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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Pagan Papers, by Kenneth Grahame
+
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+Title: Pagan Papers
+
+Author: Kenneth Grahame
+
+Release Date: March, 2004  [EBook #5319]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on June 30, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PAGAN PAPERS ***
+
+
+
+
+Pagan Papers was first published in 1893 and the text is in the public
+domain. This is a reprint of the first American edition of 1898. The
+transcription was done by William McClain <info@sattre-press.com>,
+2002.
+
+A printed version of this book is available from Sattre Press,
+http://pagan_papers.sattre-press.com/.  It includes a glossary of
+French and Latin phrases.
+
+
+PAGAN PAPERS
+by Kenneth Grahame
+
+
+The Romance of the Road
+
+Among the many places of magic visited by Pantagruel and his company
+during the progress of their famous voyage, few surpass that island
+whose roads did literally ``go'' to places -- ``ou les chemins
+cheminent, comme animaulx'': and would-be travellers, having inquired
+of the road as to its destination, and received satisfactory reply,
+``se guindans'' (as the old book hath it -- hoisting themselves up on)
+``au chemin opportun, sans aultrement se poiner ou fatiguer, se
+trouvoyent au lieu destiné.''
+
+The best example I know of an approach to this excellent sort of
+vitality in roads is the Ridgeway of the North Berkshire Downs. Join
+it at Streatley, the point where it crosses the Thames; at once it
+strikes you out and away from the habitable world in a splendid,
+purposeful manner, running along the highest ridge of the Downs a
+broad green ribbon of turf, with but a shade of difference from the
+neighbouring grass, yet distinct for all that. No villages nor
+homesteads tempt it aside or modify its course for a yard; should you
+lose the track where it is blent with the bordering turf or merged in
+and obliterated by criss-cross paths, you have only to walk straight
+on, taking heed of no alternative to right or left; and in a minute
+'tis with you again -- arisen out of the earth as it were. Or, if
+still not quite assured, lift you your eyes, and there it runs over
+the brow of the fronting hill. Where a railway crosses it, it
+disappears indeed -- hiding Alpheus-like, from the ignominy of rubble
+and brick-work; but a little way on it takes up the running again with
+the same quiet persistence. Out on that almost trackless expanse of
+billowy Downs such a track is in some sort humanly companionable: it
+really seems to lead you by the hand.
+
+The ``Rudge'' is of course an exceptional instance; but indeed this
+pleasant personality in roads is not entirely fanciful. It exists as a
+characteristic of the old country road, evolved out of the primitive
+prehistoric track, developing according to the needs of the land it
+passes through and serves: with a language, accordingly, and a meaning
+of its own. Its special services are often told clearly enough; but
+much else too of the quiet story of the country-side: something of the
+old tale whereof you learn so little from the printed page. Each is
+instinct, perhaps, with a separate suggestion. Some are martial and
+historic, and by your side the hurrying feet of the dead raise a
+ghostly dust. The name of yon town -- with its Roman or Saxon suffix
+to British root -- hints at much. Many a strong man, wanting his vates
+sacer, passed silently to Hades for that suffix to obtain. The little
+rise up yonder on the Downs that breaks their straight green line
+against the sky showed another sight when the sea of battle surged and
+beat on its trampled sides; and the Roman, sore beset, may have gazed
+down this very road for relief, praying for night or the succouring
+legion. This child that swings on a gate and peeps at you from under
+her sun-bonnet -- so may some girl-ancestress of hers have watched
+with beating heart the Wessex levies hurry along to clash with the
+heathen and break them on the down where the ash trees grew. And
+yonder, where the road swings round under gloomy overgrowth of
+drooping boughs -- is that gleam of water or glitter of lurking
+spears?
+
+Some sing you pastorals, fluting low in the hot sun between dusty
+hedges overlooked by contented cows; past farmsteads where man and
+beast, living in frank fellowship, learn pleasant and serviceable
+lessons each of the other; over the full-fed river, lipping the
+meadow-sweet, and thence on either side through leagues of hay. Or
+through bending corn they chant the mystical wonderful song of the
+reaper when the harvest is white to the sickle. But most of them,
+avoiding classification, keep each his several tender significance; as
+with one I know, not so far from town, which woos you from the valley
+by gentle ascent between nut-laden hedges, and ever by some touch of
+keen fragrance in the air, by some mystery of added softness under
+foot -- ever a promise of something to come, unguessed, delighting.
+Till suddenly you are among the pines, their keen scent strikes you
+through and through, their needles carpet the ground, and in their
+swaying tops moans the unappeasable wind -- sad, ceaseless, as the cry
+of a warped humanity. Some paces more, and the promise is fulfilled,
+the hints and whisperings become fruition: the ground breaks steeply
+away, and you look over a great inland sea of fields, homesteads,
+rolling woodland, and -- bounding all, blent with the horizon, a
+greyness, a gleam -- the English Channel. A road of promises, of
+hinted surprises, following each other with the inevitable sequence in
+a melody.
+
+But we are now in another and stricter sense an island of chemins qui
+cheminent: dominated, indeed, by them. By these the traveller,
+veritably se guindans, may reach his destination ``sans se poiner ou
+se fatiguer'' (with large qualifications); but sans very much else
+whereof he were none the worse. The gain seems so obvious that you
+forget to miss all that lay between the springing stride of the early
+start and the pleasant weariness of the end approached, when the limbs
+lag a little as the lights of your destination begin to glimmer
+through the dusk. All that lay between! ``A Day's Ride a Life's
+Romance'' was the excellent title of an unsuccessful book; and indeed
+the journey should march with the day, beginning and ending with its
+sun, to be the complete thing, the golden round, required of it. This
+makes that mind and body fare together, hand in hand, sharing the
+hope, the action, the fruition; finding equal sweetness in the languor
+of aching limbs at eve and in the first god-like intoxication of
+motion with braced muscle in the sun. For walk or ride take the mind
+over greater distances than a throbbing whirl with stiffening joints
+and cramped limbs through a dozen counties. Surely you seem to cover
+vaster spaces with Lavengro, footing it with gipsies or driving his
+tinker's cart across lonely commons, than with many a globe-trotter or
+steam-yachtsman with diary or log? And even that dividing line --
+strictly marked and rarely overstepped -- between the man who bicycles
+and the man who walks, is less due to a prudent regard for personal
+safety of the one part than to an essential difference in minds.
+
+There is a certain supernal, a deific, state of mind which may indeed
+be experienced in a minor degree, by any one, in the siesta part of a
+Turkish bath. But this particular golden glow of the faculties is only
+felt at its fulness after severe and prolonged exertion in the open
+air. ``A man ought to be seen by the gods,'' says Marcus Aurelius,
+``neither dissatisfied with anything, nor complaining.'' Though this
+does not sound at first hearing an excessive demand to make of
+humanity, yet the gods, I fancy, look long and often for such a sight
+in these unblest days of hurry. If ever seen at all, 'tis when after
+many a mile in sun and wind -- maybe rain -- you reach at last, with
+the folding star, your destined rustic inn. There, in its homely,
+comfortable strangeness, after unnumbered chops with country ale, the
+hard facts of life begin to swim in a golden mist. You are isled from
+accustomed cares and worries -- you are set in a peculiar nook of
+rest. Then old failures seem partial successes, then old loves come
+back in their fairest form, but this time with never a shadow of
+regret, then old jokes renew their youth and flavour. You ask nothing
+of the gods above, nothing of men below -- not even their company.
+To-morrow you shall begin life again: shall write your book, make your
+fortune, do anything; meanwhile you sit, and the jolly world swings
+round, and you seem to hear it circle to the music of the spheres.
+What pipe was ever thus beatifying in effect? You are aching all over,
+and enjoying it; and the scent of the limes drifts in through the
+window. This is undoubtedly the best and greatest country in the
+world; and none but good fellows abide in it.
+
+      Laud we the Gods,
+  And let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils
+  From our blest altars.
+  
+The Romance of the Rail
+
+In these iron days of the dominance of steam, the crowning wrong that
+is wrought us of furnace and piston-rod lies in their annihilation of
+the steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no
+longer begins to work at the point where vision ceases. In happier
+times, three hundred years ago, the seafarers from Bristol City looked
+out from the prows of their vessels in the grey of the morning, and
+wot not rightly whether the land they saw might be Jerusalem or
+Madagascar, or if it were not North and South America. ``And there be
+certaine flitting islands,'' says one, ``which have been oftentimes
+seene, and when men approached near them they vanished.'' ``It may be
+that the gulfs will wash us down,'' said Ulysses (thinking of what
+Americans call the ``getting-off place''); ``it may be we shall touch
+the Happy Isles.'' And so on, and so on; each with his special hope or
+``wild surmise.'' There was always a chance of touching the Happy
+Isles. And in that first fair world whose men and manners we knew
+through story-books, before experience taught us far other, the Prince
+mounts his horse one fine morning, and rides all day, and sleeps in a
+forest; and next morning, lo! a new country: and he rides by fields
+and granges never visited before, through faces strange to him, to
+where an unknown King steps down to welcome the mysterious stranger.
+And he marries the Princess, and dwells content for many a year; till
+one day he thinks ``I will look upon my father's face again, though
+the leagues be long to my own land.'' And he rides all day, and sleeps
+in a forest; and next morning he is made welcome at home, where his
+name has become a dim memory. Which is all as it should be; for,
+annihilate time and space as you may, a man's stride remains the true
+standard of distance; an eternal and unalterable scale. The severe
+horizon, too, repels the thoughts as you gaze to the infinite
+considerations that lie about, within touch and hail; and the night
+cometh, when no man can work.
+
+To all these natural bounds and limitations it is good to get back now
+and again, from a life assisted and smooth by artificialities. Where
+iron has superseded muscle, the kindly life-blood is apt to throb dull
+as the measured beat of the steam-engine. But the getting back to them
+is now a matter of effort, of set purpose, a stepping aside out of our
+ordinary course; they are no longer unsought influences towards the
+making of character. So perhaps the time of them has gone by, here in
+this second generation of steam. Pereunt et imputantur; they pass
+away, and are scored against not us but our guilty fathers. For
+ourselves, our peculiar slate is probably filling fast. The romance of
+the steam-engine is yet to be captured and expressed -- not fully nor
+worthily, perhaps, until it too is a vanished regret; though Emerson
+for one will not have it so, and maintains and justifies its right to
+immediate recognition as poetic material. ``For as it is dislocation
+and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly, the poet,
+who re-attaches things to Nature and the whole -- re-attaching even
+artificial things and violations of Nature to Nature by a deeper
+insight -- disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts''; so
+that he looks upon ``the factory village and the railway'' and ``sees
+them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive or the
+spider's geometrical web.'' The poet, however, seems hard to convince
+hereof. Emerson will have it that ``Nature loves the gliding train of
+cars''; ``instead of which'' the poet still goes about the country
+singing purling brooks. Painters have been more flexible and liberal.
+Turner saw and did his best to seize the spirit of the thing, its
+kinship with the elements, and to blend furnace-glare and rush of iron
+with the storm-shower, the wind and the thwart-flashing sun-rays, and
+to make the whole a single expression of irresoluble force. And even
+in a certain work by another and a very different painter -- though I
+willingly acquit Mr Frith of any deliberate romantic intention -- you
+shall find the element of romance in the vestiges of the old order
+still lingering in the first transition period: the coach-shaped
+railway carriages with luggage piled and corded on top, the red-coated
+guard, the little engine tethered well ahead as if between traces. To
+those bred within sight of the sea, steamers will always partake in
+somewhat of the ``beauty and mystery of the ships''; above all, if
+their happy childhood have lain among the gleaming lochs and sinuous
+firths of the Western Highlands, where, twice a week maybe, the
+strange visitant crept by headland and bay, a piece of the busy,
+mysterious outer world. For myself, I probably stand alone in owning
+to a sentimental weakness for the night-piercing whistle --
+judiciously remote, as some men love the skirl of the pipes. In the
+days when streets were less wearily familiar than now, or ever the
+golden cord was quite loosed that led back to relinquished fields and
+wider skies, I have lain awake on stifling summer nights, thinking of
+luckier friends by moor and stream, and listening for the whistles
+from certain railway stations, veritable ``horns of Elf-land, faintly
+blowing.'' Then, a ghostly passenger, I have taken my seat in a
+phantom train, and sped up, up, through the map, rehearsing the
+journey bit by bit: through the furnace-lit Midlands, and on till the
+grey glimmer of dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges, and masses
+looming up on either side; till the bright sun shone upon brown
+leaping streams and purple heather, and the clear, sharp northern air
+streamed in through the windows. Return, indeed, was bitter;
+Endymion-like, ``my first touch of the earth went nigh to kill'': but
+it was only to hurry northwards again on the wings of imagination,
+from dust and heat to the dear mountain air. ``We are only the
+children who might have been,'' murmured Lamb's dream babes to him;
+and for the sake of those dream-journeys, the journeys that might have
+been, I still hail with a certain affection the call of the engine in
+the night: even as I love sometimes to turn the enchanted pages of the
+railway a b c, and pass from one to the other name reminiscent or
+suggestive of joy and freedom, Devonian maybe, or savouring of Wessex,
+or bearing me away to some sequestered reach of the quiet Thames.
