I thought. At that thought the word 'Fire' blazed in my brain like
-      a furnace. 'What if some madman cried Fire?' flashed through my mind, and
-      then '<i>What if I cried Fire?</i>'
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;At that hideous suggestion, the demon word that suffused my brain leapt
-      like a shrieking maniac within me and screamed and fought for utterance. I
-      felt it boiling in my throat, I felt it on my tongue. I felt myself to be
-      two persons engaged in a deadly grapple&mdash;a sane person struggling to
-      keep his feet against the mad rush of an insane monster. I clenched my
-      teeth. So long as I kept my teeth tight&mdash;tight&mdash;tight the raging
-      madman would fling himself at the bars in vain. But could I keep up the
-      struggle till he fell exhausted? I gripped the arms of my seat. I felt
-      beads of perspiration breaking out on my right brow. How singular that in
-      moments of strain the moisture always broke out at that spot. I could
-      notice these things with a curious sense of detachment as if there were a
-      third person within me watching the frenzied conflict. And still that
-      titanic impulse lay on my tongue and hammered madly at my clenched teeth.
-      Should I go out? That would look odd, and be an ignominious surrender. I
-      must fight this folly down honestly and not run away from it. If I had a
-      book I would try to read. If I had a friend beside me I would talk. But
-      both these expedients were denied me. Should I turn to my unknown
-      neighbour and break the spell with an inconsequent remark or a request for
-      his programme? I looked at him out of the tail of my eye. He was a
-      youngish man, in evening dress, and sitting alone as I was. But his eyes
-      were fixed intently on the stage. He was obviously gripped by the
-      spectacle. Had I spoken to him earlier in the evening the course would
-      have been simple; but to break the ice in the midst of this tense silence
-      was impossible. Moreover, I had a programme on my knees and what was there
-      to say?...
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I turned my eyes from the stage. What was going on there I could not
-      tell. It was a blinding blur of Fire that seemed to infuriate the monster
-      within me. I looked round at the house. I looked up at the ceiling and
-      marked its gilded ornaments. I turned and gazed intensely at the occupants
-      of the boxes, trying to turn the current of my mind into speculations
-      about their dress, their faces, their characters. But the tyrant was too
-      strong to be overthrown by such conscious effort. I looked up at the
-      gallery; I looked down at the pit; I tried to busy my thoughts with
-      calculations about the numbers present, the amount of money in the house,
-      the cost of running the establishment&mdash;anything. In vain. I leaned
-      back in my seat, my teeth still clenched, my hands still gripping the arms
-      of the chair. How still the house was! How enthralled it seemed!... I was
-      conscious that people about me were noticing my restless inattention. If
-      they knew the truth.... If they could see the raging torment that was
-      battering at my teeth.... Would it never go? How long would this wild
-      impulse burn on my tongue? Was there no distraction that would
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Cleanse the stuffed bosom of this perilous stuff
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That feeds upon the brain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I recalled the reply&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Therein the patient must minister to himself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;How fantastic it seemed. Here was that cool observer within me quoting
-      poetry over my own delirium without being able to allay it. What a mystery
-      was the brain that could become the theatre of such wild drama. I turned
-      my glance to the orchestra. Ah, what was that they were playing?... Yes,
-      it was a passage from Dvorak's American Symphony. How familiar it was! My
-      mind incontinently leapt to a remote scene, I saw a well-lit room and
-      children round the hearth and a figure at the piano....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It was as though the madman within me had fallen stone dead. I looked at
-      the stage coolly, and observed that someone was diving into the lake from
-      a trapeze that seemed a hundred feet high. The glare was still behind, but
-      I knew it for a sham glare. What a fool I had been.... But what a hideous
-      time I had had.... And what a close shave.... I took out my handkerchief
-      and drew it across my forehead.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0020" id="linkimage-0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0066m.jpg" alt="0066m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0066.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0021" id="linkimage-0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0067m.jpg" alt="0067m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0067.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <h3>
-      ON SUPERSTITIONS
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was inevitable
-      that the fact that a murder has taken place at a house with the number 13
-      in a street, the letters of whose name number 13, would not pass
-      unnoticed. If we took the last hundred murders that have been committed, I
-      suppose we should find that as many have taken place at No. 6 or No. 7, or
-      any other number you choose, as at No. 13&mdash;that the law of averages
-      is as inexorable here as elsewhere. But this consideration does not
-      prevent the world remarking on the fact when No. 13 has its turn. Not that
-      the world believes there is anything in the superstition. It is quite sure
-      it is a mere childish folly, of course. Few of us would refuse to take a
-      house because its number was 13, or decline an invitation to dinner
-      because there were to be 13 at table. But most of us would be just a shade
-      happier if that desirable residence were numbered 11, and not any the less
-      pleased with the dinner if one of the guests contracted a chill that kept
-      him away. We would not confess this little weakness to each other. We
-      might even refuse to admit it to ourselves, but it is there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That it exists is evident from many irrefutable signs. There are numerous
-      streets in London, and I daresay in other towns too, in which there is no
-      house numbered 13, and I am told that it is very rare that a bed in a
-      hospital bears that number. The superstition, threadbare though it has
-      worn, is still sufficiently real to enter into the calculations of a
-      discreet landlord in regard to the letting qualities of his house, and
-      into the calculations of a hospital as to the curative properties of a
-      bed. In the latter case general agreement would support the concession to
-      the superstition, idle though that superstition is. Physical recovery is a
-      matter of the mind as well as of the body, and the slightest shadow on the
-      mind may, in a condition of low vitality, retard and even defeat recovery.
-      Florence Nightingale's almost passionate advocacy of flowers in the sick
-      bedroom was based on the necessity of the creation of a certain state of
-      mind in the patient. There are few more curious revelations in that moving
-      record by M. Duhamel of medical experiences during the war, than the case
-      of the man who died of a pimple on his nose. He had been hideously
-      mutilated in battle and was brought into hospital a sheer wreck; but he
-      was slowly patched up and seemed to have been saved when a pimple appeared
-      on his nose. It was nothing in itself, but it was enough to produce a
-      mental state that checked the flickering return of life. It assumed a
-      fantastic importance in the mind of the patient who, having survived the
-      heavy blows of fate, died of something less than a pin prick. It is not
-      difficult to understand that so fragile a hold of life might yield to the
-      sudden discovery that you were lying in No. 13 bed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not sure that I could go into the witness-box and swear that I am
-      wholly immune to these idle superstitions myself. It is true that of all
-      the buses in London, that numbered 13 chances to be the one that I
-      constantly use, and I do not remember, until now, ever to have associated
-      the superstition with it. And certainly I have never had anything but the
-      most civil treatment from it. It is as well behaved a bus, and as free
-      from unpleasant associations as any on the road. I would not change its
-      number if I had the power to do so. But there are other circumstances of
-      which I should find it less easy to clear myself of suspicion under cross
-      examination. I never see a ladder against a house side without feeling
-      that it is advisable to walk round it rather than under it. I say to
-      myself that this is not homage to a foolish superstition, but a duty to my
-      family. One must think of one's family. The fellow at the top of the
-      ladder may drop anything. He may even drop himself. He may have had too
-      much to drink. He may be a victim of epileptic fits, and epileptic fits,
-      as everyone knows, come on at the most unseasonable times and places. It
-      is a mere measure of ordinary safety to walk round the ladder. No man is
-      justified in inviting danger in order to flaunt his superiority to an idle
-      fancy. Moreover, probably that fancy has its roots in the common-sense
-      fact that a man on a ladder does occasionally drop things. No doubt many
-      of our superstitions have these commonplace and sensible origins. I
-      imagine, for example, that the Jewish objection to pork as unclean on
-      religious grounds is only due to the fact that in Eastern climates it is
-      unclean on physical grounds.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the same, I suspect that when I walk round the ladder I am rather glad
-      that I have such respectable and unassailable reasons for doing so. Even
-      if&mdash;conscious of this suspicion and ashamed to admit it to myself&mdash;I
-      walk under the ladder I am not quite sure that I have not done so as a
-      kind of negative concession to the superstition. I have challenged it
-      rather than been unconscious of it. There is only one way of dodging the
-      absurd dilemma, and that is to walk through the ladder. This is not easy.
-      In the same way I am sensible of a certain satisfaction when I see the new
-      moon in the open rather than through glass, and over my right shoulder
-      rather than my left. I would not for any consideration arrange these
-      things consciously; but if they happen so I fancy I am better pleased than
-      if they do not. And on these occasions I have even caught my hand&mdash;which
-      chanced to be in my pocket at the time&mdash;turning over money, a little
-      surreptitiously I thought, but still undeniably turning it. Hands have
-      habits of their own and one can't always be watching them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But these shadowy reminiscences of antique credulity which we discover in
-      ourselves play no part in the lives of any of us. They belong to a creed
-      outworn. Superstition was disinherited when science revealed the laws of
-      the universe and put man in his place. It was no discredit to be
-      superstitious when all the functions of nature were unexplored, and man
-      seemed the plaything of beneficent or sinister forces that he could
-      neither control nor understand, but which held him in the hollow of their
-      hand. He related everything that happened in nature to his own
-      inexplicable existence, saw his fate in the clouds, his happiness or
-      misery announced in the flight of birds, and referred every phenomenon of
-      life to the soothsayers and oracles. You may read in Thucydides of battles
-      being postponed (and lost) because some omen that had no more relation to
-      the event than the falling of a leaf was against it. When Pompey was
-      afraid that the Romans would elect Cato as prætor he shouted to the
-      Assembly that he heard thunder, and got the whole election postponed, for
-      the Romans would never transact business after it had thundered. Alexander
-      surrounded himself with fortune tellers and took counsel with them as a
-      modern ruler takes counsel with his Ministers. Even so great a man as
-      Cæsar and so modern and enlightened a man as Cicero left their fate to
-      augurs and omens. Sometimes the omens were right and sometimes they were
-      wrong, but whether right or wrong they were equally meaningless. Cicero
-      lost his life by trusting to the wisdom of crows. When he was in flight
-      from Antony and Cæsar Augustus he put to sea and might have escaped. But
-      some crows chanced to circle round his vessel, and he took the
-      circumstance to be unfavourable to his action, returned to shore and was
-      murdered. Even the farmer of ancient Greece consulted the omens and the
-      oracles where the farmer to-day is only careful of his manures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I should have liked to have seen Cæsar and I should have liked to have
-      heard Cicero, but on the balance I think we who inherit this later day and
-      who can jest at the shadows that were so real to them have the better end
-      of time. It is pleasant to be about when the light is abroad. We do not
-      know much more of the Power that
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Turns the handle of this idle show
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      than our forefathers did, but at least we have escaped the grotesque
-      shadows that enveloped them. We do not look for divine guidance in the
-      entrails of animals or the flight of crows, and the House of Commons does
-      not adjourn at a clap of thunder.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0022" id="linkimage-0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0072m.jpg" alt="0072m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0072.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0023" id="linkimage-0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0073m.jpg" alt="0073m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0073.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON POSSESSION
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> met a lady the
-      other day who had travelled much and seen much, and who talked with great
-      vivacity about her experiences. But I noticed one peculiarity about her.
-      If I happened to say that I too had been, let us say, to Tangier, her
-      interest in Tangier immediately faded away and she switched the
-      conversation on to, let us say, Cairo, where I had not been, and where
-      therefore she was quite happy. And her enthusiasm about the Honble. Ulick
-      de Tompkins vanished when she found that I had had the honour of meeting
-      that eminent personage. And so with books and curiosities, places and
-      things&mdash;she was only interested in them so long as they were her
-      exclusive property. She had the itch of possession, and when she ceased to
-      possess she ceased to enjoy. If she could not have Tangier all to herself
-      she did not want it at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the chief trouble in this perplexing world is that there are so many
-      people afflicted like her with the mania of owning things that really do
-      not need to be owned in order to be enjoyed. Their experiences must be
-      exclusive or they have no pleasure in them. I have heard of a man who
-      countermanded an order for an etching when he found that someone else in
-      the same town had bought a copy. It was not the beauty of the etching that
-      appealed to him: it was the petty and childish notion that he was getting
-      something that no one else had got, and when he found that someone else
-      had got it its value ceased to exist.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, of course, is that such a man could never possess anything in
-      the only sense that matters. For possession is a spiritual and not a
-      material thing. I do not own&mdash;to take an example&mdash;that wonderful
-      picture by Ghirlandajo of the bottle-nosed old man looking at his
-      grandchild. I have not even a good print of it. But if it hung in my own
-      room I could not have more pleasure out of it than I have experienced for
-      years. It is among the imponderable treasures stored away in the galleries
-      of the mind with memorable sunsets I have seen and noble books I have
-      read, and beautiful actions or faces that I remember. I can enjoy it
-      whenever I like and recall all the tenderness and humanity that the
-      painter saw in the face of that plain old Italian gentleman with the
-      bottle nose as he stood gazing down at the face of his grandson long
-      centuries ago. The pleasure is not diminished by the fact that all may
-      share this spiritual ownership, any more than my pleasure in the sunshine,
-      or the shade of a fine beech, or the smell of a hedge of sweetbrier, or
-      the song of the lark in the meadow is diminished by the thought that it is
-      common to all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From my window I look on the slope of a fine hill crowned with beech
-      woods. On the other side of the hill there are sylvan hollows of solitude
-      which cannot have changed their appearance since the ancient Britons
-      hunted in these woods two thousand years ago. In the legal sense a certain
-      noble lord is the owner. He lives far off and I doubt whether he has seen
-      these woods once in ten years. But I and the children of the little hamlet
-      know every glade and hollow of these hills and have them for a perpetual
-      playground. We do not own a square foot of them, but we could not have a
-      richer enjoyment of them if we owned every leaf on every tree. For the
-      pleasure of things is not in their possession but in their use.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was the exclusive spirit of my lady friend that Juvenal satirised long
-      ago in those lines in which he poured ridicule on the people who scurried
-      through the Alps, not in order to enjoy them, but in order to say that
-      they had done something that other people had not done. Even so great a
-      man as Wordsworth was not free from this disease of exclusive possession.
-      De Quincey tells that, standing with him one day looking at the mountains,
-      he (De Quincey) expressed his admiration of the scene, whereupon
-      Wordsworth turned his back on him. He would not permit anyone else to
-      praise <i>his</i> mountains. He was the high priest of nature, and had
-      something of the priestly arrogance. He was the medium of revelation, and
-      anyone who worshipped the mountains in his presence, except through him,
-      was guilty of an impertinence both to him and to nature.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the ideal world of Plato there was no such thing as exclusive
-      possession. Even wives and children were to be held in common, and Bernard
-      Shaw to-day regards the exclusiveness of the home as the enemy of the free
-      human spirit. I cannot attain to these giddy heights of communism. On this
-      point I am with Aristotle. He assailed Plato's doctrine and pointed out
-      that the State is not a mere individual, but a body composed of dissimilar
-      parts whose unity is to be drawn &ldquo;ex dissimilium hominum consensu.&rdquo; I am
-      as sensitive as anyone about my title to my personal possessions. I
-      dislike having my umbrella stolen or my pocket picked, and if I found a
-      burglar on my premises I am sure I shouldn't be able to imitate the
-      romantic example of the good bishop in &ldquo;Les Misérables.&rdquo; When I found the
-      other day that some young fruit trees I had left in my orchard for
-      planting had been removed in the night I was sensible of a very
-      commonplace anger. If I had known who my Jean Valjean was I shouldn't have
-      asked him to come and take some more trees. I should have invited him to
-      return what he had removed or submit to consequences that follow in such
-      circumstances.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I cannot conceive a society in which private property will not be a
-      necessary condition of life. I may be wrong. The war has poured human
-      society into the melting pot, and he would be a daring person who ventured
-      to forecast the shape in which it will emerge a generation or two hence.
-      Ideas are in the saddle, and tendencies beyond our control and the range
-      of our speculation are at work shaping our future. If mankind finds that
-      it can live more conveniently and more happily without private property it
-      will do so. In spite of the Decalogue private property is only a human
-      arrangement, and no reasonable observer of the operation of the
-      arrangement will pretend that it executes justice unfailingly in the
-      affairs of men. But because the idea of private property has been
-      permitted to override with its selfishness the common good of humanity, it
-      does not follow that there are not limits within which that idea can
-      function for the general convenience and advantage. The remedy is not in
-      abolishing it altogether, but in subordinating it to the idea of equal
-      justice and community of purpose. It will, reasonably understood, deny me
-      the right to call the coal measures, which were laid with the foundations
-      of the earth, my private property or to lay waste a countryside for deer
-      forests, but it will still leave me a legitimate and sufficient sphere of
-      ownership. And the more true the equation of private and public rights is,
-      the more secure shall I be in those possessions which the common sense and
-      common interest of men ratify as reasonable and desirable. It is the
-      grotesque and iniquitous wrongs associated with a predatory conception of
-      private property which to some minds make the idea of private property
-      itself inconsistent with a just and tolerable social system. When the idea
-      of private property is restricted to limits which command the sanction of
-      the general thought and experience of society, it will be in no danger of
-      attack. I shall be able to leave my fruit trees out in the orchard without
-      any apprehensions as to their safety.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But while I neither desire nor expect to see the abolition of private
-      ownership, I see nothing but evil in the hunger to possess exclusively
-      things, the common use of which does not diminish the fund of enjoyment. I
-      do not care how many people see Tangier: my personal memory of the
-      experience will remain in its integrity. The itch to own things for the
-      mere pride of possession is the disease of petty, vulgar minds. &ldquo;I do not
-      know how it is,&rdquo; said a very rich man in my hearing, &ldquo;but when I am in
-      London I want to be in the country and when I am in the country I want to
-      be in London.&rdquo; He was not wanting to escape from London or the country,
-      but from himself. He had sold himself to his great possessions and was
-      bankrupt. In the words of a great preacher &ldquo;his hands were full but his
-      soul was empty, and an empty soul makes an empty world.&rdquo; There was wisdom
-      as well as wit in that saying of the Yoloffs that &ldquo;he who was born first
-      has the greatest number of old clothes.&rdquo; It is not a bad rule for the
-      pilgrimage of this world to travel light and leave the luggage to those
-      who take a pride in its abundance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0024" id="linkimage-0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0078m.jpg" alt="0078m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0078.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0025" id="linkimage-0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0079m.jpg" alt="0079m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0079.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0011" id="link2H_4_0011"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BORES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was talking in
-      the smoking-room of a club with a man of somewhat blunt manner when
-      Blossom came up, clapped him on the shoulder, and began:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, I think America is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; &ldquo;Now, do you mind giving
-      us two minutes?&rdquo; broke in the other, with harsh emphasis. Blossom,
-      unabashed and unperturbed, moved off to try his opening on another group.
-      Poor Blossom! I had almost said &ldquo;Dear Blossom.&rdquo; For he is really an
-      excellent fellow. The only thing that is the matter with Blossom is that
-      he is a bore. He has every virtue except the virtue of being desirable
-      company. You feel that you could love Blossom if he would only keep away.
-      If you heard of his death you would be genuinely grieved and would send a
-      wreath to his grave and a nice letter of condolence to his wife and
-      numerous children.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it is only absence that makes the heart grow fond of Blossom. When he
-      appears all your affection for him withers. You hope that he will not see
-      you. You shrink to your smallest dimensions. You talk with an air of
-      intense privacy. You keep your face averted. You wonder whether the back
-      of your head is easily distinguishable among so many heads. All in vain.
-      He approacheth with the remorselessness of fate. He putteth his hand upon
-      your shoulder. He remarketh with the air of one that bringeth new new's
-      and good news&mdash;&ldquo;Well, I think that America is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
-       And then he taketh a chair and thou lookest at the clock and wonderest how
-      soon thou canst decently remember another engagement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Blossom is the bore courageous. He descends on the choicest company
-      without fear or parley. Out, sword, and at 'em, is his motto. He advances
-      with a firm voice and a confident air, as of one who knows he is welcome
-      everywhere and has only to choose his company. He will have nothing but
-      the best, and as he enters the room you may see his eye roving from table
-      to table, not in search of the glad eye of recognition, but of the most
-      select companionship, and having marked down his prey he goes forward
-      boldly to the attack. Salutes the circle with easy familiarity, draw's up
-      his chair with assured and masterful authority, and plunges into the
-      stream of talk with the heavy impact of a walrus or hippopotamus taking a
-      bath. The company around him melts away, but he is not dismayed. Left
-      alone with a circle of empty chairs, he riseth like a giant refreshed,
-      casteth his eye abroad, noteth another group that whetteth his appetite
-      for good fellowship, moveth towards it with bold and resolute front. You
-      may see him put to flight as many as three circles inside an hour, and
-      retire at the end, not because he is beaten, but because there is nothing
-      left worth crossing swords with. &ldquo;A very good club to-night,&rdquo; he says to
-      Mrs B. as he puts on his slippers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not so Trip. He is the bore circumspect. He proceeds by sap and mine where
-      Blossom charges the battlements sword in hand. He enters timidly as one
-      who hopes that he will be unobserved. He goes to the table and examines
-      the newspapers, takes one and seats himself alone. But not so much alone
-      that he is entirely out of the range of those fellows in the corner who
-      keep up such a cut-and-thrust of wit. Perchance one of them may catch his
-      eye and open the circle to him. He readeth his paper sedulously, but his
-      glance passeth incontinently outside the margin or over the top of the
-      page to the coveted group. No responsive eye meets his. He moveth just a
-      thought nearer along the sofa by the wall. Now he is well within hearing.
-      Now he is almost of the company itself. But still unseen&mdash;noticeably
-      unseen. He puts down his paper, not ostentatiously but furtively. He
-      listens openly to the conversation, as one who has been enmeshed in it
-      unconsciously, accidentally, almost unwillingly, for was he not absorbed
-      in his paper until this conversation disturbed him? And now it would be
-      almost uncivil not to listen. He waits for a convenient opening and then
-      gently insinuates a remark like one venturing on untried ice. And the ice
-      breaks and the circle melts. For Trip, too, is a bore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I remember in those wonderful submarine pictures of the brothers
-      Williamson, which we saw in London some time ago, a strange fish at whose
-      approach all the other fish turned tail. It was not, I think, that they
-      feared him, nor that he was less presentable in appearance than any other
-      fish, but simply that there was something about him that made them
-      remember things. I forget what his name was, or whether he even had a
-      name. But his calling was obvious. He was the Club Bore. He was the fish
-      who sent the other fish about their business. I thought of Blossom as I
-      saw that lonely creature whisking through the water in search of some
-      friendly ear into which he could remark&mdash;&ldquo;Well, I think that America
-      is bound to&mdash;&mdash;&rdquo; or words to that effect. I thought how superior
-      an animal is man. He doth not hastily flee from the bore as these fish
-      did. He hath bowels of compassion. He tempereth the wind to the shorn
-      lamb. He looketh at the clock, he beareth his agony a space, he seemeth
-      even to welcome Blossom, he stealeth away with delicate solicitude for his
-      feelings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a hard fate to be sociable and yet not to have the gift of
-      sociability. It is a small quality that is lacking. Good company insists
-      on one sauce. It must have humour. Anything else may be lacking, but this
-      is the salt that gives savour to all the rest. And the humour must not be
-      that counterfeit currency which consists in the retailing of borrowed
-      stories. &ldquo;Of all bores whom man in his folly hesitates to hang, and Heaven
-      in its mysterious wisdom suffers to propagate its species,&rdquo; says De
-      Quincey, &ldquo;the most insufferable is the teller of good stories.&rdquo; It is an
-      over hard saying, subject to exceptions; but it contains the essential
-      truth, for the humour of good company must be an authentic emanation of
-      personality and not a borrowed tale. It is no discredit to be a bore. Very
-      great men have been bores! I fancy that Macaulay, with all his
-      transcendent gifts, was a bore. My head aches even at the thought of an
-      evening spent in the midst of the terrific torrent of facts and
-      certainties that poured from that brilliant and amiable man. I find myself
-      in agreement for once with Melbourne who wished that he was &ldquo;as cocksure
-      of one thing as Macaulay was of everything.&rdquo; There is pretty clear
-      evidence that Wordsworth was a bore and that Coleridge was a bore, and I
-      am sure Bob Southey must have been an intolerable bore. And Neckar's
-      daughter was fortunate to escape Gibbon for he was assuredly a prince of
-      bores. He took pains to leave posterity in no doubt on the point. He wrote
-      his &ldquo;Autobiography&rdquo; which, as a wit observed, showed that &ldquo;he did not know
-      the difference between himself and the Roman Empire. He has related his
-      'progressions from London to Bariton and from Bariton to London' in the
-      same monotonous, majestic periods that he recorded the fall of states and
-      empires.&rdquo; Yes, an indubitable bore. Yet these were all admirable men and
-      even great men. Let not therefore the Blossoms and the Trips be
-      discomfited. It may be that it is not they who are not fit company for us,
-      but we who are not fit company for them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0026" id="linkimage-0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0084m.jpg" alt="0084m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0084.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0027" id="linkimage-0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0085m.jpg" alt="0085m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0085.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0012" id="link2H_4_0012"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      A LOST SWARM
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>e were busy with
-      the impossible hen when the alarm came. The impossible hen is sitting on a
-      dozen eggs in the shed, and, like the boy on the burning deck, obstinately
-      refuses to leave the post of duty. A sense of duty is an excellent thing,
-      but even a sense of duty can be carried to excess, and this hen's sense of
-      duty is simply a disease. She is so fiercely attached to her task that she
-      cannot think of eating, and resents any attempt to make her eat as a
-      personal affront or a malignant plot against her impending family. Lest
-      she should die at her post, a victim to a misguided hunger strike, we were
-      engaged in the delicate process of substituting a more reasonable hen, and
-      it was at this moment that a shout from the orchard announced that No. 5
-      was swarming.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was unexpected news, for only the day before a new nucleus hive had
-      been built up from the brood frames of No. 5 and all the queen cells
-      visible had been removed. But there was no doubt about the swarm. Around
-      the hive the air was thick with the whirring mass and filled with the
-      thrilling strum of innumerable wings. There is no sound in nature more
-      exciting and more stimulating. At one moment the hive is normal. You pass
-      it without a suspicion of the great adventure that is being hatched
-      within. The next, the whole colony roars out like a cataract, envelops the
-      hive in a cloud of living dust until the queen has emerged and gives
-      direction to the masses that slowly cohere around her as she settles on
-      some branch. The excitement is contagious. It is a call to adventure with
-      the unknown, an adventure sharpened by the threat of loss and tense with
-      the instancy of action. They have the start. It is your wit against their
-      impulse, your strategy against their momentum. The cloud thins and expands
-      as it moves away from the hive and you are puzzled to know whither the
-      main stream is moving in these ever widening folds of motion. The first
-      indeterminate signs of direction to-day were towards the beech woods
-      behind the cottage, but with the aid of a syringe we put up a barrage of
-      water in that direction, and headed them off towards a row of chestnuts
-      and limes at the end of the paddock beyond the orchard. A swift encircling
-      move, armed with syringe and pail, brought them again under the improvised
-      rainstorm. They concluded that it was not such a fine day as they had
-      thought after all, and that they had better take shelter at once, and to
-      our entire content the mass settled in a great blob on a conveniently low
-      bough of a chestnut tree. Then, by the aid of a ladder and patient
-      coaxing, the blob was safely transferred to a skep, and carried off
-      triumphantly to the orchard.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0028" id="linkimage-0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0089m.jpg" alt="0089m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0089.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And now, but for the war, all would have been well. For, but for the war,
-      there would have been a comfortable home in which the adventurers could
-      have taken up their new quarters. But hives are as hard to come by in
-      these days as petrol or matches, or butter or cheese, or most of the other
-      common things of life. We had ransacked England for hives and the
-      neighbourhood for wood with which to make hives; but neither could be had,
-      though promises were plenty, and here was the beginning of the swarms of
-      May, each of them worth a load of hay according to the adage, and never a
-      hive to welcome them with. Perhaps to-morrow something would arrive, if
-      not from Gloucester, then from Surrey. If only the creatures would make
-      themselves at home in the skep for a day or two....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But no. For two hours or so all seemed well. Then perhaps they found the
-      skep too hot, perhaps they detected the odour of previous tenants, perhaps&mdash;but
-      who can read the thoughts of these inscrutable creatures? Suddenly the
-      skep was enveloped in a cyclone of bees, and again the orchard sang with
-      the exciting song of the wings. For a moment the cloud seemed to hover
-      over an apple tree near by, and once more the syringe was at work
-      insisting, in spite of the sunshine, that it was a dreadfully wet day on
-      which to be about, and that a dry skep, even though pervaded by the smell
-      of other bees, had points worth considering. In vain. This time they had
-      made up their minds. It may be that news had come to them, from one of the
-      couriers sent out to prospect for fresh quarters, of a suitable home
-      elsewhere, perhaps a deserted hive, perhaps a snug hollow in some porch or
-      in the bole of an ancient tree. Whatever the goal, the decision was final.
-      One moment the cloud was about us; the air was filled with the
-      high-pitched roar of thirty thousand pair of wings. The next moment the
-      cloud had gone&mdash;gone sailing high over the trees in the paddock and
-      out across the valley. We burst through the paddock fence into the
-      cornfield beyond; but we might as well have chased the wind. Our first
-      load of hay had taken wings and gone beyond recovery. For an hour or two
-      there circled round the deserted skep a few hundred odd bees who had
-      apparently been out when the second decision to migrate was taken, and
-      found themselves homeless and queenless. I saw some of them try to enter
-      other hives, but they were promptly ejected as foreigners by the sentries
-      who keep the porch and admit none who do not carry the authentic odour of
-      the hive. Perhaps the forlorn creatures got back to No. 5, and the young
-      colony left in possession of that tenement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We have lost the first skirmish in the campaign, but we are full of hope,
-      for timber has arrived at last, and from the carpenter's bench under the
-      pear tree there comes the sound of saw, hammer, and plane, and before
-      nightfall there will be a hive in hand for the morrow. And it never rains
-      but it pours&mdash;here is a telegram telling us of three hives on the
-      way. Now for a counter-offensive of artificial swarms. We will harvest our
-      loads of hay before they take wing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0029" id="linkimage-0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0090m.jpg" alt="0090m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0090.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0030" id="linkimage-0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0091m.jpg" alt="0091m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0091.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0013" id="link2H_4_0013"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      YOUNG AMERICA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>f you want to
-      understand America,&rdquo; said my host, &ldquo;come and see her young barbarians at
-      play. To-morrow Harvard meets Princeton at Princeton. It will be a great
-      game. Come and see it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He was a Harvard man himself, and spoke with the light of assured victory
-      in his eyes. This was the first match since the war, but consider the
-      record of the two Universities in the past. Harvard was as much ahead of
-      Princeton on the football field as Oxford was ahead of Cambridge on the
-      river. And I went to share his anticipated triumph. It was like a Derby
-      Day at the Pennsylvania terminus at New York. From the great hall of that
-      magnificent edifice a mighty throng of fur-coated men and women, wearing
-      the favours of the rival colleges&mdash;yellow for Princeton and red for
-      Harvard&mdash;passed through the gateways to the platform, filling train
-      after train, that dipped under the Hudson and, coming out into the
-      sunlight on the other side of the river, thundered away with its jolly
-      load of revellers over the brown New Jersey country, through historic
-      Trenton and on by woodland and farm to the far-off towers of Princeton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there, under the noble trees, and in the quads and the colleges, such
-      a mob of men and women, young and old and middle-aged, such
-      &ldquo;how-d'ye-do's&rdquo; and greetings, such meetings and recollections of old
-      times and ancient matches, such hurryings and scurryings to see familiar
-      haunts, class-room, library, chapel, refectories, everything treasured in
-      the memory. Then off to the Stadium. There it rises like some terrific
-      memorial of antiquity&mdash;seen from without a mighty circular wall of
-      masonry, sixty or seventy feet high; seen from within a great oval, or
-      rather horseshoe, of humanity, rising tier above tier from the level of
-      the playground to the top of the giddy wall. Forty thousand spectators&mdash;on
-      this side of the horseshoe, the reds; on the other side, with the sunlight
-      full upon them, the yellows.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Down between the rival hosts, and almost encircled, by them, the empty
-      playground, with its elaborate whitewash markings&mdash;-for this American
-      game is much more complicated than English Rugger&mdash;its goal-posts and
-      its elaborate scoring boards that with their ten-foot letters keep up a
-      minute record of the game.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The air hums with the buzz of forty thousand tongues. Through the buzz
-      there crashes the sound of approaching music, martial music, challenging
-      music, and the band of the Princeton men, with the undergrads marching
-      like soldiers to the battlefield, emerges round the Princeton end of the
-      horseshoe, and takes its place on the bottom rank of the Princeton host
-      opposite. Terrific cheers from the enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Another crash of music, and from our end of the horseshoe comes the
-      Harvard band, with its tail of undergrads, to face the enemy across the
-      greensward. Terrific cheers from ourselves.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The fateful hour is imminent. It is time to unleash the dogs of war. Three
-      flannelled figures leap out in front of the Princeton host. They shout
-      through megaphones to the enemy. They rush up and down the line, they wave
-      their arms furiously in time, they leap into the air. And with that leap
-      there bursts from twenty thousand throats a barbaric chorus of cheers
-      roared in unison and in perfect time, shot through with strange,
-      demoniacal yells, and culminating in a gigantic bass growl, like that of a
-      tiger, twenty thousand tigers leaping on their prey&mdash;the growl rising
-      to a terrific snarl that rends the heavens.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The glove is thrown down. We take it up. We send back yell for yell, roar
-      for roar. Three cheerleaders leap out on the greensward in front of us,
-      and to their screams of command and to the wild gyrations of their limbs
-      we stand up and shout the battle-cry of Harvard. What it is like I cannot
-      hear, for I am lost in its roar. Then the band opposite leads off with the
-      battle-song of Princeton, and, thrown out by twenty thousand lusty pairs
-      of lungs, it hits us like a Niagara of sound. But, unafraid, we rise like
-      one man and, led by our band and kept in time by our cheer-leaders,
-      gesticulating before us on the greensward like mad dervishes, we shout
-      back the song of &ldquo;Har-vard! Har-vard!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And now, from underneath the Stadium, on either side there bound into the
-      field two fearsome groups of gladiators, this clothed in crimson, that in
-      the yellow and black stripes of the tiger, both padded and helmeted so
-      that they resemble some strange primeval animal of gigantic muscular
-      development and horrific visage. At their entrance the megaphones opposite
-      are heard again, and the enemy host rises and repeats its wonderful cheer
-      and tiger growl. We rise and heave the challenge back. And now the teams
-      are in position, the front lines, with the ball between, crouching on the
-      ground for the spring. In the silence that has suddenly fallen on the
-      scene, one hears short, sharp cries of numbers. &ldquo;Five!&rdquo; &ldquo;Eleven!&rdquo; &ldquo;Three!&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Six!&rdquo; &ldquo;Ten!&rdquo; like the rattle of musketry. Then&mdash;crash! The front
-      lines have leapt on each other. There is a frenzied swirl of arms and legs
-      and bodies. The swirl clears and men are seen lying about all over the
-      line as though a shell had burst in their midst, while away to the right a
-      man with the ball is brought down with a crash to the ground by another,
-      who leaps at him like a projectile that completes its trajectory at his
-      ankles.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I will not pretend to describe what happened during the next ninety
-      thrilling minutes&mdash;which, with intervals and stoppages for the
-      attentions of the doctors, panned out to some two hours&mdash;how the
-      battle surged to and fro, how the sides strained and strained until the
-      tension of their muscles made your own muscles ache in sympathy, how
-      Harvard scored a try and our cheer-leaders leapt out and led us in a psalm
-      of victory, how Princeton drew level&mdash;a cyclone from the other side!&mdash;and
-      forged ahead&mdash;another cyclone&mdash;how man after man went down like
-      an ox, was examined by the doctors and led away or carried away; how
-      another brave in crimson or yellow leapt into the breach; how at last
-      hardly a man of the original teams was left on the field; how at every
-      convenient interval the Princeton host rose and roared at us and how we
-      jumped up and roared at them; how Harvard scored again just on time; how
-      the match ended in a draw and so deprived us of the great carnival of
-      victory that is the crowning frenzy of these classic encounters&mdash;all
-      this is recorded in columns and pages of the American newspapers and lives
-      in my mind as a jolly whirlwind, a tempestuous &ldquo;rag&rdquo; in which young and
-      old, gravity and gaiety, frantic fun and frantic fury, were amazingly
-      confounded.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And what did you think of it?&rdquo; asked my host as we rattled back to New
-      York in the darkness that night. &ldquo;I think it has helped me to understand
-      America,&rdquo; I replied. And I meant it, even though I could not have
-      explained to him, or even to myself all that I meant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0031" id="linkimage-0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0095m.jpg" alt="0095m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0095.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0032" id="linkimage-0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0096m.jpg" alt="0096m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0096.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0014" id="link2H_4_0014"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GREAT REPLIES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>t a dinner table
-      the other night, the talk turned upon a certain politician whose cynical
-      traffic in principles and loyalties has eclipsed even the record of
-      Wedderbum or John Churchhil. There was one defender, an amiable and rather
-      portentous gentleman who did not so much talk as lecture, and whose habit
-      of looking up abstractedly and fixedly at some invisible altitude gave him
-      the impression of communing with the Almighty. He was profuse in his
-      admissions and apologies, but he wound up triumphantly with the remark:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But, after all, you must admit that he is a person of genius.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;So was Madame de Pompadour,&rdquo; said a voice from the other side of the
-      table.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a devastating retort, swift, unexpected, final. Like all good
-      replies it had many facets. It lit up the character of the politician with
-      a comparison of rare wit and truth. He was the courtesan of democracy who,
-      like the courtesan of the King, trafficked sacred things for ambition and
-      power, and brought ruin in his train. It ran through the dull, solemn man
-      on the other side of the table like a rapier. There was no reply. There
-      was nothing to reply to. You cannot reply to a flash of lightning. It
-      revealed the speaker himself. Here was a swift, searching intelligence,
-      equipped with a weapon of tempered steel that went with deadly certainty
-      to the heart of truth. Above all, it flashed on the whole landscape of
-      discussion a fresh and clarify ing light that gave it larger significance
-      and range.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the character of all great replies to have this various glamour and
-      finality. They are not of the stuff of argument. They have the
-      absoluteness of revelation. They illuminate both subject and personality.
