Pebbles on the shore [by] Alpha of the plough

ON A CASE OF CONSCIENCE

It was raining when Victor Crummles stepped out into the street. But he did not notice the fact. True, he put his umbrella up, but that was mere force of habit. He was not aware that he had put it up. His mind was far too engaged with the ordeal before him to permit any consciousness of external things to creep into it. He was "up against it and no mistake," he observed to himself. There was the paper in his pocket telling him the time and place at which he was to present himself for medical examination. He put his hand in his pocket. It was there all right. Kilburn. Twelve o'clock.

Yes, he was fairly up against it. Not, as he hastened to assure himself, that he objected…. Not at all…. He had always been a patriot, and always would be. He'd love to have a smack at the Huns. He'd give them what for…. He wished he'd been a bit younger—that's what he wished. If he'd been a bit younger he'd have gone like a shot. That's what he'd have done—he'd have gone like a shot. No fetching him—if he'd been a bit younger. But a chap at thirty-eight … well….

Here was the "Golden Crown." Yes, he thought he'd better have "just one." It would pull him together and give the doctors a chance. He ought to give them a chance whatever the consequence to himself. A whisky-and-soda would just put him "in the pink."

There, that was better. Now he could face anything. Now for Kilburn. How should he go? It was two miles at least … a good two miles. There was No. 16—he could take that. And there was the Tube—he could take that.

Or he could walk. There was plenty of time…. Yes, on the whole he thought he ought to walk. There was that varicose vein. The doctors ought to know about that. It wouldn't be fair to them or to the country that they shouldn't know about it. Varicose veins were very serious affairs indeed. He knew because he'd looked the subject up in the dictionary. It had made such a deep impression on him-that he could repeat what it said:—

"The dilation and thickening of the veins with lengthening and tortuosity, and projection of certain points in the form of knots or knobs, in which the blood coagulates, fibrin is deposited, and in the centre sometimes even osseous matter; in addition the coats of the veins are diseased."

There was more about it than that. It looked a very black case indeed. Many a man had been turned down for varicose veins, and—and—well, the doctors ought to know about it. That was all…. They ought to know about it…. He oughtn't to go there and pass himself off under false pretences…. Mind you, he wanted to fight the Germans all right. He wanted to do his bit—nobody more so. But was it fair not to let the doctors see what was the matter with him? He certainly had those knots and knobs when he walked very hard. Who knew? Perhaps there was "fibrin" and "osseous matter" there. At any rate, the doctors ought to see his leg under fair conditions….

He didn't hold with allowing your patriotism to make you deceive your country. It wasn't fair to the country to let it spend a heap of money on a fellow who might "crock up" in the first week or two. It wasn't fair to the fellow either. Not that he was thinking about himself…. Not at all. It was the country he was thinking of. A fellow must think about the country sometimes. It was his duty to put his own feelings, as it were, under the tap. He wanted to go to the war as much as any man, but he didn't want the country to lose by him….

Yes, it was his duty to walk. It was his duty not to conceal those knots and knobs. He hoped they wouldn't be a fatal objection. But he was going to play a straight bat with the country whatever happened…. He was not the man to palm himself for what he wasn't. He would show the doctor quite plainly what his varicose vein was like.

When Victor Crummles entered the room he was feeling a bit tired, but courageous. He had taken another "stiffener" at the "Spread Eagle" and felt equal to any fate. There were two doctors in the room—one sitting at a table, the other standing by the window.

"Anything the matter with you?" said he at the table.

"Not that I know," said Victor with the air of a man who meant business. Then, as if unwillingly dragging the truth out of himself he added, "I have got a bit of a varicose vein, but it's hardly worth mentioning."

"Oh, don't worry about that," said the doctor. "We've got past that stage.
Now strip."

Don't worry about that! Got past that stage! What did it mean?… Well, he had done his duty…. If there was fibrin and osseous matter in his veins he had given them fair warning. It was the country that would suffer. These doctors,… well, there….

"Stripped? Now, let's have a look at you."

The doctor examined him carefully. Perhaps that varicose vein would surprise him after all. He'd walked two miles and it ought to be … not that he wanted it to be; but if it was—well, it was only fair they should know.

"What did you say your age was?"

"Thirty-eight, sir."

"Thirty-eight! Thirty-eight … um … Come here, Jeffkins."

Jeffkins came from the window and joined his colleague, and together the two doctors took stock of Victor. They were taking no notice of his leg. Well, it was their look out. He wouldn't be to blame if he broke down.

"You can dress." And the two doctors went to the window and consulted in low tones.

Then the first came back.

"Well, my man, it won't do," he said. "We like your spirit…. Very creditable, very creditable indeed. But (laughing) thirty-eight! Come, come."

Light was breaking in on Victor. Was he really being rejected?… And because he was too old?… Oh, the scandal, the shame…. And he dying to get at those Huns….

"But upon my oath…." He was really in earnest now.

"There, there, we understand," said the doctor. "You've done your best. And it's very creditable to you—very. But thirty-eight! Come, come…. Now, good morning."

Outside, Victor's anguish and indignation were too bitter to be borne unaided. He turned into the "Spread Eagle."

ON THE GUINEA STAMP

My eye was caught as I passed along the street just now by an advertisement on a hoarding which announced that Mr. Martin Harvey was appearing in a new cinema play entitled The Hard Way, which was described as

A FINE STORY BY A PEER.

I confess that I took an objection to that play on the spot. It may be a good play. I don't know. I never shall know, for I shall never see it. But why should it be assumed that you and I will run off to the pay box to see a new play "by a peer"? Suppose the anonymous playwright had been a lawyer, or a journalist, or a pork-butcher, or a grocer. Would the producer have thought it helpful to announce a new play by a pork-butcher, or a lawyer, or a grocer, or a journalist? He certainly would not. He would have left the play to stand or fall on its merits.