+
+Non Libri Sed Liberi
+
+It will never be clear to the lay mind why the book-buyer buys books.
+That it is not to read them is certain: the closest inspection always
+fails to find him thus engaged. He will talk about them -- all night
+if you let him -- wave his hand to them, shake his fist at them, shed
+tears over them (in the small hours of the morning); but he will not
+read them. Yet it would be rash to infer that he buys his books
+without a remote intention of ever reading them. Most book lovers
+start with the honest resolution that some day they will ``shut down
+on'' this fatal practice. Then they purpose to themselves to enter
+into their charmed circle, and close the gates of Paradise behind
+them. Then will they read out of nothing but first editions; every day
+shall be a debauch in large paper and tall copies; and crushed morocco
+shall be familiar to their touch as buckram. Meanwhile, though, books
+continue to flaunt their venal charms; it would be cowardice to shun
+the fray. In fine, one buys and continues to buy; and the promised
+Sabbath never comes.
+
+The process of the purchase is always much the same, therein
+resembling the familiar but inferior passion of love. There is the
+first sight of the Object, accompanied of a catching of the breath, a
+trembling in the limbs, loss of appetite, ungovernable desire, and a
+habit of melancholy in secret places. But once possessed, once toyed
+with amorously for an hour or two, the Object (as in the inferior
+passion aforesaid) takes its destined place on the shelf -- where it
+stays. And this saith the scoffer, is all; but even he does not fail
+to remark with a certain awe that the owner goeth thereafter as one
+possessing a happy secret and radiating an inner glow. Moreover, he is
+insufferably conceited, and his conceit waxeth as his coat, now
+condemned to a fresh term of servitude, groweth shabbier. And shabby
+though his coat may be, yet will he never stoop to renew its pristine
+youth and gloss by the price of any book. No man -- no human,
+masculine, natural man -- ever sells a book. Men have been known in
+moments of thoughtlessness, or compelled by temporary necessity, to
+rob, to equivocate, to do murder, to commit what they should not, to
+``wince and relent and refrain'' from what they should: these things,
+howbeit regrettable, are common to humanity, and may happen to any of
+us. But amateur bookselling is foul and unnatural; and it is
+noteworthy that our language, so capable of particularity, contains no
+distinctive name for the crime. Fortunately it is hardly known to
+exist: the face of the public being set against it as a flint -- and
+the trade giving such wretched prices.
+
+In book-buying you not infrequently condone an extravagance by the
+reflection that this particular purchase will be a good investment,
+sordidly considered: that you are not squandering income but sinking
+capital. But you know all the time that you are lying. Once possessed,
+books develop a personality: they take on a touch of warm human life
+that links them in a manner with our kith and kin. Non angli sed
+Angeli was the comment of a missionary (old style) on the small human
+duodecimos exposed for sale in the Roman market-place; and many a
+buyer, when some fair-haired little chattel passed into his
+possession, must have felt that here was something vendible no more.
+So of these you may well affirm Non libri sed liberi; children now,
+adopted into the circle, they shall be trafficked in never again.
+
+There is one exception which has sadly to be made -- one class of men,
+of whom I would fain, if possible, have avoided mention, who are
+strangers to any such scruples. These be Executors -- a word to be
+strongly accented on the penultimate; for, indeed, they are the common
+headsmen of collections, and most of all do whet their bloody edge for
+harmless books. Hoary, famous old collections, budding young
+collections, fair virgin collections of a single author -- all go down
+before the executor's remorseless axe. He careth not and he spareth
+not. ``The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy,'' and it
+is chiefly by the hand of the executor that she doth love to scatter
+it. May oblivion be his portion for ever!
+
+Of a truth, the foes of the book-lover are not few. One of the most
+insidious, because he cometh at first in friendly, helpful guise, is
+the bookbinder. Not in that he bindeth books -- for the fair binding
+is the final crown and flower of painful achievement -- but because he
+bindeth not: because the weary weeks lapse by and turn to months, and
+the months to years, and still the binder bindeth not: and the heart
+grows sick with hope deferred. Each morn the maiden binds her hair,
+each spring the honeysuckle binds the cottage-porch, each autumn the
+harvester binds his sheaves, each winter the iron frost binds lake and
+stream, and still the bookbinder he bindeth not. Then a secret voice
+whispereth: ``Arise, be a man, and slay him! Take him grossly, full of
+bread, with all his crimes broad-blown, as flush as May; At gaming,
+swearing, or about some act That hath no relish of salvation in it!''
+But when the deed is done, and the floor strewn with fragments of
+binder -- still the books remain unbound. You have made all that
+horrid mess for nothing, and the weary path has to be trodden over
+again. As a general rule, the man in the habit of murdering
+bookbinders, though he performs a distinct service to society, only
+wastes his own time and takes no personal advantage.
+
+And even supposing that after many days your books return to you in
+leathern surcoats bravely tricked with gold, you have scarce yet
+weathered the Cape and sailed into halcyon seas. For these books --
+well, you kept them many weeks before binding them, that the
+oleaginous printer's-ink might fully dry before the necessary
+hammering; you forbore to open the pages, that the autocratic binder
+might refold the sheets if he pleased; and now that all is over --
+consummatum est -- still you cannot properly enjoy the harvest of a
+quiet mind. For these purple emperors are not to be read in bed, nor
+during meals, nor on the grass with a pipe on Sundays; and these brief
+periods are all the whirling times allow you for solid serious
+reading. Still, after all, you have them; you can at least pulverise
+your friends with the sight; and what have they to show against them?
+Probably some miserable score or so of half-bindings, such as lead you
+scornfully to quote the hackneyed couplet concerning the poor Indian
+whose untutored mind clothes him before but leaves him bare behind.
+Let us thank the gods that such things are: that to some of us they
+give not poverty nor riches but a few good books in whole bindings.
+Dowered with these and (if it be vouchsafed) a cup of Burgundy that is
+sound even if it be not old, we can leave to others the foaming grape
+of Eastern France that was vintaged in '74, and with it the whole
+range of shilling shockers, -- the Barmecidal feast of the purposeful
+novelist -- yea, even the countless series that tell of Eminent Women
+and Successful Men.
+
+Loafing
+
+When the golden Summer has rounded languidly to his close, when Autumn
+has been carried forth in russet winding-sheet, then all good fellows
+who look upon holidays as a chief end of life return from moor and
+stream and begin to take stock of gains and losses. And the wisest,
+realising that the time of action is over while that of reminiscence
+has begun, realise too that the one is pregnant with greater pleasures
+than the other -- that action, indeed, is only the means to an end of
+reflection and appreciation. Wisest of all, the Loafer stands apart
+supreme. For he, of one mind with the philosopher as to the end, goes
+straight to it at once; and his happy summer has accordingly been
+spent in those subjective pleasures of the mind whereof the others,
+the men of muscle and peeled faces, are only just beginning to taste.
+
+And yet though he may a little despise (or rather pity) them, the
+Loafer does not dislike nor altogether shun them. Far from it: they
+are very necessary to him. For ``Suave mari magno'' is the motto of
+your true Loafer; and it is chiefly by keeping ever in view the
+struggles and the clamorous jostlings of the unenlightened making
+holiday that he is able to realise the bliss of his own condition and
+maintain his self-satisfaction at boiling-point. And so is he never
+very far away from the track beaten by the hurrying Philistine hoof,
+but hovers more or less on the edge of it, where, the sole fixed star
+amidst whirling constellations, he may watch the mad world ``glance,
+and nod, and hurry by.''
+
+There are many such centres of contemplation along the West Coast of
+Scotland. Few places are better loafing-ground than a pier, with its
+tranquil ``lucid interval'' between steamers, the ever recurrent throb
+of paddle-wheel, the rush and foam of beaten water among the piles,
+splash of ropes and rumble of gangways, and all the attendant hurry
+and scurry of the human morrice. Here, tanquam in speculo, the Loafer
+as he lounges may, by attorney as it were, touch gently every stop in
+the great organ of the emotions of mortality. Rapture of meeting,
+departing woe, love at first sight, disdain, laughter, indifference --
+he may experience them all, but attenuated and as if he saw them in a
+dream; as if, indeed, he were Heine's god in dream on a mountain-side.
+Let the drowsy deity awake and all these puppets, emanations of his
+dream, will vanish into the nothing whence they came. And these
+emotions may be renewed each morning; if a fair one sail to-day, be
+sure that one as fair will land to-morrow. The supply is
+inexhaustible.
+
+But in the South perhaps the happiest loafing-ground is the gift of
+Father Thames; for there again the contrast of violent action, with
+its blisters, perspiration, and the like, throws into fine relief the
+bliss of ``quietism.'' I know one little village in the upper reaches
+where loafing may be pushed to high perfection. Here the early hours
+of the morning are vexed by the voices of boaters making their way
+down the little street to the river. The most of them go staggering
+under hampers, bundles of waterproofs, and so forth. Their voices are
+clamant of feats to be accomplished: they will row, they will punt,
+they will paddle, till they weary out the sun. All this the Loafer
+hears through the open door of his cottage, where in his shirt-sleeves
+he is dallying with his bacon, as a gentleman should. He is the only
+one who has had a comfortable breakfast -- and he knows it. Later he
+will issue forth and stroll down in their track to the bridge. The
+last of these Argonauts is pulling lustily forth; the river is dotted
+with evanishing blazers. Upon all these lunatics a pitiless Phoebus
+shines triumphant. The Loafer sees the last of them off the stage,
+turns his back on it, and seeks the shady side of the street.
+
+A holy calm possesses the village now; the foreign element has passed
+away with shouting and waving of banners, and its natural life of
+somnolency is in evidence at last. And first, as a true Loafer should,
+let him respectfully greet each several village dog. Arcades ambo --
+loafers likewise -- they lie there in the warm dust, each outside his
+own door, ready to return the smallest courtesy. Their own lords and
+masters are not given to the exchange of compliments nor to greetings
+in the market-place. The dog is generally the better gentleman, and he
+is aware of it; and he duly appreciates the loafer, who is not too
+proud to pause a moment, change the news, and pass the time of day. He
+will mark his sense of this attention by rising from his dust-divan
+and accompanying his caller some steps on his way. But he will stop
+short of his neighbour's dust-patch; for the morning is really too hot
+for a shindy. So, by easy stages (the street is not a long one: six
+dogs will see it out), the Loafer quits the village; and now the world
+is before him. Shall he sit on a gate and smoke? or lie on the grass
+and smoke? or smoke aimlessly and at large along the road? Such a
+choice of happiness is distracting; but perhaps the last course is the
+best -- as needing the least mental effort of selection. Hardly,
+however, has he fairly started his first daydream when the snappish
+``ting'' of a bellkin recalls him to realities. By comes the
+bicyclist: dusty, sweating, a piteous thing to look upon. But the
+irritation of the strepitant metal has jarred the Loafer's always
+exquisite nerves: he is fain to climb a gate and make his way towards
+solitude and the breezy downs.
+
+Up here all vestiges of a sordid humanity disappear. The Loafer is
+alone with the south-west wind and the blue sky. Only a carolling of
+larks and a tinkling from distant flocks break the brooding noonday
+stillness; above, the wind-hover hangs motionless, a black dot on the
+blue. Prone on his back on the springy turf, gazing up into the sky,
+his fleshy integument seems to drop away, and the spirit ranges at
+will among the tranquil clouds. This way Nirvana nearest lies. Earth
+no longer obtrudes herself; possibly somewhere a thousand miles or so
+below him the thing still ``spins like a fretful midge.'' The Loafer
+knows not nor cares. His is now an astral body, and through golden
+spaces of imagination his soul is winging her untrammelled flight. And
+there he really might remain for ever, but that his vagrom spirit is
+called back to earth by a gentle but resistless, very human summons,
+-- a gradual, consuming, Pantagruelian, god-like, thirst: a thirst to
+thank Heaven on. So, with a sigh half of regret, half of anticipation,
+he bends his solitary steps towards the nearest inn. Tobacco for one
+is good; to commune with oneself and be still is truest wisdom; but
+beer is a thing of deity -- beer is divine.
+
+Later the Loafer may decently make some concession to popular taste by
+strolling down to the river and getting out his boat. With one paddle
+out he will drift down the stream: just brushing the flowering rush
+and the meadow-sweet and taking in as peculiar gifts the varied sweets
+of even. The loosestrife is his, and the arrow-head: his the distant
+moan of the weir; his are the glories, amber and scarlet and silver,
+of the sunset-haunted surface. By-and-by the boaters will pass him
+homeward-bound. All are blistered and sore: his withers are unwrung.