-      There are men we know intimately simply by some lightning phrase that has
-      leapt from their lips at the challenge of fundamental things. I do not
-      know much about the military genius or the deeds of Augureau, but I know
-      the man by that terrible reply he made to Napoleon about the celebration
-      at Notre Dame which revealed the imperial ambitions of the First Consul.
-      Bonaparte asked Augureau what he thought of the ceremony. &ldquo;Oh, it was very
-      fine,&rdquo; replied the general; &ldquo;there was nothing wanting, <i>except the
-      million of men who have perished in pulling down what you are setting up</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And in the same way Luther lives immortally in that shattering reply to
-      the Cardinal legate at Augsburg. The Cardinal had been sent from Rome to
-      make him recant by hook or by crook. Remonstrances, threats, entreaties,
-      bribes were tried. Hopes of high distinction and reward were held out to
-      him if he would only be reasonable. To the amazement of the proud Italian,
-      a poor peasant's son&mdash;a miserable friar of a country town&mdash;was
-      prepared to defy the power and resist the prayers of the Sovereign of
-      Christendom.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What!&rdquo; said the Cardinal at last to him, &ldquo;do you think the Pope cares for
-      the opinion of a German boor? The Pope's little finger is stronger than
-      all Germany. Do you expect your princes to take up arms to defend <i>you&mdash;you</i>,
-      a wretched worm like you? I tell you, no! And where will you be then&mdash;where
-      will you be then?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Then, as now,&rdquo; replied Luther. &ldquo;Then, as now, in the hands of Almighty
-      God.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <b>Not less magnificent was the reply of Thomas Paine to the bishop. The
-      venom and malice of the ignorant and intolerant have, for more than a
-      century, poisoned the name and reputation of that great man&mdash;one of
-      the profoundest political thinkers and one of the most saintly men this
-      country has produced, the friend and secretary of Washington, the
-      brilliant author of the papers on &ldquo;The Crisis,&rdquo; that kept the flame of the
-      rebellion high in the darkest hour, the first Foreign Secretary of the
-      United States, the man to whom Lafayette handed the key of the Bastille
-      for presentation to Washington. The true character of this great
-      Englishman flashes out in his immortal reply. The bishop had discoursed
-      &ldquo;On the goodness of God in making both rich and poor.&rdquo; And Paine answered,
-      &ldquo;God did not make rich and poor. God made male and female and gave the
-      earth for their inheritance."</b>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not often that a great reply is enveloped with humour. Lincoln had
-      this rare gift, perhaps, beyond all other men. One does not know whether
-      to admire most the fun or the searching truth of the reply recorded by
-      Lord Lyons, who had called on the President and found him blacking his
-      boots. He expressed a not unnatural surprise at the occupation, and
-      remarked that people in England did not black their own boots. &ldquo;Indeed,&rdquo;
-       said the President. &ldquo;Then whose boots do they black?&rdquo; There was the same
-      mingling of humour and wisdom in his reply to the lady who anxiously
-      inquired whether he thought the Lord was on their side. &ldquo;I do not know,
-      madam,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;but I hope that we are on the Lord's side.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And with what homely humour he clothed that magnanimous reply to Raymond
-      when the famous editor, like so many other supporters, urged him to
-      dismiss Chase, his Secretary of the Treasury, who had been consistently
-      disloyal to him and was now his open rival for the Presidency, and was
-      using his department to further his ambitions. &ldquo;Raymond,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you
-      were brought up on a farm, weren't you? Then you know what a 'chin fly'
-      is. My brother and I were once ploughing on a Kentucky farm, I driving the
-      horse and he holding the plough. The horse was lazy; but once he rushed
-      across the field so that I, with my long legs, could scarcely keep pace
-      with him. On reaching the end of the furrow, I found an enormous chin fly
-      fastened upon him and I knocked him off. My brother asked me what I did
-      that for. I told him I didn't want the old horse bitten in that way.
-      'Why,' said my brother, 'that's all that made him go!' Now, if Mr Chase
-      has got a presidential 'chin-fly' biting him, I'm not going to knock it
-      off, if it will only make his department <i>go!</i>&rdquo; If one were asked to
-      name the most famous answer in history, one might, not unreasonably, give
-      the palm to a woman&mdash;a poor woman, too, who has been dust for three
-      thousand years, whose very name is unknown; but who spoke six words that
-      gave her immortality. They have been recalled on thousands of occasions
-      and in all lands, but never more memorably than by John Bright when he was
-      speaking of the hesitation with which he accepted cabinet office: &ldquo;I
-      should have preferred much,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;to have remained in the common rank
-      of citizenship in which heretofore I have lived. There is a passage in the
-      Old Testament that has often struck me as being one of great beauty. Many
-      of you will recollect that the prophet, in journeying to and fro, was very
-      hospitably entertained by a Shunamite woman. In return, he wished to make
-      her some amends, and he called her to him and asked her what there was he
-      should do for her. 'Shall I speak for thee to the King?' he said, 'or to
-      the captain of the host.' Now, it has always appeared to me that the
-      Shunamite woman returned a great answer. She replied, in declining the
-      prophet's offer, 'I dwell among mine own people.'&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the quality of a great reply that it does not so much answer the
-      point as obliterate it. It is the thunder of Sinai breaking in on the
-      babble of vulgar minds. The current of thought is changed, as if by magic,
-      from mean things to sublime things, from the gross to the spiritual, from
-      the trivial to the enduring. Clever replies, witty replies, are another
-      matter. Anybody can make them with a sharp tongue and a quick mind. But
-      great replies are not dependent on wit or cleverness. If they were Cicero
-      would have made many, whereas he never made one. His repartees are perfect
-      of their kind, but they belong to the debating club and the law court.
-      They raise a laugh and score a point, but they are summer lightnings. The
-      great reply does not come from witty minds, but from rare and profound
-      souls. The brilliant adventurer, Napoleon, could no more have made that
-      reply of Augereau than a rabbit could play Bach. He could not have made it
-      because with all his genius he was as soulless a man as ever played a
-      great part on the world's stage.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0033" id="linkimage-0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0101m.jpg" alt="0101m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0101.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0034" id="linkimage-0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0102m.jpg" alt="0102m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0102.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0015" id="link2H_4_0015"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BOILERS AND BUTTERFLIES
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> went recently to
-      an industrial town in the North on some business, and while there had
-      occasion to meet a man who manufactured boilers and engines and machinery
-      of all sorts. He talked to me about boilers and engines and machinery of
-      all sorts, and I did my best to appear interested and understanding. But I
-      was neither one nor the other. I was only bored. Boilers and engines, I
-      know, are important things. Compared with a boiler, the finest lyric that
-      was ever written is only a perfume on the gale. There is a practical
-      downrightness about a boiler that makes &ldquo;Drink to me only with thine
-      eyes,&rdquo; or &ldquo;O mistress mine, where are you roaming?&rdquo; or even &ldquo;Twelfth
-      Night&rdquo; itself, a mere idle frivolity. All you can say in favour of
-      &ldquo;Twelfth Night,&rdquo; from the strictly business point of view, is that it
-      doesn't wear out, and the boiler does. Thank heaven for that.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But though boilers and engines are undoubtedly important things, I can
-      never feel any enthusiasm about them. I know I ought to. I know I ought to
-      be grateful to them for all the privileges they confer on me. How, for
-      example, could I have gone to that distant town without the help of a
-      boiler? How&mdash;and this was still more important&mdash;how could I hope
-      to get away from that distant town without the help of a boiler? But
-      gratitude will not keep pace with obligation, and the fact remains that
-      great as my debt is to machinery, I dislike personal contact with it as
-      much as I dislike the east wind. It gives the same feeling of arid
-      discomfort, of mental depression, of spiritual bleakness. It has no bowels
-      of compassion. It is power divorced from feeling and is the symbol of
-      brute force in a world that lives or perishes by its emotional values. In
-      Dante's &ldquo;Inferno&rdquo; each sinner had a hell peculiarly adapted to give him
-      the maximum of misery. He would have reserved a machine-room for me, and
-      there I should have wandered forlornly for ever and ever among wheels and
-      pulleys and piston-rods and boilers, vainly trying amidst the thud and din
-      of machinery and the nauseous reek of oily &ldquo;waste&rdquo; to catch those perfumes
-      on the gale, those frivolous rhythms to which I had devoted so much of
-      that life' which should be &ldquo;real and earnest&rdquo; and occupied with serious
-      things like boilers. And so it came about that as my friend talked I
-      spiritually wilted away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I did not seem to be listening to a man. I seemed to be listening to a
-      learned and articulate boiler.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then something happened. I do not recall what it was; but it led from
-      boilers to butterflies. The transition seems a little violent and
-      inexplicable. The only connection I can see is that there is a &ldquo;b&rdquo; in
-      boilers and a &ldquo;b&rdquo; in butterflies. But, whatever the cause, the effect was
-      miraculous. The articulate boiler became suddenly a flaming spirit. The
-      light of passion shone in his eyes. He no longer looked at me as if I were
-      a fellow-boiler; but as if I were his long-lost and dearly-loved brother.
-      Was I interested in butterflies? Then away with boilers! Come, I must see
-      his butterflies. And off we went as fast as petrol could whisk us to his
-      house in the suburbs, and there in a great room, surrounded with hundreds
-      of cases and drawers, I saw butterflies from the ends of the earth,
-      butterflies from the forests of Brazil and butterflies from the plains of
-      India, and butterflies from the veldt of South Africa and butterflies from
-      the bush of Australia, all arranged in the foliage natural to their
-      habitat to show how their scheme of coloration conformed to their setting.
-      Some of them had their wings folded back and were indistinguishable from
-      the leaves among which they lay. And as my friend, with growing
-      excitement, revealed his treasure, he talked of his adventures in the
-      pursuit of them, and of the law of natural selection and all its bearing
-      upon the mystery of life, its survivals and its failures. This hobby of
-      his was, in short, the key of his world. The boiler house was the prison
-      where he did time. At the magic word &ldquo;butterflies&rdquo; the prison door opened,
-      and out he sailed on the wings of passion in pursuit of the things of the
-      mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There are some people who speak slightingly of hobbies as if they were
-      something childish and frivolous. But a man without a hobby is like a ship
-      without a rudder. Life is such a tumultuous and confused affair that most
-      of us get lost in the tangle and brushwood and get to the end of the
-      journey without ever having found a path and a sense of direction. But a
-      hobby hits the path at once. It may be ever so trivial a thing, but it
-      supplies what the mind needs, a disinterested enthusiasm outside the mere
-      routine of work and play. You cannot tell where it will lead. You may
-      begin with stamps, and find you are thinking in continents. You may
-      collect coins, and find that the history of man is written on them. You
-      may begin with bees, and end with the science of life. Ruskin began with
-      pictures and found they led to economics and everything else. For as every
-      road was said to lead to Rome, so every hobby leads out into the universe,
-      and supplies us with a compass for the adventure. It saves us from the
-      humiliation of being merely smatterers. We cannot help being smatterers in
-      general, for the world is too full of things to permit us to be anything
-      else, but one field of intensive culture will give even our smattering a
-      respectable foundation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It will do more. It will save our smattering from folly. No man who knows
-      even one subject well, will ever be quite such a fool as he might be when
-      he comes to subjects he does not know. He will know he does not know them
-      and that is the beginning of wisdom. He will have a scale of measurement
-      which will enable him to take soundings in strange waters. He will have,
-      above all, an attachment to life which will make him at home in the world.
-      Most of us need some such anchorage. We are plunged into this bewildering
-      whirlpool of consciousness to be the sport of circumstance. We have in us
-      the genius of speculation, but the further our speculations penetrate the
-      profounder becomes the mystery that baffles us. We are caught in the toils
-      of affections that crumble to dust, indoctrinated with creeds that wither
-      like grass, beaten about by storms that shatter our stoutest battlements
-      like spray blown upon the wind. In the end, we suspect that we are little
-      more than dreams within a dream&mdash;or as Carlyle puts it, &ldquo;exhalations
-      that are and then are not.&rdquo; And we share the poet's sense of exile&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      In this house with starry dome,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Floored with gem-like lakes and seas,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Shall I never be at home?
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Never wholly at my ease?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this spiritual loneliness there are various ways of escape, from
-      stoicism to hedonism, but one of the most rational and kindly is the
-      hobby. It brings us back from the perplexing conundrum of life to things
-      that we can see and grasp and live with cheerfully and companionably and
-      without fear of bereavement or disillusion. We cultivate our garden and
-      find in it a modest answer to our questions. We see the seasons come and
-      go like old friends whose visits may be fleeting, but are always renewed.
-      Or we make friends in books, and live in easy comradeship with Horace or
-      Pepys or Johnson in some static past that is untouched by the sense of the
-      mortality of things. Or we find in music or art a garden of the mind,
-      self-contained and self-sufficing, in which the anarchy of intractible
-      circumstance is subdued to an inner harmony that calms the spirit and
-      endows it with more sovereign vision. The old gentleman in &ldquo;Romany Rye,&rdquo;
-       you will remember, found his deliverance in studying Chinese. His
-      bereavement had left him without God and without hope in the world,
-      without any refuge except the pitiful contemplation of the things that
-      reminded him of his sorrow. One day he sat gazing vacantly before him,
-      when his eye fell upon some strange marks on a teapot, and he thought he
-      heard a voice say, &ldquo;The marks! the marks! cling to the marks! or&mdash;&mdash;-&rdquo;
-       And from this beginning&mdash;but the story is too fruity, too rich with
-      the vintage of Borrow to be mutilated. Take the book down, turn to the
-      episode, and thank me for sending you again into the enchanted Borrovian
-      realm that is so unlike anything else to be found in books. It is enough
-      for the purpose here to recall this perfect example of the healing power
-      of the hobby. It gives us an intelligible little world of our own where we
-      can be at ease, and from whose warmth and friendliness we can look out on
-      the vast conundrum without expecting an answer or being much troubled
-      because we do not get one. It was a hobby that poor Pascal needed to allay
-      that horror of the universe which he expressed in the desolating phrase,
-      &ldquo;Le silence étemel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie.&rdquo; For on the wings of
-      the butterfly one can not only outrange the boiler, but can adventure into
-      the infinite in the spirit of happy and confident adventure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0035" id="linkimage-0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0108m.jpg" alt="0108m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0108.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0036" id="linkimage-0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0109m.jpg" alt="0109m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0109.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0016" id="link2H_4_0016"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON HEREFORD BEACON
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">J</span>enny Lind sleeps
-      in Malvern Priory Church; but Wynd's Point where she died is four miles
-      away up on the hills, in the middle of that noble range of the Malverns
-      that marches north and south from Worcester beacon to Gloucester beacon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It lies just where the white ribbon of road that has wound its way up from
-      Malvern reaches the slopes of Hereford beacon, and begins its descent into
-      the fat pastures and deep woodlands of the Herefordshire country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Across the dip in the road Hereford beacon, the central point of the
-      range, rises in gracious treeless curves, its summit ringed with the deep
-      trenches from whence, perhaps on some such cloudless day as this, the
-      Britons scanned the wide plain for the approach of the Roman legions.
-      Caractacus himself is credited with fortifying these natural ramparts; but
-      the point is doubtful. There are those who attribute the work to&mdash;&mdash;.
-      But let the cabman who brought me up to Wynd's Point tell his own story.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He was a delightful fellow, full of geniality and information which he
-      conveyed in that rich accent of Worcestershire that has the strength of
-      the north without its harshness and the melody of the south without its
-      slackness. He had also that delicious haziness about the history of the
-      district which is characteristic of the native. As we walked up the steep
-      road side by side by the horse's head he pointed out the Cotswolds,
-      Gloucester Cathedral, Worcester Cathedral, the Severn and the other
-      features of the ever widening landscape. Turning a bend in the road,
-      Hereford beacon came in view.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;That's where Cromwell wur killed, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He spoke with the calm matter-of-factness of a guide-book.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Killed?&rdquo; said I, a little stunned.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, sir, he wur killed hereabouts. He fought th' battle o' Worcester
-      from about here you know, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But he came from the north to Worcester, and this is south. And he wasn't
-      killed at all. He died in his bed.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The cabman yielded the point without resentment.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, sir, happen he wur only captured. I've heard folks say he wur
-      captured in a cave on Hereford beacon. The cave's there now. I've never
-      sin it, but it's there. I used to live o'er in Radnorshire and heard tell
-      as he wur captured in a cave on Hereford beacon.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He was resolute on the point of capture. The killing was a detail; but the
-      capture was vital. To surrender that would be to surrender the whole
-      Cromwellian legend. There is a point at which the Higher Criticism must be
-      fought unflinchingly if faith is not to crumble utterly away.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;He wur a desperate mischieful man wur Cromwell,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;He blowed
-      away Little Malvern Church down yonder.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      He pointed down into the woody hollow below where an ancient tower was
-      visible amid the rich foliage. Little Malvern Priory! Here was historic
-      ground indeed, and I thought of John Inglesant and of the vision of Piers
-      Plowman as he lay by the little rivulet in the Malverns.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Left the tower standing he did, sir,&rdquo; pursued the historian. &ldquo;Now, why
-      should th' old varmint a' left th' tower standing, sir?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And the consideration of this problem of Cromwellian psychology brought us
-      to Wynd's Point.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The day before our arrival there had been a visitor to the house, an old
-      gentleman who had wandered in the grounds and sat and mused in the little
-      arbour that Jenny Lind built, and whence she used to look out on the
-      beacon and across the plain to the Cots-wolds. He had gently declined to
-      go inside the house. There are some memories too sacred to disturb. It was
-      the long widowed husband of the Swedish saint and singer.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is all as she made it and left it. There hangs about it the sense of a
-      vanished hand, of a gracious spirit. The porch, with its deep, sloping
-      roof, and its pillars of untrimmed silver birch, suggesting a mountain
-      chalet, &ldquo;the golden cage,&rdquo; of the singer fronting the drawing-room bowered
-      in ivy, the many gables, the quaint furniture, and the quainter pictures
-      of saints, that hang upon the walls&mdash;all speak with mute eloquence of
-      the peasant girl whose voice thrilled two hemispheres, whose life was an
-      anthem, and whose magic still lingers in the sweet simplicity of her name.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Why did you leave the stage?&rdquo; asked a friend of Jenny Lind, wondering,
-      like all the world, why the incomparable actress and singer should
-      surrender, almost in her youth, the intoxicating triumphs of opera for the
-      sober rôle of a concert singer, singing not for herself, but for charity.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Jenny Lind sat with her Lutheran Bible on her knee.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Because,&rdquo; she said, touching the Bible, &ldquo;it left me so little time for
-      this, and&rdquo; (looking at the sunset) &ldquo;none for that.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      There is the secret of Jenny Lind's love for Wynd's Point, where the
-      cuckoo&mdash;his voice failing slightly in these hot June days&mdash;wakes
-      you in the rosy dawn and continues with unwearied iteration until the
-      shadows lengthen across the lawn, and the Black Mountains stand out darkly
-      against the sunset, and the lights of Gloucester shine dimly in the
-      deepening gloom of the vast plain.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Jenny Lind was a child of Nature to the end, and Wynd's Point is Nature
-      unadorned. It stands on a woody rock that drops almost sheer to the road,
-      with mossy ways that wind through the larches the furze and the broom to
-      the top, where the wind blows fresh from the sea, and you come out on the
-      path of spongy turf that invites you on and on over the green summits that
-      march in stately Indian file to the shapely peak of Worcester beacon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whether you go north to Worcester beacon or south over Hereford beacon to
-      Gloucester beacon, there is no finer walk in England than along these ten
-      miles of breezy highlands, with fifteen English counties unrolled at your
-      feet, the swifts wheeling around your path and that sense of exhilaration
-      that comes from the spacious solitude of high places. It is a cheerful
-      solitude, too, for if you tire of your own thoughts and of the twin shout
-      of the cuckoo you may fling yourself down on the turf and look out over
-      half of busy England from where, beyond 'the Lickey Hills, Birmingham
-      stains the horizon with its fuliginous activities to where southward the
-      shining pathway of the Bristol Channel carries the imagination away with
-      Sebastian Cabot to the Spanish main. Here you may see our rough island
-      story traced in characters of city, hill, and plain. These grass-grown
-      trenches, where to-day the young lambs are grazing, take us back to the
-      dawn of things and the beginnings of that ancient tragedy of the Celtic
-      race. Yonder, enveloped in a thin veil of smoke, is Tewkesbury, and to see
-      Tewkesbury is to think of the Wars of the Roses, of &ldquo;false, fleeting,
-      perjured Clarence that stabbed me on the field at Tewkesbury,&rdquo; and of
-      Ancient Pistol, whose &ldquo;wits were thick as Tewkesbury mustard.&rdquo; There is
-      the battlefield of Mortimer's Cross, and far away Edgehill carries the
-      mind forward to the beginning of that great struggle for a free England
-      which finished yonder at Worcester, where the clash of arms was heard for
-      the last time in our land and where Cromwell sheathed his terrible sword
-      for ever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The sun has left the eastern slopes and night is already beginning to cast
-      its shadows over Little Malvern and the golf links beyond, and the wide
-      plain where trails of white smoke show the pathway of trains racing here
-      through the tunnel to Hereford, there to Gloucester, and yonder to Oxford
-      and London. The labourer is leaving the fields and the cattle are coming
-      up from the pastures. The landscape fades into mystery and gloom. Now is
-      the moment to turn westward, where
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Vanquished eve, as night prevails,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Bleeds upon the road to Wales.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the landscape is bathed with the splendour of the setting sun, and in
-      the mellow radiance the Welsh mountains stand out like the far battlements
-      of fairyland. Eastnor Castle gleams like a palace of alabaster, and in the
-      woods of the castle that clothe these western slopes a pheasant rends the
-      golden silence with the startled noise and flurry of its flight.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The magic passes. The cloud palaces of the west turn from gold to grey;
-      the fairy battlements are captured by the invading night, the wind turns
-      suddenly chill, the moon is up over the Cotswolds. It is time to go....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Down in the garden at Wynd's Point a rabbit scurries across the lawn and a
-      late cuckoo returning from the hills sends a last shout through the
-      twilight. The songs of the day are done. I stand under the great sycamore
-      by the porch where through the hot hours the chorus of myriads of insects
-      has sounded like the ceaseless note of a cello drawn by an unfaltering
-      bow. The chorus has ceased. The birds have vanished, all save a pied
-      wagtail, loveliest of a lovely tribe, that flirts its graceful tail by the
-      rowan tree. From the midst of the foliage come those intimate murmurs of
-      the birds, half chatter, half song, that close the day. Even these grow
-      few and faint until the silence is unbroken.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      And the birds and the beasts and the insects are drowned,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      In an ocean of dreams without a sound.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Overhead the sky is strewn with stars. Night and silence have triumphed.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0037" id="linkimage-0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0115m.jpg" alt="0115m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0115.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0038" id="linkimage-0038"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0116m.jpg" alt="0116m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0116.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0017" id="link2H_4_0017"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      CHUM
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>hen I turned the
-      key in the door and entered the cottage, I missed a familiar sound. It was
-      the &ldquo;thump, thump, thump,&rdquo; of a tail on the floor at the foot of the
-      stairs. I turned on the light. Yes, the place was vacant. Chum had gone,
-      and he would not return. I knew that the veterinary must have called,
-      pronounced his case hopeless, and taken him away, and that I should hear
-      no more his &ldquo;welcome home!&rdquo; at midnight. No matter what the labours of the
-      day had been or how profound his sleep, he never failed to give me a cheer
-      with the stump of his tail and to blink his eyes sleepily as I gave him
-      &ldquo;Good dog&rdquo; and a pat on the head. Then with a huge sigh of content he
-      would lapse back into slumber, satisfied that the last duty of the day was
-      done, and that all was well with the world for the night. Now he has
-      lapsed into sleep altogether.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I think that instead of going into the beech woods this morning I will pay
-      my old friend a little tribute at parting. It will ease my mind, and in
-      any case I should find the woods lonely to-day, for it was there that I
-      enjoyed his companionship most. And it was there, I think, that he enjoyed
-      my companionship most also. He was a little particular with whom he went,
-      and I fancy he preferred me to anybody. Children he declined to go with,
-      unless they were accompanied by a responsible grown-up person. It was not
-      that he did not love children. When little Peggy returned after a longish
-      absence his transports of joy knew no bounds. He would leap round and
-      round in wild circles culminating in an embrace that sent her to the
-      floor. For he was a big fellow, and was rather like Scott's schoolmaster
-      who, when he knocked young Scott down, apologised, and explained that &ldquo;he
-      didn't know his own strength.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But when he went into the woods Chum liked an equal to go with, and I was
-      the man for his money. He knew my favourite paths through the woodlands,
-      and flashed hither and thither to his familiar haunts, his reddish-brown
-      coat gleaming through the trees like an oriflamme of Pan, and his head
-      down to the ground like a hound on the trail. For there was more than a
-      hint of the hound in his varied composition. What he was precisely no one
-      ever could tell me. Even the veterinary gave him up. His fine liquid brown
-      eyes and eloquent eyebrows were pure Airedale, but he had a nobler head
-      than any Airedale I have known. There was a strain of the Irish terrier in
-      him, too, but the glory of his smooth ruddy coat was all his own. And all
-      his own, too, were his honest, simple heart and his genius for friendship.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There was no cunning about the fellow, and I fancy that in dogdom he was
-      reckoned something of a fool. You could always tell when he had been
-      sleeping in the armchair that was forbidden to him by the look of
-      grotesque criminality that he wore. For he had an acute sense of sin, and
-      he was too ingenuous for concealment. He was as sentimental as a
-      schoolgirl, and could put as much emotion into the play of his wonderful
-      eyebrows as any actor that ever walked the stage. In temperament, he was
-      something of a pacifist. He would strike, but only under compulsion, and
-      when he passed the Great Dane down in the valley he was a spectacle of
-      abject surrender and slinking humbleness. His self-pity under pain was
-      ludicrous, and he exploited it as openly as a beggar exploits his sores.
-      You had but to speak sympathetically to him, to show any concern about his
-      affliction, whatever it might chance to be, and he would limp off to the
-      forbidden armchair with the confidence of a convalescent entitled to any
-      good thing that was going. And there he would lie curled up and watchful,
-      his eyes blinking with mingled joy at the unaccustomed luxury and pity for
-      the misfortune that was the source of that joy. He had the qualities of a
-      rather impressionable child. Scold him and he sank into an unspeakable
-      abyss of misery; pat him or only change the tone of your voice and all the
-      world was young and full of singing birds again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He was, I fear, a snob. He had not that haughty aloofness from his kind,
-      that suggestion of being someone in particular which afflicts the Chow.
-      For him a dog was a dog whatever his pedigree, his coat, his breed, or his
-      colour. But in his relations to the human family he revealed more than a
-      little of the spirit of the flunkey. &ldquo;A man's a man, for a' that,&rdquo; was not
-      his creed. He discriminated between the people who came to the front door
-      and the people who came to the side door. To the former he was
-      systematically civil; to the latter he was frankly hostile. &ldquo;The poor in a
-      loomp is bad,&rdquo; was his fixed principle, and any one carrying a basket,
-      wearing an apron, clothed in a uniform was <i>ipso facto</i> suspect. He
-      held, in short, to the servile philosophy of clothes as firmly as any
-      waiter at the Ritz or any footman in Mayfair. Familiarity never altered
-      his convictions. No amount of correction affected his stubborn dislike of
-      postmen. They offended him in many ways. They wore uniforms; they came,
-      nevertheless, to the front door; they knocked with a challenging violence
-      that revolted his sense of propriety. In the end, the burden of their
-      insults was too much for him. He took a sample out of a postman's pair of
-      trousers. Perhaps that incident was not unconnected with his passing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      One day he limped into the garden, dragging his hindlegs painfully.
-      Whether he had been run over by a motor-car or had fallen back in leaping
-      a stile&mdash;he could take a gate with the grace of a swallow&mdash;or
-      had had a crack across the back with a pole we never knew. Perhaps the
-      latter, for he had enemies, and I am bound to say deserved to have them,
-      for he was a disobedient fellow, and would go where he was not wanted. But
-      whatever the cause he just wilted away at the hindquarters, and all the
-      veterinary's art was in vain. The magic word that called him to the revels
-      in his native woods&mdash;for he had come to us as a pup from a cottage in
-      the heart of the woodland country&mdash;no longer made him tense as a
-      drawn bow. He saw the cows in the paddock without indignation, and left
-      his bone unregarded. He made one or two efforts to follow me up the hill
-      to the woods, but at the corner of the lane turned back, crept into the
-      house, and lay under the table as if desiring only to forget and to be
-      forgotten. Now he is gone, and I am astonished to find how large a place
-      he filled in the circle of my friendships. If the Indian's dream of the
-      happy hunting ground is true, I fancy I shall find Chum there waiting to
-      scour the woods with me as of old.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0039" id="linkimage-0039"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0120m.jpg" alt="0120m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0120.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0040" id="linkimage-0040"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0121m.jpg" alt="0121m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0121.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0018" id="link2H_4_0018"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON MATCHES AND THINGS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> had an agreeable
-      assurance this afternoon that the war is over. I went-into a tea-shop and
-      sat down. There were several young waitresses by the counter engaged in
-      animated conversation. They eyed me with that cold aloofness which is the
-      ritual of the order, and which, I take it, is intended to convey to you
-      the fact that they are princesses in disguise who only serve in shops for
-      a pastime. When I had taken out my watch twice with an appearance of
-      ostentatious urgency, one of the princesses came towards me, took my order
-      (looking meanwhile out of the window to remind me that she was not really
-      aware of me, but only happened to be there by chance), and moved
-      languorously away. When she returned she brought tea&mdash;and sugar. In
-      that moment her disdain was transfigured. I saw in her a ministering angel
-      who under the disguise of indifference went about scattering benedictions
-      among her customers and assuring them that the spring had come back to the
-      earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was not only the princess who was transfigured. The whole future became
-      suddenly irradiated. The winter of discontent (and saccharine) had passed
-      magically away, and all the poor remnant of my life would be sweetened
-      thrice a day by honest sugar.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not until that astonishing sugar basin swam into my ken had I realised how
-      I loathed the chemical abomination that I had borrowed from my friends
-      through long years of abstinence. I am ordinarily a one-lump person, but
-      in my exultation I put in two lumps and then I seized the spoon and
-      stirred and stirred in an ecstasy of satisfaction. No longer did the spoon
-      seem a sardonic reminiscence of happier days, a mere survival of an
-      antique and forgotten custom, like the buttons on the back of your coat.
-      It resumed its authority in the ordinance of the tea-table. To stir your
-      tea is no mean part of a noble ceremony. It keeps tune with your thoughts
-      if you are alone, and it keeps time with your tongue if you are talking.
-      It helps out the argument, fills up the gaps, provides the animated
-      commentary on your discourse. There are people I shall always remember in
-      the attitude of standing, cup in hand, and stirring, stirring, stirring as
-      the current of talk flowed on. Such a one was that fine old tea-drinker,
-      Prince Kropotkin&mdash;rest his gentle soul if he indeed be among the
-      slain.... With what universal benevolence his patriarchal face used to
-      gleam as he stood stirring and talking, talking and stirring, with the
-      hurry of his teeming thoughts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not one's taste for sugar or loathing of saccharine that accounts
-      for the pleasure that incident in the tea-shop gave. It is that in these
-      little things we feel the return of the warm current to the frozen veins
-      of life. It is like the sensation you have when, after days in the icy
-      solitudes of the glaciers, you begin to descend to the \alleys and come
-      with a shock of delight upon the first blades of grass and later upon the
-      grazing cattle on the mountain side, and the singing birds and all the
-      pleasant intimacies of the familiar life. They seem more precious than you
-      had ever conceived them to be. You go about in these days knitting up your
-      severed friendships with things. You slip into the National Gallery just
-      to see what old favourites have come up from the darkness of the cellars.