Why, then, does he think that the fact that it is by a peer will bring us all crowding to his doors? You may, of course, take it as a reflection on the peerage. You may be supposed to think it such a miraculous thing that a peer should be able to write a play that you may be expected to go and see it as you would go to Barnum's to see a two-headed man or a bearded woman? We may be invited to see it merely as a marvel, much as we used to be invited to go and see the horse that could count or the monkeys that could ride bicycles.

If it were so I should feel it was unjust to the peerage which is certainly not below the average in intellectual capacity. But it is not so. It is something much more serious than that. It is not intended to be a reflection on the peerage. It is an unconscious reflection on the British public. The idea behind the announcement is not that we shall go to see the play in a spirit of curiosity, as if it had been written by an ourang-outang, but that we shall go to see it in a spirit of flunkeyism, as if it had been written by a demi-god. We are conceived sitting in hushed wonder that a visitor from realms far above our experience should stoop down to amuse us.

I wish I could feel that this was a false estimate of the British public. It would certainly be a false estimate of the French public. The most splendid thing, I think, in connection with the French people is their freedom from flunkeyism. The great wind of the Revolution blew that rubbish out of their souls for ever. It gave them the sublime conception of citizenship as the basis of human relationship. It destroyed all the social fences that feudalism had erected to keep the people out of the common inheritance of the possibilities of human life. It liberated them from shams, and made them the one realistic people in Europe. They looked truth in the face, because they had cleaned its face of the dirty accretions of the past. They saw, and they are the only people in Europe who as a nation have seen, that

    The rank is but the guinea stamp:
      The man's the gowd, for a' that.

It is this fact which has made France the standard-bearer of human ideals.
It is this fact which puts her spiritually at the head of all the nations.

I am afraid it must be admitted that we are still in the flunkey stage. We are still hypnotised by rank and social caste. I saw a crowd running excitedly after a carriage near the Gaiety Theatre the other day, and found it was because Princess So-and-So was passing. Our Press reeks with the disease, and loves to record this sort of thing:—

THE DUKE OF CONNAUGHT IN NEW YORK.

While strolling down Fifth Avenue the Duke of Connaught accidentally collided with a messenger boy carrying a parcel, whereupon he turned round and begged the boy's pardon.

You see the idea behind such banalities. It is that we are stricken with respectful admiration that people with titles should act like ordinary decent human beings. It is an insult to them, and it ought to be an insult to the intelligence of the reader. But the newspaper man knows his public as well as the cinema producer. He knows we have the souls of flunkeys. I am no better than the rest. When I knew Mr. Kearley, the grocer, I looked on him as a man and an equal. When he blossomed into Lord Devonport I felt that he had taken wings and flown beyond my humble circle. I feel the flunkey strong in me. I hate him, but I cannot kill him.

It is not the fact that inferior people get titles which should give us concern. It is not even that they get them so often by secret gifts, by impudent touting, by base service. These things are known, and they are no worse to-day than they have always been. Every honours list makes us gape and smile. If we see a really distinguished name in it we feel surprise and a certain sorrow. What is he doing in that galley? I confess I have never felt the same towards J.M. Barrie since he allowed a tag to be stuck on to a great name. What did he want with a tag that any tuft hunter in public life can get? It is only littleness that can gain from titles. Greatness is always dishonoured by them. Fancy Sir Charles Dickens, or Lord Dickens, or Lord Darwin, or Lord Carlyle, or Lord Shakespeare, or John Milton masquerading as the Marquis of Oxfordshire. Yes, Tennyson became a lord and was the smaller man for the fact. Who does not recall Swinburne's scornful comment:

    Stoop, Chaucer, stoop;
    Keats, Shelley, Burns bow down.

And who did not share the feeling of Mark Pattison at the pitiful anti-climax? "There certainly is something about Tennyson," he said, "that you find in very few poets; in saying what he says in the best words in which it can be said, he is quite Sophoclean. But this business of the peerage! It is really so sad that I hardly like to speak of it. Compare that with Milton's ending and mark the difference."

But it is the corrupting effect of titles on the national currency that is their real offence. They falsify our ideals. They set up shams in place of realities. They turn our minds from the gold to the guinea stamp and make us worship the false idols of social ambition. Our thinking as a people can't be right when our symbols are wrong. We can't have the root of democracy in our souls if the tree flowers into coronets and gee-gaws. France has the real jewel of democracy and we have only got the paste. Do not think that this is only a small matter touching the surface of our national character. It is a poison in the blood that infects us with the deadly sins of servility and snobbery. And already it is permeating even the free life of the Colonies. If I were an Australian or a Canadian I would fight this hateful taint of the old world with all my might. I would make it a criminal offence for a Colonial to accept a title. As for us, I know only one remedy. It is to make a title a money transaction. Let us have a tariff for titles. If American millionaires, like Lord Astor, want them let them pay for them at the market rate. It would be at least a more wholesome method than the present system. And it would bring the whole imposture into contempt. Nobody would have a title when everybody knew what he had paid for it. It is a poor way of getting rid of the abomination compared with the French way, but then we are some centuries behind the French people in these things.

ON THE DISLIKE OF LAWYERS

"I have spent a large part of my life in advising business men how to get out of their difficulties," said Mr. Asquith the other day. It was a statement wrung from him by a deputation which was inflicting on him the familiar talk about lawyers and the need of "business men" to run our affairs. I suppose there has been no more banal cackle in this war than the cackle about a "business Government" and the pestilence of lawyers.