+Most are too tired and hungry to see the sunset glories; no corporeal
+pangs clog his æsthesis -- his perceptive faculty. Some have
+quarrelled in the day and are no longer on speaking terms; he is at
+peace with himself and with the whole world. Of all that lay them down
+in the little village that night, his sleep will be the surest and the
+sweetest. For not even the blacksmith himself will have better claim
+to have earned a night's repose.
+
+Cheap Knowledge
+
+When at times it happens to me that I 'gin to be aweary of the sun,
+and to find the fair apple of life dust and ashes at the core -- just
+because, perhaps, I can't afford Melampus Brown's last volume of poems
+in large paper, but must perforce condescend upon the two-and-sixpenny
+edition for the million -- then I bring myself to a right temper by
+recalling to memory a sight which now and again in old days would
+touch the heart of me to a happier pulsation. In the long, dark winter
+evenings, outside some shop window whose gaslight flared brightest
+into the chilly street, I would see some lad -- sometimes even a girl
+-- book in hand, heedless of cold and wet, of aching limbs and
+straining eyes, careless of jostling passers-by, of rattle and turmoil
+behind them and about, their happy spirits far in an enchanted world:
+till the ruthless shopman turned out the gas and brought them rudely
+back to the bitter reality of cramped legs and numbed fingers. ``My
+brother!'' or ``My sister!'' I would cry inwardly, feeling the link
+that bound us together. They possessed, for the hour, the two gifts
+most precious to the student -- light and solitude: the true solitude
+of the roaring street.
+
+Somehow this vision rarely greets me now. Probably the Free Libraries
+have supplanted the flickering shop lights; and every lad and lass can
+enter and call for Miss Braddon and batten thereon ``in luxury's
+sofa-lap of leather''; and of course this boon is appreciated and
+profited by, and we shall see the divine results in a year or two. And
+yet sometimes, like the dear old Baron in the ``Red Lamp,'' ``I
+wonder?''
+
+For myself, public libraries possess a special horror, as of lonely
+wastes and dragon-haunted fens. The stillness and the heavy air, the
+feeling of restriction and surveillance, the mute presence of these
+other readers, ``all silent and all damned,'' combine to set up a
+nervous irritation fatal to quiet study. Had I to choose, I would
+prefer the windy street. And possibly others have found that the
+removal of checks and obstacles makes the path which leads to the
+divine mountain-tops less tempting, now that it is less rugged. So
+full of human nature are we all -- still -- despite the Radical
+missionaries that labour in the vineyard. Before the National Gallery
+was extended and rearranged, there was a little ``St Catherine'' by
+Pinturicchio that possessed my undivided affections. In those days she
+hung near the floor, so that those who would worship must grovel; and
+little I grudged it. Whenever I found myself near Trafalgar Square
+with five minutes to spare I used to turn in and sit on the floor
+before the object of my love, till gently but firmly replaced on my
+legs by the attendant. She hangs on the line now, in the grand new
+room; but I never go to see her. Somehow she is not my ``St
+Catherine'' of old. Doubtless Free Libraries affect many students in
+the same way: on the same principle as that now generally accepted --
+that it is the restrictions placed on vice by our social code which
+make its pursuit so peculiarly agreeable.
+
+But even when the element of human nature has been fully allowed for,
+it remains a question whether the type of mind that a generation or
+two of Free Libraries will evolve is or is not the one that the world
+most desiderates; and whether the spare reading and consequent fertile
+thinking necessitated by the old, or gas-lamp, style is not productive
+of sounder results. The cloyed and congested mind resulting from the
+free run of these grocers' shops to omnivorous appetites (and all
+young readers are omnivorous) bids fair to produce a race of literary
+resurrection-men: a result from which we may well pray to be spared.
+Of all forms of lettered effusiveness that which exploits the original
+work of others and professes to supply us with right opinions
+thereanent is the least wanted. And whether he take to literary
+expression by pen or only wag the tongue of him, the grocer's boy of
+letters is sure to prove a prodigious bore. The Free Library, if it be
+fulfilling the programme of its advocates, is breeding such as he by
+scores.
+
+But after all there is balm in Gilead; and much joy and consolation
+may be drawn from the sorrowful official reports, by which it would
+appear that the patrons of these libraries are confining their
+reading, with a charming unanimity, exclusively to novels. And indeed
+they cannot do better; there is no more blessed thing on earth than a
+good novel, not the least merit of which is that it induces a state of
+passive, unconscious enjoyment, and never frenzies the reader to go
+out and put the world right. Next to fairy tales -- the original
+world-fiction -- our modern novels may be ranked as our most precious
+possessions; and so it has come to pass that I shall now cheerfully
+pay my five shillings, or ten shillings, or whatever it may shortly
+be, in the pound towards the Free Library: convinced at last that the
+money is not wasted in training exponents of the subjectivity of this
+writer and the objectivity of that, nor in developing fresh imitators
+of dead discredited styles, but is righteously devoted to the support
+of wholesome, honest, unpretending novel-reading.
+
+The Rural Pan
+
+An April Essay
+
+Through shady Throgmorton Street and about the vale of Cheapside the
+restless Mercury is flitting, with furtive eye and voice a little
+hoarse from bidding in the market. Further west, down classic
+Piccadilly, moves the young Apollo, the lord of the unerring (satin)
+bow; and nothing meaner than a frock-coat shall in these latter years
+float round his perfect limbs. But remote in other haunts than these
+the rural Pan is hiding, and piping the low, sweet strain that reaches
+only the ears of a chosen few. And now that the year wearily turns and
+stretches herself before the perfect waking, the god emboldened begins
+to blow a clearer note.
+
+When the waking comes at last, and Summer is abroad, these deities
+will abroad too, each as his several attributes move him. Who is this
+that flieth up the reaches of the Thames in steam-launch hired for the
+day? Mercury is out -- some dozen or fifteen strong. The flower-gemmed
+banks crumble and slide down under the wash of his rampant screw; his
+wake is marked by a line of lobster-claws, gold-necked bottles, and
+fragments of veal-pie. Resplendent in blazer, he may even be seen to
+embrace the slim-waisted nymph, haunter of green (room) shades, in the
+full gaze of the shocked and scandalised sun. Apollo meantime
+reposeth, passively beautiful, on the lawn of the Guards' Club at
+Maidenhead. Here, O Apollo, are haunts meet for thee. A deity
+subjectively inclined, he is neither objective nor, it must be said
+for him, at all objectionable, like them of Mercury.
+
+Meanwhile, nor launches nor lawns tempt him that pursueth the rural
+Pan. In the hushed recesses of Hurley backwater where the canoe may be
+paddled almost under the tumbling comb of the weir, he is to be looked
+for; there the god pipes with freest abandonment. Or under the great
+shadow of Streatley Hill, ``annihilating all that's made to a green
+thought in a green shade''; or better yet, pushing an explorer's prow
+up the remote untravelled Thame, till Dorchester's stately roof broods
+over the quiet fields. In solitudes such as these Pan sits and
+dabbles, and all the air is full of the music of his piping.
+Southwards, again, on the pleasant Surrey downs there is shouting and
+jostling; dust that is drouthy and language that is sultry. Thither
+comes the young Apollo, calmly confident as ever; and he meeteth
+certain Mercuries of the baser sort, who do him obeisance, call him
+captain and lord, and then proceed to skin him from head to foot as
+thoroughly as the god himself flayed Marsyas in days of yore, at a
+certain Spring Meeting in Phrygia: a good instance of Time's revenges.
+And yet Apollo returns to town and swears he has had a grand day. He
+does so every year. Out of hearing of all the clamour, the rural Pan
+may be found stretched on Ranmore Common, loitering under Abinger
+pines, or prone by the secluded stream of the sinuous Mole, abounding
+in friendly greetings for his foster-brothers the dab-chick and
+water-rat.
+
+For a holiday, Mercury loveth the Pullman Express, and a short hour
+with a society paper; anon, brown boots on the pier, and the pleasant
+combination of Métropole and Monopole. Apollo for his part will urge
+the horses of the Sun: and, if he leaveth the society weekly to
+Mercury, yet he loveth well the Magazine. From which omphalos or hub
+of the universe he will direct his shining team even to the far
+Hesperides of Richmond or of Windsor. Both iron road and level highway
+are shunned by the rural Pan, who chooses rather to foot it along the
+sheep track on the limitless downs or the thwart-leading footpath
+through copse and spinney, not without pleasant fellowship with
+feather and fir. Nor does it follow from all this that the god is
+unsocial. Albeit shy of the company of his more showy brother-deities,
+he loveth the more unpretentious humankind, especially them that are
+adscripti glebæ, addicted to the kindly soil and to the working
+thereof: perfect in no way, only simple, cheery sinners. For he is
+only half a god after all, and the red earth in him is strong. When
+the pelting storm drives the wayfarers to the sheltering inn, among
+the little group on bench and settle Pan has been known to appear at
+times, in homely guise of hedger-and-ditcher or weather-beaten
+shepherd from the downs. Strange lore and quaint fancy he will then
+impart, in the musical Wessex or Mercian he has learned to speak so
+naturally; though it may not be till many a mile away that you begin
+to suspect that you have unwittingly talked with him who chased the
+flying Syrinx in Arcady and turned the tide of fight at Marathon.
+
+Yes: to-day the iron horse has searched the country through -- east
+and west, north and south -- bringing with it Commercialism, whose god
+is Jerry, and who studs the hills with stucco and garrotes the streams
+with the girder. Bringing, too, into every nook and corner fashion and
+chatter, the tailor-made gown and the eyeglass. Happily a great part
+is still spared -- how great these others fortunately do not know --
+in which the rural Pan and his following may hide their heads for yet
+a little longer, until the growing tyranny has invaded the last
+common, spinney, and sheep-down, and driven the kindly god, the
+well-wisher to man -- whither?
+
+Marginalia
+
+American Hunt, in his suggestive ``Talks about Art,'' demands that the
+child shall be encouraged -- or rather permitted, for the natural
+child needs little encouragement -- to draw when- and whereon-soever
+he can; for, says he, the child's scribbling on the margin of his
+school-books is really worth more to him than all he gets out of them,
+and indeed, ``to him the margin is the best part of all books, and he
+finds in it the soothing influence of a clear sky in a landscape.''
+Doubtless Sir Benjamin Backbite, though his was not an artist soul,
+had some dim feeling of this mighty truth when he spoke of that new
+quarto of his, in which ``a neat rivulet of text shall meander through
+a meadow of margin'': boldly granting the margin to be of superior
+importance to the print. This metaphor is pleasantly expanded in
+Burton's ``Bookhunter'': wherein you read of certain folios with
+``their majestic stream of central print overflowing into rivulets of
+marginal notes, sedgy with citations.'' But the good Doctor leaves the
+main stream for a backwater of error in inferring that the chief use
+of margins is to be a parading-ground for notes and citations. As if
+they had not absolute value in themselves, nor served a finer end! In
+truth, Hunt's child was vastly the wiser man.
+
+For myself, my own early margins chiefly served to note, cite, and
+illustrate the habits of crocodiles. Along the lower or ``tail'' edge,
+the saurian, splendidly serrated as to his back, arose out of old
+Nile; up one side negroes, swart as sucked lead-pencil could limn
+them, let fall their nerveless spears; up the other, monkeys,
+gibbering with terror, swarmed hastily up palm-trees -- a plant to the
+untutored hand of easier outline than (say) your British oak.
+Meanwhile, all over the unregarded text Balbus slew Caius on the most
+inadequate provocation, or Hannibal pursued his victorious career,
+while Roman generals delivered ornate set speeches prior to receiving
+the usual satisfactory licking. Fabius, Hasdrubal -- all alike were
+pallid shades with faint, thin voices powerless to pierce the
+distance. The margins of Cocytus doubtless knew them: mine were
+dedicated to the more attractive flesh and blood of animal life, the
+varied phases of the tropic forest. Or, in more practical mood, I
+would stoop to render certain facts recorded in the text. To these
+digressions I probably owe what little education I possess. For
+example, there was one sentence in our Roman history: ``By this single
+battle of Magnesia, Antiochus the Great lost all his conquests in Asia
+Minor.'' Serious historians really should not thus forget themselves.
+'Twas so easy, by a touch of the pen, to transform ``battle'' into
+``bottle''; for ``conquests'' one could substitute a word for which
+not even Macaulay's school-boy were at a loss; and the result,
+depicted with rude vigour in his margin, fixed the name of at least
+one ancient fight on the illustrator's memory. But this plodding and
+material art had small charm for me: to whom the happy margin was a
+``clear sky'' ever through which I could sail away at will to more
+gracious worlds. I was duly qualified by a painfully acquired
+ignorance of dead languages cautiously to approach my own; and 'twas
+no better. Along Milton's margins the Gryphon must needs pursue the
+Arimaspian -- what a chance, that Arimaspian, for the imaginative
+pencil! And so it has come about that, while Milton periods are mostly
+effaced from memory by the sponge of Time, I can still see that
+vengeful Gryphon, cousin-german to the gentle beast that danced the
+Lobster Quadrille by a certain shore.