-      You walk along the Embankment rejoicing in the great moon that shines
-      again from the Clock Tower. Every clock that chimes gives you a pleasant
-      emotion, and the boom of Big Ben sounds like the salutation of an old
-      friend who had been given up as lost. And matches.... There was a time
-      when I thought nothing of a match. I would strike a match as thoughtlessly
-      as I would breathe. And for the same reason, that matches were as
-      plentiful as air. I would strike a match and let the wind puff it out;
-      another and let it burn out before using it, simply because I was too busy
-      talking or listening or thinking or doing nothing. I would try to light a
-      pipe in a gale of wind on a mountain top, crouching behind a boulder,
-      getting inside my hat, lying on the ground under my coat, and wasting
-      matches by the dozen. I would get rid of a box of matches a day, and not
-      care a dump. The world was simply choked with matches, and it was almost a
-      duty to go on striking them to make room for the rest. You could get a
-      dozen boxes for a penny or twopence, and in the kitchen you could see
-      great bags of matches with boxes bursting out at the top, and simply
-      asking to be taken. If by some accident you found yourself without a box
-      in your pocket you asked the stranger for a light as confidently as you
-      would ask him for the time o' day. You were asking for something that cost
-      him nothing except a commonplace civility.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now... I have this very day been into half-a-dozen shops in Fleet
-      Street and the Strand and have asked for matches and been turned empty
-      away. The shopmen have long ceased to say, &ldquo;No; we haven't any.&rdquo; They
-      simply move their heads from side to side without a word, slowly,
-      smilelessly, wearily, sardonically, as though they have got into the habit
-      and just go on in their sleep. &ldquo;Oh, you funny people,&rdquo; they seem to say,
-      dreamily. &ldquo;Will you never learn sense? Will nothing ever teach you that
-      there aren't any matches; haven't been any matches for years and years;
-      never will be any matches any more? Please go away and let the other fools
-      follow on.&rdquo; And you go away, feeling much as though you had been caught
-      trying to pass a bad half-crown.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      No longer can you say in the old, easy, careless way, &ldquo;Can you oblige me
-      with a light, sir?&rdquo; You are reduced to the cunning of a bird of prey or a
-      pick-pocket. You sit in the smoking carriage, eyeing the man opposite,
-      wondering why he is not smoking, wondering whether he is the sort of
-      fellow who is likely to have a match, pretending to read, but waiting to
-      pounce if there is the least movement of his hand to his pocket, preparing
-      to have &ldquo;After you, sir,&rdquo; on your lips at the exact moment when he has lit
-      his cigarette and is screwing up his mouth to blow out the precious flame.
-      Perhaps you are lucky. Perhaps you are not. Perhaps the fellow is only
-      waiting to pounce too. And thus you sit, each waiting for what the other
-      hasn't got, symbols of eternal hope in a matchless world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have come to reckon my friends by the measure of confidence with which I
-      can ask them for a light. If the request leaps easily to the lips I know
-      that their friendship is of the sterling stuff. There is that excellent
-      fellow Higginson, for example. He works in a room near mine, and I have
-      had more lights from him in these days than from any other man on earth. I
-      never hesitate to ask Higginson for a match. I do it quite boldly,
-      fearlessly, shamelessly. And he does it to me&mdash;but not so often, not
-      nearly so often. And his instinct is so delicate. If&mdash;having borrowed
-      a little too recklessly from him of late&mdash;I go into his room and
-      begin talking of the situation in Holland, or the new taxes, or the Peace
-      Conference, or things like that&mdash;is he deceived? Not at all. He knows
-      that what I want is not conversation, but a match. And if he has one left
-      it is mine. I have even seen him pretend to relight his pipe because he
-      knew I wanted to light mine. That is the sort of man Higginson is. I
-      cannot speak too highly of Higginson.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But the years of famine are over. Soon we shall be able to go into the
-      tobacconist's shop and call for a box of matches with the old air of
-      authority and, having got them, strike them prodigally as in the days
-      before the great darkness. Even the return of the newspaper placards is
-      welcome for the assurance it brings that we can think once more about
-      Lords and the Oval.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And there are more intimate reminders that the spring is returning, Your
-      young kinsman from Canada or Australia looks in to tell you he is sailing
-      home tomorrow, and your friends turn up to see you in tweeds instead of
-      khaki. In the dining-room at the club you come across waiters who are
-      strange and yet not strange, bronzed fellows who have been on historic
-      battlefields and now ask you whether you will have &ldquo;thick or clear,&rdquo; with
-      the pleasant air of renewing an old acquaintance. Your galley proof is
-      brought down to you by a giant in shirt sleeves whom you look at with a
-      shadowy feeling of remembrance. And then you discover he is that pale,
-      thin youth who used to bring the proofs to you years ago, and who in the
-      interval has been fighting in many lands near and far, in France and
-      Macedonia, Egypt and Palestine, and now comes back wearing the burnished
-      livery of desert suns. Down on the golf links you meet a stoutish fellow
-      who turns out to be the old professional released from Germany after long
-      months of imprisonment, who tells you he was one &ldquo;of the lucky ones;
-      nothing to complain of, sir; I worked on a farm and lived with the
-      farmer's family, and had the same as they had. No, sir, nothing to
-      complain of. I was one of the lucky ones.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps the pleasure of these renewals of the old associations of men and
-      things is shadowed by the memory of those who were not lucky, those who
-      will never come back to the familiar ways and never hear the sound of Big
-      Ben again. We must not forget them and what we owe them as we enter the
-      new life that they have won for us. But to-day, under the stimulus of the
-      princess's sugar basin, I am inclined to dwell on the credit side of
-      things and rejoice in the burgeoning of spring. We have left the deathly
-      solitudes of the glaciers behind, and though the moraine is rough and
-      toilsome the valleys lie cool beneath us, and we can hear the pleasant
-      tinkle of the cow-bells calling us back to the old pastures.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0041" id="linkimage-0041"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0127m.jpg" alt="0127m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0127.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0042" id="linkimage-0042"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0128m.jpg" alt="0128m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0128.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0019" id="link2H_4_0019"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON BEING REMEMBERED
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>s I lay on the
-      hill-top this morning at the edge of the beech woods watching the
-      harvesters in the fields, and the sunlight and shadows chasing each other
-      across the valley, it seemed that the centuries were looking down with me.
-      For the hill-top is scored with memories, as an old school book is scored
-      with the names of generations of scholars. Near by are the earthworks of
-      the ancient Britons, and on the face of the hill is a great white horse
-      carved in the chalk centuries ago. Those white marks, that look like sheep
-      feeding on the green hill-side, are reminders of the great war. How long
-      ago it seems since the recruits from the valley used to come up here to
-      learn the art of trench-digging, leaving these memorials behind them
-      before they marched away to whatever fate awaited them! All over the
-      hill-top are the ashes of old fires lit by merry parties on happy
-      holidays. One scorched and blackened area, more spacious than the rest,
-      marks the spot where the beacon fire was lit to celebrate the signing of
-      Peace. And on the boles of the beech trees are initials carved deep in the
-      bark&mdash;some linked like those of lovers, some freshly cut, some old
-      and covered with lichen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What is this instinct that makes us carve our names on tree trunks, and
-      school desks with such elaborate care? It is no modern vulgarity. It is as
-      ancient as human records. In the excavations at Pergamos the school desks
-      of two thousand years ago have been found scored with the names of the
-      schoolboys of those far-off days. No doubt the act itself delighted them.
-      There was never a boy who did not find pleasure in cutting wood or
-      scrawling on a wall, no matter what was cut or what was scrawled. And the
-      joy does not wholly pass with youth. Stonewall Jackson found pleasure in
-      whittling a stick at any time, and I never see a nice white ceiling above
-      me as I lie in bed, without sharing Mr Chesterton's hankering for a
-      charcoal with which to cover it with prancing fancies. But at the back of
-      it all, the explanation of those initials on the boles of the beeches is a
-      desire for some sort of immortality&mdash;terrestrial if not celestial.
-      Even the least of us would like to be remembered, and so we carve our
-      names on tree trunks and tombstones to remind later generations that we
-      too once passed this way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If it is a weakness, it is a weakness that we share with the great. One of
-      the chief pleasures of greatness is the assurance that fame will trumpet
-      its name down the centuries. Cæsar wrote his Commentaries to take care
-      that posterity did not forget him, and Horace's &ldquo;Exegi monumentum ære
-      perennius&rdquo; is one of many confident assertions that he knew he would be
-      among the immortals. &ldquo;I have raised a monument,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;more enduring
-      than brass and loftier than the pyramids of kings; a monument which shall
-      not be destroyed by the consuming rain nor by the rage of the north wind,
-      nor by the countless years and the flight of ages.&rdquo; The same magnificent
-      confidence appears in Shakespeare's proud declaration&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      and Wordsworth could predict that he would never die because he had
-      written a song of a sparrow&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      And in this bush one sparrow built her nest
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Of which I sang one song that will not die.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Keats, it is true, lamented that his name was &ldquo;writ in water,&rdquo; but behind
-      the lament we see the lurking hope that it was destined for immortality.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Burns, in a letter to his wife, expresses the same comfortable confidence.
-      &ldquo;I'll be more respected,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a hundred years after I am dead than I
-      am at present;&rdquo; and even John Knox had his eye on an earthly as well as a
-      heavenly immortality. So, too, had Erasmus. &ldquo;Theologians there will always
-      be in abundance,&rdquo; he said; &ldquo;the like of me comes but once in centuries.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Lesser men than these have gone to their graves with the conviction that
-      their names would never pass from the earth. Landor had a most imperious
-      conceit on the subject. &ldquo;What I write,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is not written on slate
-      and no finger, not of Time itself who dips it in the cloud of years can
-      efface it.&rdquo; And again, &ldquo;I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be
-      well-lighted, the guests few and select.&rdquo; A proud fellow, if ever there
-      was one. Even that very small but very clever person, Le Brun-Pindare,
-      cherished his dream of immortality. &ldquo;I do not die,&rdquo; he said grandly; &ldquo;<i>I
-      quit the time</i>.&rdquo; And beside this we may put Victor Hugo's rather
-      truculent, &ldquo;It is time my name ceased to fill the world.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      But no one stated so frankly, not only that he expected immortality, but
-      that he laboured for immortality, as Cicero did. &ldquo;Do you suppose,&rdquo; he
-      said, &ldquo;to boast a little of myself after the manner of old men, that I
-      should have undergone such great toils by day and night, at home, and in
-      service, had I thought to limit my glory to the same bounds as my life?
-      Would it not have been far better to pass an easy and quiet life without
-      toil or struggle? But I know not how my soul, stretching upwards, has ever
-      looked forward to posterity as if, when it had departed from life, then at
-      last it would begin to live.&rdquo; The context, it is true, suggests that a
-      celestial immortality were in his thought as well as a terrestrial; but
-      earthly glory was never far from his mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor was it ever forgotten by Boswell. His confession on the subject is one
-      of the most exquisite pieces of self-revelation to be found in books. I
-      must give myself the luxury of transcribing its inimitable terms. In the
-      preface to his &ldquo;Account of Corsica&rdquo; he says:&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <i>For my part I should be proud to be known as an author; I have an
-      ardent ambition for literary fame; for of all possessions I should imagine
-      literary fame to be the most valuable. A man who has been able to furnish
-      a book which has been approved by the world has established himself as a
-      respectable character in distant society, without any danger of having the
-      character lessened by the observation of his weaknesses. (</i>Oh, you
-      rogue!<i>) To preserve a uniform dignity among those who see us every day
-      is hardly possible; and to aim at it must put us under the fetters of a
-      perpetual restraint. The author of an approved book may allow his natural
-      disposition an easy play (&rdquo;</i>You were drunk last night, you dog<i>&ldquo;),
-      and yet indulge the pride of superior genius when he considers that by
-      those who know him only as an author he never ceases to be respected. Such
-      an author in his hours of gloom and discontent may have the consolation to
-      think that his writings are at that very time giving pleasure to numbers,
-      and such an author may cherish the hope of being remembered after death,
-      which has been a great object of the noblest minds in all ages.</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We may smile at Boswell's vanity, but most of us share his ambition. Most
-      of us would enjoy the prospect of being remembered, in spite of Gray's
-      depressing reminder about the futility of flattering the &ldquo;dull cold ear of
-      death.&rdquo; In my more expansive moments, when things look rosy and
-      immortality seems cheap, I find myself entertaining on behalf of &ldquo;Alpha of
-      the Plough&rdquo; an agreeable fancy something like this. In the year two
-      thousand&mdash;or it may be three thousand&mdash;yes, let us do the thing
-      handsomely and not stint the centuries&mdash;in the year three thousand
-      and ever so many, at the close of the great war between the Chinese and
-      the Patagonians, that war which is to end war and to make the world safe
-      for democracy&mdash;at the close of this war a young Patagonian officer
-      who has been swished that morning from the British Isles across the
-      Atlantic to the Patagonian capital&mdash;swished, I need hardly remark,
-      being the expression used to describe the method of flight which consists
-      in being discharged in a rocket out of the earth's atmosphere and made to
-      complete a parabola on any part of the earth's surface that may be desired&mdash;bursts
-      in on his family with a trophy which has been recovered by him in the
-      course of some daring investigations of the famous subterranean passages
-      of the ancient British capital&mdash;those passages which have so long
-      perplexed, bewildered, intrigued, and occupied the Patagonian savants,
-      some of whom hold that they were a system of sewers, and some that they
-      were the roadways of a people who had become so afflicted with photophobia
-      that they had to build their cities underground. The trophy is a book by
-      one &ldquo;Alpha of the Plough.&rdquo; It creates an enormous sensation. It is put
-      under a glass case in the Patagonian Hall of the Immortals. It is
-      translated into every Patagonian dialect. It is read in schools. It is
-      referred to in pulpits. It is discussed in learned societies. Its author,
-      dimly descried across the ages, becomes the patron saint of a cult.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0043" id="linkimage-0043"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0134m.jpg" alt="0134m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0134.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      An annual dinner is held to his memory, at which some immense Patagonian
-      celebrity delivers a panegyric in his honour. At the close the whole
-      assembly rises, forms a procession and, led by the Patagonian Patriarch,
-      marches solemnly to the statue of Alpha&mdash;a gentleman with a flowing
-      beard and a dome-like brow&mdash;that overlooks the market-place, and
-      places wreaths of his favourite flower at the base, amid the ringing of
-      bells and a salvo of artillery.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is, of course, another and much more probable fate awaiting you, my
-      dear Alpha. It is to make a last appearance on some penny barrow in the
-      New Cut and pass thence into oblivion. That is the fate reserved for most,
-      even of those authors whose names sound so loud in the world to-day. And
-      yet it is probably true, as Boswell said, that the man who writes has the
-      best chance of remembrance. Apart from Pitt and Fox, who among the
-      statesmen of a century ago are recalled even by name? But Wordsworth and
-      Coleridge, Byron and Hazlitt, Shelley and Keats and Lamb, even
-      second-raters like Leigh Hunt and Godwin, have secure niches in the temple
-      of memory. And for one person who recalls the' brilliant military feats of
-      Montrose there are a thousand who remember him by half a stanza of the
-      poem in which he poured out his creed&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      He either fears his fate too much,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Or his deserts are small.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That dares not put it to the touch
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      To win or lose it all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Mæcenas was a great man in his day, but it was not his friendship with
-      Octavius Cæsar that gave him immortality, but the fact that he befriended
-      a young fellow named Horace, who wrote verses and linked the name of his
-      benefactor with his own for ever. And the case of Pytheas of Ægina is full
-      of suggestion to those who have money to spare and would like to be
-      remembered. Pytheas being a victor in the Isthmian games went to Pindar
-      and asked him how much he would charge to write an ode in his praise.
-      Pindar demanded one talent, about £200 of our money. &ldquo;Why, for so much
-      money,&rdquo; said Pytheas, &ldquo;I can erect a statue of bronze in the temple.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Very likely.&rdquo; On second thoughts he returned and paid for the poem. And
-      now, as Emerson remarks in recalling the story, not only all the statues
-      of bronze in the temples of Ægina are destroyed, but the temples
-      themselves and the very walls of the city are utterly gone whilst the ode
-      of Pindar in praise of Pytheas remains entire. There are few surer paths
-      to immortality than making friends with the poets, as the case of the Earl
-      of Southampton proves. He will live as long as the sonnets of Shakespeare
-      live simply in virtue of the mystery that envelops their dedication. But
-      one must choose one's poet carefully. I do not advise you to go and give
-      Mr &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; £200 and a commission to send your name
-      echoing down the corridors of time.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Pindars and Shakespeares are few, and Mr &mdash;&mdash;&mdash;&mdash; (you
-      will fill in the blank according to your own aversion) is not one of them.
-      It would be safer to spend the money in getting your name attached to a
-      rose, or an overcoat, or a pair of boots, for these things, too, can
-      confer a modest immortality. They have done so for many. A certain
-      Maréchal Neil is wafted down to posterity in the perfume of a rose, which
-      is as enviable a form of immortality as one could conceive. A certain Mr
-      Mackintosh is talked about by everybody whenever there is a shower of
-      rain, and even Blucher is remembered more by his boots than by his
-      battles. It would not be very extravagant to imagine a time when Gladstone
-      will be thought of only as some remote tradesman who invented a bag, just
-      as Archimedes is remembered only as a person who made an ingenious screw.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, after all, the desire for immortality is not one that will keep the
-      healthy mind awake at night. It is reserved for very few of us, perhaps
-      one in a million, and they not always the worthiest. The lichen of
-      forgetfulness steals over the memory of the just and the unjust alike, and
-      we shall sleep as peacefully and heedlessly if we are forgotten as if the
-      world babbles about us for ever.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0044" id="linkimage-0044"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0137m.jpg" alt="0137m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0137.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0045" id="linkimage-0045"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0138m.jpg" alt="0138m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0138.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0020" id="link2H_4_0020"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON DINING
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>here are people
-      who can hoard a secret as misers hoard gold. They can hoard it not for the
-      sake of the secret, but for the love of secrecy, for the satisfaction of
-      feeling that they have got something locked up that they could spend if
-      they chose without being any the poorer and that other people would enjoy
-      knowing. Their pleasure is in not spending what they can afford to spend.
-      It is a pleasure akin to the economy of the Scotsman, which, according to
-      a distinguished member of that race, finds its perfect expression in
-      taking the tube when you can afford a cab. But the gift of secrecy is
-      rare. Most of us enjoy secrets for the sake of telling them. We spend our
-      secrets as Lamb's spendthrift spent his money&mdash;while they are fresh.
-      The joy of creating an emotion in other people is too much for us. We like
-      to surprise them, or shock them, or please them as the case may be, and we
-      give away the secret with which we have been entrusted with a liberal hand
-      and a solemn request &ldquo;to say nothing about it.&rdquo; We relish the luxury of
-      telling the secret, and leave the painful duty of keeping it to the other
-      fellow. We let the horse out and then solemnly demand that the stable door
-      shall be shut so that it shan't escape, I have done it myself&mdash;often.
-      I have no doubt that I shall do it again. But not to-day. I have a secret
-      to reveal, but I shall not reveal it. I shall not reveal it for entirely
-      selfish reasons, which will appear later. You may conceive me going about
-      choking with mystery. The fact is that I have made a discovery. Long years
-      have I spent in the search for the perfect restaurant, where one can dine
-      wisely and well, where the food is good, the service plain, the atmosphere
-      restful, and the prices moderate&mdash;in short, the happy mean between
-      the giddy heights of the Ritz or the Carlton, and the uncompromising
-      cheapness of Lockhart's. In those extremes I find no satisfaction.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is not merely the dearness of the Ritz that I reject. I dislike its
-      ostentatious and elaborate luxury. It is not that I am indifferent to a
-      good table. Mrs Poyser was thankful to say that there weren't many
-      families that enjoyed their &ldquo;vittles&rdquo; more than her's did, and I can claim
-      the same modest talent for myself. I am not ashamed to say that I count
-      good eating as one of the chief joys of this transitory life. I could join
-      very heartily in Peacock's chorus:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      &ldquo;How can a man, in his life of a span,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Do anything better than dine.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Give me a satisfactory' dinner, and the perplexities of things unravel
-      themselves magically, the clouds break, and a benign calm overspreads the
-      landscape. I would not go so far as the eminent professor, who insisted
-      that eating was the greatest of all the pleasures in life. That, I think,
-      is exalting the stomach unduly. And I can conceive few things more
-      revolting than the Roman practice of prolonging a meal by taking emetics.
-      But, on the other hand, there is no need to apologise for enjoying a good
-      dinner. Quite virtuous people have enjoyed good dinners. I see no
-      necessary antagonism between a healthy stomach and a holy mind. There was
-      a saintly man once in this city&mdash;a famous man, too&mdash;who was
-      afflicted with so hearty an appetite that, before going out to dinner, he
-      had a square meal to take the edge off his hunger, and to enable him to
-      start even with the other guests. And it is on record that when the
-      ascetic converts of the Oxford movement went to lunch with Cardinal
-      Wiseman in Lent they were shocked at the number of fish courses that
-      hearty trencherman and eminent Christian went through in a season of
-      fasting, &ldquo;I fear,&rdquo; said one of them, &ldquo;that there is a lobster salad side
-      to the Cardinal.&rdquo; I confess, without shame, to a lobster salad side too. A
-      hot day and a lobster salad&mdash;what happier conjunction can we look for
-      in a plaguey world?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, in making this confession, I am neither <i>gourmand</i> nor <i>gourmet</i>.
-      Extravagant dinners bore me, and offend what I may call my economic
-      conscience; I have little sense of the higher poetry of the kitchen, and
-      the great language of the <i>menu</i> does not stir my pulse. I do not ask
-      for lyrics at the table. I want good, honest prose. I think that Hazlitt
-      would have found me no unfit comrade on a journey. He had no passion for
-      talk when afoot, but he admitted that there was one subject which it was
-      pleasant to discuss on a journey, and that was what one should have for
-      supper at the inn. It is a fertile topic that grows in grace as the
-      shadows lengthen and the limbs wax weary. And Hazlitt had the right
-      spirit. His mind dwelt upon plain dishes&mdash;eggs and a rasher, a rabbit
-      smothered in onions, or an excellent veal cutlet. He even spoke
-      approvingly of Sancho's choice of a cow-heel. I do not go all the way with
-      him in his preferences. I should argue with him fiercely against his
-      rabbit and onions. I should put the case for steak and onions with
-      conviction, and I hope with convincing eloquence. But the root of the
-      matter was in him. He loved plain food plainly served, and I am proud to
-      follow his banner. And it is because I have found my heart's desire at the
-      Mermaid, that I go about burdened with an agreeable secret. I feel when I
-      enter its portals a certain sober harmony and repose of things. I stroke
-      the noble cat that waits me, seated on the banister, and rises, purring
-      with dignity, under my caress. I say &ldquo;Good evening&rdquo; to the landlord who
-      greets me with a fine eighteenth-century bow, at once cordial and
-      restrained, and waves me to a seat with a grave motion of his hand. No
-      frowsy waiter in greasy swallow-tail descends on me; but a neat-handed
-      Phyllis, not too old nor yet too young, in sober black dress and white
-      cuffs, attends my wants, with just that mixture of civility and aloofness
-      that establishes the perfect relationship&mdash;obliging, but not
-      familiar, quietly responsive to a sign, but not talkative. The napery
-      makes you feel clean to look at it, and the cutlery shines like a mirror,
-      and cuts like a Seville blade. And then, with a nicely balanced dish of
-      hors d'ouvres, or, in due season, a half-a-dozen oysters, the modest
-      four-course table d'hôte begins, and when at the end you light your
-      cigarette over your cup of coffee, you feel that you have not only dined,
-      but that you have been in an atmosphere of plain refinement, touched with
-      the subtle note of a personality.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the bill? Sir, you would be surprised at its modesty. But I shall not
-      tell you. Nor shall I tell you where you will find the Mermaid. It may be
-      in Soho or off the Strand, or in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn, or it
-      may not be in any of these places. I shall not tell you because I
-      sometimes fancy it is only a dream, and that if I tell it I shall shatter
-      the illusion, and that one night I shall go into the Mermaid and find its
-      old English note of kindly welcome and decorous moderation gone, and that
-      in its place there will be a noisy, bustling, popular restaurant with a
-      band, from which I shall flee. When it is &ldquo;discovered&rdquo; it will be lost, as
-      the Rev. Mr Spalding would say. And so I shall keep its secret. I only
-      purr it to the cat who arches her back and purrs understanding in
-      response. It is the bond of freemasonry between us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0046" id="linkimage-0046"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0142m.jpg" alt="0142m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0142.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0047" id="linkimage-0047"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0143m.jpg" alt="0143m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0143.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0021" id="link2H_4_0021"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      IDLE THOUGHTS AT SEA
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was leaning over
-      the rails of the upper deck idly watching the Chinese whom, to the number
-      of over 3000, we had picked up at Havre and were to disgorge at Halifax,
-      when the bugle sounded for lunch. A mistake, I thought, looking at my
-      watch. It said 12.15, and the luncheon hour was one. Then I remembered. I
-      had not corrected my watch that morning by the ship's clock. In our
-      pursuit of yesterday across the Atlantic we had put on another
-      three-quarters of an hour. Already on this journey we had outdistanced
-      to-day by two and a half hours. By the time we reached Halifax we should
-      have gained perhaps six hours. In thought I followed the Chinamen
-      thundering across Canada to Vancouver, and thence onward across the
-      Pacific on the last stage of their voyage. And I realised that by the time
-      they reached home they would have caught yesterday up.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But would it be yesterday after all? Would it not be to-morrow? And at
-      this point I began to get anxious about To-day. I had spent fifty odd
-      years in comfortable reliance upon To-day. It had seemed the most secure
-      thing in life. It was always changing, it was true; but it was always the
-      same. It was always To-day. I felt that I could no more get out of it than
-      I could get out of my skin. And here we were leaving it behind as
-      insensibly and naturally as the trees bud in spring. In front of us,
-      beyond that hard rim of the horizon, yesterday was in flight, but we were
-      overtaking it bit by bit. We had only to keep plugging away by sea and
-      land, and we should soon see its flying skirts in the twilight across the
-      plains. But having caught it up we should discover that it was neither
-      yesterday nor to-day, but to-morrow. Or rather it would be a confusion of
-      all three.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In short, this great institution of To-day that had seemed so fixed and
-      absolute a property of ours was a mere phantom&mdash;a parochial illusion
-      of this giddy little orb that whizzed round so industriously on its own
-      axis, and as it whizzed cut up the universal day into dress lengths of
-      light and dark. And these dress lengths, which were so elusive that they
-      were never quite the same in any two places at once, were named and
-      numbered and tied up into bundles of months and years, and packed away on
-      the shelves of history as the whirring orb unrolled another length of
-      light and dark to be duly docketed and packed away with the rest. And
-      meanwhile, outside this little local affair of alternate strips of light
-      and dark&mdash;what? Just one universal blaze of sunshine, going on for
-      ever and ever, without dawn or sunset, twilight or dark&mdash;not many
-      days, but just one day and that always midday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At this stage I became anxious not only about Today, but about Time
-      itself. That, too, was becoming a fiction of this unquiet little speck of
-      dust on which I and those merry Chinese below were whizzing round. A few
-      hours hence, when our strip of daylight merged into a strip of dark, I
-      should see neighbouring specks of dust sparkling in the indigo sky&mdash;specks
-      whose strip of daylight was many times the length of ours, and whose year
-      would outlast scores of ours. Indeed, did not the astronomers tell us that
-      Neptune's year is equal to 155 of our years? Think of it&mdash;our
-      Psalmist's span of life would not stretch half round a single solar year
-      of Neptune. You might be born on New Year's Day and live to a green old
-      age according to our reckoning, and still never see the glory of
-      midsummer, much less the tints of autumn. What could our ideas of Time
-      have in common with those of the dwellers on Neptune&mdash;if, that is,
-      there be any dwellers on Neptune.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And beyond Neptune, far out in the infinite fields of space, were hosts of
-      other specks of dust which did not measure their time by this regal orb
-      above me at all, but cut their strips of light and dark, and numbered
-      their days and their years, their centuries and their aeons by the
-      illumination of alien lamps that ruled the illimitable realms of other
-      systems as the sun ruled ours. Time, in short, had ceased to have any
-      fixed meaning before we left the Solar system, but out in the unthinkable
-      void beyond it had no meaning at all. There was not Time: there was only
-      duration. Time had followed To-day into the realm of fable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As I reached this depressing conclusion&mdash;not a novel or original one,
-      but always a rather cheerless one&mdash;a sort of orphaned feeling stole
-      over me. I seemed like a poor bereaved atom of consciousness, cast adrift
-      from Time and the comfortable earth, and wandering about forlornly in
-      eternity and infinity. But the Chinese enabled me to keep fairly jolly in
-      the contemplation of this cosmic loneliness. They were having a gay time
-      on the deck below after being kept down under hatches during yesterday's
-      storm. One of them was shaving the round grinning faces of his comrades at
-      an incredible speed. Another, with a basket of oranges before him, was
-      crying something that sounded like &ldquo;Al-lay! Al-lay!&rdquo; counting the money in
-      his hand meanwhile again and again, not because he doubted whether it was
-      all there, but because he liked the feel and the look of it. A sprightly
-      young rascal, dressed as they all were in a grotesque mixture of garments,
-      French and English and German, picked up on the battlefields of France,
-      where they had been working for three years, stole up behind the
-      orange-seller (throwing a joyful wink at me as he did so) snatched an
-      orange and bolted. There followed a roaring scrimmage on deck, in the
-      midst of which the orange-seller's coppers were sent flying along the
-      boards, occasioning enormous hilarity and scuffling, and from which the
-      author of the mischief emerged riotously happy and, lighting a cigarette,
-      flung himself down with an air of radiant good humour, in which he
-      enveloped me with a glance of his bold and merry eye.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The little comedy entertained me while my mind still played with the
-      illusions of Time. I recalled occasions when I had seemed to pass, not
-      intellectually as I had now, but emotionally out of Time. The experiences
-      were always associated with great physical weariness and the sense of the
-      endlessness of the journey. There was that day in the Dauphiné coming down
-      from the mountains to Bourg-d'Oison. And that other experience in the Lake
-      District. How well I recalled it! I stood with a companion in the doorway
-      of the hotel at Patterdale looking at the rain. We had come to the end of
-      our days in the mountains, and now we were going back to Keswick, climbing
-      Helvellyn on the way. But Helvellyn was robed in clouds, and the rain was
-      of that determined kind that admits of no hope. And so, after a long wait,
-      we decided that Helvellyn &ldquo;would not go,&rdquo; as the climber would say, and,
-      putting on our mackintoshes and shouldering our rucksacks, we set out for
-      Keswick by the lower slopes of the mountains&mdash;by the track that
-      skirts Great Dodd and descends by the moorlands into the Vale of St John.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All day the rain came down with pauseless malice, and the clouds hung low
-      over the mountains. We ploughed on past Ullswater, heard Airey Force
-      booming through the universal patter of the rain and, out on the moor,
-      tramped along with that line sense of exhilaration that comes from the
-      struggle with forbidding circumstance. Baddeley declares this walk to be
-      without interest, but on that sombre day we found the spacious loneliness
-      of the moors curiously stimulating and challenging. In the late afternoon
-      we descended the steep fell side by the quarries into the Vale of St John
-      and set out for the final tramp of five miles along the road. What with
-      battling with the wind and rain, and the weight of the dripping mackintosh
-      and the sodden rucksack, I had by this time walked myself into that
-      passive mental state which is like a waking dream, in which your voice
-      sounds hollow and remote in your ears, and your thoughts seem to play
-      irresponsibly on the surface of your slumbering consciousness.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now, if you know that road in the Vale of St John, you will remember that
-      it is what Mr Chesterton calls &ldquo;a rolling road, a reeling road.&rdquo; It is
-      like a road made by a man in drink. First it seems as though it is going
-      down the Vale of Thirlmere, then it turns back and sets out for Penrith,
-      then it remembers Thirlmere again and starts afresh for that goal, only to
-      give it up and make another dash for Penrith. And so on, and all the time
-      it is not wanting to go either to Thirlmere or to Penrith, but is sidling
-      crabwise to Keswick. In short, it is a road which is like the
-      whip-flourish that Dickens used to put at the end of his signature, thus:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0048" id="linkimage-0048"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0148m.jpg" alt="0148m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0148.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      Now, as we turned the first loop and faced round to Penrith, I saw through
-      the rain a noble view of Saddleback. The broad summit of that fine
-      mountain was lost in the clouds. Only the mighty buttresses that sustain
-      the southern face were visible. They looked like the outstretched fingers
-      of some titanic hand coming down through the clouds and clutching the
-      earth as though they would drag it to the skies. The image fell in with
-      the spirit of that grey, wild day, and I pointed the similitude out to my
-      companion as we paced along the muddy road.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Presently the road turned in one of its plunges towards Thirlmere, and we
-      went on walking in silence until we swung round at the next loop. As we
-      did so I saw the fingers of a mighty hand descending from the clouds and
-      clutching the earth. Where had I seen that vision before? Somewhere, far
-      off, far hence, I had come suddenly upon just such a scene, the same mist
-      of rain, the same great mountain bulk lost in the clouds, the same
-      gigantic fingers gripping the earth. When? Where? It might have been years
-      ago. It might have been the projection of years to come. It might have
-      been in another state of existence.... Ah no, of course, it was this
-      evening, a quarter of an hour ago, on this very road. But the impression
-      remained of something outside the confines of time. I had passed into a
-      static state in which the arbitrary symbols had vanished, and Time was
-      only like a faint shadow cast upon the timeless deeps. I had walked
-      through the shadow into the deeps.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But my excursion into Eternity, I remembered, did not prevent me, when I
-      reached the hotel at Keswick, consulting the railway guide very earnestly
-      in order to discover the time of the trains for London next day. And the
-      recollection of that prosaic end to my spiritual wanderings brought my
-      thoughts back to the Chinamen. One of them, sitting just below me, was
-      happily engaged in devouring a large loaf of French bread, one of those
-      long rolls that I had seen being despatched to them on deck from the shore
-      at Havre, skilfully balanced on a basket that was passed along a rope
-      connecting the ship and the landing-stage. The gusto of the man as he
-      devoured the bread, and the crisp, appetising look of the brown crust
-      reminded me of something.... Yes, of course. The bugle had gone for lunch
-      long ago. They would be half through the meal' by this time. I turned
-      hastily away and went below, and as I went I put my watch back
-      three-quarters of an hour. After all, one might as well accept the fiction
-      of the hours and be in the fashion. It would save trouble.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0049" id="linkimage-0049"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0150m.jpg" alt="0150m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0150.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0050" id="linkimage-0050"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0151m.jpg" alt="0151m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0151.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0022" id="link2H_4_0022"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      TWO DRINKS OF MILK
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he cabin lay a
-      hundred yards from the hot, dusty road, midway between Sneam and
-      Derrynane, looking across the noble fiord of Kenmare River and out to the
-      open Atlantic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A bare-footed girl with hair black as midnight was driving two cows down
-      the rocks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We put our bicycles in the shade and ascended the rough rocky path to the
-      cabin door. The bare-footed girl had marked our coming and received us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milk? Yes. Would we come in?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We entered. The transition from the glare of the sun to the cool shade of
-      the cabin was delicious. A middle-aged woman, probably the mother of the
-      girl, brushed the seats of two chairs for us with her apron, and having
-      done that drove the chickens which were grubbing on the earthen floor out
-      into the open. The ashes of a turf fire lay on the floor and on a bench by
-      the ingle sat the third member of the family.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      She was a venerable woman, probably the grandmother of the girl; but her
-      eye was bright, her faculties unblunted, and her smile as instant and
-      untroubled as a child's. She paused in her knitting to make room for me on
-      the bench by her side, and while the girl went out for the milk she played
-      the hostess.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If you have travelled in Kerry you don't need to be told of the charm of
-      the Kerry peasantry. They have the fascination of their own wonderful
-      country, with its wild rocky coast encircling the emerald glories of
-      Killamey. They are at once tragic and childlike. In their eyes is the look
-      of an ancient sorrow; but their speech is fresh and joyous as a spring
-      morning. They have none of our Saxon reserve and aloofness, and to know
-      them is to forgive that saying of the greatest of the sons of Kerry,
-      O'Connell, who remarked that an Englishman had all the qualities of a
-      poker except its occasional warmth. The Kerry peasant is always warm with
-      the sunshine of comradeship. He is a child of nature, gifted with
-      wonderful facility of speech and with a simple joy in giving pleasure to
-      others. It is impossible to be lonely in Kerry, for every peasant you meet
-      is a gentleman anxious to do you a service, delighted if you will stop to
-      talk, privileged if you will only allow him to be your guide. It is like
-      being back in the childhood of the world, among elemental things and an
-      ancient, unhasting people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The old lady in the cabin by the Derrynane road seemed to me a duchess in
-      disguise. That is, she had just that gracious repose of manner that a
-      duchess ought to have. She knew no bigger world than the village of Sneam,
-      five miles away. Her life had been passed in this little cabin and among
-      these barren rocks. But the sunshine was in her heart and she had caught
-      something of the majesty of the great ocean that gleamed out there through
-      the cabin door. Across that sunlit water generations of exiles had gone to
-      far lands. Some few had returned and some had been for ever silent. As I
-      sat and listened I seemed to hear in those gentle accents all the tale of
-      a stricken people and of a deserted land. There was no word of complaint&mdash;only
-      a cheerful acceptance of the decrees of Fate. There is the secret of the
-      fascination of the Kérry temperament&mdash;the happy sunlight playing
-      across the sorrow of things.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The girl returned with a huge, rough earthen bowl of milk, filled almost
-      to the brim, and a couple of mugs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We drank and then rose to leave, asking as we did so what there was to
-      pay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sure, there's nothing to pay,&rdquo; said the old lady with just a touch of
-      pride in her sweet voice. &ldquo;There's not a cabin in Kerry where you'll not
-      be welcome to a drink of milk.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The words sang in the mind all the rest of that summer day, as we bathed
-      in the cool waters that, lapped the foot of the cliffs near Derrynane, and
-      as we toiled up the stiff gradient of Coomma Kistie Pass. And they added a
-      benediction to the grave night when, seated in front of Teague M'Carty's
-      hotel&mdash;Teague, the famous fisherman and more famous flymaker, whose
-      rooms are filled with silver cups, the trophies of great exploits among
-      the salmon and trout, and whose hat and coat are stuck thick with
-      many-coloured flies&mdash;we saw the moon rise over the bay at Waterville
-      and heard the wash of the waves upon the shore.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      When cycling from Aberfeldy to Killin you will be well advised to take the
-      northern shore of Loch Tay, where the road is more level and much better
-      made than that on the southern side. (I speak of the days before the
-      coming of the motor which has probably changed all this.)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In our ignorance of the fact we had taken the southern road. It was a day
-      of brilliant sunshine and inimitable thirst. Midway along the lake we
-      dismounted and sought the hospitality of a cottage&mdash;neat and
-      well-built, a front garden gay with flowers, and all about it the sense of
-      plenty and cleanliness. A knock at the door was followed by the bark of a
-      dog. Then came the measured tramp of heavy boots along the flagged
-      interior. The door opened, and a stalwart man in shooting jacket and
-      leggings, with a gun under his arm and a dog at his heels, stood before
-      us. He looked at us with cold firmness to hear our business. We felt that
-      we had made a mistake. We had disturbed someone who had graver affairs
-      than thirsty travelers to attend to.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milk? Yes. He turned on his heel and stalked with great strides back to
-      the kitchen. We stood silent at the door. Somehow, the day seemed suddenly
-      less friendly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In a few minutes the wife appeared with a tray bearing a jug and two
-      glasses&mdash;a capable, neatly-dressed woman, silent and severe of
-      feature. While we poured out the milk and drank it, she stood on the
-      doorstep, looking away across the lake to where the noble form of
-      Schiehallion dominates the beautiful Rannoch country. We felt that time
-      was money and talk foolishness, and drank our milk with a sort of guilty
-      haste.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What have we to pay, please?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Sixpence.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And the debt discharged, the lady turned and closed the door.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a nice, well-kept house, clean and comfortable; but it lacked
-      something that made the poor cabin on the Derrynane road a fragrant
-      memory.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0051" id="linkimage-0051"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0155m.jpg" alt="0155m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0155.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0052" id="linkimage-0052"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0156m.jpg" alt="0156m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0156.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0023" id="link2H_4_0023"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON FACTS AND THE TRUTH
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t was my fortune
-      the other evening to be at dinner with a large company of doctors. While
-      we were assembling I fell into conversation with an eminent physician,
-      and, our talk turning upon food, he remarked that we English seasoned our
-      dishes far too freely. We scattered salt and pepper and vinegar over our
-      food so recklessly that we destroyed the delicacy of our taste, and did
-      ourselves all sorts of mischief. He was especially unfriendly to the use
-      of salt. He would not admit even that it improved the savour of things. It
-      destroyed our sense of their natural flavour, and substituted a coarser
-      appeal to the palate. From the hygienic point of view, the habit was all
-      wrong. All the salts necessary to us are contained in the foods we eat,
-      and the use of salt independently is entirely harmful.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Take the egg, for example,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;It contains in it all the elements
-      necessary for the growth of a chicken&mdash;salt among the rest. That is
-      sufficient proof that it is a complete, self-contained article of food.