I am not a lawyer, and have no particular affection for lawyers. I keep out of their professional reach as much as possible. But it is as foolish to ban them as a class as it would be to assume that a grocer or a tailor is a great statesman because he is a successful grocer or tailor. Running an empire is quite a different job from running a grocery establishment, and it is folly to suppose that because a man has been successful in buying and selling bacon and butter for his own profit he can ipso facto govern a nation with wisdom and prudence. Who are the most distinguished grocers of to-day? They are Lord Devonport and Sir Thomas Lipton. Both excellent men, I've no doubt. But would you like to hand over the Premiership to either of them? Now, would you?

The great statesman has to prove himself a great statesman just as the great grocer has to prove himself a great grocer. He has to prove it by the qualities of statesmanship exercised in the full glare of publicity. If the grocer makes a howler in his trade the world knows nothing about it. If the statesman makes a howler all the world knows about it. He has to emerge to the front in the most public of all battles, and you may be sure that no one comes to eminence without great powers which have passed the test of the fiercest trials. He does not evade that test because he is a lawyer. Mr. Asquith had to survive it just as Mr. Chamberlain, who was a maker of nails, had to survive it, just as Mr. Balfour, who is a landowner, had to survive it. No one said to Mr. Chamberlain, "Yah! nailmaker," or to Mr. Balfour, "Yah! landlord," thinking he had disposed of them. Why should you suppose that when you have said "Yah! lawyer" to Mr. Asquith or Mr. Lloyd George you have disposed of them?

Is the idea that lawyers are more selfish than other people—brewers, or soap boilers, or bankers? I doubt it. They are just the average, and include good and bad like any other class. Judge Jeffreys was a monster; but, on the other hand, it was the lawyers of the seventeenth century who largely saved the liberties of this country. I doubt whether the world has ever produced a wiser, more unselfish, more heroic figure than Lincoln. And he was a lawyer. I doubt whether any man in politics to-day has made such financial sacrifices as Mr. Asquith has made. He had a practice at the Bar which, I believe, brought him in £10,000 a year, and had he devoted himself to it instead of to politics, would have brought him in far more, and he gave it up for a job immeasurably more burdensome that has never brought him more than £5000. He might have been Lord Chancellor, with a comfortable seat on the Woolsack and £10,000 a year, and he chose instead to sit in the House of Commons every day to be the target of every disappointed placeman. Ah, you say, but look at the glory. Well, look at it. I would, as Danton said, rather keep sheep on the hillside than meddle with the government of men. It is the most ungrateful calling on earth. And, whatever other defects may be attributed to Mr. Asquith, a passion for such an empty thing as glory is not one of them. You will discover more passion for glory in Mr. Churchill in five minutes than you will discover in Mr. Asquith in five years. And Mr. Churchill is not a lawyer.

But this dislike of lawyers in the abstract has a certain basis. It is an old dislike. You remember that remark of Johnson's when he was asked on a certain occasion who was the man who had left the room: "I don't like saying unpleasant things about a man behind his back; but I believe he is an attorney." And Carlyle was not much more civil when he described a barrister as "a loaded blunderbuss "—if you bought him he blew your opponent's brains out; if your opponent bought him he blew yours out. His weapon is the law, but his object is not justice. As often as not he aims at defeating justice, and the more skilful a lawyer he is the more injustice he succeeds in doing. It is this detachment from the merits of a case, this deliberate repudiation of conscience in his business relations that makes him so suspect. Of course he has a very sound reply. "It is my business to put my client's case, and my opponent's business to put his client's case. And it is the business of the judge and jury to see that justice is done as between us." That is true, but it does not get rid of the suspicion that attaches to a man who fights for the guilty or the innocent with equal fervour.

And then he deals in such a tricky article. When Sancho Panza was Governor of the Island of Barataria he administered justice. If he had been the Governor of the Island of Britain he would have administered the law, and his decisions would have been very different. Law has about the same relation to justice that grammar has to Shakespeare. If Shakespeare were put in the dock and tried by the grammarians he would be condemned as a rogue and vagabond, and, similarly, justice is not infrequently hanged by the lawyers. We must have law just as we must have grammar, but we have no love for either of them. They are dry, bloodless sciences, and we look askance at those who practice them. You may be the greatest rascal of your time, but if you study the law and keep within its letter the strong lance of justice cannot reach you. No, law which is the servant of justice often betrays his master.

But do not let us be unjust. If law to-day is more nearly the instrument of justice than it has ever been, it is the great lawyers to whom we chiefly owe the fact. There are Dodsons and Foggs in the law, but there are also Pyms and Pratts who have upheld the liberties of this country in the teeth of tyrant kings and servile Parliaments.

ON THE CHEERFULNESS OF THE BLIND

I was coming off a Tube train last evening when some one said to me: "Will you please give this gentleman an arm to the lift? He is blind." I did so, and found, as I usually find in the case of the blind, that my companion was uncommonly talkative and cheerful. This gaiety of the blind is a perpetual wonder to me. It is as though the outer light being quenched an inner light of the spirit illuminates the darkness. Outside the night is black and dread, but inside there is warmth and brightness. The world is narrowed to the circle of one's own mind, but the very limitation feeds the flame of the spirit, and makes it leap higher. It was the most famous of blind Englishmen who in the days of his darkness made the blind Samson say:—

    He that hath light within his own clear breast
    May sit i' th' centre and enjoy bright day.

And it has been remarked in many cases in which men have gone blind that their cheerfulness so far from being diminished has by some miracle gained a new strength. In no case of which I have had any knowledge has it apparently had the contrary effect. The zest of living seems heightened. Not long ago Mr. Galsworthy wrote to the Times a letter in which he spoke with pity of the unhappiness of the blind, and there promptly descended on him an avalanche of protest from the blind themselves. I suppose there was never a man who seemed to have a more intense pleasure in life than the late Dr. Campbell, the founder of the Normal School for the Blind, who worked wonders in extending the range of the activities of the blind, and himself did such apparently impossible things as riding a bicycle and climbing mountains.