+
+It is by no means insisted upon that the chief end and use of margins
+is for pictorial illustration, nor yet for furtive games of oughts and
+crosses, nor (in the case of hymn-books) for amorous missives scrawled
+against the canticle for the day, to be passed over into an adjacent
+pew: as used, alas! to happen in days when one was young and godless,
+and went to church. Nor, again, are the margins of certain poets
+entrusted to man for the composing thereon of infinitely superior
+rhymes on the subjects themselves have maltreated: a depraved habit,
+akin to scalping. What has never been properly recognised is the
+absolute value of the margin itself -- a value frequently superior to
+its enclosure. In poetry the popular taste demands its margin, and
+takes care to get it in ``the little verses wot they puts inside the
+crackers.'' The special popularity, indeed, of lyric as opposed to
+epic verse is due to this habit of feeling. A good example maybe found
+in the work of Mr Swinburne: the latter is the better poetry, the
+earlier remains the more popular -- because of its eloquence of
+margin. Mr Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow but for
+his neglect of this first principle. The song of Sigurd, our one epic
+of the century, is pitiably unmargined, and so has never won the full
+meed of glory it deserves; while the ingenious gentleman who wrote
+``Beowulf,'' our other English epic, grasped the great fact from the
+first, so that his work is much the more popular of the two. The moral
+is evident. An authority on practical book-making has stated that
+``margin is a matter to be studied''; also that ``to place the print
+in the centre of the paper is wrong in principle, and to be
+deprecated.'' Now, if it be ``wrong in principle,'' let us push that
+principle to its legitimate conclusion, and ``deprecate'' the placing
+of print on any part of the paper at all. Without actually suggesting
+this course to any of our living bards, when, I may ask -- when shall
+that true poet arise who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall
+give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margin? How we
+shall shove and jostle for large paper copies!
+
+The Eternal Whither
+
+There was once an old cashier in some ancient City establishment,
+whose practice was to spend his yearly holiday in relieving some
+turnpike-man at his post, and performing all the duties appertaining
+thereunto. This was vulgarly taken to be an instance of mere
+mill-horse enslavement to his groove -- the reception of payments; and
+it was spoken of both in mockery of all mill-horses and for the due
+admonishment of others. And yet that clerk had discovered for himself
+an unique method of seeing Life at its best, the flowing, hurrying,
+travelling, marketing Life of the Highway; the life of bagman and
+cart, of tinker, and pig-dealer, and all cheery creatures that drink
+and chaffer together in the sun. He belonged, above all, to the scanty
+class of clear-seeing persons who know both what they are good for and
+what they really want. To know what you would like to do is one thing;
+to go out boldly and do it is another -- and a rarer; and the sterile
+fields about Hell-Gate are strewn with the corpses of those who would
+an if they could.
+
+To be sure, being bent on the relaxation most congenial to one's soul,
+it is possible to push one's disregard for convention too far: as is
+seen in the case of another, though of an earlier generation, in the
+same establishment. In his office there was the customary
+``attendance-book,'' wherein the clerks were expected to sign each
+day. Here his name one morning ceases abruptly from appearing; he
+signs, indeed, no more. Instead of signature you find, a little later,
+writ in careful commercial hand, this entry: ``Mr --- did not attend
+at his office to-day, having been hanged at eight o'clock in the
+morning for horse-stealing.'' Through the faded ink of this record do
+you not seem to catch, across the gulf of years, some waft of the
+jolly humanity which breathed in this prince among clerks? A formal
+precisian, doubtless, during business hours; but with just this honest
+love of horseflesh lurking deep down there in him -- unsuspected,
+sweetening the whole lump. Can you not behold him, freed from his
+desk, turning to pursue his natural bent, as a city-bred dog still
+striveth to bury his bone deep in the hearth-rug? For no filthy lucre,
+you may be sure, but from sheer love of the pursuit itself! All the
+same, he erred; erred, if not in taste, at least in judgment: for we
+cannot entirely acquit him of blame for letting himself be caught.
+
+In these tame and tedious days of the policeman rampant, our
+melancholy selves are debarred from many a sport, joyous and debonair,
+whereof our happier fathers were free. Book-stealing, to be sure,
+remains to us; but every one is not a collector; and, besides, 'tis a
+diversion you can follow with equal success all the year round. Still,
+the instance may haply be pregnant with suggestion to many who wearily
+ask each year, what new place or pursuit exhausted earth still keeps
+for the holiday-maker. 'Tis a sad but sober fact, that the most of men
+lead flat and virtuous lives, departing annually with their family to
+some flat and virtuous place, there to disport themselves in a manner
+that is decent, orderly, wholly uninteresting, vacant of every buxom
+stimulus. To such as these a suggestion, in all friendliness: why not
+try crime? We shall not attempt to specify the particular branch --
+for every one must himself seek out and find the path his nature best
+fits him to follow; but the general charm of the prospect must be
+evident to all. The freshness and novelty of secrecy, the artistic
+satisfaction in doing the act of self-expression as well as it can
+possibly be done; the experience of being not the hunter, but the
+hunted, not the sportsman, but the game; the delight of comparing and
+discussing crimes with your mates over a quiet pipe on your return to
+town; these new pleasures -- these and their like -- would furnish
+just that gentle stimulant, that peaceful sense of change so necessary
+to the tired worker. And then the fact, that you would naturally have
+to select and plan out your particular line of diversion without
+advice or assistance, has its own advantage. For the moment a man
+takes to dinning in your ears that you ought, you really ought, to go
+to Norway, you at once begin to hate Norway with a hate that ever will
+be; and to have Newlyn, Cromer, or Dawlish, Carinthia or the Austrian
+Tyrol jammed down your throat, is enough to initiate the discovery
+that your own individual weakness is a joyous and persistent liking
+for manslaughter.
+
+Some few seem to be born without much innate tendency to crime. After
+all, it is mostly a matter of heredity; these unfortunates are less
+culpable than their neglectful ancestors; and it is a fault that none
+need really blush for in the present. For such as they there still
+remains the example of the turnpike-loving clerk, with all its golden
+possibilities. Denied the great delight of driving a locomotive, or a
+fire-engine -- whirled along in a glorious nimbus of smoke-pant,
+spark-shower, and hoarse warning roar -- what bliss to the palefaced
+quilldriver to command a penny steamboat between London Bridge and
+Chelsea! to drive a four-horsed Jersey-car to Kew at sixpence a head!
+Though turnpikes be things of the past, there are still tolls to be
+taken on many a pleasant reach of Thames. What happiness in quiet
+moments to tend the lock-keeper's flower-beds -- perhaps make love to
+his daughter; anon in busier times to let the old gates swing, work
+the groaning winches, and hear the water lap and suck and gurgle as it
+slowly sinks or rises with its swaying freight; to dangle legs over
+the side and greet old acquaintances here and there among the
+parti-coloured wayfarers passing up or down; while tobacco palleth not
+on the longest day, and beer is ever within easy reach. The iron
+tetter that scurfs the face of our island has killed out the pleasant
+life of the road; but many of its best conditions still linger round
+these old toll gates, free from dust and clatter, on the silent liquid
+Highway to the West.
+
+These for the weaker brethren: but for him who is conscious of the
+Gift, the path is plain.
+
+Deus Terminus
+
+The practical Roman, stern constructor of roads and codes, when he
+needs must worship, loved a deity practical as himself; and in his
+parcelling of the known world into plots, saying unto this man, Bide
+here, and to that, Sit you down there, he could scarce fail to evolve
+the god Terminus: visible witness of possession and dominion, type of
+solid facts not to be quibbled away. We Romans of this latter day --
+so hailed by others, or complacently christened by ourselves -- are
+Roman in nothing more than in this; and, as much in the less tangible
+realms of thought as in our solid acres, we are fain to set up the
+statue which shall proclaim that so much country is explored, marked
+out, allotted, and done with; that such and such ramblings and
+excursions are practicable and permissible, and all else is exploded,
+illegal, or absurd. And in this way we are left with naught but a
+vague lingering tradition of the happier days before the advent of the
+ruthless deity.
+
+The sylvan glories of yonder stretch of woodland renew themselves each
+autumn, regal as ever. It is only the old enchantment that is gone;
+banished by the matter-of-fact deity, who has stolidly settled exactly
+where Lord A.'s shooting ends and Squire B.'s begins. Once, no such
+petty limitations fettered the mind. A step into the woodland was a
+step over the border -- the margin of the material; and then, good-bye
+to the modern world of the land-agent and the ``Field'' advertisement!
+A chiming of little bells over your head, and lo! the peregrine, with
+eyes like jewels, fluttered through the trees, her jesses catching in
+the boughs. 'Twas the favourite of the Princess, the windows of whose
+father's castle already gleamed through the trees, where honours and
+favours awaited the adventurous. The white doe sprang away through the
+thicket, her snowy flank stained with blood; she made for the
+enchanted cot, and for entrance you too had the pass-word. Did you
+fail on her traces, nor fox nor mole was too busy to spare a moment
+for friendly advice or information. Little hands were stretched to
+trip you, fairy gibe and mockery pelted you from every rabbit-hole;
+and O what Dryads you have kissed among the leaves, in that brief
+blissful moment ere they hardened into tree! 'Tis pity, indeed, that
+this sort of thing should have been made to share the suspicion
+attaching to the poacher; that the stony stare of the boundary god
+should confront you at the end of every green ride and rabbit-run;
+while the very rabbits themselves are too disgusted with the altered
+circumstances to tarry a moment for so much as to exchange the time of
+day.
+
+Truly this age is born, like Falstaff, with a white head and something
+a round belly: and will none of your jigs and fantasies. The golden
+era of princesses is past. For your really virtuous 'prentices there
+still remain a merchant's daughter or two, and a bottle of port o'
+Sundays on the Clapham mahogany. For the rest of us, one or two decent
+clubs, and plenty of nice roomy lunatic asylums. ``Go spin, you jade,
+go spin!'' is the one greeting for Imagination. And yet -- what a lip
+the slut has! What an ankle! Go to: there's nobody looking; let us
+lock the door, pull down the blinds, and write us a merry ballad.
+
+'Tis ungracious, perhaps, to regret what is gone for ever, when so
+much is given in return. A humour we have, that is entirely new; and
+allotments that shall win back Astræa. Our Labor Program stands for
+evidence that the Board School, at least, has done enduring work; and
+the useless race of poets is fast dying out. Though we no longer
+conjecture what song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed
+when he hid himself among women, yet many a prize (of guineas galore)
+awaits the competitor who will stoop, week by week, to more practical
+research. ``Le monde marche,'' as Renan hath it, ``vers une sorte
+d'americanisme.... Peut-être la vulgarité générale sera-t-elle un jour
+la condition du bonheur des élus. Nous n'avons pas le droit d'etre
+fort difficiles.'' We will be very facile, then, since needs must;
+remembering the good old proverb that ``scornful dogs eat dirty
+puddings.'' But, ere we show Terminus the door, at least let us fling
+one stone at the shrieking sulphureous houses of damnation erected as
+temples in his honour, and dignified with his name! There, 'mid
+clangour, dirt, and pestilence of crowding humanity, the very spirit
+of worry and unrest sits embodied. The old Roman was not such a bad
+fellow. His deity of demarcation at least breathed open air, and knew
+the kindly touch of sun and wind. His simple rites were performed amid
+flowers and under blue sky, by sunny roads or tranquil waters; and on
+this particular altar the sacrifice was ordained to be free from any
+stain of gore. Our hour of sacrifice, alas, has not yet come. When it
+does -- ( et haud procul absit!) -- let the offering be no bloodless
+one, but let (for choice) a fat and succulent stationmaster smoke and
+crackle on the altar of expiation!
+
+Of Smoking
+
+Concerning Cigarette Smoking: It hath been well observed by a certain
+philosopher that this is a practice commendable enough, and pleasant
+to indulge in, ``when you're not smoking''; wherein the whole
+criticism of the cigarette is found, in a little room. Of the same
+manner of thinking was one that I knew, who kept by him an ample case
+bulging with cigarettes, to smoke while he was filling his pipe. Toys
+they be verily, nugæ, and shadows of the substance. Serviceable,
+nevertheless, as shadows sometimes be when the substance is
+temporarily unattainable; as between the acts of a play, in the park,
+or while dressing for dinner: that such moments may not be entirely
+wasted. That cigarette, however, which is so prompt to appear after
+dinner I would reprehend and ban and totally abolish: as enemy to that
+diviner thing before which it should pale its ineffectual fires in
+shame -- to wit, good drink, ``la dive bouteille''; except indeed when
+the liquor be bad, as is sometimes known to happen. Then it may serve
+in some sort as a sorry consolation. But to leave these airy
+substitutes, and come to smoking.