-      Yet when we come to eat it we drench it with salt, vulgarise its delicate
-      flavour, and change its natural dietetic character.&rdquo; And he concluded, as
-      we went down to dinner, by commending the superior example of the Japanese
-      in this matter. &ldquo;They,&rdquo; he said laughingly, &ldquo;only take salt when they want
-      to die.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      At the dinner table I found myself beside another member of the Faculty,
-      and by way of breaking the conversational ice I asked (as I liberally
-      applied salt to my soup) whether he agreed with those of his profession
-      who held that salt was unnecessary and even harmful. He replied with great
-      energy in the negative. He would not admit that the foods we eat contain
-      the salt required by the human body. &ldquo;Not even the egg?&rdquo; I asked. &ldquo;No, not
-      even the egg. We cook the egg as we cook most of our foods, and even if
-      the foods contain the requisite salt in their raw state they tend to lose
-      their character cooked.&rdquo; He admitted that that was an argument for eating
-      things <i>au naturel</i> more than is the practice. But he was firm in his
-      conviction that the separate use of salt is essential. &ldquo;And as for
-      flavour, think of a walnut, eaten raw, with or without salt. What
-      comparison is there?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said I (artfully exploiting my newly acquired information about the
-      Japanese), &ldquo;are there not races who do not use salt?&rdquo; &ldquo;My dear sir,&rdquo; said
-      he, &ldquo;the most conclusive evidence about the hygienic quality of salt is
-      supplied by the case of the Indians. Salt is notoriously one of the prime
-      essentials of life to them. When the supply, from one cause or another, is
-      seriously diminished, the fact is reflected with absolute exactness in the
-      mortality returns. If they don't get a sufficiency of salt to eat with
-      their food they die.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      After this exciting beginning I should have liked to spend the evening in
-      examining all the doctors separately on the subject of salt. No doubt I
-      should have found all shades of differing opinion among them. On the face
-      of it, there is no possibility of reconciling the two views I have quoted,
-      especially the illustrations from the Japanese and the Indians. Yet I
-      daresay they could be reconciled easily enough if we knew all the facts.
-      For example, while the Indians live almost exclusively upon rice, the
-      Japanese are probably the greatest fish consuming community in the world,
-      and anyone who has dined with them knows how largely they eat their fish
-      in the raw state. This difference of habit, I imagine, would go far to
-      explain what seems superficially inexplicable and incredible.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I refer to the incident here only to show what a very elusive thing
-      the truth is. One would suppose that if there were one subject about which
-      there would be no room for controversy or disagreement it would be a
-      commonplace thing like the use of salt.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yet here were two distinguished doctors, taken at random&mdash;men whose
-      whole life had been devoted to the study of the body and its requirements&mdash;whose
-      views on the subject were in violent antagonism. They approached their
-      subject from contrary angles and with contrary sets of facts, and the
-      truth they were in search of took a wholly different form for each.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is with facts as with figures. You can make them prove anything by
-      judicious manipulation.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A strenuous person was declaiming in the train the other day about our air
-      service. He was very confident that we were &ldquo;simply out of it&mdash;that
-      was all, simply out of it.&rdquo; And he was full of facts on the subject. <b>I
-      don't like people who brim over with facts&mdash;who lead facts about, as
-      Holmes says, like a bull-dog to leap at our throat. There are few people
-      so unreliable as the man whose head bulges with facts.</b> His conclusions
-      are generally wrong. He has so many facts that he cannot sort them out and
-      add up the total. He belongs to what the Abbé Sieyès called &ldquo;loose,
-      unstitched minds.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Perhaps I am prejudiced, for I confess that I am not conspicuous for
-      facts. I sympathise with poor Mrs Shandy. She could never remember whether
-      the earth went round the sun or the sun round the earth. Her husband had
-      told her again and again, but she always forgot. I am not so bad as that,
-      but I find that facts are elusive things. I put a fact away in the
-      chambers of my mind, and when I go for it I discover, not infrequently,
-      that it has got some moss or fungus on it, or something chipped off, and I
-      can never trust it until I have verified my references.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But to return to the gentleman in the train. The point about him was that,
-      so far as I could judge, his facts were all sound. He could tell you how
-      many English machines had failed to return on each day of the week, and
-      how many German machines had been destroyed or forced to descend. And
-      judging from his figures he was quite right. &ldquo;We were out of it&mdash;simply
-      out of it.&rdquo; Yet the truth is that while his facts were right, his
-      deduction was wrong. It was wrong because he had taken account of some
-      facts, but had left other equally important facts out of consideration.
-      For example, through all this time the German airmen had been on the
-      defensive and ours had been on the attack. The Englishmen had taken great
-      risks for a great object. They had gone miles over the enemy's lines&mdash;as
-      much as fifty miles over&mdash;and had come back with priceless
-      information. They had paid for the high risks, of course, but the whole
-      truth is that, so far from being beaten, they were at this time the most
-      victorious element of our Army.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I mention this little incident to show that facts and the truth are not
-      always the same thing. Truth is a many-sided affair, and is often composed
-      of numerous facts that, taken separately, seem even to contradict each
-      other. Take the handkerchief incident in &ldquo;Othello.&rdquo; Poor Desdemona could
-      not produce the handkerchief. That was the fact that the Moor saw.
-      Desdemona believed she had lost the handkerchief. Othello believed she had
-      given it away, for had not Iago said he had seen Cassio wipe his beard
-      with it? Neither knew it had been stolen. Hence the catastrophe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But we need not go to the dramatists for examples. You can find them in
-      real life anywhere, any day. Let me give a case from Fleet Street. A
-      free-lance reporter, down on his luck, was once asked by a newspaper to
-      report a banquet. He went, was seen by a waiter to put a silver-handled
-      knife into his pocket, was stopped as he was going out, examined and the
-      knife discovered&mdash;also, in his waistcoat pocket, a number of
-      pawntickets for silver goods. Could anyone, on such facts, doubt that he
-      was a thief? Yet he was perfectly innocent, and in the subsequent hearing
-      his innocence was proved. Being hard up, he had parted with his dress
-      clothes, and had hired a suit at a pawnbroker's. The waist of the trousers
-      was too small, and after an excellent dinner he felt uncomfortable. He
-      took up a knife to cut some stitches behind. As he was doing so he saw a
-      steely-eyed waiter looking in his direction; being a timid person he
-      furtively put the knife in his pocket. The speeches came on, and when he
-      had got his &ldquo;take&rdquo; he left to transcribe it, having forgotten all about
-      the knife. The rest followed as stated. The pawntickets, which seemed so
-      strong a collateral evidence of guilt, were of course not his at all. They
-      belonged to the owner of the suit.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You remember that Browning in &ldquo;The Ring and the Book,&rdquo; tells the story of
-      the murder of Pompilia from twelve different points of view before he
-      feels that he has told you the truth about it. And who has not been
-      annoyed by the contradictions of Ruskin?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Yet with patience you find that these apparent contradictions are only
-      different aspects of one truth. &ldquo;Mostly,&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;matters of any
-      consequence are three-sided or four-sided or polygonal.... For myself, I
-      am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have
-      contradicted myself three times.&rdquo; I fancy it is this discovery of the
-      falsity of isolated facts that makes us more reasonable and less cocksure
-      as we get older We get to suspect that there are other facts that belong
-      to the truth we are in search of. Tennyson says that &ldquo;a lie that is only
-      half a truth is ever the blackest of lies&rdquo;; but he is wrong. It is the
-      fact that is only half the truth (or a quarter) which is the most
-      dangerous lie&mdash;for a fact seems so absolute, so incontrovertible.
-      Indeed, the real art of lying is in the use of facts, their arrangement
-      and concealment. It was never better stated than by a famous business man
-      in an action for libel which I have referred to in another connection. He
-      was being examined about the visit of Government experts to his works, and
-      the instructions he gave to his manager. And this, as I remember it, was
-      the dialogue between counsel and witness:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Did you tell him to tell them the facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;The whole facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;What facts?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;<i>Selected facts</i>.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a daring reply, but he knew his jury, and he knew that in the midst
-      of the Boer War they would not give a verdict against anybody bearing his
-      name.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If in such a matter as the use of salt, which ought to be reducible to a
-      scientific formula it is so hard to come at the plain truth of things, we
-      cannot wonder that it dodges us so completely in the jungle of politics
-      and speculation. I have heard a skilful politician make a speech in which
-      there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of which was a
-      colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is so easy to make
-      the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in the realm that lies
-      outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation is denounced as the
-      heresy of another. Justification by &ldquo;works&rdquo; is displaced by justification
-      by faith, and that in turn is superseded by justification by &ldquo;service&rdquo;
-       which is &ldquo;works&rdquo; in new terms. Which is truth and which error? Or is that
-      the real alternative? May they not be different facets of one truth. The
-      prism breaks up the sunlight into many different colours and facts are
-      only the broken lights of truth. In this perplexing world we must be
-      prepared to find the same truth demonstrated in the fact that Japanese die
-      because they take salt, and the fact that Indians die because they don't
-      take it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0053" id="linkimage-0053"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0163m.jpg" alt="0163m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0163.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0054" id="linkimage-0054"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0164m.jpg" alt="0164m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0164.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0024" id="link2H_4_0024"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GREAT MEN
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was reading just
-      now, apropos of a new work on Burke, the estimate of him expressed by
-      Macaulay who declared him to be &ldquo;the greatest man since Milton.&rdquo; I paused
-      over the verdict, and the subject led me naturally enough to ask myself
-      who were the great Englishmen in history&mdash;for the sake of argument,
-      the six greatest. I found the question so exciting that I had reached the
-      end of my journey (I was in a bus at the time) almost before I had reached
-      the end of my list. I began by laying down my premises or principles. I
-      would not restrict the choice to men of action. The only grievance I have
-      against Plutarch is that he followed that course. His incomparable
-      &ldquo;Lives,&rdquo; would be still more satisfying, a still more priceless treasury
-      of the ancient world, if, among his crowd of statesmen and warriors, we
-      could make friends with Socrates and Virgil, Archimedes and Epictetus,
-      with the men whose work survived them as well as with the men whose work
-      is a memory. And I rejected the blood-and-thunder view of greatness. I
-      would not have in my list a mere homicidal genius. My great man may have
-      been a great killer of his kind, but he must have some better claim to
-      inclusion than the fact that he had a pre-eminent gift for slaughter. On
-      the other hand, I would not exclude a man simply because I adjudged him to
-      be a bad man. Henry Fielding, indeed, held that all great men were bad
-      men. &ldquo;Greatness,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;consists in bringing all manner of mischief
-      upon mankind, and goodness in removing it from them.&rdquo; And it was to
-      satirise the traditional view of greatness that he wrote that terrific
-      satire &ldquo;The Life of Jonathan Wild the Great,&rdquo; probably having in mind the
-      Marlboroughs and Fredericks of his day. But while rejecting the
-      traditional view, we cannot keep out the bad man because he was a bad man.
-      I regard Bismarck as a bad man, but it would be absurd to deny that he was
-      a great man. He towers over the nineteenth century like a baleful ogre, a
-      sort of Bluebeard, terrible, sinister, cracking his heartless, ruthless
-      jests, heaving with his volcanic wrath, cunning as a serpent, merciless as
-      a tiger, but great beyond challenge, gigantic, barbaric, a sort of
-      mastodon of the primeval world, born as a terrific afterthought of nature.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nor is power alone a sufficient title to greatness. It must be power
-      governed by purpose, by a philosophy, good or bad, of human life, not by
-      mere spasms of emotion or an itch for adventure. I am sure Pericles was a
-      great man, but I deny the ascription to Alcibiades. I am sure about Cæsar,
-      but I am doubtful about Alexander, loud though his name sounds down twenty
-      centuries. Greatness may be moral or a-moral, but it must have design. It
-      must spring from deliberate thought and not from mere accident, emotion or
-      effrontery, however magnificent. It is measured by its influence on the
-      current of the world, on its extension of the kingdom of the mind, on its
-      contribution to the riches of living. Applying tests like these, who are
-      our six greatest Englishmen? For our first choice there would be a
-      unanimous vote. Shakespeare is the greatest thing we have done. He is our
-      challenger in the fists of the world, and there is none to cross swords
-      with him. Like Sirius, he has a magnitude of his own. Take him away from
-      our heavens, conceive him never to have been born, and the imaginative
-      wealth of fife shrinks to a lower plane, and we are left, in Iago's
-      phrase, &ldquo;poor indeed.&rdquo; There is nothing English for which we would
-      exchange him. &ldquo;Indian Empire or no Indian Empire,&rdquo; we say with Carlyle,
-      &ldquo;we cannot do without our Shakespeare.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      For the second place, the choice is less obvious, but I think it goes
-      indisputably to him who had
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      &ldquo;... a voice whose sound was like the sea.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Milton plays the moon to Shakespeare's sun. He breathed his mighty
-      harmonies into the soul of England like a god. He gave us the note of the
-      sublime, and his influence is like a natural element, all pervasive,
-      intangible, indestructible. With him stands his &ldquo;chief of men&rdquo;&mdash;the
-      &ldquo;great bad man&rdquo; of Burke&mdash;the one man of action in our annals capable
-      of measuring his stature with Bismarck for crude power, but overshadowing
-      Bismarck in the realm of the spirit&mdash;the man at whose name the cheek
-      of Mazarin turned pale, who ushered in the modern world by sounding the
-      death-knell of despotic monarchism, who founded the naval supremacy of
-      these islands and who (in spite of his own ruthlessness at Drogheda) first
-      made the power of England the instrument of moral law in Europe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But there my difficulties begin. I mentally survey my candidates as the
-      bus lumbers along. There comes Chaucer bringing the May morning eternally
-      with him, and Swift with his mighty passion tearing his soul to tatters,
-      and Ruskin filling the empyrean with his resounding eloquence, and Burke,
-      the prose Milton, to whose deep well all statesmanship goes with its pail,
-      and Johnson rolling out of Bolt Court in his brown wig, and Newton
-      plumbing the ultimate secrets of this amazing universe, and deep-browed
-      Darwin unravelling the mystery of life, and Wordsworth giving &ldquo;to weary
-      feet the gift of rest,&rdquo; and Dickens bringing with him a world of creative
-      splendour only less wonderful than that of Shakespeare. But I put these
-      and a host of others aside. For my fourth choice I take King Alfred. Strip
-      him of all the legends and improbabilities that cluster round his name,
-      and he is still one of the grand figures of the Middle Ages, a heroic,
-      enlightened man, reaching out of the darkness towards the light, the first
-      great Englishman in our annals. Behind him comes Bacon. At first I am not
-      quite sure whether it is Francis or Roger, but it turns out to be Roger&mdash;there
-      by virtue of precedence in time, of the encyclopaedic range of his
-      adventurous spirit and the black murk of superstition through which he
-      ploughed his lonely way to truth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am tempted, as the bus turns my corner, to finish my list with a woman,
-      Florence Nightingale, chosen, not as the romantic &ldquo;lady of the lamp,&rdquo; but
-      as the fierce warrior against ignorance and stupidity, the adventurer into
-      a new field, with the passion of a martyr controlled by a will of iron, a
-      terrific autocrat of beneficence, the most powerful and creative woman
-      this nation has produced.. But I reject her, not because she is unworthy,
-      but because she must head a companion fist of great Englishwomen. I
-      hurriedly summon up two candidates from among our English saints&mdash;Sir
-      Thomas More and John Wesley. In spite of the intolerance (incredible to
-      modern ears) that could jest so diabolically at the martyrdom of the
-      &ldquo;heretic,&rdquo; Sir Thomas Fittar, More holds his place as the most fragrant
-      flower of English culture, but if greatness be measured by achievement and
-      enduring influence he must yield place to the astonishing revivalist of
-      the eighteenth century who left a deeper mark upon the spiritual life of
-      England than any man in our history.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is my list&mdash;Shakespeare, Milton, Cromwell, King Alfred, Roger
-      Bacon, John Wesley&mdash;and anybody can make out another who cares and a
-      better who can. And now that it is made I find that, quite
-      unintentionally, it is all English in the most limited sense. There is not
-      a Scotsman, an Irishman, or a Welshman in it. That will gall the kibe of
-      Mr Bernard Shaw. And I rejoice to find another thing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no politician and no professional soldier in the half-dozen. It
-      contains two poets, two men of action, one scientist and one preacher. If
-      the representative arts have no place, it is not because greatness cannot
-      be associated with them. Bach and Michael Angelo cannot be left out of any
-      list of the world's great men. But, matchless in literature, we are poor
-      in art, though in any rival list I should be prepared to see the great
-      name of Turner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0055" id="linkimage-0055"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0169m.jpg" alt="0169m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0169.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0056" id="linkimage-0056"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0170m.jpg" alt="0170m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0170.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0025" id="link2H_4_0025"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON SWEARING
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> young officer in
-      the flying service was describing to me the other day some of his recent
-      experiences in France. They were both amusing and sensational, though told
-      with that happy freedom from vanity and self-consciousness which is so
-      pleasant a feature of the British soldier of all ranks. The more he has
-      done and seen the less disposed he seems to regard himself as a hero. It
-      is a common enough phenomenon. Bragging is a sham currency. It is the base
-      coin with which the fraudulent pay their way. F. C. Selous was the
-      greatest big game hunter of modern times, but when he talked about his
-      adventures he gave the impression of a man who had only been out in the
-      back garden killing slugs. And Peary, who found the North Pole, writes as
-      modestly as if he had only found a new walk in Epping Forest. It is Dr
-      Cook, who didn't find the North Pole and didn't climb Mount M'Kinley, who
-      does the boasting. And the man who talks most about patriotism is usually
-      the man who has least of that commodity, just as the man who talks most
-      about his honesty is rarely to be trusted with your silver spoons. A man
-      who really loves his country would no more brag about it than he would
-      brag about loving his mother.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it was not the modesty of the young officer that leads me to write of
-      him. It was his facility in swearing. He was extraordinarily
-      good-humoured, but he swore all the time with a fluency and variety that
-      seemed inexhaustible. There was no anger in it and no venom in it. It was
-      just a weed that had overgrown his talk as that pestilent clinging
-      convolvulus overgrows my garden. &ldquo;Hell&rdquo; was his favourite expletive, and
-      he garnished every sentence with it in an absent-minded way as you might
-      scatter pepper unthinkingly over your pudding. He used it as a verb, and
-      he used it as an adjective, and he used it as an adverb, and he used it as
-      a noun. He stuck it in anyhow and everywhere, and it was quite clear that
-      he didn't know that he was sticking it in at all.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And in this reckless profusion he had robbed swearing of the only secular
-      quality it possesses&mdash;the quality of emphasis. It is speech breaking
-      bounds. It is emotion earned beyond the restraints of the dictionary and
-      the proprieties of the normal habit. It is like a discord in music that in
-      shattering the harmony intensifies the effect. Music which is all discord
-      is noise, and speech which is all emphasis is deadly dull.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is like the underlining of a letter. The more it is underlined the
-      emptier it seems, and the less you think of the writer. It is merely a
-      habit, and emphasis should be a departure from habit. &ldquo;When I have said
-      'Malaga,'&rdquo; says Plancus, in the &ldquo;Vicomte de Bragelonne,&rdquo; &ldquo;I am no longer a
-      man.&rdquo; He had the true genius for swearing. He reserved his imprecations
-      for the grand occasions of passion. I can see his nostrils swell and his
-      eyes flash fire as he cries, &ldquo;Malaga.&rdquo; It is a good swear word. It has the
-      advantage of meaning nothing, and that is precisely what a swear word
-      should mean. It should be sound and fury, signifying nothing. It should be
-      incoherent, irrational, a little crazy like the passion that evokes it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If &ldquo;Malaga&rdquo; has one defect it is that it is not monosyllabic. It was that
-      defect which ruined Bob Acres' new fashion in swearing. &ldquo;'Damns' have had
-      their day,&rdquo; he said, and when he swore he used the &ldquo;oath referential.&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Odds hilts and blades,&rdquo; he said, or &ldquo;Odds slanders and lies,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Odds
-      bottles and glasses.&rdquo; But when he sat down to write his challenge to
-      Ensign Beverley he found the old fashion too much for him. &ldquo;Do, Sir
-      Lucius, let me begin with a damme,&rdquo; he said. He had to give up artificial
-      swearing when he was really in a passion, and take to something which had
-      a wicked sound in it. For I fear that, after all, it is the idea of being
-      a little wicked that is one of the attractions of swearing. It is a
-      symptom of the perversity of men that it should be so. For in its origin
-      always swearing is a form of sacrament. When Socrates spoke &ldquo;By the Gods,&rdquo;
-       he spoke, not blasphemously, but with the deepest reverence he could
-      command. But the oaths of to-day are not the expression of piety, but of
-      violent passion, and the people who indulge in a certain familiar
-      expletive would not find half so much satisfaction in it if they felt
-      that, so far from being wicked, it was a declaration of faith&mdash;&ldquo;By
-      our Lady.&rdquo; That is the way our ancestors used to swear, and we have
-      corrupted it into something which is bankrupt of both faith and meaning.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The revival of swearing is a natural product of the war. Violence of life
-      breeds violence of speech, and according to Shakespeare it is the
-      prerogative of the soldier to be &ldquo;full of strange oaths.&rdquo; In this respect
-      Wellington was true to his vocation. Not that he used &ldquo;strange oaths.&rdquo; He
-      stuck to the beaten path of imprecation, but he was most industrious in
-      it. There are few of the flowers of his conversation that have come down
-      to us which are not garnished with &ldquo;damns&rdquo; or &ldquo;By Gods.&rdquo; Hear him on the
-      morrow of Waterloo when he is describing the battle to gossip Creevey&mdash;&ldquo;It
-      has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It
-      has been a damned nice thing&mdash;the nearest run thing you ever saw in
-      your life.&rdquo; Or when some foolish Court flunkey appeals to him to support
-      his claim to ride in the carriage with the young Queen on some public
-      occasion&mdash;&ldquo;Her Majesty can make you ride on the box or inside the
-      carriage or run behind like a damned tinker's dog.&rdquo; But in this he
-      followed not only the practice of soldiers in all times, but the
-      fashionable habit of his own time. Indeed, he seems to have regarded
-      himself as above reproach, and could even be shocked at the language of
-      the Prince Regent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;By God! you never saw such a figure in your life as he is,&rdquo; he remarks,
-      speaking of that foul-mouthed wastrel. &ldquo;Then he speaks and swears so like
-      old Falstaff, that damn me if I was not ashamed to walk into the room with
-      him.&rdquo; This is a little unfair to Falstaff, who had many vices, but whose
-      recorded speech is singularly free from bad language. It suggests also
-      that Wellington, like my young aviator, was unconscious of his own
-      comminatory speech. He had caught the infection of the camps and swore as
-      naturally and thoughtlessly as he breathed. It was so with that other
-      famous soldier Sherman, whose sayings were a blaze of blasphemy, as when,
-      speaking of Grant, he said, &ldquo;I'll tell you where he beats me, and where he
-      beats the world. He don't care a damn for what the enemy does out of his
-      sight, but it scares me like Hell.&rdquo; Two centuries ago, according to Uncle
-      Toby, our men &ldquo;swore terribly in Flanders,&rdquo; and they are swearing terribly
-      there again, to-day. Perhaps this is the last time that the Flanders mud,
-      which has been watered for centuries by English blood, will ensanguine the
-      speech of English lips. I fancy that pleasant young airman will talk a
-      good deal less about &ldquo;Hell&rdquo; when he escapes from it to a cleaner world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0057" id="linkimage-0057"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0174m.jpg" alt="0174m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0174.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0058" id="linkimage-0058"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0175m.jpg" alt="0175m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0175.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0026" id="link2H_4_0026"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A HANSOM CAB
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> saw a surprising
-      spectacle in Regent Street last evening. It was a hansom cab. Not a
-      derelict hansom cab such as you may still occasionally see, with an
-      obsolete horse in the shafts and an obsolete driver on the box, crawling
-      along like a haggard dream, or a forlorn spectre that has escaped from a
-      cemetery and has given up hope of ever finding its way back&mdash;no, but
-      a lively, spic-and-span hansom cab, with a horse trotting in the shafts
-      and tossing its head as though it were full of beans and importance, and a
-      slap-up driver on the box, looking as happy as a sandboy as he flicked and
-      flourished his whip, and, still more astonishing, a real passenger, a
-      lady, inside the vehicle.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I felt like taking my hat off to the lady and giving a cheer to the
-      driver, for the apparition was curiously pleasing. It had something of the
-      poignancy of a forgotten odour or taste that summons up whole vistas of
-      the past&mdash;sweetbriar or mignonette or the austere flavour of the
-      quince. In that trotting nag and the swaying figure on the box there
-      flashed upon me the old London that used to amble along on four legs, the
-      London before the Deluge, the London before the coming of King Petrol,
-      when the hansom was the jaunty aristocrat of the streets, and the
-      two-horse bus was the chariot of democracy. London was a slow place then,
-      of course, and a journey say, from Dollis Hill to Dülwich, was a
-      formidable adventure, but it was very human and humorous. When you took
-      your seat behind, or still better, beside the rosy-cheeked bus-driver, you
-      settled down to a really good time. The world was in no hurry and the
-      bus-driver was excellent company. He would tell you about the sins of that
-      &ldquo;orf horse,&rdquo; the idiosyncrasies of passengers, the artifices of the
-      police, the mysteries of the stable. He would shout some abstruse joke to
-      a passing driver, and with a hard wink include you in the revelry. The
-      conductor would stroll up to him and continue a conversation that had
-      begun early in the morning and seemed to go on intermittently all day&mdash;a
-      conversation of that jolly sort in which, as Washington Irving says, the
-      jokes are rather small and the laughter abundant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In those happy days, of course, women knew their place. It was inside the
-      bus. The outside was consecrated to that superior animal, Man. It was an
-      act of courage, almost of impropriety, for a woman to ride on the top
-      alone. Anything might happen to her in those giddy moral altitudes. And
-      even the lady I saw in the hansom last night would not have been quite
-      above suspicion of being no better than she ought to be. The hansom was a
-      rather roguish, rakish contraption that was hardly the thing for a lady to
-      be seen in without a stout escort. It suggested romance, mysteries,
-      elopements, late suppers, and all sorts of wickednesses. A staid,
-      respectable &ldquo;growler&rdquo; was much more fitting for so delicate an exotic as
-      Woman. If she began riding in hansoms alone anything might happen. She
-      might want to go to public dinners next&mdash;think of it!&mdash;she might
-      be wanting to ride a bicycle&mdash;horrors!&mdash;she might discover a
-      shameless taste for cigarettes, or demand a living wage, or University
-      degrees, or a vote, just for all the world as though she was the equal of
-      Man, the Magnificent....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      As I watched this straggler from the past bowling so gaily and
-      challengingly through the realm that he had lost, my mind went back to the
-      coming of King Petrol, whose advent heralded a new age. How clumsy, and
-      impossible he seemed then! He was a very Polyphemus of fable, mighty, but
-      blind and blundering. He floundered along the streets, reeling from right
-      to left like a drunken giant, encountering the kerb-stone, skimming the
-      lamp-post. He was in a perpetual state of boorish revolt, standing
-      obstinately and mulishly in the middle of the street or across the street
-      amidst the derision and rejoicing of those whose empire he threatened, and
-      who saw in these pranks the assurance of his ultimate failure. Memory went
-      back to the old One a.m. from the Law Courts, and to one night that sums
-      up for me the spirit of those days of the great transition....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It was a jocose beast that, with snortings and trumpetings, used to start
-      from the vicinity of the Law Courts at One a.m. The fellow knew his power.