Nor was the case of Mr. Pulitzer, the famous proprietor of the New York World, less remarkable. Night came down on him with terrible suddenness. He was watching the sunset from his villa in the Mediterranean one evening when he said: "How quickly the sun has set." "But it has not set," said his companion. "Oh, yes, it has; it is quite dark," he answered. In that moment he had gone stone blind. But I am told by those who knew him that his vivacity of mind was never greater than in the years of his blindness.

My friend Mr. G.W.E. Russell has a theory that the advantage of the blind over the deaf and dumb in this matter of cheerfulness is perhaps more apparent than real. He points out that it is in company that the blind is least conscious of his misfortune, and that the deaf and dumb is most conscious of it. That is certainly the case. In conversation the sightless are on an equality with the seeing, while the deaf and dumb are shut up in a terrible isolation. The fact that they see is not their gain but their loss. They watch the movement of the lips and the signs of laughter, but this only adds to the bitterness of the prison of soundlessness in which they dwell. Hence the appearance of gloom. On the other hand, in solitude the deaf and dumb has the advantage. All the colour and movement of life is before him, while the blind is not only denied that vision of the outside world, but has a restriction of movement that the other does not share. Mr. Russell's conclusion, therefore, is that while the happiest moments of the blind are those when he is observed, the happiest of the deaf and dumb are when he is not observed.

There is some measure of truth in this, but I believe, nevertheless, that the common impression is right, and that, judged by the test of the cheerful acceptance of affliction, the loss of sight is less depressing than the loss of hearing and speech. And this for a very obvious reason. After all, the main interest in life is in easy, familiar intercourse with our fellows. I love to watch a golden sunset, to walk in the high beech woods in spring—or, for that matter, in summer or autumn or winter—to see the apples reddening on the trees, and the hedgerows thick with blackberries. But this is the setting of my drama—the scenery of the play, not the play itself. It is its human contacts that give life its vivacity and intensity. And it is the ear and tongue that are the channels of the cheerful interplay of mind with mind. In that interplay the blind man has full measure and brimming over. His very affliction intensifies his part in the human comedy and gives him a peculiar delight in homely intercourse. He is not merely at his ease in the human family: he is the centre of it. He fulfils Johnson's test of a good fellow: he is "a clubbable man."

And even in the enjoyment of the external world it may be doubted whether he does not find as much mental stimulus as the deaf-and-dumb. He cannot see the sunset, but he hears the shout of the cuckoo, the song of the lark, "the hum of bees, and rustle of the bladed corn." And if, as usually happens, he has music in his soul, he has a realm of gold for his inheritance that makes life a perpetual holiday. Have you heard Mr. William Wolstenholme, the composer, improvising on the piano? If not, you have no idea what a jolly world the world of sounds can be to the blind. Of course, the case of the musician is hardly a fair test. With him, hearing is life and deafness death. There is no more pathetic story than that of Beethoven breaking the strings of the piano in his vain efforts to make his immortal harmonies penetrate his soundless ears. Can we doubt that had he been afflicted with blindness instead of deafness the tragedy of his life would have been immeasurably relieved? What peace, could he have heard his Ninth Symphony, would have slid into his soul. Blind Milton, sitting at his organ, was a less tragic figure and probably a happier man than Milton with a useless ear-trumpet would have been. Perhaps without the stimulus of the organ he could not have fashioned that song which, as Macaulay says in his grandiloquent way, "would not have misbecome the lips of those ethereal beings whom he saw with that inner eye, which no calamity could darken, flinging down on the jasper pavements their crowns of amaranth and gold."

It is probable that in a material sense blindness is the most terrible affliction that can befall us; but I am here speaking only of its spiritual effects, and in this respect the deprivation of hearing and speech seems to involve a more forlorn state than the deprivation of sight. The one affliction means spiritual loneliness: the other deepens the spiritual intimacies of life. It was a man who had gone blind late in life who said: "I am thankful it is my sight which has gone rather than my hearing. The one has shut me off from the sun: the other would have shut me off from life."

ON TAXING VANITY

That quaint idea of Sir Edward Clarke's that, as a revenue expedient in time of war, we should impose a tax on those who have names as well as numbers on their garden gates has a principle in it which is capable of wide extension. It is the principle of taxing us on our vanities. I am not suggesting that there is not also a practical point in Sir Edward's idea. There is no doubt that this custom of giving our houses names is the source of much unnecessary labour and irritation to other people—postmen, tradesmen, debt collectors, and errand boys. Mr. Smythe—formerly Smith—of 236, Belinda Avenue, is easily discoverable, but what are you to do about Mr. Smythe, of Chatsworth House, Belinda Avenue, on a dark night? How are you to find him? There are 350 houses in Belinda Avenue, all as like as two peas, and though Mr. Smythe has a number, he never admits it. Chatsworth House is where he lives, and if you want him it's Chatsworth House that you have to find.

The other night a friend of mine was called to the door at a late hour. It was dark and raining and dismal. At the door stood a coal-heaver. "Please, sir," he said, "can you tell me where Balmoral is? I've got a load of coal to take there, and I've been up and down this road in the dark twice, and can't make out where it is." "It's the fourth house from here to the right," said my friend, and the coal-heaver thanked him and went away. That illustrates the practical case for a tax on house names.