+
+It hath been ofttimes debated whether the morning pipe be the sweeter,
+or that first pipe of the evening which ``Hesperus, who bringeth all
+good things,'' brings to the weary with home and rest. The first is
+smoked on a clearer palate, and comes to unjaded senses like the kiss
+of one's first love; but lacks that feeling of perfect fruition, of
+merit recompensed and the goal and the garland won, which clings to
+the vesper bowl. Whence it comes that the majority give the palm to
+the latter. To which I intend no slight when I find the incense that
+arises at matins sweeter even than that of evensong. For, although
+with most of us who are labourers in the vineyard, toilers and
+swinkers, the morning pipe is smoked in hurry and fear and a sense of
+alarums and excursions and fleeting trains, yet with all this there
+are certain halcyon periods sure to arrive -- Sundays, holidays, and
+the like -- the whole joy and peace of which are summed up in that one
+beatific pipe after breakfast, smoked in a careless majesty like that
+of the gods ``when they lie beside their nectar, and the clouds are
+lightly curled.'' Then only can we be said really to smoke. And so
+this particular pipe of the day always carries with it festal
+reminiscences: memories of holidays past, hopes for holidays to come;
+a suggestion of sunny lawns and flannels and the ungirt loin; a sense
+withal of something free and stately, as of ``faint march-music in the
+air,'' or the old Roman cry of ``Liberty, freedom, and
+enfranchisement.''
+
+If there be any fly in the pipe-smoker's ointment, it may be said to
+lurk in the matter of ``rings.'' Only the exceptionally gifted smoker
+can recline in his chair and emit at will the perfect smoke-ring, in
+consummate eddying succession. He of the meaner sort must be content
+if, at rare heaven-sent intervals -- while thinking, perhaps, of
+nothing less -- there escape from his lips the unpremeditated flawless
+circle. Then ``deus fio'' he is moved to cry, at that breathless
+moment when his creation hangs solid and complete, ere the particles
+break away and blend with the baser atmosphere. Nay, some will deny to
+any of us terrene smokers the gift of fullest achievement: for what
+saith the poet of the century? ``On the earth the broken arcs: in the
+heaven the perfect round!''
+
+It was well observed by a certain character in one of Wilkie Collins's
+novels (if an imperfect memory serveth me rightly) that women will
+take pleasure in scents derived from animal emanations, clarified
+fats, and the like; yet do illogically abhor the ``clean, dry,
+vegetable smell'' of tobacco. Herein the true base of the feminine
+objection is reached; being, as usual, inherent want of logic rather
+than any distaste, in the absolute, for the thing in question.
+Thinking that they ought to dislike, they do painfully cast about for
+reasons to justify their dislike, when none really exist. As a
+specimen of their so-called arguments, I remember how a certain fair
+one triumphantly pointed out to me that my dog, though loving me well,
+could yet never be brought to like the smell of tobacco. To whom I,
+who respected my dog (as Ben saith of Master Shakespeare) on this side
+idolatry as much as anything, was yet fain to point out -- more in
+sorrow than in anger -- that a dog, being an animal who delights to
+pass his whole day, from early morn to dewy eve, in shoving his nose
+into every carrion beastliness that he can come across, could hardly
+be considered arbiter elegantiarum in the matter of smells. But indeed
+I did wrong to take such foolish quibbling seriously; nor would I have
+done so, if she hadn't dragged my poor innocent dog into the
+discussion.
+
+Of Smoking in Bed: There be who consider this a depravity -- an
+instance of that excess in the practice of a virtue which passes into
+vice -- and couple it with dram-drinking: who yet fail to justify
+themselves by argument. For if bed be by common consent the greatest
+bliss, the divinest spot, on earth, ``ille terrarum qui præter omnes
+angulus ridet''; and if tobacco be the true Herb of Grace, and a joy
+and healing balm, and respite and nepenthe, -- if all this be
+admitted, why are two things, super-excellent separately, noxious in
+conjunction? And is not the Bed Smoker rather an epicure in pleasure
+-- self indulgent perhaps, but still the triumphant creator of a new
+``blend,'' reminding one of a certain traveller's account of an
+intoxicant patronised in the South Sea Islands, which combines the
+blissful effect of getting drunk and remaining sober to enjoy it? Yet
+I shall not insist too much on this point, but would only ask -- so
+long as the smoker be unwedded -- for some tolerance in the matter and
+a little logic in the discussion thereof.
+
+Concerning Cigars: That there be large sums given for these is within
+common knowledge. 1 d., 2 d., nay even 4 d., is not too great a price,
+if a man will have of the finest leaf, reckless of expense. In this
+sort of smoking, however, I find more of vainglory and ostentation
+than solid satisfaction; and its votaries would seem to display less a
+calm, healthy affection for tobacco than (as Sir T. Browne hath it) a
+``passionate prodigality.'' And, besides grievous wasting of the
+pocket, atmospheric changes, varyings in the crops, and the like,
+cause uncertainty to cling about each individual weed, so that man is
+always more or less at the mercy of Nature and the elements -- an
+unsatisfactory and undignified position in these latter days of the
+Triumphant Democracy. But worst and fatallest of all, to every
+cigar-smoker it is certain to happen that once in his life, by some
+happy combination of time, place, temperament, and Nature -- by some
+starry influence, maybe, or freak of the gods in mocking sport --
+once, and once only, he will taste the aroma of the perfect leaf at
+just the perfect point -- the ideal cigar. Henceforth his life is
+saddened; as one kissed by a goddess in a dream, he goes thereafter,
+as one might say, in a sort of love-sickness. Seeking he scarce knows
+what, his existence becomes a dissatisfied yearning; the world is
+spoiled for him, its joys are tasteless: so he wanders,
+vision-haunted, down dreary days to some miserable end.
+
+Yet, if one will walk this path and take the risks, the thing may be
+done at comparatively small expense. To such I would commend the Roman
+motto, slightly altered -- Alieni appetens, sui avarus. There be
+always good fellows, with good cigars for their friends. Nay, too, the
+boxes of these lie open; an the good cigar belongs rather to him that
+can appreciate it aright than to the capitalist who, owing to a false
+social system, happens to be its temporary guardian and trustee. Again
+there is a saying -- bred first, I think, among the schoolmen at
+Oxford -- that it is the duty of a son to live up to his father's
+income. Should any young man have found this task too hard for him,
+after the most strenuous and single-minded efforts, at least he can
+resolutely smoke his father's cigars. In the path of duty complete
+success is not always to be looked for; but an approving conscience,
+the sure reward of honest endeavour, is within reach of all.
+
+An Autumn Encounter
+
+For yet another mile or two the hot dusty road runs through level
+fields, till it reaches yonder shoulder of the downs, already golden
+three-parts up with ripening corn. Thitherwards lies my inevitable
+way; and now that home is almost in sight it seems hard that the last
+part of the long day's sweltering and delightful tramp must needs be
+haunted by that hateful speck, black on the effulgence of the slope.
+Did I not know he was only a scarecrow, the thing might be in a way
+companionable: a pleasant suggestive surmise, piquing curiosity,
+gilding this last weary stage with some magic of expectancy. But I
+passed close by him on my way out. Early as I was, he was already up
+and doing, eager to introduce himself. He leered after me as I swung
+down the road, -- mimicked my gait, as it seemed, in a most
+uncalled-for way; and when I looked back, he was blowing derisive
+kisses of farewell with his empty sleeve.
+
+I had succeeded, however, in shaking off the recollection between the
+morning's start and now; so it was annoying that he should force
+himself on me, just when there was no getting rid of him. At this
+distance, however, he might be anything. An indeterminate blot, it
+seems to waver, to falter, to come and vanish again in the quivering,
+heated air. Even so, in the old time, leaning on that familiar gate --
+are the tell-tale inwoven initials still decipherable? -- I used to
+watch Her pacing demurely towards me through the corn. It was
+ridiculous, it was fatuous, under all the circumstances it was
+monstrous, and yet{...}! We were both under twenty, so She was She,
+and I was I, and there were only we three the wide world over, she and
+I and the unbetraying gate. Porta eburnea! False visions alone sped
+through you, though Cupid was wont to light on your topmost bar, and
+preen his glowing plumes. And to think that I should see her once
+more, coming down the path as if not a day had passed, hesitating as
+of old, and then -- but surely her ankles seem -- Confound that
+scarecrow!...
+
+His sex is by this time painfully evident; also his condition in life,
+which is as of one looking back on better days. And now he is upon a
+new tack. Though here on the level it is still sultry and airless, an
+evening breeze is playing briskly along the slope where he stands, and
+one sleeve saws the air violently; the other is pointed stiffly
+heavenwards. It is all plain enough, my poor friend! The sins of the
+world are a heavy burden and a grievous unto you. You have a mission,
+you must testify; it will forth, in season and out of season. For man,
+he wakes and sleeps and sins betimes: but crows sin steadily, without
+any cessation. And this unhappy state of things is your own particular
+business. Even at this distance I seem to hear you rasping it:
+``Salvation, damnation, damnation, salvation!'' And the jolly earth
+smiles in the perfect evenglow, and the corn ripples and laughs all
+round you, and one young rook (only fledged this year, too!), after an
+excellent simulation of prostrate, heart-broken penitence, soars
+joyously away, to make love to his neighbour's wife. ``Salvation,
+damnation, damn -- '' A shifty wriggle of the road, and he is
+transformed once more. Flung back in an ecstasy of laughter, holding
+his lean sides, his whole form writhes with the chuckle and gurgle of
+merriment. Ho, ho! what a joke it was! How I took you all in! Even the
+rooks! What a joke is everything, to be sure!
+
+Truly, I shall be glad to get quit of this heartless mummer.
+Fortunately I shall soon be past him. And now, behold! the old dog
+waxes amorous. Mincing, mowing, empty sleeve on hollow breast, he
+would fain pose as the most irresistible old hypocrite that ever paced
+a metropolitan kerb. ``Love, you young dogs,'' he seems to croak,
+``Love is the one thing worth living for! Enjoy your present, rooks
+and all, as I do!'' Why, indeed, should he alone be insensible to the
+golden influence of the hour? More than one supple waist (alas! for
+universal masculine frailty!) has been circled by that tattered sleeve
+in days gone by; a throbbing heart once beat where sodden straw now
+fails to give a manly curve to the chest. Why should the coat survive,
+and not a particle of the passion that inspired it long ago?
+
+At last I confront him, face to face: and the villain grins
+recognition, completely unabashed. Nay, he cocks his eye with a
+significant glance under the slouch of his shapeless hat, and his arm
+points persistently and with intelligence up the road. My good fellow,
+I know the way to the Dog and Duck as well as you do: I was going
+there anyhow, without your officious interference -- and the beer, as
+you justly remark, is unimpeachable. But was this really all you've
+been trying to say to me, this last half-hour? Well, well!
+
+The White Poppy
+
+A riot of scarlet on gold, the red poppy of our native fields tosses
+heavy tresses with gipsy abandon; her sister of the sea-shore is
+golden, a yellow blossom that loves the keen salt savour of the spray.
+Of another hue is the poppy of history, of romance, of the muse. White
+as the stark death-shroud, pallid as the cheeks of that queen of a
+silent land whose temples she languorously crowns, ghost-like beside
+her fuller-blooded kin, she droops dream-laden, Papaver somniferum,
+the poppy of the magic juice of oblivion. In the royal plenitude of
+summer, the scarlet blooms will sometimes seem but a red cry from
+earth in memory of the many dews of battle that have drenched these
+acres in years gone by, for little end but that these same ``bubbles
+of blood'' might glow to-day; the yellow flower does but hint of the
+gold that has dashed a thousand wrecks at her feet around these
+shores: for happier suggestion we must turn to her of the pallid
+petals, our white Lady of Consolation. Fitting hue to typify the
+crowning blessing of forgetfulness! Too often the sable robes of night
+dissemble sleeplessness, remorse, regret, self-questioning. Let black,
+then, rather stand for hideous memory: white for blessed blank
+oblivion, happiest gift of the gods! For who, indeed, can say that the
+record of his life is not crowded with failure and mistake, stained
+with its petty cruelties of youth, its meannesses and follies of later
+years, all which storm and clamour incessantly at the gates of memory,
+refusing to be shut out? Leave us alone, O gods, to remember our
+felicities, our successes: only aid us, ye who recall no gifts, aptly
+and discreetly to forget.