-      He knew that he was the last thing on wheels to skid along the Edgeware
-      Road. He knew that he had journalists aboard, worthless men who wrote him
-      down in the newspapers, unmoral men who wrote articles
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />=
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      (from Our Peking Correspondent)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      in Fleet Street, and then went home to bed with a quiet conscience;
-      chauffeurs from other routes returning home, who when the car was &ldquo;full
-      up&rdquo; hung on by teeth and toe-nails to the rails, or hilariously crowded in
-      with the driver; barmaids and potboys loudly jocular, cabmen&mdash;yes,
-      cabmen, upon my honour, cabmen in motor buses! You might see them in the
-      One a.m. from the Law Courts any morning, red faced and genial as only
-      cabmen can be, flinging fine old jokes at each other from end to end of
-      the car, passing the snuff-box, making innocent merriment out of the tipsy
-      gentleman with the tall hat who has said he wants to get out at Baker
-      Street, and who, lurching in his sleep from right to left, is being swept
-      on through Maida Vale to far Cricklewood. What winks are exchanged, what
-      jokes cracked, what lighthearted raillery! And when the top hat, under the
-      impetus of a bigger lurch than usual, rolls to the floor&mdash;oh, then
-      the car resounds with Homeric laughter, and the tipsy gentleman opens his
-      dull eyes and looks vacantly around. But these revels soon are ended.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      An ominous grunt breaks in upon the hilarity inside the car:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      First a shiver, and then a thrill,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Then something decidedly like a spill&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      O. W. Holmes,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      <i>The Deacon's Masterpiece</i> (DW)
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      and we are left sitting motionless in the middle of Edgware Road, with the
-      clock over the shuttered shop opposite pointing to quarter to two.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the spirit of Jest inside the breast of the motor bus asserting
-      himself. He disapproves of the passengers having all the fun. Is he not a
-      humorist too? May he not be merry in the dawn of this May morning?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We take our fate like Englishmen, bravely, even merrily.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The cabmen laugh recklessly. This is their moment. This is worth living
-      for. Their enemy is revealed in his true colours, a base betrayer of the
-      innocent wayfarer; their profession is justified. What though it is two or
-      three miles to Cricklewood, what though it is two in the morning! Who
-      cares?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Only the gentleman with the big bag in the corner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Ow am I to git 'ome to Cricklewood?&rdquo; he asks the conductor with tears in
-      his voice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The conductor gives it up. He goes round to help the driver. They busy
-      themselves in the bowels of the machinery, they turn handles, they work
-      pumps, they probe here and thump there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They come out perspiring but merry. It's all in the day's work. They have
-      the cheerful philosophy of people who meddle with things that move&mdash;cab
-      drivers, bus-drivers, engine-drivers.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      If, when looking well won't move thee.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      Looking ill prevail?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So they take a breather, light cigarettes, crack jokes. Then to it again.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Meanwhile all the hansoms in nocturnal London seem to swoop down on us,
-      like sharks upon the dead whale. Up they rattle from this side and that,
-      and every cabman flings a jibe as he passes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Look 'ere,&rdquo; says one, pulling up. &ldquo;Why don't yer take the genelmen where
-      they want to go? That's what I asks yer. Why&mdash;don't&mdash;yer&mdash;take&mdash;the&mdash;genelmen&mdash;where&mdash;they&mdash;want&mdash;to
-      go? It's only your kid. Yer don't want to go. That's what it is. Yer don't
-      want to go.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      For the cabman is like &ldquo;the wise thrush who sings his song twice over.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;'Ere take ole Jumbo to the 'orspital!&rdquo; cries another.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;We can't 'elp larfin', yer know,&rdquo; says a third feelingly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, you keep on larfin',&rdquo; says the chauffeur looking up from the inside
-      of One a.m. &ldquo;It suits your style o' beauty.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      A mellow voice breaks out:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      We won't go home till morning,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Till daylight does appear.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the refrain is taken up by half a dozen cabmen in comic chorus. Those
-      who can't sing, whistle, and those who can neither sing nor whistle,
-      croak.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We sit inside patiently. We even joke too. All but the man with the big
-      bag. He sits eyeing the bag as if it were his life-long enemy.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      He appeals again to the conductor, who laughs.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The tipsy man with the tall hat staggers outside. He comes back, puts his
-      head in the doorway, beams upon the passengers, and says:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;It's due out at eight-thirty in the mor-r-ning.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We think better of the tipsy gentleman in the tall hat. His speech is that
-      of the politest people on earth. His good humour goes to the heart. He is
-      like Dick Steele&mdash;&ldquo;when he was sober he was delightful; when he was
-      drunk he was irresistible.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;She won't go any more to-night,&rdquo; says the conductor.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So we fold our tents like the Arabs and as silently steal away. All but
-      the man with the big bag. We leave him still, struggling with a problem
-      that looks insoluble.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Two of us jump into a hansom that still prowls around, the last of the
-      shoal of sharks.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Drive up West End Lane.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Right, sir.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Presently the lid opens. We look up. Cabby's face, wreathed in smiles,
-      beams down on us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I see what was coming all the way from Baker Street,&rdquo; he savs. &ldquo;I see the
-      petrol was on fire.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yus,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;Thought I should pick you up about 'ere.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No good, motors,&rdquo; he goes on, cheerfully. &ldquo;My opinion is they'll go out
-      as fast as they come in. Why, I hear lots o' the aristocracy are giving
-      'em up and goin' back to 'orses.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Hope they'll get better horses than this,&rdquo; for we are crawling painfully
-      up the tortuous reaches of West End Lane.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Well, genelmen, it ain't because 'e's overworked. 'E ain't earned more
-      than three bob to-night. That's jest what' e's earned. Three bob. It's the
-      cold weather, you know. That's what it is. It's the cold weather as makes
-      'im duck his 'ead. Else 'e's a good 'orse. And 'e does go after all, even
-      if 'e only goes slow. And that's what you can't say of that there
-      motor-bus.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      We had no reply to this thrust, and the lid dropped down with a sound of
-      quiet triumph.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And so home. And my dreams that night were filled with visions of a huge
-      Monster, reeking with strange odours, issuing hoarse-sounds of malicious
-      laughter and standing for ever and ever in the middle of Edgware Road with
-      the clock opposite pointing to a quarter to two, a rueful face in the
-      corner staring fixedly at a big bag and a tipsy gentleman in a tall hat
-      finding his way back to Baker Street in happy converse with a policeman.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Gone is the old London over which the shade of Mr Hansom presided like a
-      king. Gone is the &ldquo;orf horse&rdquo; with all its sins; gone is the rosy-cheeked
-      driver with his merry jokes and his eloquent whip and his tales of the
-      streets; gone is the conductor who, as he gave you your ticket, talked to
-      you in a spirit of leisurely comradeship about the weather, the Boat Race,
-      or the latest clue to the latest mystery. We amble no more. We have
-      banished laughter and leisure from the streets, and the face of the
-      motor-bus driver, fixed and intense, is the symbol of the change. We have
-      passed into a breathless world, a world of wonderful mechanical
-      contrivances that have quickened the tempo of life and will soon have made
-      the horse as much a memory as the bow and arrow or the wherry that used to
-      be the principal vehicle of Elizabethan London. As I watched the hansom
-      bowling along Regent Street until it was lost in the swirl of motor-buses
-      and taxis I seemed to see in it the last straggler of an epoch passing
-      away into oblivion. I am glad it went so gallantly, and I am half sorry I
-      did not give the driver a parting cheer as he flicked his whip in the face
-      of the night.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0059" id="linkimage-0059"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0183m.jpg" alt="0183m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0183.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0060" id="linkimage-0060"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0184m.jpg" alt="0184m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0184.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0027" id="link2H_4_0027"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON MANNERS
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t is always
-      surprising, if not always agreeable, <b>to see ourselves as others see us</b>.
-      The picture we present to others is never the picture we present to
-      ourselves. It may be a prettier picture: generally it is a much plainer
-      picture; but, whether pretty or plain, it is always a strange picture.
-      Just now we English are having our portrait painted by an American lady,
-      Mrs Shipman Whipple, and the result has been appearing in the press. It is
-      not a flattering portrait, and it seems to have angered a good many people
-      who deny the truth of the likeness very passionately. The chief accusation
-      seems to be that we have no manners, are lacking in the civilities and
-      politenesses of life, and so on, and are inferior in these things to the
-      French, the Americans, and other peoples. It is not an uncommon charge,
-      and it comes from many quarters. It came to me the other day in a letter
-      from a correspondent, French or Belgian, who has been living in this
-      country during the war, and who wrote bitterly about the manners of the
-      English towards foreigners. In the course of his letter he quoted with
-      approval the following cruel remark of Jean Carrière, written, needless to
-      say, before the war:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Il ne faut pas conclure qu'un Anglais est grossier et mal élevé du fait
-      qu'il manque de manières; il ignore encore la politesse, voilà tout.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      The saying is none the less hard because it is subtly apologetic. On the
-      whole Mrs Whipple's uncompromising plainness is more bearable.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not going to join in the attack which has been made on her. I have
-      enjoyed her articles and I like her candour. It does us good to be taken
-      up and smacked occasionally. Self-esteem is a very common ailment, and we
-      suffer from it as much as any nation. It is necessary that we should be
-      told, sometimes quite plainly, what our neighbours think about us. At the
-      same time it is permissible to remind Mrs Whipple of Burke's warning about
-      the difficulty of indicting a nation. There are some forty millions of us,
-      and we have some forty million different manners, and it is not easy to
-      get all of them into one portrait. The boy who will take this &ldquo;copy&rdquo; to
-      the printer is a miracle of politeness. The boy who preceded him was a
-      monument of boorishness. One bus conductor is all civility; another is all
-      bad temper, and between the two extremes you will get every shade of good
-      and bad manners. And so through every phase of society.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or leaving the individual, and going to the mass, you will find the widest
-      differences of manner in different parts of the country. In Lancashire and
-      Yorkshire the general habit is abrupt and direct. There is a deep-seated
-      distrust of fine speech and elegant manners, and the code of conduct
-      differs as much from that of, say, a Southern cathedral town as the manner
-      of Paris differs from the manner of Munich. But even here you will find
-      behind the general bearing infinite shades of difference that make your
-      generalisation foolish. Indeed, the more you know of any people the less
-      you feel able to sum them up in broad categories.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Suppose, for example, you want to find out what the manners of our
-      ancestors were like. Reading about them only leaves you in complete
-      darkness. You turn to Pepys, and find him lamenting&mdash;apropos of the
-      Russian Ambassador having been jeered at in the London streets because of
-      the strangeness of his appearance&mdash;lamenting the deplorable manners
-      of the people. &ldquo;Lord!&rdquo; he says, &ldquo;to see the absurd nature of Englishmen
-      that cannot forbear laughing and jeering at anything that looks strange.&rdquo;
-       Or you turn to Defoe, half a century later, and find him describing the
-      English as the most boorish nation in Europe.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But, on the other hand, so acute an observer as Erasmus, writing still
-      earlier, found our manners altogether delightful. &ldquo;To mention but a single
-      attraction,&rdquo; he says in one of his letters, &ldquo;the English girls are
-      divinely pretty; soft, pleasant, gentle, and charming as the Muses. They
-      have one custom which cannot be too much admired. When you go anywhere on
-      a visit the girls all kiss you. They kiss you when you arrive, they kiss
-      you when you go away, and they kiss you again when you return. Go where
-      you will, it is all kisses, and, my dear Faustus, if you had once tasted
-      how soft and fragrant those lips are, you would wish to spend your life
-      there.&rdquo; Erasmus would find the manners of our maidens a good deal changed
-      to-day. They would offer him, not kisses, but a cigarette.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I fancy it is true that, taken in the bulk, we are stiffer in bearing and
-      less expansive than most peoples. There is enough truth in the saying of
-      O'Connell which I have already quoted to make it good criticism. Our lack
-      of warmth may be due in part to our insularity; but more probably it is
-      traceable not to a physical but to a social source. Unlike the Celtic and
-      the Latin races, we are not democratic. We have not the ease that comes
-      from the ingrained tradition of human equality. The French have that ease.
-      So have the Spanish. So have the Irish. So have the Americans. But the
-      English are class conscious. The dead hand of feudalism is still heavy
-      upon our souls. If it were not, the degrading traffic in titles would long
-      since have been abolished as an insult to our intelligence. But we not
-      only tolerate it: we delight in this artificial scheme of relationship. It
-      is not human values, but social discriminations that count. And while
-      human values are cohesive in their effect, social discriminations are
-      separatist. They break society up into castes, and permeate it with the
-      twin vices of snobbery and flunkeyism. The current of human intercourse is
-      subdivided into infinite artificial channels, and the self-conscious
-      restraints of a people uncertain of their social relationships create a
-      defensive manner which sometimes seems hostile and superior when its true
-      root is a timorous distrust. A person who is not at ease or sure of his
-      ground tends to be stiff and gauche. It is not necessarily that he is
-      proud: it may be that he is only uncomfortable. When youth breaks away
-      from this fettering restraint of the past it is apt to mistake bad manners
-      for independence, and to lose servility without acquiring civility.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth probably is that we do not so much lack manners as suffer from a
-      sort of armour-plated manner. Emerson said that manners were invented to
-      keep fools at a distance, and the Englishman does give the impression that
-      he is keeping fools at a. distance. He would be more popular if he had
-      more <i>abandon</i>. I would not have him imitate the rather rhetorical
-      politeness of the French, but he would be the better for a dash of the
-      spontaneous comradeship of the Irish or the easy friendliness which makes
-      the average American so pleasant to meet. I think that is probably what
-      Mrs Whipple misses in us. Our excess of manner gives her the impression
-      that we are lacking in manners. It is the paradox of good manners that
-      they exist most where they do not exist at all&mdash;that is to say, where
-      conduct is simple, natural, and unaffected. Scott told James Hogg that no
-      man who was content to be himself, without either diffidence or egotism,
-      would fail to be at home in any company, and I do not know a better recipe
-      for good manners.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p>
-      I was riding in a bus yesterday afternoon when I overheard a conversation
-      between a couple of smartly dressed young people&mdash;a youth and a
-      maiden&mdash;at the other end of the vehicle. It was not an amusing
-      conversation, and I am not going to tell what it was about. Indeed, I
-      could not tell what it was about, for it was too vapid to be about
-      anything in particular. It was one of those conversations which consist
-      chiefly of &ldquo;Awfullys&rdquo; and &ldquo;Reallys!&rdquo; and &ldquo;Don't-you-knows&rdquo; and tattle
-      about dances and visits to the theatres, and motor-cars and similar
-      common-place topics. I refer to it, not because of the matter but because
-      of the manner. It was conducted on both sides as if the speakers were
-      alone on a hillside talking to each other in a gale of wind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The bus was quite full of people, some of whom affected not to hear, while
-      others paid the young people the tribute of attention, if not of approval.
-      They were not distressed by the attention. They preserved an air of being
-      unconscious of it, of having the bus to themselves, of not being aware
-      that anyone was within earshot. As a matter of fact, their manner
-      indicated a very acute consciousness of their surroundings. They were
-      really talking, not to each other, but to the public in the bus. If they
-      had been alone, you felt, they would have talked in quite reasonable
-      tones. They would not have dreamed of talking loudly and defiantly to an
-      empty bus. They would have made no impression on an empty bus. But they
-      were happily sensible of making quite a marked impression on a full bus.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it was not the impression they imagined. It was another impression
-      altogether. There are few more unpleasing and vulgar habits than that of
-      loud, aggressive conversation in public places. It is an impertinence to
-      inflict one's own affairs upon strangers who do not want to know about
-      them, and who may want to read or doze or think or look out of the window
-      at the shops and the people, without disturbance. The assumption behind
-      the habit is that no one is present who matters. It is an announcement to
-      the world that we are someone in particular and can talk as loudly as we
-      please whenever we please. It is a sort of social Prussianism that
-      presumes to trample on the sensibilities of others by a superior egotism.
-      The idea that it conveys an impression of ease in the world is mistaken.
-      On the contrary, it is often a symptom of an inverted self-consciousness.
-      These young people were talking loudly, not because they were unconscious
-      of themselves in relation to their fellows, but because they were much too
-      conscious and were not content to be just quiet, ordinary people like the
-      rest of us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I hesitate to say that it is a peculiarly English habit; I have not lived
-      abroad sufficiently to judge. But it is a common experience of those who
-      travel to find, as I have often found, their country humiliated by this
-      habit of aggressive bearing in public places. It is unlovely at home, but
-      it is much more offensive abroad, for then it is not only the person who
-      is brought into disrepute, but the country he (and not less frequently
-      she) is supposed to represent. We in the bus could afford to bear the
-      affliction of that young couple with tolerance and even amusement, for
-      they only hurt themselves. We could discount them. But the same bearing in
-      a foreign capital gives the impression that we are all like this, just as
-      the rather crude boasting of certain types of American grossly
-      misrepresent a people whose general conduct, as anyone who sees them at
-      home will agree, is unaffected, unpretentious, and good-natured.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, I suspect, is that every country sends abroad a
-      disproportionate number of its &ldquo;bounders.&rdquo; It is inevitable that it should
-      be so, for the people who can afford to travel are the people who have
-      made money, and while many admirable qualities may be involved in the
-      capacity to make money it is undeniable that a certain coarse
-      assertiveness is the most constant factor. Mr Leatherlung has got so
-      hoarse shouting that his hats, or his umbrellas, or his boots are better
-      than anybody else's hats, or umbrellas, or boots that he cannot attune his
-      voice to social intercourse. And when, in the second generation, this
-      congenital vulgarity is smeared with the accent of the high school it is
-      apt to produce the sort of young people we listened to in the bus
-      yesterday.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      So far from being representative of the English, they are violently
-      unEnglish. Our general defect is in quite the opposite direction. Take an
-      average railway compartment. It is filled with people who distrust the
-      sound of their own voices so much, and are so little afflicted with
-      egoism, that they do not talk at all, or talk in whispers and
-      monosyllables, nudging each other's knees perhaps to attract attention
-      without the fearful necessity of speaking aloud. There is a happy mean
-      between this painful timidity which evacutes the field and the overbearing
-      note that monopolises the field. We ought to be able to talk of our
-      affairs in the hearing of others, naturally and simply, without desiring
-      to be heard, yet not caring too much if we are heard, without wishing to
-      be observed, but indifferent if we are observed. Then we have achieved
-      that social ease which consists in the adjustment of a reasonable
-      confidence in ourselves to a consideration for the sensibilities of
-      others.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0061" id="linkimage-0061"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0192m.jpg" alt="0192m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0192.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0062" id="linkimage-0062"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0193m.jpg" alt="0193m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0193.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0028" id="link2H_4_0028"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A FINE DAY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span>t's just like
-      summer! That has been the refrain all day. When I have forgotten to say
-      it, Jane has said it, or the bee expert has shouted it from the orchard
-      with the freshness of a sudden and delighted discovery. There are some
-      people of penurious emotions and speech, like the Drumtochty farmer in Ian
-      Maclaren's story, who would disapprove of this iteration. They would find
-      it wasteful and frivolous. They do not understand that we go on saying it
-      over and over again, like the birds, for the sheer joy of saying it.
-      Listen to that bullfinch in the coppice. There he goes skipping from
-      branch to branch and twig to twig, and after each skip he pauses to say,
-      &ldquo;It's just like summer,&rdquo; and from a neighbouring tree his mate twitters
-      confirmation in perfect time. I've listened to them for half an hour and
-      they've talked about nothing else.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In fact, all the birds are talking of nothing else, notably the great
-      baritone who is at last in full song in his favourite chestnut below the
-      paddock. For weeks he has been trying his scales a little doubtfully and
-      tremulously, for he is a late starter, and likes the year to be well aired
-      before he begins; but today he is going it like a fellow who knows his
-      score so well that he could sing it in his sleep. And he, too, has only
-      one theme: It's just like summer. He does not seem to say it to the world,
-      but to himself, for he is a self-centred, contemplative singer, and not a
-      conscious artist like his great tenor rival, the thrush, who seems never
-      to forget the listening world.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the calm, still air, hill-side, valley and plain babble of summer.
-      There are far-off, boisterous shouts of holiday makers rattling along the
-      turnpike in wagons to some village festival (a belated football match, I
-      fancy); the laughter of children in the beech woods behind; the cheerful
-      outdoor sounds of a world that has come out into the gardens and the
-      fields. From one end of the hamlet there is the sound of hammering; from
-      the other the sound of sawing. That excellent tenor voice that comes up
-      from the allotments below belongs to young Dick. I have not heard it for
-      four years or more; but it has been heard in many lands and by many rivers
-      from the Somme to the Jordan. But Dick would rather be singing in the
-      allotment with his young brother Sam (the leader of the trebles in the
-      village choir) than anywhere else in the vide world. &ldquo;Yes, I've been to
-      Aleppo and Jerusalem, and all over the 'Oly Land,&rdquo; he says. &ldquo;I don't care
-      if I never see the 'Oly Land again. Anybody can have the 'Oly Land as far
-      as I'm concerned. This is good enough for me&mdash;that is, if there's a
-      place for a chap that wants to get married to live in.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      Over the hedge a hearty voice addresses the old village dame who sits at
-      her cottage door, knitting in the tranquil sunshine. &ldquo;Well, this is all
-      right, ain't it, mother?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; says the old lady, &ldquo;it's just like summer.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;And to think,&rdquo; continues the voice, &ldquo;that there was a thick layer o' snow
-      a week back. And, mind you, I shouldn't wonder if there's more to come
-      yet. To-morrow's the first day o' spring according to the calendar, and it
-      stands to reason summer ain't really come yet, you know, though it do seem
-      like it, don't it?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Yes, it's just like summer,&rdquo; repeats the old lady tranquilly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There in the clear distance is a streamer of smoke, white as wool in the
-      sunlight. It is the banner of the train on its way to London. It is just
-      like summer there no doubt, but London is not gossiping about it as we are
-      here. Weather in town is only an incident&mdash;a pleasurable incident or
-      a nuisance. It decides whether you will take a stick or an umbrella,
-      whether you will wear a straw hat or a bowler, a heavy coat or a
-      mackintosh, whether you will fight for a place inside the bus or outside.
-      It may turn the scale in favour of shopping or postpone your visit to the
-      theatre. But it only touches the surface of life, and for this reason the
-      incurable townsman, like Johnson, regards it merely as an acquaintance of
-      a rather uncertain temper who can be let in when he is in a good humour
-      and locked out when he is in a bad humour.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But in the country the weather is the stuff of which life is woven. It is
-      politics and society, your livelihood and your intellectual diversion. You
-      study the heavens as the merchant studies his ledger, and watch the change
-      of the wind as anxiously as the politician watches the mood of the public.
-      When I meet Jim Squire and remark that it is a fine day, or has been a
-      cold night, or looks like rain, it is not a conventional civility. It is
-      the formal opening of the discussion of weighty matters. It involves the
-      prospects of potatoes and the sowing of onions, the blossoms on the trees,
-      the effects of weather on the poultry and the state of the hives. I do not
-      suppose that there is a moment of his life when Jim is unconscious of the
-      weather or indifferent to it, unless it be Sunday. I fancy he does not
-      care what happens to the weather on Sunday. It has passed into other hands
-      and secular interference would be an impertinence, if not a sin. For he is
-      a stem Sabbatarian, and wet or fine goes off in his best clothes to the
-      chapel in the valley, his wife, according to some obscure ritual, always
-      trudging a couple of yards ahead of his heavy figure. He don't hold wi'
-      work on Sundays, not even on his allotment, and if you were to offer to
-      dig the whole day for him he would not take the gift. &ldquo;I don't hold wi'
-      work on Sundays,&rdquo; he would repeat inflexibly.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0063" id="linkimage-0063"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0197m.jpg" alt="0197m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0197.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And to poor Miss Tonks, who lives in the tumbledown cottage at the other
-      end of the lane, life resolves itself into an unceasing battle with the
-      weather. We call her Poor Miss Tonks because it would be absurd to call
-      her anything else. She is born to misfortune as the sparks fly upward. It
-      is always her sitting of eggs that turns out cocks when she wants hens. If
-      the fox makes a raid on our little hamlet he goes by an unerring instinct
-      to her poor hen-roost and leaves it an obscene ruin of feathers. The hard
-      frost last winter destroyed her store of potatoes when everybody else's
-      escaped, and it was her hive that brought the &ldquo;Isle of Wight&rdquo; into our
-      midst. Her neighbour, the Widow Walsh, holds that the last was a
-      visitation of Providence. Poor Miss Tonks had had a death in the family&mdash;true,
-      it was only a second cousin, but it was &ldquo;in the family&rdquo;&mdash;and had
-      neglected to tell the bees by tapping on the hive. And of course they
-      died. What else could they do, poor things? Widow Walsh has no patience
-      with people who fly in the face of Providence in this way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But of all Poor Miss Tonks' afflictions the weather is the most
-      unremittingly malevolent. It is either &ldquo;smarty hot&rdquo; or &ldquo;smarty cold.&rdquo; If
-      it isn't giving her a touch of &ldquo;brownchitis,&rdquo; or &ldquo;a blowy feeling all up
-      the back,&rdquo; or making her feel &ldquo;blubbed all over,&rdquo; it is dripping through
-      her thatched roof, or freezing her pump, or filling her room with smoke,
-      or howling through the crazy tenement where she lives her solitary life. I
-      think she regards the weather as a sort of ogre who haunts the hill-side
-      like a highwayman. Sometimes he sleeps, and sometimes he even smiles, but
-      his sleep is short and his smile is a deception. At the bottom he is a
-      terrible and evil-disposed person who gives a poor country woman no end of
-      work, and makes her life a burden.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But to-day warms even her bleak life, and reconciles her to her enemy.
-      When she brings a basket of eggs to the cottage she observes that &ldquo;it is a
-      bit better to-day.&rdquo; This is the most extreme compliment she ever pays to
-      the weather. And we translate it for her into &ldquo;Yes, it's just like
-      summer.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      In the orchard a beautiful peacock butterfly flutters out, and under the
-      damson trees there is the authentic note of high summer. For the most part
-      the trees are still as bare as in midwinter, but the damson trees are
-      white with blossom, and offer the first real feast for the bees which fill
-      the branches with the hum of innumerable wings, like the note of an aerial
-      violin infinitely prolonged. A bumble bee adds the boom of his double bass
-      to the melody as he goes in his heavy, blustering way from blossom to
-      blossom. He is rather a boorish fellow, but he is as full of the gossip of
-      summer as the peacock butterfly that comes flitting back across the
-      orchard like a zephyr on wings, or as Old Benjy, who saluted me over the
-      hedge just now with the remark that he didn't recall the like of this for
-      a matter o' seventy year. Yes, seventy year if 'twas a day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Old Benjy likes weather that reminds him of something about seventy years
-      ago, for his special vanity is his years, and he rarely talks about
-      anything in the memory of this generation. &ldquo;I be nearer a 'underd,&rdquo; he
-      says, &ldquo;than seventy,&rdquo; by which I think he means that he is eighty-six. He
-      longs to be able to boast that he is a hundred, and I see no reason why he
-      shouldn't live to do it, for he is an active old boy, still does a good
-      day's gardening and has come up the lane on this hot day at a nimble
-      speed, carrying his jacket on his arm. He is known to have made his coffin
-      and to keep it in his bedroom; but that is not from any morbid yearning
-      for death. It is, I fancy, a cunning way of warding him off, just as the
-      rest of us &ldquo;touch wood&rdquo; lest evil befall. &ldquo;It's just like summer,&rdquo; he
-      says.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;I remember when I was a boy in the year eighteen-underd-and-varty....&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0064" id="linkimage-0064"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0200m.jpg" alt="0200m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0200.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0065" id="linkimage-0065"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0029" id="link2H_4_0029"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON WOMEN AND TOBACCO
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> see that Mr
-      Joynson Hicks and Mrs Bramwell Booth have been talking to women very
-      seriously on the subject of smoking. &ldquo;Would you like to see your mother
-      smoke?&rdquo; asked Mr Hicks of the Queen's Hall audience he was addressing, and
-      Mrs Bramwell Booth pictured the mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face
-      of the baby she was nursing. I confess I have mixed feelings on this
-      subject, and in order to find out what I really think I will write about
-      it. And in the first place let us dispose of the baby. I do not want to
-      see mother blowing tobacco smoke in the face of the baby. But neither do I
-      want to see father doing so. If father is smoking when he nurses the baby
-      he will, I am sure, turn his head when he puffs out his smoke. Do not let
-      us drag in the baby.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The real point is in Mr Hicks' question. Would your respect or your
-      affection for your mother be lessened if she took to smoking. He would
-      not, of course, ask the question in relation to your father. It would be
-      absurd to say that your affection for your father was lessened because he
-      smoked a pipe or a cigar after dinner. You would as soon think of
-      disliking him for taking mustard with his mutton. It is a matter of taste
-      which has no moral implications either way. You may say it is wasteful and
-      unhygienic, but that is a criticism that applies to the habit regardless
-      of sex. Mr Hicks would not say that <i>women</i> must not smoke because
-      the habit is wasteful and unhygienic and that <i>men</i> may. He would no
-      more say this than he would say that it is right for men to live in stuffy
-      rooms, but wicked for women to do so, or that it is right for men to get
-      drunk but wrong for women to do so. In the matter of drunkenness there is
-      no discrimination between the sexes. We may feel that it is more tragic in
-      the case of the woman, but it is equally disgusting in both sexes.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      What Mr Hicks really maintains is that a habit which is innocent in men is
-      vicious in women. But this is a confusion of thought. It is mixing up
-      morals with customs. Custom has habituated us to men smoking and women not
-      smoking, and we have converted it into a moral code. Had the custom been
-      otherwise we should have been equally happy with it. If Carlyle, for
-      example, had been in Mr Hicks' audience he would have answered the
-      question with a snort of rage. He and his mother used to smoke their pipes
-      together in solemn comradeship as they talked of time and eternity, and no
-      one who has read his letters will doubt his love for her. There are no
-      such letters from son to mother in all literature. And of course Mr Hicks
-      knows many admirable women who smoke. I should not be surprised to know
-      that at dinner to-night he will be in the company of some women who smoke,
-      and that he will be as cordial with them as with those who do not smoke.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet.... Last night I was coming along Victoria Street on the top of a
-      bus, and saw two young women in front light cigarettes and begin to smoke.
-      And I am bound to confess I felt sorry, as I always do at these now not
-      infrequent incidents. Sorry, and puzzled that I was sorry, for I had been
-      smoking a cigarette myself, and had not felt at all guilty. If smoking is
-      an innocent pleasure, said I, which is as reasonable in the case of women
-      as in the case of men, why should I dislike to see women smoking outdoors
-      while I am doing the same thing myself? You are an irrational fellow, said
-      I. Of course I am an irrational fellow, I replied. We are all irrational
-      fellows. If we were brought to the judgment seat of pure reason how few of
-      us would escape the cells.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Nevertheless, beneath the feeling there was a reason. Those two young
-      women smoking on the top of the bus were a symbol. Their trail of smoke
-      was a flag&mdash;the flag of the rebellion of women. But then I got
-      perplexed again. For I rejoice in this great uprising of women&mdash;this
-      universal claim to equality of status with men. It is the most momentous
-      fact of the time. And, as I have said, I do not disapprove of the flag.
-      Yet when I saw the flag, of which I did not disapprove (for I wore it
-      myself), flaunted publicly as the symbol of the rebellion in which I
-      rejoice, I felt a cold chill. And probing to the bottom of this paradox, I
-      came to the conclusion that it was the wrong symbol for the idea. These
-      young women were proclaiming their freedom in false terms. Because men
-      smoked on the top of the bus they must smoke too&mdash;not perhaps because
-      they liked it, but because they felt it was a little daring, and put them
-      on an equality with men. But imitation is not equality: it is the badge of
-      servility and vulgarity. The freedom of women must not borrow the symbols
-      of men, but must take its own forms, enlarging the empire of women, but
-      preserving their independence and cherishing their loyalty to their finer
-      perceptions and traditions.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But here my perplexity returned. It is not the fact of those young women
-      smoking that offends you, I said addressing myself. It is the fact of
-      their smoking on a public conveyance. Yet if you agree that the habit of
-      smoking is as reputable and reasonable in the case of women as of men, why
-      should it be secretly, or at least privately, practised in their case,
-      while it may be publicly enjoyed in the other? You yourself are smoking at
-      this moment on the top of a bus while you are engaged in defending the
-      propriety of women smoking, and at the same time mentally reprobating the
-      conduct of the young women who are smoking in front of you, not because
-      they are smoking, but because (like you) they are smoking in public. How
-      do you reconcile such confusions of mind?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      At this reasonable challenge I found myself driven on to the the horns of
-      a dilemma. I could not admit a sex discrimination in regard to the habit.
-      And that being so it was, I saw, clearly impossible to defend differential
-      smoking conditions for men and women. If the main position was surrendered
-      no secondary line was defensible. If men smoked in public then women could
-      smoke in public; if men smoked pipes and cigars then women could smoke
-      pipes and cigars. And at the thought of women smoking pipes on the top of
-      buses, I realised that I had not yet found a path out of the absurd bog in
-      which I had become mentally involved.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then something happened which suggested another solution. The young women
-      rose to leave the bus, and as they passed me a wave of scent was wafted
-      with them. It was not the scent of tobacco, for they had thrown their
-      cigarettes down before rising to leave. It was one of those heavy,
-      languorous odours with which some women drench themselves. The trivial
-      fact slipped into the current of my thought. If women adopt the man's
-      tobacco habit, I thought, would it be equally fitting for men to adopt the
-      woman's scent habit? Why should they not use powder and paint and wear
-      rings in their ears? The idea threw a new light on my perplexity. The mind
-      revolted at the thought of a man perfumed and powdered and be-ringed.
-      Disraeli, it is true, approved of men rouging their cheeks. But Disraeli
-      was not a man so much as an Oriental fable, a sort of belated tale from
-      the Arabian Nights. The healthy instinct of men universally revolts
-      against paint, powder, and perfume. And asking myself why a habit, which
-      custom had made tolerable in the case of women, became grotesque and
-      offensive if imagined in connection with men, I saw a way out of my
-      puzzle. I dismissed the view that the difference of sex accounted for the
-      different emotions awakened. It was the habit itself which was
-      objectionable. Familiarity with it in the case of women had dulled our
-      perceptions to the reality. It was only when we conceived the habit in an
-      unusual connection&mdash;imagined men going about with painted and
-      powdered faces, with rings in their ears and heavy scents on their clothes&mdash;that
-      its essential vulgarity and uncleanness were freshly and intensely
-      presented to the mind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And that, said I, is the case with women and tobacco. It is the habit in
-      the abstract which is vulgar and unclean. Long familiarity with it in the
-      case of man has deadened our sense of the fact, but the adoption of the
-      habit by women, coupled with the fact that there is no logical
-      halting-place between the cigarette indoors and a pipe on the top of the
-      bus, gives us what the Americans call a new view-point. From that new
-      view-point we are bound to admit that there is much to be said against
-      tobacco and not much to be said for it&mdash;except, of course, that we
-      like it. But Mr Hicks must eliminate sex in the matter. He must talk to
-      the men as well as to the women.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Then perhaps we will see what can be done. For myself, I make no promise.
-      After forty, says Meredith, we are wedded to our habits. And I, alas, am
-      long past forty....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0066" id="linkimage-0066"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0207m.jpg" alt="0207m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0207.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0067" id="linkimage-0067"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0208m.jpg" alt="0208m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0208.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0030" id="link2H_4_0030"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      DOWN TOWN
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>hrough the grey
-      mists that hang over the water in the late autumn afternoon there emerges
-      a deeper shadow. It is like the serrated mass of a distant range of
-      mountains, except that the sky-line is broken with a precision that
-      suggests the work of man rather than the careless architecture of Nature
-      The mass is compact and isolated. It rises from the level of the water,
-      sheer on either side, in bold precipitous cliffs, broken by horizontal
-      lines, and dominated by one kingly, central peak that might be the
-      Matterhorn if it were not so suggestive of the spire of some cathedral
-      fashioned for the devotions of a Cyclopean race. As the vessel from afar
-      moves slowly through the populous waters and between the vaguely defined
-      shores of the harbour, another shadow emerges ahead, rising out of the sea
-      in front of the mountain mass. It is a colossal statue, holding up a torch
-      to the open Atlantic.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Gradually, as you draw near, the mountain range takes definition. It turns
-      to houses made with hands, vast structures with innumerable windows. Even
-      the star-y-pointing spire is seen to be a casement of myriad windows. The
-      day begins to darken and a swift transformation takes place. Points of
-      light begin to shine from the windows like stars in the darkening
-      firmament, and soon the whole mountain range glitters with thousands of
-      tiny lamps. The sombre mass has changed to a fairy palace, glowing with
-      illuminations from the foundations to the topmost height of the giddy
-      precipices, the magic spectacle culminating in the scintillating pinnacle
-      of the slender cathedral spire. The first daylight impression was of
-      something as solid and enduring as the foundations of the earth; the
-      second, in the gathering twilight, is of something slight and fanciful,
-      of' towering proportions but infinitely fragile structure, a spectacle as
-      airy and dream-like as a tale from the &ldquo;Arabian Nights.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is &ldquo;down town.&rdquo; It is America thrusting out the spear-head of its
-      astonishing life to the Atlantic. On the tip of this tongue of rock that
-      lies between the Hudson River and the East River is massed the greatest
-      group of buildings in the world. Behind the mountain range, all over the
-      tongue of rock for a dozen miles and more, stretches an incalculable maze
-      of streets, not rambling about in the easygoing, forgetful fashion of the
-      London street, which generally seems a little uncertain of its direction,
-      but running straight as an arrow, north and south, or east and west,
-      crosswise between the Hudson and the East River, longwise to the Harlem
-      River, which joins the two streams, and so forms this amazing island of
-      Manhattan. And in this maze of streets, through which the noble Fifth
-      Avenue marches like a central theme, there are many lofty buildings that
-      shut out the sunlight from the causeway and leave it to gild the upper
-      storeys of the great stores and the towers of the many churches and the
-      gables of the houses of the merchant princes, giving, on a sunny
-      afternoon, a certain cloistral feeling to the streets as you move in the
-      shadows with the sense of the golden light filling the air above. And
-      around the Grand Central Station, which is one of the architectural
-      glories of &ldquo;up town&rdquo; New York, the great hotels stand like mighty
-      fortresses that dwarf the delicate proportions of the great terminus. And
-      in the Hotel MacAlpin off Fifth Avenue you may be whirled to the
-      twenty-fourth floor before you reach the dining-room to which you are
-      summoned.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But it is in &ldquo;down town,&rdquo; on the tip of the tongue that is put out to the
-      Atlantic, that New York reveals itself most startlingly to the stranger.