But it was not that case which was in Sir Edward's mind. His view is that we ought to pay for the innocent vanity of living at Chatsworth House instead of 236, Belinda Avenue. Now if that principle is carried into effect, I see no end to its operation. I am not sure that Sir Edward himself would escape. I have often admired his magnificent side-whiskers. I doubt whether there is a pair of side-whiskers to match them in London. That he is proud of them goes without saying. Nobody could possibly have whiskers like them without feeling proud of them. I feel that if I had such whiskers I should never be away from the looking-glass. And consider the pleasurable employment they give in idle moments. Satan, it is said, has mischief still for idle hands to do. But no one with such streamers as Sir Edward's can ever have idle hands. When you have nothing else to do with them you stroke your whiskers and purr. Certainly they are worth paying for. I think they would be dirt cheap at a tax of £1 a side.

And then there are white spats. I don't know how you regard white spats, but I never see them without feeling that something ought to be done about it. I daresay the people who wear them are quite nice people, but I think they ought to suffer in some way for the jolt they give to the sensibilities of humbler mortals who could no more wear white spats than they could stand on their head in the middle of Fleet Street. I am aware that white spats are often only a sort of business advertisement. I have known careers founded on a pair of white spats. There is Simpkins, for example. I remember quite well when he first came to the club in white spats. We all smiled and said it was like Simpkins. He was pushful, meant to get on, and had set up white spats as a part of his stock-in-trade. We knew Simpkins, of course, and discounted the white spats; but they made a great impression on his clients, and he forged ahead from that day. Now he wears a fur-lined coat, drives his own motor-car, and has a man in livery to receive you at the door. But the foundation of his fortunes were the white spats. He understood that maxim of Rochefoucauld that "to succeed in the world you must appear to have succeeded already," and the white spats did the trick. I think he ought to pay for them—£2 a spat is my figure.

Most of us, too, I think, will agree that, if vanity is to be taxed, the wearing of an eyeglass cannot be overlooked. It is impossible to dissociate vanity from the use of the monocle. There are some people, it is true, who wear an eyeglass naturally and unaffectedly, as though they were really born with it and had forgotten that it was there. I saw a lady in a bus the other day who used an eyeglass and yet carried it so well, with such simple propriety and naturalness, that you could not feel that there was any vanity in the matter. But that is an exception. Ordinarily the wearing of a monocle seems like an announcement to the world that you are a person of consequence. Disraeli knew that. His remark, when Chamberlain made his first appearance in the House, that "at least he wore his eyeglass like a gentleman," showed that he knew that, in general, it was an affectation. It was so in his own case, of course. I hope Sir Edward Clarke will agree that £5 is a reasonable tariff for an eyeglass.

There are a thousand other vanities more or less innocent, that will occur to you in looking round. I should put a very stiff tax on painted cheeks and hair-dyes. Any lady dyeing her hair once would be taxed £5 for the privilege. If, growing tired of auburn, she decided to change again to a raven hue, she would pay £10. The tax, in fact, might be doubled for every change of colour. If rather than pay the tax Mrs. Fitzgibbons Jones resolves to wear her hair as nature arranged that she should, life will be simplified for me. The first time I met Mrs. Fitzgibbons Jones she had black hair. A year later I met her husband with a lady with chestnut hair. He introduced me to her as his wife, and she said we had met before. I said I thought she was mistaken, and it was not until we had parted that I realised that it was the same lady with another head of hair and another system of coloration altogether.

The weak point about Sir Edward's idea as a financial expedient is that so few of our vanities would survive the attention of the tax-collector. Personally, I should have the name-plate off my gate at once. Indeed, I'm not sure I'll not have it off as it is. It was there when I came, and I have always been a little ashamed of its foppery, and have long used only the number. Now the name seems rather more absurd than ever. Its pretentiousness is out of tune with these times. I think many of us are getting ashamed of our little vanities without the help of the tax-collector.

ON THOUGHTS AT FIFTY

Stevenson, it will be remembered, once assigned his birthday to a little girl—or was it a boy?—of his acquaintance. The child was fond of birthdays, while he had reached a time of life when they had ceased to have any interest for him. Most of us, if we live long enough, experience that indifference. The birthday emotion vanishes with the toys that awaken it. I remember when life was a journey from one birthday to another, the tedium of which was only relieved by such agreeable incidents as Christmas, Easter, and the school holidays. But for many years I have stumbled up against my birthday, as it were, with a shock of surprise, have given it a nod of recognition as one might greet an ancient acquaintance with whom one has lost sympathy, and have passed on without a further thought about the occasion.

But to-day it is different. One cannot pass over one's fiftieth birthday without feeling that an event has happened. Fifty! Why, the Psalmist's limit is only seventy. Fifty from seventy. An easy sum, but what an impressive answer! Twenty years, and they the years of the sere, the yellow leaf. Only twenty more times to hear the cuckoo calling over the valley and see the dark beech woods bursting into tender green. I look back twenty years, and it seems only a span. And yet how remote fifty seemed in those days! It was so remote as to be hardly worth thinking about. To be fifty was to be among the old fellows, to be on the shelf, to have become an antiquity.

And now here am I at fifty, and so far from feeling like an antiquity, I feel as much of a young fellow as at any time of my life. I had feared that when middle age overtook me I should feel middle-aged and full of sad longings for the old toys and the old pleasures. How would life be tolerable when cricket, for example, had ceased to play an important part in it? Never again to have the ecstasy of a drive along "the carpet" to the boundary or, with a flash of the arm, snapping an opponent in the slips. What a dreary desolation life must be, stripped of those joys! And on the contrary I find that the spirit of youth is no more dependent on cricket than it is on the taste for lollipops. It consists in the contented acceptance of the things that are possible to us. Do not suppose, young fellow, that you are any younger than I am because you can jump five feet eight and I have ceased to want to jump at all. The feeling of youth is something much deeper and more enduring than the ability to jump five feet eight. It may be as vigorous at eighty as it is at eighteen. It is only its manner of expression which is changed. Holmes never admitted that he had grown old. "I am eighty-three young to-day," he would say. And Johnson, with his old age and his infirmities, still insisted that he was "a young fellow"—as, indeed, he was, for where shall we find such freshness of spirit, such a defiance of the tooth of Time as in that grand old boy?