+
+Discreetly, we say; for it is a tactful forgetfulness that makes for
+happiness. In the minor matter, for instance, of small money
+obligations, that shortness of memory which the school of Professors
+Panurge and Falstaff rashly praises, may often betray into some
+unfortunate allusion or reference to the subject which shall pain the
+delicate feelings of the obliger; or, if he be of coarser clay, shall
+lead him in his anger to express himself with unseemliness, and
+thereby to do violence to his mental tranquillity, in which alone, as
+Marcus Aurelius teacheth, lieth the perfection of moral character.
+This is to be a stumbling-block and an offence against the brethren.
+It is better to keep just memory enough to avoid such hidden rocks and
+shoals; in which thing Mr Swiveller is our great exemplar, whose
+mental map of London was a chart wherein every creditor was carefully
+``buoyed.''
+
+The wise man prays, we are told, for a good digestion: let us add to
+the prayer -- and a bad memory. Truly we are sometimes tempted to
+think that we are the only ones cursed with this corroding canker. Our
+friends, we can swear, have all, without exception, atrocious
+memories; why is ours alone so hideously vital? Yet this isolation
+must be imaginary; for even as we engage in this selfish moan for help
+in our own petty case, we are moved to add a word for certain others
+who, meaning no ill, unthinkingly go about to add to humanity's
+already heavy load of suffering. How much needless misery is caused in
+this world by the reckless ``recollections'' of dramatic and other
+celebrities? You gods, in lending ear to our prayer, remember too,
+above all other sorts and conditions of men, these our poor erring
+brothers and sisters, the sometime sommités of Mummerdom!
+
+Moments there are, it is true, when this traitor spirit tricks you:
+when some subtle scent, some broken notes of an old song, nay, even
+some touch of a fresher air on your cheeks at night -- a breath of
+``le vent qui vient à travers la montagne'' -- have power to ravish,
+to catch you back to the blissful days when you trod the one authentic
+Paradise. Moments only, alas! Then the evil crowd rushes in again,
+howls in the sacred grove, tramples down and defiles the happy garden;
+and once more you cry to Our Lady of Sleep, crowned of the white
+poppy. And you envy your dog who, for full discharge of a present
+benefaction having wagged you a hearty, expressive tail, will then
+pursue it gently round the hearth-rug till, in restful coil, he
+reaches it at last, and oblivion with it; every one of his half-dozen
+diurnal sleeps being in truth a royal amnesty.
+
+But whose the hand that shall reach us the herb of healing? Perdita
+blesses every guest at the shearing with a handful of blossom; but
+this gift is not to be asked of her whose best wish to her friends is
+``grace and remembrance.'' The fair Ophelia, rather: nay, for as a
+nursling she hugs her grief, and for her the memory of the past is a
+``sorrow's crown of sorrow.'' What flowers are these her pale hand
+offers? ``There's pansies, that's for thoughts!'' For me rather, O
+dear Ophelia, the white poppy of forgetfulness.
+
+A Bohemian in Exile
+
+A Reminiscence
+
+When, many years ago now, the once potent and extensive kingdom of
+Bohemia gradually dissolved and passed away, not a few historians were
+found to chronicle its past glories; and some have gone on to tell the
+fate of this or that once powerful chieftain who either donned the
+swallow-tail and conformed or, proudly self-exiled, sought some quiet
+retreat and died as he had lived, a Bohemian. But these were of the
+princes of the land. To the people, the villeins, the common rank and
+file, does no interest attach? Did they waste and pine, anæmic, in
+thin, strange, unwonted air? Or sit at the table of the scornful and
+learn, with Dante, how salt was alien bread? It is of one of those
+faithful commons I would speak, narrating only ``the short and simple
+annals of the poor.''
+
+It is to be noted that the kingdom aforesaid was not so much a kingdom
+as a United States -- a collection of self-ruling guilds,
+municipalities, or republics, bound together by a common method of
+viewing life. ``There once was a king of Bohemia'' -- but that was a
+long time ago, and even Corporal Trim was not certain in whose reign
+it was. These small free States, then, broke up gradually, from
+various causes and with varying speed; and I think ours was one of the
+last to go.
+
+With us, as with many others, it was a case of lost leaders. ``Just
+for a handful of silver he left us''; though it was not exactly that,
+but rather that, having got the handful of silver, they wanted a wider
+horizon to fling it about under than Bloomsbury afforded.
+
+  So they left us for their pleasure; and in due time, one by one --
+  
+But I will not be morose about them; they had honestly earned their
+success, and we all honestly rejoiced at it, and do so still.
+
+When old Pan was dead and Apollo's bow broken, there were many
+faithful pagans who would worship at no new shrines, but went out to
+the hills and caves, truer to the old gods in their discrowned
+desolation than in their pomp and power. Even so were we left behind,
+a remnant of the faithful. We had never expected to become great in
+art or song; it was the life itself that we loved; that was our end --
+not, as with them, the means to an end.
+
+  We aimed at no glory, no lovers of glory we;
+  Give us the glory of going on and still to be.
+  
+Unfortunately, going on was no longer possible; the old order had
+changed, and we could only patch up our broken lives as best might be.
+
+Fothergill said that he, for one, would have no more of it. The past
+was dead, and he wasn't going to try to revive it. Henceforth he, too,
+would be dead to Bloomsbury. Our forefathers, speaking of a man's
+death, said ``he changed his life.'' This is how Fothergill changed
+his life and died to Bloomsbury. One morning he made his way to the
+Whitechapel Road, and there he bought a barrow. The Whitechapel
+barrows are of all sizes, from the barrow wheeled about by a boy with
+half a dozen heads of cabbages to barrows drawn by a tall pony, such
+as on Sundays take the members of a club to Epping Forest. They are
+all precisely the same in plan and construction, only in the larger
+sizes the handles develop or evolve into shafts; and they are equally
+suitable, according to size, for the vending of whelks, for a
+hot-potato can, a piano organ, or for the conveyance of a cheery and
+numerous party to the Derby. Fothergill bought a medium sized
+``developed'' one, and also a donkey to fit; he had it painted white,
+picked out with green -- the barrow, not the donkey -- and when his
+arrangements were complete, stabled the whole for the night in
+Bloomsbury. The following morning, before the early red had quite
+faded from the sky, the exodus took place, those of us who were left
+being assembled to drink a parting whisky-and-milk in sad and solemn
+silence. Fothergill turned down Oxford Street, sitting on the shaft
+with a short clay in his mouth, and disappeared from our sight,
+heading west at a leisurely pace. So he passed out of our lives by way
+of the Bayswater Road.
+
+They must have wandered far and seen many things, he and his donkey,
+from the fitful fragments of news that now and again reached us. It
+seems that eventually, his style of living being economical, he was
+enabled to put down his donkey and barrow, and set up a cart and a
+mare -- no fashionable gipsy-cart, a sort of houseboat on wheels, but
+a light and serviceable cart, with a moveable tilt, constructed on his
+own designs. This allowed him to take along with him a few canvases
+and other artists' materials; soda-water, whisky, and such like
+necessaries; and even to ask a friend from town for a day or two, if
+he wanted to.
+
+He was in this state of comparative luxury when at last, by the merest
+accident, I foregathered with him once more. I had pulled up to
+Streatley one afternoon, and, leaving my boat, had gone for a long
+ramble on the glorious North Berkshire Downs to stretch my legs before
+dinner. Somewhere over on Cuckhamsley Hill, by the side of the
+Ridgeway, remote from the habitable world, I found him, smoking his
+vesper pipe on the shaft of his cart, the mare cropping the short
+grass beside him. He greeted me without surprise or effusion, as if we
+had only parted yesterday, and without a hint of an allusion to past
+times, but drifted quietly into rambling talk of his last three years,
+and, without ever telling his story right out, left a strange
+picturesque impression of a nomadic life which struck one as separated
+by fifty years from modern conventional existence. The old road-life
+still lingered on in places, it seemed, once one got well away from
+the railway: there were two Englands existing together, the one
+fringing the great iron highways wherever they might go -- the England
+under the eyes of most of us. The other, unguessed at by many, in
+whatever places were still vacant of shriek and rattle, drowsed on as
+of old: the England of heath and common and windy sheep down, of
+by-lanes and village-greens -- the England of Parson Adams and
+Lavengro. The spell of the free untrammelled life came over me as I
+listened, till I was fain to accept of his hospitality and a
+horse-blanket for the night, oblivious of civilised comforts down at
+the Bull. On the downs where Alfred fought we lay and smoked, gazing
+up at the quiet stars that had shone on many a Dane lying stark and
+still a thousand years ago; and in the silence of the lone tract that
+enfolded us we seemed nearer to those old times than to these I had
+left that afternoon, in the now hushed and sleeping valley of the
+Thames.
+
+When the news reached me, some time later, that Fothergill's aunt had
+died and left him her house near town and the little all she had
+possessed, I heard it with misgivings, not to say forebodings. For the
+house had been his grandfather's, and he had spent much of his boyhood
+there; it had been a dream of his early days to possess it in some
+happy future, and I knew he could never bear to sell or let it. On the
+other hand, can you stall the wild ass of the desert? And will not the
+caged eagle mope and pine?
+
+However, possession was entered into, and all seemed to go well for
+the time. The cart was honourably installed in the coach-house, the
+mare turned out to grass. Fothergill lived idly and happily, to all
+seeming, with ``a book of verses underneath the bough,'' and a bottle
+of old claret for the friend who might chance to drop in. But as the
+year wore on small signs began to appear that he who had always
+``rather hear the lark sing than the mouse squeak'' was beginning to
+feel himself caged, though his bars were gilded.
+
+I was talking one day to his coachman (he now kept three
+men-servants), and he told me that of a Sunday morning when the
+household had gone to church and everything was quiet, Mr Fothergill
+would go into the coach-house and light his pipe, and sit on the step
+of the brougham (he had a brougham now), and gaze at the old cart, and
+smoke and say nothing; and smoke and say nothing again. He didn't like
+it, the coachman confessed; and to me it seemed ominous.
+
+One morning late in March, at the end of a long hard winter, I was
+wakened by a flood of sunshine. The early air came warm and soft
+through the open window; the first magic suggestion of spring was
+abroad, with its whispered hints of daffodils and budding hawthorns;
+and one's blood danced to imagined pipings of Pan from happy fields
+far distant. At once I thought of Fothergill, and, with a certain
+foreboding of ill, made my way down to Holly Lodge as soon as
+possible. It was with no surprise at all that I heard that the master
+was missing. In the very first of the morning, it seemed, or ever the
+earliest under-housemaid had begun to set man-traps on the stairs and
+along the passages, he must have quietly left the house. The servants
+were cheerful enough, nevertheless, and thought the master must only
+have ``gone for a nice long walk,'' and so on, after the manner of
+their kind. Without a word I turned my steps to the coach-house. Sure
+enough, the old cart was missing; the mare was gone from the paddock.
+It was no good my saying anything; pursuit of this wild haunter of
+tracks and by-paths would have been futile indeed. So I kept my own
+counsel. Fothergill never returned to Holly Lodge, and has been more
+secret and evasive since his last flight, rarely venturing on old
+camping grounds near home, like to a bird scared by the fowler's gun.
+
+Once indeed, since then, while engaged in pursuit of the shy quarry
+known as the Early Perp., late Dec., E. Eng., and the like, specimens
+of which I was tracking down in the west, I hit upon him by accident;
+hearing in an old village rumours concerning a strange man in a cart
+who neither carried samples nor pushed the brewing interest by other
+means than average personal consumption -- tales already beginning to
+be distorted into material for the myth of the future. I found him
+friendly as ever, equally ready to spin his yarns. As the evening wore
+on, I ventured upon an allusion to past times and Holly Lodge; but his
+air of puzzled politeness convinced me that the whole thing had passed
+out of his mind, as a slight but disagreeable incident in the even
+tenor of his nomadic existence.
+
+After all, his gains may have outbalanced his losses. Had he cared, he
+might, with his conversational gifts, have been a social success;
+certainly, I think, an artistic one. He had great powers, had any
+impulse been present to urge him to execution and achievement. But he
+was for none of these things. Contemplative, receptive, with a keen
+sense of certain sub-tones and side aspects of life unseen by most, he
+doubtless chose wisely to enjoy life his own way, and to gather from
+the fleeting days what bliss they had to give, nor spend them in
+toiling for a harvest to be reaped when he was dust.
+
+  Some for the glories of this life, and some
+  Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come:
+  Ah, take the cash and let the credit go,
+  Nor heed the rumble of a distant drum.
+  
+Justifiable Homicide
+
+This is a remedial age, an age of keys for all manner of locks; so he
+cannot be said to ask too much who seeks for exact information as to
+how a young man ought, in justice to himself and to society, to deal
+with his relations. During his minority he has lain entirely at their
+mercy: has been their butt, their martyr, their drudge, their corpus
+vile. Possessing all the sinews of war, this stiff-necked tribe has
+consistently refused to ``part'': even for the provision of those
+luxuries so much more necessary than necessities. Its members have
+crammed their victim full of precepts, rules of conduct, moral maxims,
+and most miscellaneous counsel: all which he intuitively suspected at
+the time, and has ascertained by subsequent experience, to be utterly
+worthless. Now, when their hour has come, when the tocsin has sounded
+at last, and the Gaul is at the gate, they still appear to think that
+the old condition of things is to go on; unconscious, apparently, of
+atonement due, of retribution to be exacted, of wrongs to be avenged
+and of insults to be wiped away!