-      It is like a gesture of power. There are other cities, no doubt, that make
-      an equally striking appeal to the eye&mdash;Salzburg, Innsbruck,
-      Edinburgh, Tunis&mdash;but it is the appeal of nature supplemented by art.
-      Generally the great cities are untheatrical enough. There is not an
-      approach to London, or Paris, or Berlin, which offers any shock of
-      surprise. You are sensible that you are leaving the green fields behind,
-      that factories are becoming more frequent, and streets more continuous,
-      and then you find that you have arrived. But New York and, through New
-      York, America greets you with its most typical spectacle before you land.
-      It holds it up as if in triumphant assurance of its greatness. It ascends
-      its topmost tower and shouts its challenge and its invitation over the
-      Atlantic. &ldquo;Down town&rdquo; stands like a strong man on the shore of the ocean,
-      asking you to come in to the wonderland that lies behind these terrific
-      battlements. See, he says, how I toss these towers to the skies. Look at
-      this muscular development. And I am only the advance agent. I am only the
-      symbol of what lies behind. I am only a foretaste of the power that heaves
-      and throbs through the veins of the giant that bestrides this continent
-      for three thousand miles, from his gateway to the Atlantic to his gateway,
-      to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, after the long monotony of the sea, the impression of this
-      terrific gateway from without holds the mind, the impression from within,
-      stuns the mind. You stand in the Grand Canon, in which Broadway ends, a
-      street here no wider than Fleet Street, but a street imprisoned between
-      two precipices that rise perpendicular to an altitude more' lofty than the
-      cross of St Paul's Cathedral&mdash;square towers, honeycombed with
-      thousands of rooms, with scurrying hosts of busy people, flying up in
-      lifts&mdash;called &ldquo;elevators&rdquo; for short&mdash;clicking at typewriters,
-      performing all the myriad functions of the great god Mammon, who reigns at
-      the threshold of the giant.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For this is the very keep of his castle. Here is the throne from which he
-      rules the world. This little street running out of the Grand Canyon is
-      Wall Street, and that low, modest building, looking curiously demure in
-      the midst of these monstrous bastions, is the House of Morgan, the high
-      priest of Big Money. A whisper from this street and distant worlds are
-      shaken. Europe, beggared by the war, stands, cap in hand, on the kerbstone
-      of Wall Street, with its francs and its marks and its sovereigns wilting
-      away before the sun of the mighty dollar. And as you stand, in devout
-      respect before the modest threshold of the high priest a babel of strange
-      sounds comes up from Broad Street near by. You turn towards it and come
-      suddenly upon another aspect of Mammon, more strange than anything
-      pictured by Hogarth&mdash;in the street a jostling mass of human beings,
-      fantastically garbed, wearing many-coloured caps like jockeys or
-      pantaloons, their heads thrown back, their arms extended high as if in
-      prayer to some heathen deity, their fingers working with frantic symbols,
-      their voices crying in agonised frenzy, and at a hundred windows in the
-      great buildings on either side of the street little groups of men and
-      women gesticulating back as wildly to the mob below. It is the outside
-      market of Mammon.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      You turn from this strange nightmare scene and seek the solace of the
-      great cathedral that you saw from afar towering over these battlements
-      like the Matterhorn. The nearer view does not disappoint you. Slender and
-      beautifully proportioned, it rises in great leaps to a pinnacle nearly
-      twice as high as the cross of St Paul's Cathedral. It is the temple of St
-      Woolworth. Into this masterpiece he poured the wealth acquired in his
-      sixpenny bazaars, and there it stands, the most significant building in
-      America and the first turret to catch the noose of light that the dawn
-      flings daily over the Atlantic from the East. You enter its marble halls
-      and take an express train to the forty-ninth floor, flashing in your
-      journey past visions of crowded offices, tier after tier, offices of banks
-      and publishers and merchants and jewellers, like a great street,
-      Piccadilly or the Strand, that has been miraculously turned skywards by
-      some violent geological &ldquo;fault.&rdquo; And at the forty-ninth floor you get out
-      and take another &ldquo;local&rdquo; train to the top, and from thence you look
-      giddily down, far down even upon the great precipices of the Grand Canon,
-      down to the streets where the moving throng you left a few minutes ago
-      looks like a colony of ants or black-beetles wandering uncertainly over
-      the pavement.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And in the midst of the great fortresses of commerce, two toy buildings
-      with tiny spires. You have been in them, perhaps, and know them to be
-      large churches, St Paul's and Trinity, curiously like our own City
-      churches. Once New York nestled under their shadows; now they are
-      swallowed up and lost at the base of the terrific structures that loom
-      above them. In one of them you will have seen the pew of George Washington
-      still decorated with the flag of the thirteen stars of the original union.
-      Perhaps you will be tempted to see in this inverted world an inverted
-      civilisation. There will flash on your mind's eye the vision of the great
-      dome that seems to float in the heavens over the secular activities of
-      another city, still holding aloft, to however negligent and indifferent a
-      generation, the symbol of the supremacy of spiritual things. And you will
-      wonder whether in this astonishing spectacle below you, in which the
-      temples of the ancient worship crouch at the porch of these Leviathan
-      temples of commerce, there is the unconscious expression of another
-      philosophy of life in which St Woolworth and not St Paul points the way to
-      the stars.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And for the correction to this disquieting thought you turn from the scene
-      below to the scene around. There in front lies the harbour, so near that
-      you feel you could cast a stone into it. And beyond, the open Atlantic,
-      with all its suggestions of the tide of humanity, a million a year, that
-      has flowed, with its babel of tongues and its burden of hopes, past the
-      statue with the torch that stands in the midst of the harbour, to be
-      swallowed up in the vastness of the great continent that lies behind you.
-      You turn and look over the enormous city that, caught in the arms of its
-      two noble rivers, extends over many a mile before you, with its overflow
-      of Brooklyn on the far bank of one stream, and its overflow of Jersey City
-      on the far bank of the other. In the brilliant sunshine and the clear,
-      smokeless atmosphere the eye travels far over this incredible vista of
-      human activity. And beyond the vision of the eye, the mind carries the
-      thought onward to the great lakes and the seething cities by their shores,
-      and over the illimitable plains westward to sunny lands more remote than
-      Europe, but still obedient to the stars and stripes, and southward by the
-      great rivers to the tropic sea.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And, as you stand on this giddy pinnacle, looking over New York to the far
-      horizons, you find your mind charged with enormous questionings. They will
-      not be diminished when, after long jouneyings towards those horizons,
-      after days and nights of crowded experiences in many fields of activity,
-      you return to take a farewell glimpse of America. On the contrary, they
-      will be intensified. They will be penetrated by a sense of power unlike
-      anything else the world has to offer&mdash;the power of immeasurable
-      resources, still only in the infancy of their development, of
-      inexhaustible national wealth, of a dynamic energy that numbs the mind, of
-      a people infinitely diverse, yet curiously one&mdash;one in a certain
-      fierce youthfulness of outlook, as of a people in the confident prime of
-      their morning and with all the tasks and possibilities of the day before
-      them. In the presence of this tumultuous life, with its crudeness and
-      freshness and violence, one looks back to Europe as to something avuncular
-      and elderly, a mellowed figure of the late afternoon, a little tired and
-      more than a little disillusioned and battered by the journey. For him the
-      light has left the morning hills, but here it still clothes those hills
-      with hope and spurs on to adventure.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That strong man who meets you on the brink of Manhattan Rock and tosses
-      his towers to the skies is no idle boaster. He has, in his own phrase,
-      &ldquo;the goods.&rdquo; He holds the world in fee. What he intends to do with his
-      power is not very clear, even to himself. He started out, under the
-      inspiration of a great prophet, to rescue Europe and the world from the
-      tyranny of militarism, but the infamies of European statesmanship and the
-      squalid animosities of his own household have combined to chill the
-      chivalrous purpose. In his perplexity he has fallen a victim to reaction
-      at home. He is filled with panic. He sees Bolshevism behind every bush,
-      and a revolutionist in everyone who does not keep in step. Americanism has
-      shrunk from a creed of world deliverance to a creed of American interests,
-      and the &ldquo;100 per cent. American&rdquo; in every disguise of designing
-      self-advertisement is preaching a holy war against everything that is
-      significant and inspiring in the story of America. It is not a moment when
-      the statue of Liberty, on her pedestal out there in the harbour, can feel
-      very happy. Her occupation has gone. Her torch is no longer lit to invite
-      the oppressed and the adventurer from afar. On the contrary, she turns her
-      back on America and warns the alien away. Her torch has become a
-      policeman's baton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And as, in the afternoon of another day, brilliant, and crisp with the
-      breath of winter, you thread your way once more through the populous
-      waters of the noble harbour and make for the open sea, you look back upon
-      the receding shore and the range of mighty battlements. The sun floods the
-      land you are leaving with light. At this gateway he is near his setting,
-      but at the far gateway of the Pacific he is still in his morning prime, so
-      vast is the realm he traverses. The mountain range of your first
-      impression is caught in the glow of evening, and the proud pinnacle that
-      looked to the untutored eye like the Matterhorn or the temple of primeval
-      gods points its delicate traceries to the skies. And as you gaze you are
-      conscious of a great note of interrogation taking shape in the mind. Is
-      that Cathedral of St Woolworth the authentic expression of the soul of
-      America, or has this mighty power you are leaving another gospel for
-      mankind? And as the light fades and battlements and pinnacle merge into
-      the encompassing dark there sounds in the mind the echoes of an immortal
-      voice&mdash;&ldquo;Let us here highly resolve that these dead shall not have
-      died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
-      freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people
-      shall not perish from the earth!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And with that resounding music echoing in the mind you bid farewell to
-      America, confident that, whatever its failures, the great spirit of
-      Lincoln will outlive and outsoar the pinnacle of St Woolworth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0068" id="linkimage-0068"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0217m.jpg" alt="0217m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0217.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0069" id="linkimage-0069"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0208m.jpg" alt="0208m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0208.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0031" id="link2H_4_0031"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON KEYHOLE MORALS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">M</span>y neighbour at the
-      breakfast table complained that he had had a bad night. What with the gale
-      and the crash of the seas, and the creaking of the timbers of the ship and
-      the pair in the next cabin&mdash;especially the pair in the next cabin....
-      How they talked! It was two o'clock before they sank into silence. And
-      such revelations! He couldn't help overhearing them. He was alone in his
-      cabin, and what was he to do? He couldn't talk to himself to let them know
-      they were being overheard. And he didn't sing. And he hadn't a cough. And,
-      in short, there was nothing for it but to overhear. And the things he
-      heard&mdash;well.... And with a gesture of head, hands, and eyebrows he
-      left it to me to imagine the worst. I suggested that he might cure the
-      trouble by telling the steward to give the couple a hint that the next
-      cabin was occupied. He received the idea as a possible way out of a
-      painful and delicate situation. Strange, he said, it had not occurred to
-      him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Whether he adopted it I do not know. If I did I should know a very
-      important thing about him. It would give me the clue to the whole man. It
-      would tell me whether he was a willing or an unwilling eavesdropper, and
-      there are few more searching tests of character than this. We are not to
-      be catalogued by what we do in the open. We are all of us proper enough
-      when we walk abroad and play our part in society. It is not our public
-      hearing which reveals the sort of fellows we are. It only indicates the
-      kind of fellows we desire the world to take us to be. We want the world's
-      good opinion, and when we go out we put on our company manners as we put
-      on our best clothes in order to win it. No one would put his ear to a
-      keyhole if he thought an eye might be at the keyhole behind him watching
-      him in the act. The true estimate of your character (and mine) depends on
-      what we should do if we knew there was no keyhole behind us. It depends,
-      not on whether you are chivalrous to some one else's wife in public, but
-      whether you are chivalrous to your own wife in private. The eminent judge
-      who, checking himself in a torrent of abuse of his partner at whist,
-      contritely observed, &ldquo;I beg your pardon, madam; I thought you were my
-      wife,&rdquo; did not improve matters. He only lifted the curtain of a rather
-      shabby private cabin. He white-washed himself publicly out of his dirty
-      private pail.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or, to take another sounding, what happens when you find yourself in the
-      quiet and undisturbed presence of other people's open letters? Perhaps you
-      have accidentally put on your son's jacket and discovered the pockets
-      bulging with letters. Your curiosity is excited: your parental concern is
-      awakened. It is not unnatural to be interested in your own son. It is
-      natural and proper. You can summon up a score of convincing and weighty
-      reasons why you should dip into those letters. You know that all those
-      respectable reasons would become disreputable if you heard young John's
-      step approaching. You know that this very reasonable display of paternal
-      interest would suddenly become a mean act of prying of which you would be
-      ashamed to be thought capable. But young John is miles off&mdash;perhaps
-      down in the city, perhaps far away in the country. You are left alone with
-      his letters and your own sense of decency. You can read the letters in
-      perfect safety. If there are secrets in them you can share them. Not a
-      soul will ever find you out. You may be entitled to know those secrets,
-      and young John may be benefited by your knowing them. What do you do in
-      these circumstances? The answer will provide you with a fairly reliable
-      tape measure for your own spiritual contents.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no discredit in being curious about the people in the next Cabin.
-      We are all curious about our neighbours. In his fable of &ldquo;Le Diable
-      Boiteux,&rdquo; Lesage tells how the devil transported him from one house to
-      another, lifted the roof, and showed what was going on inside, with very
-      surprising and entertaining results. If the devil, in the guise of a very
-      civil gentleman, paid me a call this evening, and offered to do the same
-      for me, offered to spirit me over Hampstead and lift with magic and
-      inaudible touch any roof I fancied, and show me the mysteries and
-      privacies of my neighbours' lives, I hope I should have the decency to
-      thank him and send him away. The amusement would be purchased at too high
-      a price. It might not do my neighbours any harm, but it would do me a lot
-      of harm. For, after all, the important thing is not that we should be
-      able, like the honest blacksmith, to look the whole world in the face, but
-      that we should be able to look ourselves in the face. And it is our
-      private standard of conduct and not our public standard of conduct which
-      gives or denies us that privilege. We are merely counterfeit coin if our
-      respect for the Eleventh Commandment only applies to being found out by
-      other people. It is being found out by ourselves that ought to hurt us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is the private cabin side of us that really matters. I could pass a
-      tolerably good examination on my public behaviour. I have never committed
-      a murder, or a burglary. I have never picked a pocket, or forged a cheque.
-      But these things are not evidence of good character. They may only mean
-      that I never had enough honest indignation to commit a murder, nor enough
-      courage to break into a house. They may only mean that I never needed to
-      forge a cheque or pick a pocket. They may only mean that I am afraid of
-      the police. Respect for the law is a testimonial that will not go far in
-      the Valley of Jehosophat. The question that will be asked of me there is
-      not whether I picked my neighbour's lock, but whether I put my ear to his
-      keyhole; not whether I pocketed the bank note he had left on his desk, but
-      whether I read his letters when his back was turned&mdash;in short, not
-      whether I had respect for the law, but whether I had respect for myself
-      and the sanctities that are outside the vulgar sphere of the law. It is
-      what went on in my private cabin which will probably be my undoing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0070" id="linkimage-0070"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0222m.jpg" alt="0222m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0222.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0071" id="linkimage-0071"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0223m.jpg" alt="0223m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0223.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0032" id="link2H_4_0032"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      FLEET STREET NO MORE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>o-day I am among
-      the demobilised. I have put off the harness of a lifetime and am a person
-      at large. For me, Fleet Street is a tale that is told, a rumour on the
-      wind; a memory of far-off things and battles long ago. At this hour I
-      fancy it is getting into its nightly paroxysm. There is the thunder of
-      machinery below, the rattle of linotypes above, the click-click-click of
-      the tape machine, the tapping of telegraph operators, the tinkling of
-      telephones, the ringing of bells for messengers who tarry, reporters
-      coming in with &ldquo;stories&rdquo; or without &ldquo;stories,&rdquo; leader-writers writing for
-      dear life and wondering whether they will beat the clock and what will
-      happen if they don't, night editors planning their pages as a shopman
-      dresses his shop window, sub-editors breasting the torrent of &ldquo;flimsies&rdquo;
-       that flows in from the ends of the earth with tidings of this, that, and
-      the other. I hear the murmur of it all from afar as a disembodied spirit
-      might hear the murmurs of the life it has left behind. And I feel much as
-      a policeman must feel when, pensioned and in plain clothes, he walks the
-      Strand submerged in the crowd, his occupation gone, his yoke lifted, his
-      glory departed. But yesterday he was a man having authority. There in the
-      middle of the surging current of traffic he took his stand, the visible
-      embodiment of power, behind him the sanctions of the law and the strong
-      arm of justice. He was a very Moses of a man. He raised his hand and the
-      waters stayed; he lowered his hand and the waters flowed. He was a
-      personage. He was accosted by anybody and obeyed by everybody. He could
-      stop Sir Gorgius Midas' Rolls-Royce to let the nurse-maid cross the
-      street. He could hold converse with the nobility as an equal and talk to
-      the cook through the area railings without suspicion of impropriety. His
-      cloud of dignity was held from falling by the pillars of the Constitution,
-      and his truncheon was as indispensable as a field-marshal's baton.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now he is even as one of the crowd that he had ruled, a saunterer on
-      the side-walk, an unknown, a negligible wayfarer. No longer can he make a
-      pathway through the torrent of the Strand for the nurse-maid to walk
-      across dryshod; no longer can he hold equal converse with ex-Ministers.
-      Even &ldquo;J. B.,&rdquo; who has never been known to pass a policeman without a
-      gossip, would pass him, unconscious that he was a man who had once lived
-      under a helmet and waved an august arm like a semaphore in Piccadilly
-      Circus; perhaps even stood like one of the Pretorian Guard at the gates or
-      in the halls of Westminster. But the pathos of all this vanished
-      magnificence is swallowed up in one consuming thought. He is free,
-      independent, the captain of his soul, the master of his own motions. He
-      can no longer stop all the buses in the Strand by a wave of his hand, but
-      he can get in any bus he chooses. He can go to Balham, or Tooting, or
-      Ealing, or Nine Elms, or any place he fancies. Or he can look in the shop
-      windows, or turn into the &ldquo;pictures&rdquo; or go home to tea. He can light his
-      pipe whenever he has a mind to. He can lie in bed as long as he pleases.
-      He can be indifferent to the clock. He has soared to a realm where the
-      clock has no terrors. It may point to anything it likes without stirring
-      his pulse. It may strike what it pleases and he will not care.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And now I share his liberty. I, too, can snap my fingers at the clock and
-      take any bus I like to anywhere I like. For long years that famous
-      thoroughfare from Temple Bar to Ludgate Hill has been familiar to me as my
-      own shadow. I have lived in the midst of its eager, jostling life until I
-      have seemed to be a cell of its multitudinous being. I have heard its
-      chimes at midnight, as Squire Shallow heard them with the swanking
-      swashbucklers of long ago, and have felt the pulse of its unceasing life
-      during every hour of the twenty-four&mdash;in the afternoon when the
-      pavements are thronged and the be-wigged barristers are crossing
-      to-and-fro between the Temple and the Law Courts, and the air is shrill
-      with the cries of the newsboys; in the evening when the tide of the day's
-      life has ebbed, and the Street has settled down to work, and the telegraph
-      boys flit from door to door with their tidings of the world's happenings;
-      in the small hours when the great lorries come thundering up the side
-      streets with their mountains of papers and rattle through the sleeping
-      city to the railway termini; at dawn, when the flag of morn in sovereign
-      state floats over the dome of the great Cathedral that looks down so
-      grandly from the summit of the hill beyond. &ldquo;I see it arl so plainly as I
-      saw et, long ago.&rdquo; I have worn its paving stones as industriously as
-      Johnson wore them. I have dipped into its secrecies as one who had the run
-      of the estate and the freeman's right. I have known its <i>habitues</i> as
-      familiarly as if they had belonged to my own household, and its
-      multitudinous courts and inns and taverns, and have drunk the solemn toast
-      with the White-friars o' Friday nights, and taken counsel with the lawyers
-      in the Temple, and wandered in its green and cloistered calm in the hot
-      afternoons, and written thousands of leaders and millions of words on
-      this, that, and the other, wise words and foolish words, and words without
-      any particular quality at all, except that they filled up space, and have
-      had many friendships and fought many battles, winning some and losing
-      others, and have seen the generations go by, and the young fellows grow
-      into old fellows who scan a little severely the new race of ardent boys
-      that come along so gaily to the enchanted street and are doomed to grow
-      old and weary in its service also. And at the end it has come to be a
-      street of ghosts&mdash;a street of memories, with faces that I knew
-      lurking in its shadows and peopling its rooms and mingling with the moving
-      pageant that seems like a phantom too.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Now the chapter is closed and I have become a memory with the rest. Like
-      the Chambered Nautilus, I
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      ... seal up the idle door,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Stretch in my new found home and know the old no more.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I may stroll down it some day as a visitor from the country and gape at
-      its wonders and take stock of its changes. But I wear its chains no more.
-      No more shall the pavement of Fleet Street echo to my punctual footsteps.
-      No more shall I ring in vain for that messenger who had always &ldquo;gone out
-      to supper, sir,&rdquo; or been called to the news-room or sent on an errand. No
-      more shall I cower nightly before that tyrannous clock that ticked so much
-      faster than I wrote. The galley proofs will come down from above like
-      snow, but I shall not con them. The tumults of the world will boil in like
-      the roar of many waters, but I shall not hear them. For I have come into
-      the inheritance of leisure. Time, that has lorded it over me so long, is
-      henceforth my slave, and the future stretches before me like an infinite
-      green pasture in which I can wander till the sun sets. I shall let the
-      legions thunder by while I tend my bees and water my plants, and mark how
-      my celery grows and how the apples ripen.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if, perchance, as I sit under a tree with an old book, or in the
-      chimney corner before a chessboard, there comes to me one from the great
-      noisy world, inviting me to return to Fleet Street, I shall tell him a
-      tale. One day (I shall say) Wang Ho, the wise Chinese, was in his orchard
-      when there came to him from the distant capital two envoys, bearing an
-      urgent prayer that he would return and take his old place in the
-      Government. He ushered them into his house and listened gravely to their
-      plea. Then, without a word, he turned, went to a basin of water, took a
-      sponge <i>and washed out his ears.</i>
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0072" id="linkimage-0072"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0228m.jpg" alt="0228m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0228.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0073" id="linkimage-0073"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0229m.jpg" alt="0229m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0229.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0033" id="link2H_4_0033"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON WAKING UP
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">W</span>hen I awoke this
-      morning and saw the sunlight streaming over the valley and the beech woods
-      glowing with the rich fires of autumn, and heard the ducks clamouring for
-      their breakfast, and felt all the kindly intimacies of life coming back in
-      a flood for the new day, I felt, as the Americans say, &ldquo;good.&rdquo; Waking up
-      is always&mdash;given a clear conscience, a good digestion, and a healthy
-      faculty of sleep&mdash;a joyous experience. It has the pleasing excitement
-      with which the tuning up of the fiddles of the orchestra prior to the
-      symphony affects you. It is like starting out for a new adventure, or
-      coming into an unexpected inheritance, or falling in love, or stumbling
-      suddenly upon some author whom you have unaccountably missed and who goes
-      to your heart like a brother. In short, it is like anything that is sudden
-      and beautiful and full of promise.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But waking up can never have been quite so intoxicating a joy as it is now
-      that peace has come back to the earth. It is in the first burst of
-      consciousness that you feel the full measure of the great thing that has
-      happened in the world. It is like waking from an agonising nightmare and
-      realising with a glorious surge of happiness that it was not true. The
-      fact that the nightmare from which we have awakened now was true does not
-      diminish our happiness. It deepens it, extends it, projects it into the
-      future. We see a long, long vista of days before us, and on awaking to
-      each one of them we shall know afresh that the nightmare is over, that the
-      years of the Great Killing are passed, that the sun is shining and the
-      birds are singing in a friendly world, and that men are going forth to
-      their labour until the evening without fear and without hate. As the day
-      advances and you get submerged in its petty affairs and find it is very
-      much like other days the emotion passes. But in that moment when you step
-      over the threshold of sleep into the living world the revelation is
-      simple, immediate, overwhelming. The shadow has passed. The devil is dead.
-      The delirium is over and sanity is coming back to the earth. You recall
-      the far different emotions of a few brief months ago when the morning sun
-      woke you with a sinister smile, and the carolling of the birds seemed
-      pregnant with sardonic irony, and the news in the paper spoiled your
-      breakfast. You thank heaven that you are not the Kaiser. Poor wretch, he
-      is waking, too, probably about this time and wondering what will happen to
-      him before nightfall, wondering where he will spend the miserable remnant
-      of his days, wondering whether his great ancestor's habit of carrying a
-      dose of poison was not after all a practice worth thinking about. He
-      wanted the whole, earth, and now he is discovering that he is entitled to
-      just six feet of it&mdash;the same as the lowliest peasant in his land.
-      &ldquo;The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests,&rdquo; but there is
-      neither hole nor nest where he will be welcome. There is not much joy for
-      him in waking to a new day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But perhaps he doesn't wake. Perhaps, like Macbeth, he has &ldquo;murdered
-      Sleep,&rdquo; and is suffering the final bankruptcy of life. A man may lose a
-      crown and be all the better, but to lose the faculty of sleep is to enter
-      the kingdom of the damned. If you or I were offered a new lease of life
-      after our present lease had run out and were told that we could nominate
-      our gifts what would be our first choice? Not a kingdom, nor an earldom,
-      nor even succession to an O.B.E. There was a period of my childhood when I
-      thought I should have liked to have been born a muffin man, eternally
-      perambulating the streets ringing a bell, carrying a basket on my head and
-      shouting &ldquo;Muffins,&rdquo; in the ears of a delighted populace. I loved muffins
-      and I loved bells, and here was a man who had those joys about him all day
-      long and every day. But now my ambitions are more restrained. I would no
-      more wish to be born a muffin man than a poet or an Archbishop. The first
-      gift I should ask would be something modest. It would be the faculty of
-      sleeping eight solid hours every night, and waking each morning with the
-      sense of unfathomable and illimitable content with which I opened my eyes
-      to the world to-day.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All the functions of nature are agreeable, though views may differ as to
-      their relative pleasure. A distinguished man, whose name I forget, put
-      eating first, &ldquo;for,&rdquo; said he, &ldquo;there is no other pleasure that comes three
-      times a day and lasts an hour each time.&rdquo; But sleep lasts eight hours. It
-      fills up a good third of the time we spend here and it fills it up with
-      the divinest of all balms. It is the very kingdom of democracy. &ldquo;All equal
-      are within the church's gate,&rdquo; said George Herbert. It may have been so in
-      George Herbert's parish; but it is hardly so in most parishes. It is true
-      of the Kingdom of Sleep. When you enter its portals all discriminations
-      vanish, and Hodge and his master, the prince and the pauper, are alike
-      clothed in the royal purple and inherit the same golden realm. There is
-      more harmony and equality in life than wre are apt to admit. For a good
-      twenty-five years of our seventy we sleep (and even snore) with an
-      agreement that is simply wonderful.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And the joy of waking up is not less generously distributed. What delight
-      is there like throwing off the enchantment of sleep and seeing the
-      sunlight streaming in at the window and hearing the happy jangle of the
-      birds, or looking out on the snow-covered landscape in winter, or the
-      cherry blossom in spring, or the golden fields of harvest time, or (as
-      now) upon the smouldering fires of the autumn woodlands? Perhaps the day
-      will be as thorny and full of disappointments and disillusions as any that
-      have gone before. But no matter. In this wonder of waking there is eternal
-      renewal of the spirit, the inexhaustible promise of the best that is still
-      to come, the joy of the new birth that experience cannot stale nor
-      familiarity make tame.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That singer of our time, who has caught most perfectly the artless note of
-      the birds themselves, has uttered the spirit of joyous waking that all
-      must feel on this exultant morning&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Good morning, Life&mdash;and all
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Things glad and beautiful.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      My pockets nothing hold,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      But he that owns the gold,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      The Sun, is my great friend&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      His spending has no end.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Let us up, brothers, and greet the sun and hear the ringing of the bells.
-      There has not been such royal waking since the world began.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is an agreeable fancy of some that eternity itself will be a thing of
-      sleep and happy awakenings. It is a cheerful faith that solves a certain
-      perplexity. For however much we cling to the idea of immortality, we can
-      hardly escape an occasional feeling of concern as to how we shall get
-      through it. We shall not &ldquo;get through it,&rdquo; of course, but speech is only
-      fashioned for finite things. Many men, from Pascal to Byron, have had a
-      sort of terror of eternity. Byron confessed that he had no terror of a
-      dreamless sleep, but that he could not conceive an eternity of
-      consciousness which would not be unendurable. We are cast in a finite
-      mould and think in finite terms, and we cling to the thought of
-      immortality less perhaps from the desire to enjoy it for ourselves than
-      from fear of eternal separation from the companionship of those whose love
-      and friendship we would fain believe to be deathless. For this perplexity
-      the fancy of which I speak offers a solution. An eternity of happy
-      awakenings would be a pleasant compromise between being and not being. I
-      can conceive no more agreeable lot through eternity, than
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      To dream as I may,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      And awake when I will,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      With the song of the bird,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      And the sun on the hill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Was it not Wilfred Scawen Blunt who contemplated an eternity in which,
-      once in a hundred years, he would wake and say, &ldquo;Are you there, beloved?&rdquo;
-       and hear the reply, &ldquo;Yes, beloved, I am here,&rdquo; and with that sweet
-      assurance lapse into another century of forgetfulness? The tenderness and
-      beauty of the idea were effectually desecrated by Alfred Austin, whom some
-      one in a jest made Poet Laureate. &ldquo;For my part,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I should like
-      to wake once in a hundred years and hear news of another victory for the
-      British Empire.&rdquo; It would not be easy to invent a more perfect contrast
-      between the feeling of a poet and the simulated passion of a professional
-      patriot. He did not really think that, of course. He was simply a timid,
-      amiable little man who thought it was heroic and patriotic to think that.
-      He had so habituated his tiny talent to strutting about in the grotesque
-      disguise of a swashbuckler that it had lost all touch with the primal
-      emotions of poetry. Forgive me for intruding him upon the theme. The happy
-      awakenings of eternity must outsoar the shadow of our night, its slayings
-      and its vulgar patriotisms. If they do not do that, it will be better to
-      sleep on.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0074" id="linkimage-0074"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0235m.jpg" alt="0235m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0235.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0075" id="linkimage-0075"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0236m.jpg" alt="0236m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0236.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0034" id="link2H_4_0034"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON RE-READING
-    </h2>
-    <h3>
-      I
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> weekly paper has
-      been asking well-known people what books they re-read. The most pathetic
-      reply made to the inquiry is that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. &ldquo;I seldom
-      re-read now,&rdquo; says that unhappy man. &ldquo;Time is so short and literature so
-      vast and unexplored.&rdquo; What a desolating picture! It is like saying, &ldquo;I
-      never meet my old friends now. Time is so short and there are so many
-      strangers I have not yet shaken hands with.&rdquo; I see the poor man, hot and
-      breathless, scurrying over the &ldquo;vast and unexplored&rdquo; fields of literature,
-      shaking hands and saying, &ldquo;How d'ye do?&rdquo; to everybody he meets and
-      reaching the end of his journey, impoverished and pitiable, like the
-      peasant in Tolstoi's &ldquo;How much land does a man need?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I rejoice to say that I have no passion for shaking hands with strangers.
-      I do not yearn for vast unexplored regions. I take the North Pole and the
-      South, the Sahara and the Karoo for granted. As Johnson said of the
-      Giant's Causeway, I should like to see them, but I should not like <i>to
-      go</i> to see them. And so with books. Time is so short that I have none
-      to spare for keeping abreast with the circulating library. I could almost
-      say with the Frenchman that when I see that a new book is published I read
-      an old one. I am always in the rearward of the fashion, and a book has to
-      weather the storms of its maiden voyage before I embark on it. When it has
-      proved itself seaworthy I will go aboard; but meanwhile the old ships are
-      good enough for me. I know the captain and the crew, the fare I shall get
-      and the port I shall make and the companionship I shall have by the way.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Look at this row of fellows in front of me as I write&mdash;Boswell, &ldquo;The
-      Bible in Spain,&rdquo; Pepys, Horace, &ldquo;Elia,&rdquo; Montaigne, Sainte-Beuve, &ldquo;Travels
-      with a Donkey,&rdquo; Plutarch, Thucydides, Wordsworth, &ldquo;The Early Life of
-      Charles James Fox,&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Under the Greenwood Tree,&rdquo; and so on. Do not call them books.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Camerado, this is no book.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Who touches this, touches a man,
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      as Walt Whitman said of his own &ldquo;Leaves of Grass.&rdquo; They are not books.
-      They are my friends. They are the splendid wayfarers I have met on my
-      pilgrimage, and they are going on with me to the end. It was worth making
-      the great adventure of life to find such company. Come revolutions and
-      bereavements, come storm and tempest, come war or peace, gain or loss&mdash;these
-      friends shall endure through all the vicissitudes of the journey. The
-      friends of the flesh fall away, grow cold, are estranged, die, but these
-      friends of the spirit are not touched with mortality. They were not born
-      for death, no hungry generations tread them down, and with their immortal
-      wisdom and laughter they give us the password to the eternal. You can no
-      more exhaust them than you can exhaust the sunrise or the sunset, the
-      joyous melody of Mozart or Scarlatti, the cool serenity of Velasquez or
-      any other thing of beauty. They are a part of ourselves, and through their
-      noble fellowship we are made freemen of the kingdoms of the mind&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      ... rich as the oozy bottom of the deep
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      In sunken wrack and sumless treasuries.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      We do not say we have read these books: we say that we live in communion
-      with these spirits.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am not one who wants that communion to be too exclusive. When my old
-      friend Peter Lane shook the dust of Fleet Street off his feet for ever and
-      went down into the country he took Horace with him, and there he sits in
-      his garden listening to an enchantment that never grows stale. It is a way
-      Horace has. He takes men captive, as Falstaff took Bardolph captive. They
-      cannot see the swallows gathering for their southern flight without
-      thinking that they are going to breathe the air that Horace breathed, and
-      asking them to carry some such message as John Marshall's:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent30">
-      Tell him, bird,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      That if there be a Heaven where he is not,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      One man at least seeks not admittance there.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      This is not companionship. This is idolatry. I should be sorry to miss the
-      figure of Horace&mdash;short and fat, according to Suetonius&mdash;in the
-      fields of asphodel, but there are others I shall look for with equal
-      animation and whose footsteps I shall dog with equal industry. Meanwhile,
-      so long as my etheric body, as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would say, is
-      imprisoned in the flesh I shall go on reading and re-reading the books in
-      which their spirits live, leaving the vast and unexplored tracts of the
-      desert to those who like deserts.