Youth, in fact, is not a physical affair at all, but an affair of the soul. You may be spiritually bald-headed at twenty-five or a romping young blade at eighty. Byron was only thirty-four when he wrote:—

    I am ashes where once I was fire.
      And the soul in my bosom is dead;
    What I loved I now merely admire,
      And my heart is as grey as my head.

Perhaps there was some affectation in this, for Byron was always dramatising himself. But that he died an old man at thirty-six is as indisputable as that Browning died a young man at seventy-seven, with that triumphant envoi of Asolando as his last expression of the eternal youth of the soul.

In thinking of old age, the mistake is to assume that the spirit must decay with the body. Of course, if the body is maltreated it will react on the spirit. But the natural decline of the physical powers leaves the healthy spirit untouched with age, should indeed leave it strengthened—glowing not with passion but with a steadier fire. When we are young in years our eager spirit cries for the moon.

    We look before and after,
      And pine for what is not.

But as we get older we learn to be satisfied with something nearer than the moon. The horizon of our hopes and ambitions narrows, but the sky above is not less deep, and we make the wonderful discovery that the things that matter are very near to us. It is the homing of the spirit. We have been avid of the "topless grandeurs" of life, and we return to find that the spiritual satisfactions we sought were all the time within very easy reach. And in cultivating those satisfactions intensively we make another discovery. We find that this is the true way to the "topless grandeurs" themselves, for those topless grandeurs are not without us but within.

But I am afraid I am sermonising, and I do not want to sermonise, though if ever a man may be allowed to sermonise it is when he is completing his half-century. Let me as an antidote recall a little story which the present Bishop of Chester once told me over the dinner table, for it contains a practical recipe for keeping the heart young. He was in his earlier days associated with Archdeacon Jones of Liverpool. The Archdeacon, then over eighty, had been tutor to Gladstone, and one day the future Bishop turned the conversation into a reminiscent channel, and sought to evoke the Archdeacon's memories of the long past. Presently the Archdeacon abruptly changed the subject by asking, "What was the concert of the Philharmonic like last night?" And then, in answer to the obvious surprise which the question had aroused, he added, "Although I am an old man, I want to keep my heart young, and the best way of doing that is not to let one's thoughts live in the past, but to keep them in tune with the life around one."

The truth is that every stage of the journey has its own interests. Probably none is better than another, but my own preference has always been for that stage which I happen to be doing at the time. When I was twenty I thought there was no age like twenty, and now I am fifty I have transferred my enthusiasm to fifty. There is no age like it, I feel, for all-round enjoyment. And I have a strong conviction that if I have the good fortune to reach sixty I shall be found declaring that there is no age like sixty. And why not? It is pleasant to see the sun on the morning hills, but it is not less pleasant to walk home when the shadows are lengthening and the cool of the evening has come.

THE ONE-EYED CAT

"There's Peggy with that horrid cat again—the one-eyed cat from over the fence." I looked out as I heard the ejaculation, and there in truth coming down the garden path was Peggy bearing affectionately in her arms the one-eyed cat from over the fence. Peggy likes the animal in spite of its one eye. I am not sure that she does not like it all the more because of its one eye. I think she has an idea that if she nurses the cat it forgets that it has only one eye and recovers its happiness. She has a passion for all four-legged creatures. I have seen her spend a whole day picking handfuls of grass in the orchard and running with them to the donkey or the horse standing patiently in the neighbour's paddock, and when she hasn't animals to play with she will put a horseshoe on each hand and each foot, and then you will hear from above the plod-plod-plod of a horse going its daily round. But while she has a comprehensive affection for all four-legged things, her most fervent love is reserved for the halt and the blind.

It is only among children that we find the quality of charity sufficiently strong to forgive deformity. The natural instinct is to turn away from any physical imperfection. It is the instinct of the race for the preservation of its forms. We call these forms beauty and the departure from them ugliness, and it is from "beauty's rose," as Shakespeare says, that "we desire increase." If you shudder at the touch of a withered hand or at the sight of a one-eyed cat, it is because you feel that they are a menace to the established forms of life. You are unconsciously playing the part of policeman for nature. You are the guardian of its traditions when you blush at the glance of two eyes and shudder at the glance of one.

And yet it is not impossible to fall in love with the physically defective and sincerely to believe that they are beautiful. Take that incident mentioned by Descartes. He said that when he was a child he used to play with a little girl who had a squint, and that to the end of his days he liked people who squinted. In this case it was the associations of memory that gave a glamour to deformity and made it beautiful. The squint brought back to him the memory of the Golden Age, and through the mist of that memory it was transmuted into loveliness.

Nor is it memory alone that will work the miracle. Intellectual sympathy will do it, too. Wilkes was renowned for his ugliness, but he claimed that, given half an hour's start, he would win the smiles of any woman against any competitor. And when one of his lady admirers, engaged in defending him, was reminded that he squinted badly, she replied: "Of course he does; but he doesn't squint more than a man of his genius ought to squint." Nor was it women alone whom the fellow fascinated. Who can forget the scene when Tom Davies brought him into the company of Dr. Johnson, who hated Wilkes' Radicalism, and would never willingly have consented to meet him? For a time Johnson refused to unbend, but at last he could hold out no longer, and fell a victim to the charm of Wilkes' talk.