+
+Over the north-west frontier, where the writ of the English Raj runs
+not, the artless Afghan is happy in a code that fully provides for
+relatives who neglect or misunderstand their obligations. An Afghan it
+was who found himself compelled to reprove an uncle with an
+unfortunate habit of squandering the family estate. An excellent
+relative, this uncle, in all other respects. As a liar, he had few
+equals; he robbed with taste and discretion; and his murders were all
+imbued with true artistic feeling. He might have lived to a green old
+age of spotless respectability but for his one little failing. As it
+was, justice had to be done, ruat cælum: and so it came about that one
+day the nephew issued forth to correct him with a matchlock. The
+innocent old man was cultivating his paternal acres; so the nephew was
+able, unperceived, to get a steady sight on him. His finger was on the
+trigger, when suddenly there slipped into his mind the divine precept:
+``Allah is merciful!'' He lowered his piece, and remained for a little
+plunged in thought; meanwhile the unconscious uncle hoed his paddy.
+Then with a happy smile he took aim once more, for there also occurred
+to him the precept equally divine: ``But Allah is also just.'' With an
+easy conscience he let fly, and behold! there was an uncle the more in
+Paradise.
+
+It was probably some little affair of a similar quality that
+constrained a recruit in a regiment stationed at Peshawur to apply for
+leave of absence: in order to attend to family matters of importance.
+The Colonel knew it was small use refusing the leave, as in that case
+his recruit would promptly desert; so he could only ask, how long was
+the transaction like to take? It was told him, after consideration,
+that, allowing for all possible difficulties and delays, a month would
+meet the necessities of the case; and on that understanding he allowed
+his man to depart. At the end of the month he reappeared on duty, a
+subdued but mellow cheer shining through his wonted impassiveness. His
+Colonel ventured to inquire of him, in a general way, if the business
+in question were satisfactorily concluded. And he replied: ``I got him
+from behind a rock.''
+
+There are practical difficulties in the way of the adoption of such
+methods at home. We must be content to envy, without imitating, these
+free and happy sons of the hills. And yet a few of the old school are
+left us still: averse from change, mistrustful of progress, sticking
+steadily to the good old-fashioned dagger and bowl. I had a friend who
+disposed of a relative every spring. Uncles were his special line --
+(he had suffered much from their tribe, having been early left an
+orphan) -- though he had dabbled in aunts, and in his hot youth, when
+he was getting his hand in, he had even dallied with a grand-parent or
+two. But it was in uncles he excelled. He possessed (at the beginning
+of his career) a large number of these connections, and pursuit of
+them, from the mere sordid point of view of £ s. d., proved lucrative.
+But he always protested (and I believed him) that gain with him was a
+secondary consideration. It would hardly be in the public interest to
+disclose his modus operandi. I shall only remark that he was one of
+the first to realise the security and immunity afforded the artist by
+the conditions of modern London. Hence it happened that he usually
+practised in town, but spent his vacations at the country houses of
+such relations as were still spared him, where he was always the life
+and soul of the place. Unfortunately he is no longer with us, to
+assist in the revision of this article: nor was it permitted me to
+soothe his last moments. The presiding Sheriff was one of those
+new-fangled officials who insist on the exclusion of the public, and
+he declined to admit me either in the capacity of a personal
+connection or, though I tried my hardest, as the representative of
+``The National Observer.'' It only remains to be said of my much-tried
+and still lamented friend, that he left few relatives to mourn his
+untimely end.
+
+But our reluctant feet must needs keep step with the imperious march
+of Time, and my poor friend's Art (as himself in later years would
+sorrowfully admit) is now almost as extinct as the glass-staining of
+old, or ``Robbia's craft so apt and strange''; while our thin-blooded
+youth, too nice for the joyous old methods, are content to find
+sweetest revenge in severely dropping their relations. This is indeed
+a most effective position: it exasperates, while it is unassailable.
+And yet there remains a higher course, a nobler task. Not mere
+forgiveness: it is simple duty to forgive -- even one's guardians. No
+young man of earnest aspirations will be content to stop there. Nay:
+lead them on, these lost ones, by the hand; conduct them ``generously
+and gently, and with linking of the arm''; educate them, eradicate
+their false ideals, dispel their foolish prejudices; be to their
+faults a little blind and to their virtues very kind: in fine, realise
+that you have a mission -- that these wretches are not here for
+nothing. The task will seem hard at first; but only those who have
+tried can know how much may be done by assiduous and kindly effort
+towards the chastening -- ay! the final redemption even! -- of the
+most hopeless and pig-headed of uncles.
+
+The Fairy Wicket
+
+From digging in the sandy, over-triturated soil of times historical,
+all dotted with date and number and sign, how exquisite the relief in
+turning to the dear days outside history -- yet not so very far off
+neither for us nurslings of the northern sun -- when kindly beasts
+would loiter to give counsel by the wayside, and a fortunate encounter
+with one of the Good People was a surer path to Fortune and the Bride
+than the best-worn stool that ever proved step-ladder to aspiring
+youth. For then the Fairy Wicket stood everywhere ajar -- everywhere
+and to each and all. ``Open, open, green hill!'' -- you needed no more
+recondite sesame than that: and, whoever you were, you might have a
+glimpse of the elfin dancers in the hall that is litten within by
+neither sun nor moon; or catch at the white horse's bridle as the
+Fairy Prince rode through. It has been closed now this many a year
+(the fairies, always strong in the field, are excellent
+wicket-keepers); and if it open at all, 'tis but for a moment's
+mockery of the material generation that so deliberately turned its
+back on the gap into Elf-Land -- that first stage to the Beyond.
+
+It was a wanton trick, though, that these folk of malice used to play
+on a small school-boy, new kicked out of his nest into the draughty,
+uncomfortable outer world, his unfledged skin still craving the
+feathers whereinto he was wont to nestle. The barrack-like school, the
+arid, cheerless class-rooms, drove him to Nature for redress; and,
+under an alien sky, he would go forth and wander along the iron road
+by impassive fields, so like yet so unlike those hitherto a part of
+him and responding to his every mood. And to him, thus loitering with
+overladen heart, there would come suddenly a touch of warmth, of
+strange surprise. The turn of the road just ahead -- that, sure, is
+not all unfamiliar? That row of elms -- it cannot entirely be accident
+that they range just so? And, if not accident, then round the bend
+will come the old duck-pond, the shoulder of the barn will top it, a
+few yards on will be the gate -- it swings-to with its familiar click
+-- the dogs race down the avenue -- and then -- and then! It is all
+wildly fanciful; and yet, though knowing not Tertullian, a ``credo
+quia impossibile'' is on his tongue as he quickens his pace -- for
+what else can he do? A step, and the spell is shattered -- all is
+cruel and alien once more; while every copse and hedge-row seems
+a-tinkle with faint elfish laughter. The Fairies have had their joke:
+they have opened the wicket one of their own hand's-breadths, and shut
+it in their victim's face. When next that victim catches a fairy, he
+purposes to tie up the brat in sight of his own green hill, and set
+him to draw up a practical scheme for Village Councils.
+
+One of the many women I ever really loved, fair in the fearless old
+fashion, was used to sing, in the blithe, unfettered accent of the
+people: ``I'd like to be a fairy, And dance upon my toes, I'd like to
+be a fairy, And wear short close!'' And in later life it is to her sex
+that the wee (but very wise) folk sometimes delegate their power of
+torment. Such understudies are found to play the part exceeding well;
+and many a time the infatuated youth believes he sees in the depth of
+one sole pair of eyes -- blue, brown, or green (the fairy colour) --
+the authentic fairy wicket standing ajar: many a time must he hear the
+quaint old formula, ``I'm sure, if I've ever done anything to lead you
+to think,'' etc (runs it not so?), ere he shall realise that here is
+the gate upon no magic pleasance but on a cheap suburban villa,
+banging behind the wrathful rate-collector or hurled open to speed the
+pallid householder to the Registrar's Office. In still grosser
+habitations, too, they lurk, do the People of Mischief, ready to
+frolic out on the unsuspecting one: as in the case, which still haunts
+my memory, of a certain bottle of an historic Château-Yquem, hued like
+Venetian glass, odorous as a garden in June. Forth from out the faint
+perfume of this haunted drink there danced a bevy from Old France,
+clad in the fashion of Louis-Quinze, peach-coloured knots of ribbon
+bedizening apple-green velvets, as they moved in stately wise among
+the roses of the old garden, to the quaint music -- Rameau, was it? --
+of a fairy cornemuse, while fairy Watteaus, Fragonards, Lancrets, sat
+and painted them. Alas! too shallow the bottle, too brief the brawls:
+not to be recalled by any quantity of Green Chartreuse.
+
+Aboard the Galley
+
+He was cruising in the Southern Seas (was the Ulysses who told me this
+tale), when there bore down upon him a marvellous strange fleet, whose
+like he had not before seen. For each little craft was a corpse,
+stiffly ``marlined,'' or bound about with tarred rope, as mariners do
+use to treat plug tobacco: also ballasted, and with a fair mast and
+sail stepped through his midriff. These self-sufficing ships knew no
+divided authority: no pilot ever took the helm from the captain's
+hands; no mutines lay in bilboes, no passengers complained of the
+provisions. In a certain island to windward (the native pilot
+explained) it was the practice, when a man died, to bury him for the
+time being in dry, desiccating sand, till a chief should pass from his
+people, when the waiting bodies were brought out and, caulked and
+rigged secumdum artem, were launched with the first fair breeze, the
+admiral at their head, on their voyage to the Blessed Islands. And if
+a chief should die, and the sand should hold no store of corpses for
+his escort, this simple practical folk would solve the little
+difficulty by knocking some dozen or twenty stout fellows on the head,
+that the notable might voyage like a gentleman. Whence this gallant
+little company, running before the breeze, stark, happy, and extinct,
+all bound for the Isles of Light! 'Twas a sight to shame us sitters at
+home, who believe in those Islands, most of us, even as they, yet are
+content to trundle City-wards or to Margate, so long as the sorry
+breath is in us; and, breathless at last, to Bow or Kensal Green;
+without one effort, dead or alive, to reach the far-shining
+Hesperides.
+
+``Dans la galère, capitane, nous étions quatre-vingt rameurs!'' sang
+the oarsmen in the ballad; and they, though indeed they toiled on the
+galley-bench, were free and happy pirates, members of an honoured and
+liberal profession. But all we -- pirates, parsons, stockbrokers,
+whatever our calling -- are but galley-slaves of the basest sort,
+fettered to the oar each for his little spell. A common misery links
+us all, like the chain that runs the length of the thwarts. Can
+nothing make it worth our while not to quarrel with our fellows? The
+menace of the storms is for each one and for all: the master's whip
+has a fine impartiality. Crack! the lash that scored my comrade's back
+has flicked my withers too; yet neither of us was shirking -- it was
+that grinning ruffian in front. Well: to-morrow, God willing, the
+evasion shall be ours, while he writhes howling. But why do we never
+once combine -- seize on the ship, fling our masters into the sea, and
+steer for some pleasant isle far down under the Line, beyond the
+still-vexed Bermoothes? When ho for feasting! Hey for tobacco and
+free-quarters! But no: the days pass, and are reckoned up, and done
+with; and ever more pressing cares engage. Those fellows on the
+leeward benches are having an easier time than we poor dogs on the
+weather side? Then, let us abuse, pelt, vilify then: let us steal
+their grub, and have at them generally for a set of shirking,
+malingering brutes! What matter that to-morrow they may be to
+windward, we to lee? We never can look ahead. And they know this well,
+the gods our masters, pliers of the whip. And mayhap we like them none
+the worse for it.
+
+Indeed, there is a traitor sort among ourselves, that spins facile
+phrases in the honour of these whipmasters of ours -- as ``omnes eodem
+cogimur,'' and the rest; which is all very pretty and mighty
+consoling. The fact is, the poets are the only people who score by the
+present arrangement; which it is therefore their interest to maintain.
+While we are doing all the work, these incorrigible skulkers lounge
+about and make ribald remarks; they write Greek tragedies on Fate, on
+the sublimity of Suffering, on the Petty Span, and so on; and act in a
+generally offensive way. And we are even weak enough to buy their
+books; offer them drinks, peerages, and things; and say what
+superlative fellows they are! But when the long-looked-for combination
+comes, and we poor devils have risen and abolished fate, destiny, the
+Olympian Council, early baldness, and the like, these poets will
+really have to go.