-    </p>
-    <h3>
-      II
-    </h3>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span> correspondent
-      asked me the other day to make him out a list of Twelve Books that he
-      ought to read. I declined the task in that form. I did not know what he
-      had read, and I did not know what his tastes or his needs were, and even
-      with that knowledge I should hesitate to prescribe for another. But I
-      compromised with him by prescribing for myself. I assumed that for some
-      offence against D.O.R.A. I was to be cast ashore on a desert island out in
-      the Pacific, where I was to be left in solitude for twelve months, or
-      perhaps never to be called for at all, and that as a mitigation of the
-      penalty I was to be permitted to carry with me twelve books of my own
-      choosing. On what principles should I set about so momentous a choice?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the first place I decided that they must be books of the inexhaustible
-      kind. Rowland Hill said that &ldquo;the love of God was like a generous roast of
-      beef&mdash;you could cut and come again.&rdquo; That must be the first quality
-      of my Twelve Books. They must be books that one could go on reading and
-      re-reading as interminably as the old apple-woman in Borrow went on
-      reading &ldquo;Moll Flanders.&rdquo; If only her son had known that immortal book, she
-      said, he would never have got transported for life. That was the sort of
-      book I must have with me on my desert island. But my choice would be
-      different from that of the old apple-woman of Old London Bridge. I
-      dismissed all novels from my consideration. Even the best of novels are
-      exhaustible, and if I admitted novels at all my bundle of books would be
-      complete before I had made a start with the essentials, for I should want
-      &ldquo;Tristram Shandy&rdquo; and &ldquo;Tom Jones,&rdquo; two or three of Scott's, Gogol's &ldquo;Dead
-      Souls,&rdquo; &ldquo;David Copperfield,&rdquo; &ldquo;Evan Harrington,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Brothers Karamazoff,&rdquo;
-       &ldquo;Père Goriot,&rdquo; &ldquo;War and Peace,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Three Musketeers,&rdquo; all of Hardy's,
-      &ldquo;Treasure Island,&rdquo; &ldquo;Robinson Crusoe,&rdquo; &ldquo;Silas Marner,&rdquo; &ldquo;Don Quixote,&rdquo; the
-      &ldquo;Cloister and the Hearth,&rdquo; &ldquo;Esmond&rdquo;&mdash;no, no, it would never do to
-      include novels. They must be left behind.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The obvious beginning would have been the Bible and Shakespeare, but these
-      had been conceded not as a luxury but as a necessity, and did not come in
-      the scope of my Twelve. History I must have on the grand scale, so that I
-      can carry the story of the past with me into exile. I have no doubt about
-      my first choice here. Thucydides (I) is as easily first among the
-      historians as Sirius is first among the stars. To read him by the
-      lightnings of to-day is to read him with a freshness and understanding
-      that have the excitement of contemporary comment. The gulf of twenty-three
-      centuries is miraculously bridged, and you pass to and fro, as it were,
-      from the mighty European drama of to-day to the mighty drama of ancient
-      Greece, encountering the same emotions and agonies, the same ambitions,
-      the same plots and counter-plots, the same villains, and the same heroes.
-      Yes, Thucydides of course.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And Plutarch (2) almost equally of course. What portrait gallery is there
-      to compare with his? What a mine of legend and anecdote, history and
-      philosophy, wisdom and superstition. I am less clear when I come to the
-      story of Rome. Shall I put in the stately Gibbon, the learned Mommsen, or
-      the lively, almost journalistic Ferrero? It is a hard choice. I shut my
-      eyes and take pot luck. Ferrero (3) is it? Well, I make no complaint. And
-      then I will have those three fat volumes of Motley's, &ldquo;Rise of the Dutch
-      Republic&rdquo; (4) put in my boat, please, and&mdash;yes, Carlyle's &ldquo;French
-      Revolution&rdquo; (5), which is history and drama and poetry and fiction all in
-      one. And, since I must take the story of my own land with me, just throw
-      in Green's &ldquo;Short History&rdquo; (6). It is lovable for its serene and gracious
-      temper as much as for its story.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That's as much history as I can afford, for I must leave room for the more
-      personal companions who will talk to me like old friends and keep the
-      fires of human contact ablaze on my solitary isle. First, of course, there
-      is Boswell (7), and next there is Pepys (8), (Wheatley's edition, for
-      there only is the real Samuel revealed &ldquo;wart and all&rdquo;). I should like to
-      take &ldquo;Elia&rdquo; and that rascal Benvenuto Cellini; but I must limit my
-      personal following to three, and on the whole I think the third place must
-      be reserved for old Montaigne (9), for I could not do without that frank,
-      sagacious, illuminated mind in my little fellowship. Akin to these good
-      fellows I must have the picaresque Borrow to lend the quality of open-air
-      romance to the comradeship, and shutting my eyes once more I choose
-      indifferently from the pile, for I haven't the heart to make a choice
-      between the &ldquo;Bible in Spain,&rdquo; &ldquo;The Romany Rye,&rdquo; &ldquo;Lavengro,&rdquo; and &ldquo;Wild
-      Wales.&rdquo; But I rejoice when I find that &ldquo;Lavengro&rdquo; (10) is in the boat.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I can have only one poet, but that makes the choice easy. If I could have
-      had half a dozen the choice would have been hard; but when it is
-      Wordsworth (11) <i>contra mundum</i>, I have no doubt. He is the man who
-      will &ldquo;soothe and heal and bless.&rdquo; My last selection shall be given to a
-      work of travel and adventure. I reduce the area of choice to Hakluyt's
-      &ldquo;Voyages&rdquo; and the &ldquo;Voyage of the Beagle,&rdquo; and while I am balancing their
-      claims the &ldquo;Beagle&rdquo; (12) slips out of my hand into the boat. My library is
-      complete. And so, spread the sails to the wind and away for the Pacific.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0076" id="linkimage-0076"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0243m.jpg" alt="0243m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0243.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0035" id="link2H_4_0035"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      FEBRUARY DAYS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">T</span>he snow has gone
-      from the landscape and the sun, at the hour of setting, has got round to
-      the wood that crowns the hill on the other side of the valley. Soon it
-      will set on the slope of the hill and then down on the plain. Then we
-      shall know that spring has come. Two days ago a blackbird, from the
-      paddock below the orchard, added his golden baritone to the tenor of the
-      thrush who had been shouting good news from the beech tree across the road
-      for weeks past. I don't know why the thrush should glimpse the dawn of the
-      year before the blackbird, unless it is that his habit of choosing the
-      topmost branches of the tree gives him a better view of the world than
-      that which the golden-throated fellow gets on the lower branches that he
-      always affects. It may be the same habit of living in the top storey that
-      accounts for the early activity of the rooks. They are noisy neighbours,
-      but never so noisy as in these late February days, when they are breaking
-      up into families and quarrelling over their slatternly household
-      arrangements in the topmost branches of the elm trees. They are comic
-      ruffians who wash all their dirty linen in public, and seem almost as
-      disorderly and bad-tempered as the human family itself. If they had only a
-      little of our ingenuity in mutual slaughter there would be no need for my
-      friend the farmer to light bonfires underneath the trees in order to drive
-      the female from the eggs and save his crops.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      A much more amiable little fellow, the great tit, has just added his
-      modest assurance that spring is coming. He is not much of a singer, but he
-      is good hearing to anyone whose thoughts are turning to his garden and the
-      pests that lurk therein for the undoing of his toil. The tit is as
-      industrious a worker in the garden as the starling, and, unlike the
-      starling, he has no taste for my cherries. A pair of blue tits have been
-      observed to carry a caterpillar to their nest, on an average every two
-      minutes for the greater part of the day. That is the sort of bird that
-      deserves encouragement&mdash;a bird that loves caterpillars and does not
-      love cherries. There are very few creatures with so clean a record. So
-      hang out the cocoanut as a sign of goodwill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And yet, as I write, I am reminded that in this imperfect world where no
-      unmixed blessing is vouchsafed to us, even the tit does not escape the
-      general law of qualified beneficence. For an hour past I have been
-      agreeably aware of the proximity of a great tit who, from a hedge below
-      the orchard, has been singing his little see-saw song with unremitting
-      industry. Now behold him. There he goes flitting and pirouetting with that
-      innocent grace which, as he skips in and out of the hedge just in front of
-      you, suggests that he is inviting you to a game of hide-and-seek. But not
-      now. Now he is revealing the evil that dwells in the best of us. Now he
-      reminds us that he too is a part of that nature which feeds so
-      relentlessly on itself. See him over the hives, glancing about in his own
-      erratic way and taking his bearings. Then, certain that the coast is
-      clear, he nips down and taps upon one of the hives with his beak. He skips
-      away to await results. The trick succeeds; the doorkeeper of the hive
-      comes out to enquire into the disturbance, and down swoops the great tit
-      and away he flies with his capture. An artful fellow in spite of his air
-      of innocence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      There is no affectation of innocence about that robust fellow the
-      starling. He is almost as candid a ruffian as the rook, and three months
-      hence I shall hate him with an intensity that would match Caligula's &ldquo;Oh,
-      that the Romans had only one neck!&rdquo; For then he will come out of the beech
-      woods on the hillside for his great annual spring offensive against my
-      cherry trees, and in two or three days he will leave them an obscene
-      picture of devastation, every twig with its desecrated fruit and the
-      stones left bleaching in the sun. But in these days of February I can be
-      just even to my enemy. I can admit without reserve that he is not all bad
-      any more than the other winsome little fellow is all good. See him on
-      autumn or winter days when he has mobilised his forces for his forages in
-      the fields, and is carrying out those wonderful evolutions in the sky that
-      are such a miracle of order and rhythm. Far off, the cloud approaches like
-      a swirl of dust in the sky, expanding, contracting, changing formation,
-      breaking up into battalions, merging into columns, opening out on a wide
-      front, throwing out flanks and advance guards and rear guards, every
-      complication unravelled in perfect order, every movement as serene and
-      assured as if the whole cloud moved to the beat of some invisible
-      conductor below&mdash;a very symphony of the air, in which motion merges
-      into music, until it seems that you are not watching a flight of birds,
-      but listening with the inner ear to great waves of soundless harmony. And
-      then, the overture over, down the cloud descends upon the fields, and the
-      farmers' pests vanish before the invasion. And if you will follow them
-      into the fields you will find infinite tiny holes that they have drilled
-      and from which they have extracted the lurking enemy of the drops, and you
-      will remember that it is to their beneficial activities that we owe the
-      extermination of the May beetle, whose devastations were so menacing a
-      generation ago. And after the flock has broken up and he has paired, and
-      the responsibilities of housekeeping have begun he continues his worthy
-      labours. When spring has come you can see him dart from his nest in the
-      hollow of the tree and make a journey a minute to the neighbouring field,
-      returning each time with a chafer-grub or a wire-worm or some other
-      succulent, but pestiferous morsel for the young and clamorous family at
-      home. That acute observer, Mr G. G. Desmond, says that he has counted
-      eighteen such journeys in fifteen minutes. What matter a few cherries for
-      a fellow of such benignant spirit?
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But wait, my dear sir, wait until June brings the ripening cherries and
-      see how much of this magnanimity of February is left.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Sir, I refuse to be intimidated by June or any other consideration.
-      Sufficient unto the day&mdash;&mdash; And to-day I will think only good of
-      the sturdy fellow in the coat of mail. To-day I will think only of the
-      brave news that is abroad. It has got into the hives. On fine days such as
-      this stray bees sail out for water, bringing the agreeable tidings that
-      all is well within, that the queen bee is laying her eggs, &ldquo;according to
-      plan,&rdquo; and that moisture is wanted in the hive. There are a score of hives
-      in the orchard, and they have all weathered the winter and its perils. We
-      saw the traces of one of those perils when the snow still lay on the
-      ground. Around each hive were the footmarks of a mouse. He had come from a
-      neighbouring hedge, visited each hive in turn, found there was no
-      admission and had returned to the hedge no doubt hungrier than he came.
-      Poor little wretch! to be near such riches, lashings of sweetness and
-      great boulders of wax, and not be able to get bite or sup. I see him
-      trotting back through the snow to his hole, a very dejected mouse. Oh,
-      these new-fangled hives that don't give a fellow a chance.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the garden the news is coming up from below, borne by those unfailing
-      outriders of the spring, the snowdrop and the winter aconite. A modest
-      company; but in their pennons is the assurance of the many-coloured host
-      that is falling unseen into the vast pageant of summer and will fill the
-      woods with the trumpets of the harebell and the wild hyacinth, and make
-      the hedges burst into foam, and the orchard a glory of pink and white, and
-      the ditches heavy with the scent of the meadowsweet, and the fields golden
-      with harvest and the gardens a riot of luxuriant life. I said it was all
-      right, chirps little red waistcoat from the fence&mdash;all the winter
-      I've told you that there was a good time coming and now you see for
-      yourself. Look at those flowers. Ain't they real? The philosopher in the
-      red waistcoat is perfectly right. He has kept his end up all through the
-      winter, and has taken us into his fullest confidence. Formerly he never
-      came beyond the kitchen, but this winter when the snow was about he
-      advanced to the parlour where he pottered about like one of the family.
-      Now, however, with the great news outside and the earth full of good
-      things to pick up, he has no time to call.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Even up in the woods that are still gaunt with winter and silent, save for
-      the ringing strokes of the woodcutters in some distant clearing, the
-      message is borne in the wind that comes out of the west at the dawn of the
-      spring, and is as unlike the wind of autumn as the spirit of the sunrise
-      is unlike the spirit of the sunset. It is the lusty breath of life coming
-      back to the dead earth, and making these February days the most thrilling
-      of the year. For in these expanding skies and tremors of life and
-      unsealings of the secret springs of nature all is promise and hope, and
-      nothing is for regret and lament. It is when fulfilment comes that the joy
-      of possession is touched with the shadow of parting. The cherry blossom
-      comes like a wonder and goes like a dream, carrying the spring with it,
-      and the dirge of summer itself is implicit in the scent of the lime trees
-      and the failing note of the cuckoo. But in these days of birth when
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      &ldquo;Youth, inexpressibly fair, wakes like a wondering rose.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      there is no hint of mortality and no reverted glance. The curtain is
-      rising and the pageant is all before us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0077" id="linkimage-0077"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0249m.jpg" alt="0249m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0249.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0078" id="linkimage-0078"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0250m.jpg" alt="0250m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0250.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0036" id="link2H_4_0036"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON AN ANCIENT PEOPLE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>mong my letters
-      this morning was one requesting that if I were in favour of &ldquo;the
-      reconstitution of Palestine as a National Home for the Jewish people,&rdquo; I
-      should sign the enclosed declaration and return it in the envelope
-      (unstamped), also enclosed. I dislike unstamped envelopes. I also dislike
-      stamped envelopes. You can ignore an unstamped enveloped but a stamped
-      envelope compels you to write a letter, when perhaps you don't want to
-      write a letter. My objection to unstamped envelopes is that they show a
-      meagre spirit and a lack of confidence in you. They suggest that you are
-      regarded with suspicion as a person who will probably steam off the stamp
-      and use it to receipt a bill.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But I waived the objection, signed the declaration, stamped the envelope
-      and put it in the post. I did all this because I am a Zionist. I am so
-      keen a Zionist that I would use a whole bookful of stamps in the cause. I
-      am a Zionist, not on sentimental grounds, but on very practical grounds. I
-      want the Jews to have Palestine, so that the English may have England and
-      the Germans Germany and the Russians Russia. I want them to have a home of
-      their own so that the rest of us can have a home of our own. By this I do
-      not mean that I am an anti-Semite. I loathe Jew-baiting, and regard the
-      Jew-baiter as a very unlovely person. But I want the Jew to be able to
-      decide whether he is an alien or a citizen. I want him to shed the dualism
-      that makes him such an affliction to himself and to other people. I want
-      him to possess Palestine so that he may cease to want to possess the
-      earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I am therefore fiercely on the side of the Zionist Jews, and fiercely
-      against their opponents. These people want to be Jews, but they do not
-      want Jewry. They do not want to be compelled to make a choice between
-      being Jews and being Englishmen or Americans, Germans or French. They want
-      the best of both worlds. We are not a nation, they say; we are Englishmen,
-      or Scotsmen, or Welshmen, or Frenchmen, or Germans, or Russians, or
-      Japanese &ldquo;of the Jewish persuasion.&rdquo; We are a religious community like the
-      Catholics, or the Presbyterians, or the Unitarians, or the Plymouth
-      Brethren. Indeed! And what is your religion, pray? <i>It is the religion
-      of the Chosen People</i>. Great heavens! You deny that you are a nation,
-      and in the same breath claim that you are the Chosen Nation. The very
-      foundation of your religion is that Jehovah has picked you out from all
-      the races of men as his own. Over you his hand is spread in everlasting
-      protection. For you the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night; for
-      the rest of us the utter darkness of the breeds that have not the
-      signature of Jehovah. We cannot enter your kingdom by praying or fasting,
-      by bribe or entreaty. Every other nation is accessible to us on its own
-      conditions; every other religion is eager to welcome us, sends its
-      missionaries to us to implore us to come in. But you, the rejected of
-      nations, yourself reject all nations and forbid your sacraments to those
-      who are not bom of your household. You are the Chosen People, whose
-      religion is the nation and whose nationhood is religion.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Why, my dear sir, history offers no parallel to your astounding claim to
-      nationality&mdash;the claim that has held your race together through
-      nearly two thousand years of dispersion and wandering, of persecution and
-      pride, of servitude and supremacy&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Slaves in eternal Egypts, baking your strawless bricks;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      At ease in successive Zions, prating your politics.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      All nations are afflicted with egoism. It is the national egoism of
-      Prussia that has just brought it to such catastrophic ruin. The Frenchman
-      entertains the firm conviction that civilisation ends at the French
-      frontier. Being a polite person, he does his best not to betray the
-      conviction to us, and sometimes almost succeeds. The Englishman, being
-      less sophisticated, does not try to conceal the fact that he has a similar
-      conviction. It does not occur to him that anyone can doubt his claim. He
-      knows that every foreigner would like to be an Englishman if he knew how.
-      The pride of the Spaniard is a legend, and you have only to see Arab
-      salute Arab to understand what a low person the European must seem in
-      their eyes. In short, national egoism is a folly which is pretty equally
-      distributed among all of us. But your national egoism is unlike any other
-      brand on earth. In the humility of Shylock is the pride of the most
-      arrogant racial aristocracy the world has ever seen. God appeared to you
-      in the burning bush and spoke to you in the thunders of Sinai, and set you
-      apart as his own exclusive household. And when one of your prophets
-      declared that all nations were one in the sight of God, you rejected his
-      gospel and slew the prophet. By comparison with you we are a humble
-      people. We know we are a mixed race and that we have no more divine origin&mdash;and
-      no less&mdash;than anybody else. Mr Kipling, it is true, has caught your
-      arrogant note:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      For the Lord our God Most High,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      He hath made the deep as dry,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      He hath smote for us a pathway to the ends of all the earth.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But that is because Mr Kipling seems to be one of those who believe we are
-      one of the lost tribes of your Chosen race. I gather that is so from
-      another of his poems in which he cautions us against
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      Such boastings as the Gentiles use
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent20">
-      And lesser breeds without the law.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But Mr Kipling is only a curiosity among us. We are much more modest than
-      that. But you are like that. You are not only a nation. You are, except
-      the Chinese, the most isolated, the most tenacious, the most exclusive
-      nation in history. Other races have changed through the centuries beyond
-      recognition or have disappeared altogether. Where are the Persians of the
-      spacious days of Cyrus? Who finds in the Egyptians of to-day the spirit
-      and genius of the mighty people who built the Pyramids and created the art
-      of the Third Dynasty? What trace is there in the modern Cretans of the
-      imperial race whose seapower had become a legend before Homer sang? Can we
-      find in the Greeks of our time any reminiscence of the Athens of Pericles?
-      Or in the Romans any kinship with the sovereign people that conquered the
-      world from Parthia to Britain, and stamped it with the signature of its
-      civilisation as indelibly as it stamped it with its great highways? The
-      nations chase each other across the stage of time, and vanish as the
-      generations of men chase each other and vanish. You and the Chinese alone
-      seem indestructible. It is no extravagant fancy that foresees that when
-      the last fire is lit on this expiring planet it will be a Chinaman and a
-      Jew who will stretch their hands to its warmth, drink in the last breath
-      of air, and write the final epitaph of earth. No, it is too late by many a
-      thousand years to deny your nationhood, for it is the most enduring fact
-      in human records. And being a nation without a fatherland, you run like a
-      disturbing immiscible fluid through the blood of all the nations. You need
-      a home for your own peace and for the world's peace. I am going to try and
-      help you to get one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0079" id="linkimage-0079"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0254m.jpg" alt="0254m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0254.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0080" id="linkimage-0080"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0037" id="link2H_4_0037"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON GOOD RESOLUTIONS
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> think, on the
-      whole, that I began the New Year with rather a good display of moral
-      fireworks, and as fireworks are meant to be seen (and admired) I propose
-      to let them off in public. When I awoke in the morning I made a good
-      resolution.... At this point, if I am not mistaken, I observe a slight
-      shudder on your part, madam. &ldquo;How Victorian!&rdquo; I think I hear you remark.
-      You compel me, madam, to digress.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is, I know, a little unfashionable to make New Year's resolutions
-      nowadays. That sort of thing belonged to the Victorian world in which we
-      elderly people were born, and for which we are expected to apologise. No
-      one is quite in the fashion who does not heave half a brick at Victorian
-      England. Mr Wells has just heaved a book of 760 pages at it. This
-      querulous superiority to past ages seems a little childish. It is like the
-      scorn of youth for its elders.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I cannot get my indignation up to the boil about Victorian England. I
-      should find it as difficult to draw up an indictment of a century as it is
-      to draw up an indictment of a nation. I seem to remember that the
-      Nineteenth Century used to speak as disrespectfully of the Eighteenth as
-      we now speak of the Nineteenth, and I fancy that our grandchildren will be
-      as scornful of our world of to-day as we are of the world of yesterday.
-      The fact that we have learned to fly, and have discovered poison gas, and
-      have invented submarines and guns that will kill a churchful of people
-      seventy miles away does not justify us in regarding the Nineteenth Century
-      as a sort of absurd guy. There were very good things as well as very bad
-      things about our old Victorian England. It did not go to the Ritz to dance
-      in the New Year, it is true. The Ritz did not exist, and the modern hotel
-      life had not been invented. It used to go instead to the watch-night
-      service, and it was not above making good resolutions, which for the most
-      part, no doubt, it promptly proceeded to break.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Why should we apologise for these habits? Why should we be ashamed of
-      watch-night services and good resolutions? I am all for gaiety. If I had
-      my way I would be as &ldquo;merry&rdquo; as Pepys, if in a different fashion. &ldquo;Merry&rdquo;
-       is a good word and implies a good thing. It may be admitted that merriment
-      is an inferior quality to cheerfulness. It is an emotion, a mere spasm,
-      whereas cheerfulness is a habit of mind, a whole philosophy of life. But
-      the one quality does not necessarily exclude the other, and an occasional
-      burst of sheer irresponsible merriment is good for anybody&mdash;even for
-      an Archbishop&mdash;especially for an Archbishop. The trouble with an
-      Archbishop is that his office tends to make him take himself too
-      seriously. He forgets that he is one of us, and that is bad for him. He
-      needs to give himself a violent reminder occasionally that his virtue is
-      not an alien thing; but is rooted in very ordinary humanity. At least once
-      a year he should indulge in a certain liveliness, wear the cap and bells,
-      dance a cake-walk or a horn-pipe, not too publicly, but just publicly
-      enough so that there should be nothing furtive about it. If not done on
-      the village green it might at least be done in the episcopal kitchen, and
-      chronicled in the local newspapers. &ldquo;Last evening His Grace the Archbishop
-      attended the servants' ball at the Palace, and danced a cake-walk with the
-      chief scullery-maid.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0081" id="linkimage-0081"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0257m.jpg" alt="0257m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0257.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      And I do not forget that, together with its watch-night services and its
-      good resolutions, Victorian England used to wish you &ldquo;A Merry Christmas
-      and a Happy New Year.&rdquo; Nowadays the formula is &ldquo;A Happy Christmas and a
-      Prosperous New Year.&rdquo; It is a priggish, sophisticated change&mdash;a sort
-      of shamefaced implication that there is something vulgar in being &ldquo;merry.&rdquo;
-       There isn't. For my part, I do not want a Happy Christmas: I want a Merry
-      Christmas. And I do not want a fat, prosperous New Year. I want a Happy
-      New Year, which is a much better and more spiritual thing.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If, therefore, I do not pour contempt on the Victorian habit of making
-      good resolutions, it is not because I share Malvolio's view that virtue is
-      a matter of avoiding cakes and ale. And if I refuse to deride Victorian
-      England because it went to watch-night services it is not because I think
-      there is anything wrong in a dance at the Ritz. It is because, in the
-      words of the old song, I think &ldquo;It is good to be merry <i>and</i> wise.&rdquo; I
-      like a festival of foolishness and I like good resolutions, too. Why
-      shouldn't I? Lewis Carrol's gift for mathematics was not less admirable
-      because he made Humpty-Dumpty such a poor hand at doing sums in his head.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      From this digression, madam, permit me to return to my good resolution.
-      The thing that is the matter with you, I said, addressing myself on New
-      Year's morning as I applied the lather before the shaving glass, is that
-      you have a devil of impatience in you. I shouldn't call you an intolerant
-      fellow, but I rather fear that you are an impulsive fellow. Perhaps to put
-      the thing agreeably, I might say that your nervous reaction to events is a
-      little too immediate. I don't want to be unpleasant, but I think you see
-      what I mean. Do not suppose that I am asking you to be a cold-blooded,
-      calculating person. God forbid. But it would do you no harm to wear a
-      snaffle bar and a tightish rein&mdash;or, as we used to say in our
-      Victorian England, to &ldquo;count ten.&rdquo; I accepted the criticism with approval.
-      For though we do not like to hear of our failings from other people, that
-      does not mean that we are unconscious of them. The more conscious we are
-      of them, the less we like to hear of them from others and the more we hear
-      of them from ourselves. So I said &ldquo;Agreed. We will adopt 'Second thoughts'
-      as our New Year policy and begin the campaign at once.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      And then came my letters&mdash;nice letters and nasty letters and
-      indifferent letters, and among them one that, as Lancelot Gobbo would say,
-      &ldquo;raised the waters.&rdquo; No, it was not one of those foolish, venomous letters
-      which anonymous correspondents write to newspapers. They leave you cold. I
-      might almost say that they cheer you up. They give you the comforting
-      assurance that you cannot be very far wrong when persons capable of
-      writing these letters disapprove of you. But this letter was different. As
-      I read it I felt a flame of indignation surging up and demanding
-      expression. And I seized a pen, and expressed it, and having done so, I
-      said &ldquo;Second thoughts,&rdquo; and tore it up, and put the fragments aside, as
-      the memorial of the first skirmish in the campaign. I do not expect to
-      dwell on this giddy moral altitude long; perhaps in a week the old
-      imperious impulse will have resumed full dominion. But it is good to have
-      a periodical brush with one's habits, even if one knows one is pretty sure
-      to go down in the second round. It serves at least as a reminder that we
-      are conscious of our own imperfections as well as of the imperfections of
-      others. And that, I think, is the case for our old Victorian habit of New
-      Year's Day commandments.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I wrote another reply in the evening. It was quite <i>pianissimo</i> and
-      nice.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0082" id="linkimage-0082"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0261m.jpg" alt="0261m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0261.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0038" id="link2H_4_0038"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON A GRECIAN PROFILE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> see that the
-      ghouls have descended upon George Meredith, and are desecrating his
-      remains. They have learned from the life of him just published that he did
-      not get on well with his father, or his eldest son, and that he did not
-      attend his first wife's funeral. Above all, he was a snob. He was ashamed
-      of the tailoring business from which he sprang, concealed the fact that he
-      was bom at Portsmouth, and generally turned his Grecian profile to the
-      world and left it to be assumed that his pedigree was wrapped in mystery
-      and magnificence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay it is all true. Many of us have an indifferent record at home
-      and most of us like to turn our Grecian profiles to the world, if we have
-      Grecian profiles. We are like the girl in Hardy's story who always managed
-      to walk on the right side of her lover, because she fancied that the left
-      side of her face was her strong point. The most distinguished and, I
-      think, the noblest American of our time always turns his profile to the
-      camera&mdash;and a beautiful profile it is&mdash;for reasons quite obvious
-      and quite pardonable to those who have seen the birth-mark that disfigures
-      the other cheek. I suspect that I do not myself object to being caught
-      unaware in favourable attitudes or pleasing situations that dispose the
-      observer to agreeable impressions. And, indeed, why should I (or you) be
-      ashamed to give-a pleasant thrill to anybody if it is in our power. If we
-      pretend we are above these human frailties, what is the meaning of the
-      pains we take about choosing a hat, or about the cut of a coat, or the
-      colour of a cloth for the new suit? Why do we so seldom find pleasure in a
-      photograph of ourselves&mdash;so seldom feel that it does justice to that
-      benignant and Olympian ideal of ourselves which we cherish secretly in our
-      hearts? I should have to admit, if I went into the confession box, that I
-      had never seen a photograph of myself that had satisfied me. And I fancy
-      you would do the same if you were honest. We may pretend to ourselves that
-      it is only abstract beauty or absolute truth that we are concerned about,
-      but we know better. We are thinking of our Grecian profile.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is no doubt regrettable to find that great men are so often afflicted
-      with little weaknesses. There are some people who delight in pillorying
-      the immortals and shying dead cats and rotten eggs at them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      They enjoy the discovery that no one is better than he should be. It gives
-      them a comfortable feeling to discover that the austere outside of the
-      lord Angelo conceals the libertine. If you praise Caesar they will remind
-      you that after dinner he took emetics; if Brutus, they will say he made an
-      idol of his public virtue. They like to remember that Lamb was not quite
-      the St Charles he is represented to be, but took far too much wine at
-      dinner and dosed beautifully, but alcoholically, afterwards, as you may
-      read in De Quincey. They like to recall that Scott was something of a
-      snob, and put the wine-glass that the Prince Regent had used at dinner in
-      his pocket, sitting down on it afterwards in a moment of happy
-      forgetfulness. In short, they go about like Alcibiades mutilating the
-      statues of Hermes (if he was indeed the culprit), and will leave us
-      nothing in human nature that we can entirely reverence.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I suppose they are right enough on the facts. Considering what
-      multitudinous persons we are it would be a miracle if, when we button up
-      ourselves in the morning we did not button up some individual of
-      unpleasant propensities, whom we pretend we do not know. I have never been
-      interested in my pedigree. I am sure it is a very ancient one, and I leave
-      it at that. But I once made a calculation&mdash;based on the elementary
-      fact that I had two parents and they had each two parents, and so on&mdash;and
-      came to the conclusion that about the time of the Norman Conquest my
-      ancestors were much more numerous than the population then inhabiting this
-      island. I am aware that this proves rather too much&mdash;that it is an
-      example of the fact that you can prove anything by statistics, including
-      the impossible. But the truth remains that I am the temporary embodiment
-      of a very large number of people&mdash;of millions of millions of people,
-      if you trace me back to my ancestors who used to sharpen flints some six
-      hundred thousand years ago. It would be singular if in such a crowd there
-      were not some ne'er-do-wells jostling about among the nice, reputable
-      persons who, I flatter myself, constitute my Parliamentary majority.
-      Sometimes I fancy that, in a snap election taken at a moment of public
-      excitement within myself, the ne'er-do-wells get on top. These accidents
-      will happen, and the best I can hope is that the general trend of policy
-      in the multitudinous kingdom that I carry under my hat is in the hands of
-      the decent people.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And that is the best we can expect from anybody&mdash;the great as well as
-      the least. If we demand of the supreme man that he shall be a perfect
-      whole we shall have no supreme man&mdash;only a plaster saint. Certainly
-      we shall have no great literature. Shakespeare did not sit aloof like a
-      perfect god imagining the world of imperfect creatures that he created.
-      The world was within him and he was only the vehicle of his enormous
-      ancestry and of the tumultuous life that they reproduced in the theatre of
-      his mind. In him was the mirth of a roystering Falstaff of long ago, the
-      calculating devilry of some Warwickshire Iago, the pity of Hubert, the
-      perplexity of some village Hamlet, the swagger of Ancient Pistol, the
-      bucolic simplicity of Cousin Silence, the mingled nobleness and baseness
-      of Macbeth, the agony of Lear, the sweetness of many a maiden who walked
-      by Avon's banks in ancient days and lived again in the Portias and
-      Rosalinds of his mind. All these people dwelt in Shakespeare. They were
-      the ghosts of his ancestors. He was, like the rest of us, not a man, but
-      multitudes of men. He created all these people because he was all these
-      people, contained in a larger measure than any man who ever lived all the
-      attributes, good and bad, of humanity. Each character was a peep into the
-      gallery of his ancestors. Meredith, himself, recognised the ancestral
-      source of creative power. When Lady Butcher asked him to explain his
-      insight into the character of women he replied, &ldquo;It is the spirit of my
-      mother in me.&rdquo; It was indeed the spirit of many mothers working in and
-      through him.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is this infinitely mingled yarn from which we are woven that makes it
-      so difficult to find and retain a contemporary hero. It was never more
-      difficult than in these searching days. I was walking along the Embankment
-      last evening with a friend&mdash;a man known alike for his learning and
-      character&mdash;when he turned to me and said, &ldquo;I will never have a hero
-      again.&rdquo; We had been speaking of the causes of the catastrophe of Paris,
-      and his remark referred especially to his disappointment with President
-      Wilson. I do not think he was quite fair to the President. He did not make
-      allowance for the devil's broth of intrigue and ambitions into which the
-      President was plunged on this side of the Atlantic. But, leaving that
-      point aside, his remark expressed a very common feeling. There has been a
-      calamitous slump in heroes. They have fallen into as much disrepute as
-      kings.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And for the same reason. Both are the creatures of legend. They are the
-      fabulous offspring of comfortable times&mdash;supermen reigning on Olympus
-      and standing between us common people and the unknown. Then come the storm
-      and the blinding lightnings, and the Olympians have to get busy and prove
-      that they are what we have taken them for. And behold, they are discovered
-      to be ordinary men as we are, reeds shaken by the wind, feeble folk like
-      you and I, tossed along on the tide of events as helpless as any of us.