In the same way, Johnson believed his wife to be a woman of perfect beauty. To the rest of the world she was extraordinarily plain and commonplace, but to Johnson she was the mirror of beauty. "Pretty creature," he would say with a sigh in referring to her after her death.

And there, I fancy, we touch the root of the matter. The sense of beauty is in one respect an affair of the soul, and only superficially an aesthetic quality. We start with a common prejudice in favour of certain physical forms. They are the forms with which nature has made us familiar, and we seek to perpetuate them. But if the conventionally beautiful form is allied with spiritual ugliness it ceases to be beautiful to us, and if the conventionally ugly form is allied with spiritual beauty that beauty irradiates the physical deficiency. The soul dominates the senses. Francis Thompson expresses the idea very beautifully when he says:—

    I cannot tell what beauty is her dole,
    Who cannot see her features for her soul.
    As birds see not the casement for the sky.

But there is another sense in which beauty is the most matter-of-fact thing. I can conceive that if the human family had developed only one eye, and that planted in the centre of the forehead, the appearance of a person with two eyes would be as offensive to our sense of beauty as a hand that consisted not of fingers but of thumbs. We should go to the show to see the two-eyed man with just the same feelings as we go now to see the bearded woman. We should not go to admire his two eyes, any more than we go to admire the beard; we should go to enjoy a pleasant sense of disgust at his misfortune and a comfortable satisfaction at the fact that we had not been the victims of such a calamity. We should roll our single eye with a proud feeling that we were in the true line of beauty, from which the two-eyed man in front was a hideous and fantastic departure.

Beauty, in short, is only a tribute which we pay to necessity. In equipping itself for the struggle for existence humanity has found that it is convenient to have two eyes and a stereoscopic vision, just as it is convenient to have four fingers on the hand and one thumb instead of five thumbs. Our members have been developed in the manner best fitted to enable us to fight our battle. And the more perfectly they fulfil that supreme condition the more beautiful we declare them to be. Our ideas of beauty, therefore, are not absolute; they are conditional. They are the humble servants of our necessity. Two eyes are necessary for us to get about our business, and so we fall in love with two eyes, and the more perfect they are for their work the more we fall in love with them, and the more beautiful we declare them to be.

I think that Peggy, nursing her one-eyed cat there in the sun, has not yet accepted our creed of beauty. She will be as conventional as the rest of us when her frocks are longer.

ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HATS

The other day I went into a hatter's to get my hat ironed. It had been ruffled by the weather, and I had a reason for wishing it to look as new and glossy as possible. And as I waited and watched the process of polishing, the hatter talked to me on the subject that really interested him—that is, the subject of hats and heads.

"Yes," said he, in reply to some remark I had made; "there's a wonderful difference in the shape of 'eads and the size. Now your 'ead is what you may call an ord'nary 'ead. I mean to say," he added, no doubt seeing a shadow of disappointment pass across my ordinary face, "I mean to say, it ain't what you would call extry-ord'nary. But there's some 'eads—well, look at that 'at there. It belongs to a gentleman with a wonderful funny-shaped 'ead, long and narrer and full of nobbles—'stror'nary 'ead 'e 'as. And as for sizes, it's wonderful what a difference there is. I do a lot of trade with lawyers, and it's astonishing the size of their 'eads. You'd be surprised. I suppose it's the amount of thinking they have to do that makes their 'eads swell. Now that 'at there belongs to Mr. ——— (mentioning the name of a famous lawyer), wonderful big 'ead 'e 'as—7-1/2—that's what 'e takes, and there's lots of 'em takes over 7.

"It seems to me," he went on, "that the size of the 'ead is according to the occupation. Now I used to be in a seaport town, and I used to serve a lot of ships' captains. 'Stror'nary the 'eads they have. I suppose it's the anxiety and worry they get, thinking about the tides and the winds and the icebergs and things…."

I went out of the shop with my ord'nary 'ead, conscious of the fact that I had made a poor impression on the hatter. To him I was only a 6-7/8 size, and consequently a person of no consequence. I should have liked to point out to him that it is not always the big heads that have the jewel in them. Of course, it is true that great men often have big heads. Bismarck's size was 7-1/4, so was Gladstone's, so was Campbell-Bannerman's. But on the other hand, Byron had a small head, and a very small brain. And didn't Goethe say that Byron was the finest brain that Europe had produced since Shakespeare? I should not agree in ordinary circumstances, but as a person with a smallish head, I am prepared in this connection to take Goethe's word on the subject. As Holmes points out, it is not the size of the brain but its convolutions that are important (I think, by the way, that Holmes had a small head). Now I should have liked to tell the hatter that though my head was small I had strong reason to believe that the convolutions of my brain were quite top-hole.

I did not do so and I only recall the incident now because it shows how we all get in the way of looking at life through our own particular peep-hole. Here is a man who sees all the world through the size of its hats. He reverences Jones because he takes 7-1/2; he dismisses Smith as of no account because he only takes 6-3/4. In some degree, we all have this restricted professional vision. The tailor runs his eye over your clothes and reckons you up according to the cut of your garments and the degree of shininess they display. You are to him simply a clothes-peg and your merit is in exact ratio to the clothes you carry. The bootmaker looks at your boots and takes your intellectual, social and financial measurement from their quality and condition. If you are down-at-the-heel, the glossy condition of your hat will not alter his opinion about you. The hat does not come in his range of vision. It is not a part of his criteria.

It is so with the dentist. He judges all the world by its teeth. One look in your mouth and he has settled and immovable convictions about your character, your habits, your physical condition, your position, and your mental attributes. He touches a nerve and you wince. "Ah," says he to himself, "this man takes too much alcohol and tobacco and tea and coffee." He sees the teeth are irregular. "Poor fellow," he says, "how badly he was brought up!" He observes that the teeth are neglected. "A careless fellow," he says. "Spends his money on follies and neglects his family I'll be bound." And by the time he has finished with you he feels that he could write your biography simply from the evidence of your teeth. And I daresay it would be as true as most biographies—and as false.