+
+And when every rhymester has walked the plank, shall we still put up
+with our relations? True members of the ``stupid party,'' who never
+believe in us, who know (and never forget) the follies of our
+adolescence; who are always wanting us not to do things; who are
+lavish of advice, yet angered by the faintest suggestion of a small
+advance in cash: shall the idle singers perish and these endure? No:
+as soon as the last poet has splashed over the side, to the sharks
+with our relations!
+
+The old barkey is lightening famously: who shall be next to go? The
+Sportsman of intolerable yarns: who slays twice over -- first, his
+game, and then the miserable being he button-holes for the tedious
+recital. Shall we suffer him longer? Who else? Who is that cowering
+under the bulwarks yonder? The man who thinks he can imitate the
+Scottish accent! Splash! And the next one? What a crowd is here! How
+they block the hatchways, lumber the deck, and get between you and the
+purser's room -- these fadmongers, teetotallers, missionaries of
+divers isms! Overboard with them, and hey for the Fortunate Isles!
+Then for tobacco in a hammock 'twixt the palms! Then for wine cooled
+in a brooklet losing itself in silver sands! Then for -- but O these
+bilboes on our ankles, how mercilessly they grip! The vertical sun
+blisters the bare back: faint echoes of Olympian laughter seem to
+flicker like Northern Lights across the stark and pitiless sky. One
+earnest effort would do it, my brothers! A little modesty, a short
+sinking of private differences; and then we should all be free and
+equal gentlemen of fortune, and I would be your Captain! ``Who? you?
+you would make a pretty Captain!'' Better than you, you scurvy,
+skulking, little galley-slave! ``Galley-slave yourself, and be ---
+Pull together, boys, and lie low! Here's the Master coming with his
+whip!''
+
+The Lost Centaur
+
+It is somewhere set down (or does the legend only exist in the great
+volume of ought-to-be-writ?) that the young Achilles, nurtured from
+babyhood by the wise and kindly Cheiron, accustomed to reverence an
+ideal of human skill and wisdom blent with all that was best and
+noblest of animal instinct, strength and swiftness, found poor
+humanity sadly to miss, when at last the was sent forth among his
+pottering little two-legged peers. Himself alone he had hitherto
+fancied to be the maimed one, the incomplete; he looked to find the
+lords of earth even such as these Centaurs; wise and magnanimous atop:
+below, shod with the lightning, winged with the wind, terrible in the
+potentiality of the armed heel. Instead of which -- ! How fallen was
+his first fair hope of the world! And even when reconciled at last to
+the dynasty of the forked radish, after he had seen its quality tested
+round the clangorous walls of Troy -- some touch of an imperial
+disdain ever lingered in his mind for these feeble folk who could
+contentedly hail him -- him, who had known Cheiron! -- as hero and
+lord!
+
+Achilles has passed, with the Centaurs and Troy; but the feeling
+lingers.
+
+Of strange and divers strands is twisted the mysterious cord that,
+reaching back ``through spaces out of space and timeless time,''
+somewhere joins us to the Brute; a twine of mingled yarn, not utterly
+base. As we grow from our animal infancy, and the threads snap one by
+one at each gallant wing-stroke of a soul poising for flight into
+Empyrean, we are yet conscious of a loss for every gain, we have some
+forlorn sense of a vanished heritage. Willing enough are we to ``let
+the ape and tiger die''; but the pleasant cousins dissembled in hide
+and fur and feather are not all tigers and apes: which last vile folk,
+indeed, exist for us only in picture-books, and chiefly offend by
+always carrying the Sunday School ensign of a Moral at their tails.
+Others -- happily of less didactic dispositions -- there be; and it is
+to these unaffected, careless companions that the sensible child is
+wont to devote himself; leaving severely alone the stiff, tame
+creatures claiming to be of closer kin. And yet these playmates, while
+cheerfully admitting him of their fellowship, make him feel his
+inferiority at every point. Vainly, his snub nose projected
+earthwards, he essays to sniff it with the terrier who (as becomes the
+nobler animal) is leading in the chase; and he is ready to weep as he
+realises his loss. And the rest of the Free Company, -- the pony, the
+cows, the great cart-horses, -- are ever shaming him by their
+unboastful exercise of some enviable and unattainable attribute. Even
+the friendly pig, who (did but parents permit) should eat of his bread
+and drink of his cup, and be unto him as a brother, -- which among all
+these unhappy bifurcations, so cheery, so unambitious, so purely
+contented, so apt to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of boyhood
+as he? What wonder that at times, when the neophyte in life begins to
+realise that all these desirable accomplishments have had to be
+surrendered one by one in the process of developing a Mind, the course
+of fitting out a Lord of Creation, he is wont -- not knowing the
+extent of the kingdom to which he is heir -- to feel a little
+discontented?
+
+Ere now this ill-humour, taking root in a nature wherein the animal is
+already ascendant, has led by downward paths to the Goat-Foot, in whom
+the submerged human system peeps out but fitfully, at exalted moments.
+He, the peevish and irascible, shy of trodden ways and pretty
+domesticities, is linked to us by little but his love of melody; but
+for which saving grace, the hair would soon creep up from thigh to
+horn of him. At times he will still do us a friendly turn: will lend a
+helping hand to poor little Psyche, wilfully seeking her own
+salvation; will stand shoulder to shoulder with us on Marathon plain.
+But in the main his sympathies are first for the beast: to which his
+horns are never horrific, but, with his hairy pelt, ever natural and
+familiar, and his voice (with its talk of help and healing) not harsh
+nor dissonant, but voice of very brother as well as very god.
+
+And this declension -- for declension it is, though we achieve all the
+confidences of Melampus, and even master with him the pleasant argot
+of the woods -- may still be ours if we suffer what lives in us of our
+primal cousins to draw us down. On the other hand, let soul inform and
+irradiate body as it may, the threads are utterly shorn asunder never:
+nor is man, the complete, the self-contained, permitted to cut himself
+wholly adrift from these his poor relations. The mute and stunted
+human embryo that gazes appealingly from out the depths of their eyes
+must ever remind him of a kinship once (possibly) closer. Nay, at
+times, it must even seem to whelm him in reproach. As thus: ``Was it
+really necessary, after all, that we two should part company so early?
+May you not have taken a wrong turning somewhere, in your long race
+after your so-called progress, after the perfection of this be-lauded
+species of yours? A turning whose due avoidance might perhaps have
+resulted in no such lamentable cleavage as is here, but in some
+perfect embodiment of the dual nature: as who should say a being with
+the nobilities of both of us, the basenesses of neither? So might you,
+more fortunately guided, have been led at last up the green sides of
+Pelion, to the ancestral, the primeval, Centaur still waiting majestic
+on the summit!'' It is even so. Perhaps this thing might once have
+been, O cousin outcast and estranged! But the opportunity was long
+since lost. Henceforth, two ways for us for ever!
+
+Orion
+
+The moonless night has a touch of frost, and is steely-clear. High and
+dominant amidst the Populations of the Sky, the restless and the
+steadfast alike, hangs the great Plough, lit with a hard radiance as
+of the polished and shining share. And yonder, low on the horizon, but
+half resurgent as yet, crouches the magnificent hunter: watchful,
+seemingly, and expectant: with some hint of menace in his port.
+
+Yet should his game be up, you would think by now. Many a century has
+passed since the plough first sped a conqueror east and west, clearing
+forest and draining fen; policing the valleys with barbed-wires and
+Sunday schools, with the chains that are forged of peace, the irking
+fetters of plenty: driving also the whole lot of us, these to sweat at
+its tail, those to plod with the patient team, but all to march in a
+great chain-gang, the convicts of peace and order and law: while the
+happy nomad, with his woodlands, his wild cattle, his pleasing
+nuptialities, has long since disappeared, dropping only in his flight
+some store of flint-heads, a legacy of confusion. Truly, we Children
+of the Plough, but for yon tremendous Monitor in the sky, were in
+right case to forget that the Hunter is still a quantity to reckon
+withal. Where, then, does he hide, the Shaker of the Spear? Why, here,
+my brother, and here; deep in the breasts of each and all of us! And
+for this drop of primal quicksilver in the blood what poppy or
+mandragora shall purge it hence away?
+
+Of pulpiteers and parents it is called Original Sin: a term wherewith
+they brand whatever frisks and butts with rude goatish horns against
+accepted maxims and trim theories of education. In the abstract, of
+course, this fitful stirring of the old yeast is no more sin than a
+natural craving for a seat on a high stool, for the inscription -- now
+horizontal, and now vertical -- of figures, is sin. But the deskmen
+command a temporary majority: for the short while they shall hold the
+cards they have the right to call the game. And so -- since we must
+bow to the storm -- let the one thing be labelled Sin, and the other
+Salvation -- for a season: ourselves forgetting never that it is all a
+matter of nomenclature. What we have now first to note is that this
+original Waft from the Garden asserts itself most vigorously in the
+Child. This it is that thrusts the small boy out under the naked
+heavens, to enact a sorry and shivering Crusoe on an islet in the
+duck-pond. This it is that sends the little girl footing it after the
+gipsy's van, oblivious of lessons, puddings, the embrace maternal, the
+paternal smack; hearing naught save the faint, far bugle-summons to
+the pre-historic little savage that thrills and answers in the
+tingling blood of her; seeing only a troop of dusky, dull-eyed guides
+along that shining highway to the dim land east o' the sun and west o'
+the moon: where freedom is, and you can wander and breathe, and at
+night tame street lamps there are none -- only the hunter's fires, and
+the eyes of lions, and the mysterious stars. In later years it is
+stifled and gagged -- buried deep, a green turf at the head of it, and
+on its heart a stone; but it lives, it breathes, it lurks, it will up
+and out when 'tis looked for least. That stockbroker, some brief
+summers gone, who was missed from his wonted place one settling-day! a
+goodly portly man, i' faith: and had a villa and a steam launch at
+Surbiton: and was versed in the esoteric humours of the House. Who
+could have thought that the Hunter lay hid in him? Yet, after many
+weeks, they found him in a wild nook of Hampshire. Ragged, sun-burnt,
+the nocturnal haystack calling aloud from his frayed and
+weather-stained duds, his trousers tucked, he was tickling trout with
+godless native urchins; and when they would have won him to himself
+with honied whispers of American Rails, he answered but with babble of
+green fields. He is back in his wonted corner now: quite cured,
+apparently, and tractable. And yet -- let the sun shine too wantonly
+in Throgmorton Street, let an errant zephyr, quick with the warm
+South, fan but his cheek too wooingly on his way to the station; and
+will he not once more snap his chain and away? Ay, truly: and next
+time he will not be caught.
+
+Deans have danced to the same wild piping, though their chapters have
+hushed the matter up. Even Duchesses (they say) have ``come tripping
+doon the stair,'' rapt by the climbing passion from their
+strawberry-leaved surroundings into starlit spaces. Nay, ourselves,
+too -- the douce, respectable mediocrities that we are -- which of us
+but might recall some fearful outbreak whose details are mercifully
+unknown to the household that calls us breadwinner and chief? What
+marvel that up yonder the Hunter smiles? When he knows that every one
+in his ken, the tinker with the statesman, has caught his bugle blast
+and gone forth on its irresistible appeal!
+
+Not that they are so easily followed as of yore, those flying echoes
+of the horn! Joints are stiffer, maybe; certainly the desolate suburbs
+creep ever farther into the retreating fields; and when you reach the
+windy moorland, lo! it is all staked out into building-lots. Mud is
+muddier now than heretofore; and ruts are ruttier. And what friendless
+old beast comes limping down the dreary lane? He seems sorely shrunk
+and shoulder-shotten; but by the something of divinity in his look,
+still more than by the wings despondent along his mighty sides, 'tis
+ever the old Pegasus -- not yet the knacker's own. ``Hard times I've
+been having,'' he murmurs, as you rub his nose. ``These fellows have
+really no seat except for a park hack. As for this laurel, we were
+wont to await it trembling: and in taking it we were afraid. Your
+English way of hunting it down with yelpings and hallooings -- well, I
+may be out of date, but we wouldn't have stood that sort of thing on
+Helicon.'' So he hobbles down the road. Good night, old fellow! Out of
+date? Well, it may be so. And alas! the blame is ours.
+
+But for the Hunter -- there he rises -- couchant no more. Nay, flung
+full stretch on the blue, he blazes, he dominates, he appals! Will his
+turn, then, really come at last? After some Armageddon of cataclysmal
+ruin, all levelling, whelming the County Councillor with the
+Music-hall artiste, obliterating the very furrows of the Plough, shall
+the skin-clad nomad string his bow once more, and once more loose the
+whistling shaft? Wildly incredible it seems. And yet -- look up! Look
+up and behold him confident, erect, majestic -- there on the threshold
+of the sky!
+
+
+
+
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, PAGAN PAPERS ***
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