-      Their heads are no longer in the clouds, and their feet have come down
-      from Sinai. And we find that they are feet of clay.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is no new experience in times of upheaval. Writing on the morrow of the
-      Napoleonic wars, when the world was on the boil as it is now, Byron
-      expressed what we are feeling to-day very accurately:
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      I want a hero: an uncommon want,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      When every year and month sends forth a new one.
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent10">
-      Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The age discovers he is not the true one.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The truth, I suppose, is contained in the old saying that &ldquo;no man is a
-      hero to his valet.&rdquo; To be a hero you must be remote in time or
-      circumstance, seen far off, as it were, through a haze of legend and
-      fancy. The valet sees you at close quarters, marks your vanities and
-      angers, hears you fuming over your hard-boiled egg, perhaps is privileged
-      to laugh with you when you come out of the limelight over the tricks you
-      have played on the open-mouthed audience. Bourrienne was a faithful
-      secretary and a genuine admirer of Napoleon, but the picture he gives of
-      Napoleon's shabby little knaveries reveals a very wholesome loathing for
-      that scoundrel of genius. And Cæsar, loud though his name thunders down
-      the centuries, was, I fancy, not much of a hero to his contemporaries. It
-      was Decimus Brutus, his favourite general, whom he had just appointed to
-      the choicest command in his gift, who went to Caesar's house on that March
-      morning, two thousand years ago, to bring him to the slaughter.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      If I were asked-to name one incontrovertible hero among the sons of men I
-      should nominate Abraham Lincoln. He fills the part more completely than
-      anyone else. In his union of wisdom with humanity, tolerance in secondary
-      things with firmness in great things, unselfishness and tenderness with
-      resolution and strength, he stands alone in history. But even he was not a
-      hero to his contemporaries. They saw him too near&mdash;near enough to
-      note his frailties, for he was human, too near to realise the grand and
-      significant outlines of the man as a whole. It was not until he was dead
-      that the world realised what a leader had fallen in Israel. Motley thanked
-      heaven, as for something unusual, that he had been privileged to
-      appreciate Lincoln's greatness before death revealed him to men. Stanton
-      fought him bitterly, though honourably, to the end, and it was only when
-      life had ebbed away that he understood the grandeur of the force that had
-      been withdrawn from the affairs of earth. &ldquo;There lies the most perfect
-      ruler of men the world has ever seen,&rdquo; he said, as he stood with other
-      colleagues around the bed on which Lincoln had breathed his last. But the
-      point here is that, sublime though the sum of the man was, his heroic
-      profile had its abundant human warts.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is possible that the future may unearth heroes from the wreckage of
-      reputations with which the war and the peace have strewn the earth. It
-      will have a difficult task to find them among the statesmen who have made
-      the peace, and the fighting men are taking care that it shall not find
-      them in their ranks. They are all writing books. Such books! Are these the
-      men&mdash;these whimpering, mean-spirited complaining dullards&mdash;the
-      demi-gods we have watched from afar? Why, now we see them under the
-      microscope of their own making, they seem more like insects than
-      demi-gods. You read the English books and wonder why we ever won, and then
-      you read the German books and wonder why we didn't win sooner.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      It is fatal for the heroic aspirant to do his own trumpeting. Benvenuto
-      Cellini tried it, and only succeeded in giving the world a priceless
-      picture of a swaggering bravo. Posterity alone can do the trick, by its
-      arts of forgetfulness and exaltation, exercised in virtue of its passion
-      to find something in human nature that it can unreservedly adore. It is a
-      painful thought that, perhaps, there never was and perhaps there never
-      will be such a being. The best of us is woven of &ldquo;mingled yarn, good and
-      ill together.&rdquo; And so I come back to Meredith's Grecian profile and the
-      ghouls. Meredith was a great man and a noble man. But he &ldquo;contained
-      multitudes&rdquo; too, and not all of them were gentlemen. Let us be thankful
-      for the legacy he has left us, and forgive him for the unlovely aspects of
-      that versatile humanity which he shared with the least of us.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0083" id="linkimage-0083"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0269m.jpg" alt="0269m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0269.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0084" id="linkimage-0084"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0270m.jpg" alt="0270m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0270.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0039" id="link2H_4_0039"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON TAKING A HOLIDAY
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> hope the two
-      ladies from the country who have been writing to the newspapers to know
-      what sights they ought to see in London during their Easter holiday will
-      have a nice time. I hope they will enjoy the tube and have fine weather
-      for the Monument, and whisper to each other successfully in the whispering
-      gallery of St Paul's, and see the dungeons at the Tower and the seats of
-      the mighty at Westminster, and return home with a harvest of joyful
-      memories. But I can promise them that there is one sight they will not
-      see. They will not see me. Their idea of a holiday is London. My idea of a
-      holiday is forgetting there is such a place as London.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Not that I dislike London. I should like to see it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I have long promised myself that I would see it. Some day, I have said, I
-      will surely have a look at this place. It is a shame, I have said, to have
-      lived in it so long and never to have seen it. I suppose I am not much
-      worse than other Londoners. Do you, sir, who have been taking the morning
-      bus from Balham for heaven knows how many years&mdash;do you, when you are
-      walking down Fleet Street, stand still with a shock of delight as the dome
-      of St Paul's and its cross of gold burst on your astonished sight? Do you
-      go on a fine afternoon and take your stand on Waterloo Bridge to see that
-      wondrous river façade that stretches with its cloud-capped towers and
-      gorgeous palaces from Westminster to St Paul's? Do you know the spot where
-      Charles was executed, or the church where there are the best Grinling
-      Gibbons carvings? Did you ever go into Somerset House to see the will of
-      William Shakespeare, or&mdash;in short, did you ever see London? Did you
-      ever see it, not with your eyes merely, hut with your mind, with the sense
-      of revelation, of surprise, of discovery? Did you ever see it as those two
-      ladies from the country will see it this Easter as they pass breathlessly
-      from wonder to wonder? Of course not. You need a holiday in London as I
-      do. You need to set out with young Tom (aged ten) on a voyage of discovery
-      and see all the sights of this astonishing city as though you had come to
-      it from a far country.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      That is how I hope to visit it&mdash;some day. But not this Easter, not
-      when I know the beech woods are dressing themselves in green and the
-      cherry blossoms are out in the orchards and the great blobs of the
-      chestnut tree are ready to burst, and the cuckoo is calling all day long
-      and the April meadows are &ldquo;smoored wi' new grass,&rdquo; as they say in the
-      Yorkshire dales. Not when I know that by putting down a bit of paper at
-      the magic casement at Paddington I can be whisked between sunset and dawn
-      to the fringe of Dartmoor and let loose&mdash;shall it be from Okehampton
-      or Bovey Tracy or Moreton Hampstead? what matter the gate by which we
-      enter the sanctuary?&mdash;let loose, I say, into the vast spaces of earth
-      and sky where the moorland streams sing their ancient runes over the
-      boulders and the great tors stand out like castles of the gods against the
-      horizon and the Easter sun dances, as the legend has it, overhead and
-      founders gloriously in the night beyond Plymouth Sound.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      Or, perhaps, ladies, if you come from the North, I may pass you unawares,
-      and just about the time when you are cracking your breakfast egg in the
-      boarding house at Russell Square&mdash;heavens, Russell Square!&mdash;and
-      discussing whether you shall first go down the deepest lift or up the
-      highest tower, or stand before the august ugliness of Buckingham Palace,
-      or see the largest station or the smallest church, I shall be stepping out
-      from Keswick, by the lapping waters of Derwent water, hailing the old
-      familiar mountains as they loom into sight, looking down again&mdash;think
-      of it!&mdash;into the' Jaws of Borrowdale, having a snack at Rosthwaite,
-      and then, hey for Styehead! up, up ever the rough mountain track, with the
-      buzzard circling with slow flapping wings about the mountain flanks, with
-      glorious Great Gable for my companion on the right hand and no less
-      glorious Scafell for my companion on the left hand, and at the rocky turn
-      in the track&mdash;lo! the great amphitheatre of Wasdale, the last
-      Sanctuary of lakeland.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And at this point, ladies, you may as you crane your neck to see the Duke
-      of York at the top of his column&mdash;wondering all the while who the
-      deuce the fellow was that he should stand so high&mdash;you may, I say, if
-      you like, conceive me standing at the top of the pass, taking my hat from
-      my head and pronouncing a terrific curse on the vandals who would
-      desecrate the last temple of solitude by driving a road over this fastness
-      of the mountains in order that the gross tribe of motorists may come with
-      their hoots and their odours, their hurry and vulgarity, and chase the
-      spirit of the mountains away from us for ever.... And then by the screes
-      of Great Gable to the hollow among the mountains. Or perchance, I may turn
-      by Sprinkling Tam and see the Pikes of Langdale come into view and stumble
-      down Rossett Ghyll and so by the green pastures of Langdale to Grasmere.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In short, ladies, I may be found in many places. But I shall not tell you
-      where. I am not quite sure that I could tell you where at this moment, for
-      I am like a fellow who has come into great riches and is doubtful how he
-      can squander them most gloriously. But, I repeat, ladies, that you will
-      not find me in London. I leave London to you. May you enjoy it.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0085" id="linkimage-0085"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0201m.jpg" alt="0201m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0201.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0040" id="link2H_4_0040"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      UNDER THE SYCAMORE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">A</span>n odd question was
-      put to me the other day which I think I may venture to pass on to a wider
-      circle. It was this: What is the best dish that life has set before you?
-      At first blush it seems an easy question to answer. It was answered gaily
-      enough by Mr H. G. Wells when he was asked what was the best thing that
-      had ever happened to him. &ldquo;The best thing that ever happened to me was to
-      be born,&rdquo; he replied. But that is not an answer: it is an evasion. It
-      belongs to another kind of inquiry, whether life is worth living. Life may
-      be worth living or not worth living on balance, but in either case we can
-      still say what was the thing in it that we most enjoyed. You may dislike a
-      dinner on the whole and yet make an exception of the trout, or the braised
-      ham and spinach or the dessert. You may dislike a man very heartily and
-      still admit that he has a good tenor voice. You may, like Job and Swift
-      and many more, have cursed the day you were born and still remember many
-      pleasant things that have happened to you&mdash;falling in love, making
-      friends, climbing mountains, reading books, seeing pictures, scoring runs,
-      watching the sunrise in the Oberland or the sunset on Hampstead Heath. You
-      may write off life as a bad debt and still enjoy the song of the thrush
-      outside. It is a very unusual bankrupt that has no assets. It is a very
-      sad heart who has never had anything to thank his stars for.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But while the question about the dish seems easy enough at first, it grows
-      difficult on reflection.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      In the end you are disposed to say that it cannot be satisfactorily
-      answered here at all. We shall have to wait till we get the journey over
-      and in perspective before we can be sure that we can select the things
-      that were best worth having. It is pleasant to imagine that in that long
-      sunny afternoon, which I take eternity to be, it will be a frequent and
-      agreeable diversion to sit under a spacious tree&mdash;sycamore or
-      chestnut for choice, not because they are my favourite trees, but because
-      their generous leaves cast the richest and greenest shade&mdash;to sit, I
-      say, and think over the queer dream which befell us on that tiny ball
-      which the Blessèd Damozel, as she looks over the battlements of heaven
-      near by, sees &ldquo;spinning like a midge&rdquo; below.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And if in the midst of those pleasant ruminations one came along and asked
-      us to name the thing that had given us most pleasure at the play to which
-      we had been so mysteriously sent, and from which we had slipped away so
-      quietly, the answers would probably be very unlike those we should make
-      now. You, Mr Contractor, for example (I am assuming you will be there)
-      will find yourself most dreadfully gravelled for an answer. That glorious
-      contract you made, which enabled you to pocket a cool million&mdash;come
-      now, confess, sir, that it will seem rather a drab affair to remember your
-      journey by. You will have to think of something better than that as the
-      splendid gamering of the adventure, or you will have to confess to a very
-      complete bankruptcy. And you, sir, to whom the grosser pleasures seemed so
-      important, you will not like to admit, even to yourself, that your most
-      rapturous memory of earth centres round the grillroom at the Savoy. You
-      will probably find that the things best worth remembering are the things
-      you rejected.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay the most confident answers will come from those whose pleasures
-      were of the emotions and of the mind. They got more out of life, after
-      all, than the brewers and soap-boilers and traffickers in money, and
-      traffickers in blood, who have nothing left from those occupations to
-      hallow its memory. Think of St Francis meeting Napoleon under that
-      sycamore tree&mdash;which of them, now that it is all over, will have most
-      joy in recalling the life which was a feast of love to the one and a
-      gamble with iron dice to the other? Wordsworth will remember the earth as
-      a miraculous pageant, where every day broke with magic over the mountains,
-      and every night was filled with the wonder of the stars, and where season
-      followed season with a processional glory that never grew dim. And Mozart
-      will recall it as a ravishing melody, and Claude and Turner as a panorama
-      of effulgent sunsets. And the men of intellect, with what delight they
-      will look back on the great moments of life&mdash;Columbus seeing the new
-      world dawning on his vision, Copernicus feeling the sublime architecture
-      of the universe taking shape in his mind, Harvey unravelling the cardinal
-      mystery of the human frame, Darwin thrilling with the birth pangs of the
-      immense secret that he wrung from Nature. These men will be able to answer
-      the question grandly. The banquet they had on earth will bear talking
-      about even in Heaven.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But in that large survey of the journey which we shall take under the
-      scyamore tree of my obstinate fancy, there will be one dish that will, I
-      fancy, transcend all others for all of us, wise and simple, great and
-      humble alike. It will not be some superlative moment, like the day we won
-      the Derby, or came into a fortune, or climbed the Matterhorn, or shook
-      hands with the Prince of Wales, or received an O.B.E., or got our name in
-      the paper, or bought a Rolls-Royce, or won a seat in Parliament. It will
-      be a very simple, commonplace thing. It will be the human comradeship we
-      had on the journey&mdash;the friendships of the spirit, whether made in
-      the flesh or through the medium of books, or music, or art. We shall
-      remember the adventure not by its appetites, but by its affections&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br />
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      For gauds that perished, shows that passed,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The fates some recompense have sent&mdash;
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      Thrice blessed are the things that last,
-    </p>
-    <p class="indent15">
-      The things that are more excellent.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /> <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0086" id="linkimage-0086"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0278m.jpg" alt="0278m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0278.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0087" id="linkimage-0087"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0279m.jpg" alt="0279m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0279.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0041" id="link2H_4_0041"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON THE VANITY OF OLD AGE
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> met an old
-      gentleman, a handsome and vigorous old gentleman, with whom I have a
-      slight acquaintance, in the lane this morning, and he asked me whether I
-      remembered Walker of <i>The Daily News</i>. No, said I, he was before my
-      time. He resigned the editorship, I thought, in the 'seventies.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Before that,&rdquo; said the old gentleman. &ldquo;Must have been in the 'sixties.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Probably,&rdquo; I said. &ldquo;Did you know him in the 'sixties?&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Oh, I knew him before then,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, warming to his
-      subject. &ldquo;I knew him in the 'forties.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I took a step backwards in respectful admiration. The old gentleman
-      enjoyed this instinctive testimony to the impression he had made.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Heavens!&rdquo; said I, &ldquo;the 'forties!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said the old gentleman, half closing his eyes, as if to get a better
-      view across the ages. &ldquo;No.... It must have been in the 'thirties.... Yes,
-      it was in the 'thirties. We were boys at school together in the 'thirties.
-      We called him Sawney Walker.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      I fell back another step. The old gentleman's triumph was complete. I had
-      paid him the one compliment that appealed to him&mdash;the compliment of
-      astonished incredulity at the splendour of his years.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      His age was his glory, and he loved to bask in it. He had scored ninety
-      not out, and with his still robust frame and clear eye he looked &ldquo;well
-      set&rdquo; for his century. And he was as honourably proud of his performance
-      as, seventy or eighty years ago, he would have been of making his hundred
-      at the wickets. The genuine admiration I had for his achievement was mixed
-      with enjoyment of his own obvious delight in it. An innocent vanity is the
-      last of our frailties to desert us. It will be the last infirmity that
-      humanity will outgrow. In the great controversy that rages around Dean
-      Inge's depressing philosophy I am on the side of the angels. I want to
-      feel that we are progressing somewhere, that we are moving upwards in the
-      scale of creation, and not merely whizzing round and round and biting our
-      tail. I think the case for the ascent of man is stronger than the Dean
-      admits. A creature that has emerged from the primordial slime and evolved
-      a moral law has progressed a good way. It is not unreasonable to think
-      that he has a future. Give him time&mdash;and it may be that the world is
-      still only in its rebellious childhood&mdash;and he will go far.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But however much we are destined to grow in grace, I do not conceive a
-      time when we shall have wholly shed our vanity. It is the most constant
-      and tenacious of our attributes. The child is vain of his first
-      knickerbockers, and the Court flunkey is vain of his knee-breeches. We are
-      vain of noble things and ignoble things. The Squire is as vain of his
-      acres as if he made them, and Jim Ruddle carries his head high all the
-      year round in virtue of the notorious fact that all the first prizes at
-      the village flower show go to his onions and potatoes, his carrots and his
-      cabbages. There is none of us so poor as to escape. A friend of mine who,
-      in a time of distress, had been engaged in distributing boots to the
-      children at a London school, heard one day a little child pattering behind
-      her in very squeaky boots. She suspected it was one of the beneficiaries
-      &ldquo;keeping up&rdquo; with her. She turned and recognised the wearer. &ldquo;So you've
-      got your new boots on, Mary?&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said little Mary grandly.
-      &ldquo;Don't they squeak beautiful, mum.&rdquo; And though, as we grow older, we cease
-      to glory in the squeakiness of squeaky boots, we find other material to
-      keep the flame of vanity alive. &ldquo;What for should I ride in a carriage if
-      the guid folk of Dunfermline dinna see me?&rdquo; said the Fifer, putting his
-      head out of the window. He spoke for all of us. We are all a little like
-      that. I confess that I cannot ride in a motor-car that whizzes past other
-      motor-cars without an absurd and irrational vanity. I despise the emotion,
-      but it is there in spite of me. And I remember that when I was young I
-      could hardly free-wheel down a hill on a bicycle without feeling superior
-      to the man who was grinding his way up with heavings and perspiration. I
-      have no shame in making these absurd confessions for I am satisfied that
-      you, sir (or madam), will find in them, if you listen hard, some quite
-      audible echo of yourself.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      And when we have ceased to have anything else to be vain about we are vain
-      of our years. We are as proud of having been born before our neighbours as
-      we used to be of throwing the hammer farther than our neighbours. We are
-      like the old maltster in &ldquo;Far from the Madding Crowd,&rdquo; when Henery Fray
-      claimed to be &ldquo;a strange old piece, goodmen.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;A strange old piece, ye say!&rdquo; interposed the maltster in a querulous
-      voice. &ldquo;Ye be no old man worth naming&mdash;no old man at all. Yer teeth
-      bain't half gone yet; and what's a old man's standing if so be his teeth
-      bain't gone? Weren't I stale in wedlock afore ye were out of arms? 'Tis a
-      poor thing to be sixty when there's people far past fourscore&mdash;a
-      boast weak as water.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It was the unvarying custom in Weatherbury to sink all minor differences
-      when the maltster had to be pacified.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Weak as water, yes,&rdquo; said Jan Coggan. &ldquo;Malter, we feel ye to be a
-      wonderful veteran man, and nobody can gainsay it.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      &ldquo;Nobody,&rdquo; said Joseph Poorgrass. &ldquo;Ye be a very rare old spectacle, malter,
-      and we all respect ye for that gift.&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      That's it. When we haven't anything else to boast about we glory in being
-      &ldquo;a very rare old spectacle.&rdquo; We count the reigns we've lived in and exalt
-      the swingebucklers of long ago when we, too, heard the chimes at midnight.
-      Sometimes the vanity of years begins to develop quite early, as in the
-      case of Henery Fray. There is the leading instance of Cicero who was only
-      in his fifties when he began to idealise himself as an old man and wrote
-      his &ldquo;De Senectute,&rdquo; exalting the pleasures of old age. In the eyes of the
-      maltster he would never have been an old man worth naming, for he was only
-      sixty-four when he was murdered. I have noticed in my own case of late a
-      growing tendency to flourish my antiquity. I find the same naive pleasure
-      in recalling the 'seventies to those who can remember, say, only the
-      'nineties, that my fine old friend in the lane had in talking to me about
-      the 'thirties. I met two nice boys the other day at a country house, and
-      they were full, as boys ought to be, of the subject of the cricket. And
-      when they found I was worth talking to on that high theme, they submitted
-      their ideal team to me for approval, and I launched out about the giants
-      that lived in the days before Agamemnon Hobbs. I recalled the mighty deeds
-      of &ldquo;W. G.&rdquo; and Spofforth, William Gunn and Ulyett, A. P. Lucas and A. G.
-      Steel, and many another hero of my youth. And I can promise you that their
-      stature did not lose in the telling. I found I was as vain of those
-      memories as the maltster was of having lost all his teeth. I daresay I
-      shall be proud when I have lost all my teeth, too. For Nature is a cunning
-      nurse. She gives us lollipops all the way, and when the lollipop of hope
-      and the lollipop of achievement are done, she gently inserts in our
-      toothless gums the lollipop of remembrance. And with that pleasant vanity
-      we are soothed to sleep.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0088" id="linkimage-0088"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0284m.jpg" alt="0284m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0284.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0089" id="linkimage-0089"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0285m.jpg" alt="0285m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0285.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br />
-    </p>
-    <hr />
-    <p>
-      <a name="link2H_4_0042" id="link2H_4_0042"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div style="height: 4em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h2>
-      ON SIGHTING LAND
-    </h2>
-    <p class="pfirst">
-      <span class="dropcap" style="font-size: 4.00em">I</span> was in the midst
-      of an absorbing game of chess when a cry brought me to my feet with a
-      leap. My opponent had sprung to his feet too. He was a doughty fellow, who
-      wore a wisp of hair on his baldish forehead, and had trained it to stand
-      up like a sardonic Mephistophelian note of interrogation. &ldquo;I offer you a
-      draw,&rdquo; I said with a regal wave of the hand, as though I was offering him
-      Czecho-Slovakia or Jugoslavia, or something substantial like that.
-      &ldquo;Accepted,&rdquo; he cried with a gesture no less reckless and comprehensive.
-      And then we bolted for the top deck. For the cry we had heard was &ldquo;Land in
-      sight!&rdquo; And if there are three more comfortable words to hear when you
-      have been tossing about on the ocean for a week or two, I do not know
-      them.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For now that I am safely ashore I do not mind confessing that the Atlantic
-      is a dull place. I used to think that Oscar Wilde was merely facetious
-      when he said he was &ldquo;disappointed with the Atlantic.&rdquo; But now I am
-      disposed to take the remark more seriously. In a general, vague way I knew
-      it was a table-top. We do not have to see these things in order to know
-      what they are like. Le Brun-Pindare did not see the ocean until he was a
-      middle-aged man, but he said that the sight added little to his conception
-      of the sea because &ldquo;we have in us the glance of the universe.&rdquo; But though
-      the actual experience of the ocean adds little to the broad imaginative
-      conception of it formed by the mind, we are not prepared for the effect of
-      sameness, still less for the sense of smallness. It is as though we are
-      sitting day after day in the geometrical centre of a very round table-top.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The feeling of motion is defeated by that unchanging horizon. You are told
-      that the ship made 396 knots (Nautical Miles, DW) the day before yesterday
-      and 402 yesterday, but there is nothing that gives credibility to the
-      fact, for volition to be felt must have something to be measured by and
-      here there is nothing. You are static on the table-top. It is perfectly
-      flat and perfectly round, with an edge as hard as a line drawn by
-      compasses. You feel that if you got to the edge you would have &ldquo;a drop
-      into nothing beneath you, as straight as a beggar can spit.&rdquo; You conceive
-      yourself snatching as you fall at the folds of the table-cloth which hangs
-      over the sides.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      For there is a cloth to this table-top, a cloth that changes its
-      appearance with ceaseless unrest. Sometimes it is a very dark blue cloth,
-      with white spots that burst out here and there like an eruption of
-      transient snow. Sometimes it is a green cloth; sometimes a grey cloth;
-      sometimes a brownish cloth. Occasionally the cloth looks smooth and
-      tranquil, but now and then a wind seems to get between it and the table,
-      and then it becomes wrinkled and turbulent, like a table-cloth flinging
-      itself about in a delirious sleep. In some moods it becomes an
-      incomparable spectacle of terror and power, almost human in its passion
-      and intensity. The ship reels and rolls, and pitches and slides under the
-      impact and withdrawal of the waves that leave it at one moment suspended
-      in air, at the next engulfed in blinding surges. It is like a wrestler
-      fighting desperately to keep his feet, panting and groaning, every joint
-      creaking and every muscle cracking with the frightful strain. A gleam of
-      sunshine breaks through the grey sky, and catching the clouds of spray
-      turns them to rainbow hues that envelop the reeling ship with the glamour
-      of a magic world. Then the gleam passes, and there is nothing but the
-      raging torment of the waters, the groaning wrestler in their midst, and
-      far off a vagrant ray of sunlight touching the horizon, as if it were a
-      pencil of white flame, to a spectral and unearthly beauty.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But whether tranquil or turbulent the effect is the same. We are moveless
-      in the centre of the flat, unchanging circle of things. Our magic carpet
-      (or table-cloth) may be taking us on a trip to America or Europe, as the
-      case may be, but so far as our senses are concerned we are standing still
-      for ever and ever. There is nothing that registers progress to the mind.
-      The circle we looked out on last night is indistinguishable from the
-      circle we look out on this morning. Even the sky and cloud effects are
-      lost on this flat contracted stage, with its hard horizon and its thwarted
-      vision. There is a curious absence of the sense of distance, even of
-      distance in cloudland, for the sky ends as abruptly as the sea at that
-      severely drawn circumference and there is no vague merging of the seen
-      into the unseen, which alone gives the imagination room for flight. To
-      live in this world is to be imprisoned in a double sense&mdash;in the
-      physical sense that Johnson had in mind in his famous retort, and in the
-      emotional sense that I have attempted to describe. In my growing list of
-      undesirable occupations&mdash;sewermen, lift-men, stokers,
-      tram-conductors, and so on&mdash;I shall henceforth include ships'
-      stewards on ocean routes. To spend one's life in being shot like a shuttle
-      in a loom across the Atlantic from Plymouth to New York and back from New
-      York to Plymouth, to be the sport of all the ill-humour of the ocean and
-      to play the sick nurse to a never-ending mob of strangers, is as dreary a
-      part as one could be cast for. I would rather navigate a barge on the
-      Regent Canal or run a night coffee-stall in the Gray's Inn Road. And yet,
-      on second thoughts, they have their joys. They hear, every fortnight or
-      so, that thrilling cry, &ldquo;Land in sight!&rdquo;
-     </p>
-    <p>
-      It is a cry that can never fail to stir the pulse, whatever the land and
-      however familiar it may be.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      The vision is always fresh, and full of wonder. Take a familiar example.
-      Who, crossing the Channel after however short an absence, can catch the
-      first glimpse of the white cliffs of Dover without the surge of some
-      unsuspected emotion within him? He sees England anew, objectively,
-      comprehensively, as something thrown on a screen, and in that moment
-      seizes it, feels it, loves it with a sudden freshness and illumination.
-      Or, take the unfamiliar. That wavy line that breaks at last the monotonous
-      rim of the ocean, is that indeed America? You see it with the emotion of
-      the first adventurers into this untamed wilderness of the sea. Such a
-      cloud appeared one day on the horizon to Columbus. Three hundred years
-      ago, on such a day as this, perhaps, the straining eyes of that immortal
-      little company of the <i>Mayflower</i> caught sight of the land where,
-      they were to plant the seed of so mighty a tree. And all down through the
-      centuries that cry of &ldquo;Land in sight!&rdquo; has been sounded in the ears of
-      generations of exiles chasing each other across the waste to the new land
-      of hope and promise. It would be a dull soul who could see that land
-      shaping itself on the horizon without a sense of the great drama of the
-      ages.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      But of all first sights of land there is none so precious to English eyes
-      as those little islands of the sea that lie there to port on this sunny
-      morning. And of all times when that vision is grateful to the sight there
-      is none to compare with this Christmas eve. I find myself heaving with a
-      hitherto unsuspected affection for the Stilly Islanders. I have a fleeting
-      vision of becoming a stilly Islander myself, settling down there amid a
-      glory of golden daffodils, keeping a sharp look-out to sea, and standing
-      on some dizzy headland to shout the good news of home to the Ark that is
-      for ever coming up over the rim of the ocean.
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      I daresay the Scilly Islander does nothing so foolish. I daresay he is a
-      rather prosaic person, who has no thought of the dazzling vision his hills
-      hold up to the voyager from afar. No matter where that voyager comes from,
-      whether across the Atlantic from America or up the Atlantic from the Cape,
-      or round the Cape from Australia, or through the Mediterranean from India,
-      this is the first glimpse of the homeland that greets him, carrying his
-      mind on over hill and dale, till it reaches the journey's end. And that
-      vision links him up with the great pageant of history. Drake, sailing in
-      from the Spanish main, saw these islands, and knew he was once more in his
-      Devon seas. I fancy I see him on the deck beside me with a wisp of hair,
-      curled and questioning, on his baldish forehead, and I mark the shine in
-      his eyes....
-    </p>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0090" id="linkimage-0090"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:20%;">
-      <img src="images/0291m.jpg" alt="0291m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0291.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <p>
-      <br /><br /><a name="linkimage-0091" id="linkimage-0091"> </a>
-    </p>
-    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
-      <img src="images/0294m.jpg" alt="0294m " width="100%" /><br />
-    </div>
-    <h5>
-      <a href="images/0294.jpg"><i>Original</i></a>
-    </h5>
-    <div style="height: 6em;">
-      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
-    </div>
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-<pre>
-
-
-
-
-
-End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Windfalls, by
-(AKA Alpha of the Plough) Alfred George Gardiner
-
-*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WINDFALLS ***
-
-***** This file should be named 47429-h.htm or 47429-h.zip *****
-This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
-        http://www.gutenberg.org/4/7/4/2/47429/
-
-Produced by David Widger from page images generously
-provided by the Internet Archive
-
-
-Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
-will be renamed.
-
-Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
-one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
-(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
-permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
-set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
-copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
-protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
-Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
-charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
-do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
-rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
-such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
-research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
-practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
-subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
-redistribution.
-
-
-
-*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
-
-THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
-PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
-
-To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
-distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
-(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase &ldquo;Project
-Gutenberg&rdquo;), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
-  www.gutenberg.org/license.
-
-
-Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic works
-
-1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
-and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
-(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
-the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
-all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
-If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
-terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
-entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
-
-1.B.  &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; is a registered trademark.  It may only be
-used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
-agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
-things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
-even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
-paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
-and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
-
-1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation (&ldquo;the Foundation&rdquo;
- or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
-collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
-individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
-located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
-copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
-works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
-are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
-Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
-freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
-this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
-the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
-keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
-Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
-
-1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
-what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
-a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
-the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
-before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
-creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
-Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
-the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
-States.
-
-1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
-
-1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
-access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
-whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
-phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; appears, or with which the phrase &ldquo;Project
-Gutenberg&rdquo; is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
-copied or distributed:
-
-This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
-almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
-re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
-with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
-
-1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
-from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
-posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
-and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
-or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
-with the phrase &ldquo;Project Gutenberg&rdquo; associated with or appearing on the
-work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
-through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
-Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
-1.E.9.
-
-1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
-with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
-must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
-terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
-to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
-permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
-
-1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
-work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
-
-1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
-electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
-prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
-active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm License.
-
-1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
-compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
-word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
-distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
-&ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other format used in the official version
-posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
-you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
-copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
-request, of the work in its original &ldquo;Plain Vanilla ASCII&rdquo; or other
-form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
-
-1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
-performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
-unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
-
-1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
-access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
-that
-
-- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
-     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
-     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
-     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
-     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
-     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
-     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
-     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
-     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
-     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
-     address specified in Section 4, &ldquo;Information about donations to
-     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.&rdquo;
-
-- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
-     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
-     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
-     License.  You must require such a user to return or
-     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
-     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
-     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
-     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
-     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
-     of receipt of the work.
-
-- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
-     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
-
-1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
-electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
-forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
-both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
-Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
-Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
-
-1.F.
-
-1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
-effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
-public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
-collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
-&ldquo;Defects,&rdquo; such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
-corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
-property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
-computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
-your equipment.
-
-1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the &ldquo;Right
-of Replacement or Refund&rdquo; described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
-Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
-Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
-liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
-fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
-LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
-PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
-TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
-LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
-INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
-DAMAGE.
-
-1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
-defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
-receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
-written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
-received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
-your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
-the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
-refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
-providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
-receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
-is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
-opportunities to fix the problem.
-
-1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
-in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
-WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
-WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
-
-1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
-warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
-If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
-law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
-interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
-the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
-provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
-
-1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
-trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
-providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
-with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
-promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
-harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
-that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
-or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
-work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
-Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
-
-
-Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
-electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
-including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
-because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
-people in all walks of life.
-
-Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
-assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
-goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
-remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
-Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
-and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
-To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
-and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
-and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
-
-
-Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
-Foundation
-
-The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
-501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
-state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
-Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
-number is 64-6221541.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
-permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
-
-The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
-Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
-throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at 809
-North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887.  Email
-contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
-Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
-
-For additional contact information:
-     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
-     Chief Executive and Director
-     gbnewby@pglaf.org
-
-Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
-Literary Archive Foundation
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
-spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
-increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
-freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
-array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
-($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
-status with the IRS.
-
-The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
-charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
-States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
-considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
-with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
-where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
-SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
-particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
-have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
-against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
-approach us with offers to donate.
-
-International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
-any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
-outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
-
-Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
-methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
-ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
-To donate, please visit:  www.gutenberg.org/donate
-
-
-Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
-works.
-
-Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
-concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
-with anyone.  For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
-Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
-
-Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
-editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
-unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
-keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
-
-Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
-
-     www.gutenberg.org
-
-This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
-including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
-Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
-subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
-
-
-
-</pre>
-
-  </body>
-</html>
diff --git a/47429/old/readme.htm b/47429/old/readme.htm
deleted file mode 100644
index a0ae862..0000000
--- a/47429/old/readme.htm
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,13 +0,0 @@
-<!DOCTYPE html>
-<html lang="en">
-<head>
-    <meta charset="utf-8">
-</head>
-<body>
-<div>
-Versions of this book's files up to October 2024 are here.<br>
-More recent changes, if any, are reflected in the GitHub repository:
-<a href="https://github.com/gutenbergbooks/47429">https://github.com/gutenbergbooks/47429</a>
-</div>
-</body>
-</html>
author	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-02-28 05:29:45 -0800
committer	nfenwick <nfenwick@pglaf.org>	2025-02-28 05:29:45 -0800
commit	c1f44b4243ba2473225d7bbe29ecd324bd9de99d (patch)
tree	bd7d7469abc843c9a5ad5527f0c909c9ada4e72f
parent	268e5f9024a1c2dd7daa85b801f31252258e1713 (diff)