In the same way, the business man looks at life through the keyhole of his counting-house. The world to him is an "emporium," and he judges his neighbour by the size of his plate glass. And so with the financier. When one of the Rothschilds heard that a friend of his who had died had left only a million of money he remarked: "Dear me, dear me! I thought he was quite well off." His life had been a failure, because he had only put a million by for a rainy day. Thackeray expresses the idea perfectly in Vanity Fair:—

"You see," said old Osborne to George, "what comes of merit and industry and judicious speculations and that. Look at me and my banker's account. Look at your poor grandfather Sedley and his failure. And yet he was a better man than I was, this day twenty years—a better man I should say by twenty thousand pounds."

I fancy I, too, have my professional way of looking at things, and am disposed to judge men, not by what they do but by the skill they have in the use of words. And I know that when an artist comes into my house he "sizes me up" from the pictures on the wall, just as when the upholsterer comes he "places" me according to the style of the chairs and the quality of the carpet, or as when the gourmet comes he judges by the cooking and the wine. If you give him champagne he reverences you; if hock he puts you among the commonplace.

In short, we all go through life wearing spectacles coloured by our own tastes, our own calling, and our own prejudices, measuring our neighbours by our own tape-measure, summing them up according to our own private arithmetic. We see subjectively, not objectively; what we are capable of seeing, not what there is to be seen. It is not wonderful that we make so many bad guesses at that prismatic thing, the truth.

ON SEEING LONDON

I see that the Spectator, in reviewing a new book on the Tower, says that, whilst visitors to London usually visit that historic monument, Londoners themselves rarely visit it. There is, I suppose, a good deal of truth in this. I know a man who was born in London, and has spent all his working life in Fleet Street, who confesses that he has never yet been inside the Tower. It is not because he is lacking in interest. He has been to St. Peter's at Rome, and he went to Madrid largely to see the Prado. If the Tower had been on the other side of Europe, I think he would probably have made a pilgrimage to it, but it has been within a stone's-throw of him all his life, and therefore he has never found time to visit it.

It is so, more or less, with most of us. Apply the test to yourself or to your friends who live in London, and you will probably be astonished at the number of precious things that you and they have not seen—not because they are so distant, but because they are so near. Have you been to the Record Office, for example? I haven't, although it is within a couple of hundred yards of where I work and although I know it is rich in priceless treasures. I am always going, but "never get," as they say in Lancashire. It is too handy.

I was talking the other day to a City merchant who lives at Sydenham, and who has never seen Hampstead Heath. He had been travelling from Sydenham to the City for a quarter of a century, and has worn the rut so deep that he cannot get out of it, and has hardly more likelihood of seeing the Northern Heights than of visiting the mountains of the moon. Yet Hampstead Heath, which he could see in a morning for the cost of a threepenny ride in the Tube, is one of the incomparable things of Nature. I doubt whether there is such a wonderful open space within the limits of any other great city. It has hints of the seaside and the mountain, the moor and the down in most exquisite union, and the Spaniards Road is as noble a promenade as you will find anywhere.

This incuriousness is not a peculiarity of Londoners only. It is a part of that temporising habit that afflicts most of us. If a thing can be done at any time, then that is just the thing that never gets done. If my Fleet Street friend knew that the Tower was going to be blown to pieces by a Zeppelin to-morrow he would, I am sure, rush off to see it this afternoon. But he is conscious that he has a whole lifetime to see it in, and so he will never see it. We are most of us slackers at the bottom, and need the discipline of a timetable to keep us on the move. If I could put off writing this article till to-morrow I should easily convince myself that I hadn't time to write it to-day.

The point is very well expressed in that story of the Pope who received three American visitors in turn. "How long are you staying?" he said to the first. "Six months, your Holiness," was the reply. "You will be able to see something of Rome in that time," said the Pope. The second was staying three months. "You will see a great deal of Rome in three months," said the Pope. The third was only staying three weeks. "You'll see all there is to be seen in Rome in three weeks," was the Pope's comment. He was a good judge of human nature.

But if we Londoners are no worse than most people we certainly miss more, for there is no such book of revelation as this which we look at so differently. I love to walk its streets with those who know its secrets. Mr. John Burns is such a one. The very stones begin to be eloquent when he is about. They pour out memories at his invitation as the rock poured out water at the touch of Moses. The houses tell you who built them and who lived hi them and where their stone came from. The whole pageant of history passes before you, and you see the spot where Julius Caesar crossed the river at Battersea—where else should he cross?—you discover, it may be for the first time, the exquisite beauty of Waterloo Bridge, and learn what Canovas said about it. York Gate tells you of the long past when the Embankment was not, and when great nobles came through that archway to take the boat for Westminster or the Tower. He makes you dive out of the Strand to see a beautiful doorway, and out of Fleet Street to admire the Henry room. Every foot of Whitehall babbles its legends; you see Tyburn as our forefathers saw it, and George Fox meeting Cromwell there on his return from Ireland. In Westminster Hall he is at his best. You feel that he knew Rufus and all the masons who built that glorious fabric. In fact, you almost feel that he built it himself, so vividly does its story live in his mind and so strong is his sense of possession.

If I were a Dictator I would make him the Great Showman of London. I would have him taking us round and inspiring us with something of his own delight in our astonishing City. We should no longer look upon London then as if it were a sort of Bradshaw's Guide: we should find it as fascinating as a fairy tale, as full of human interest as a Canterbury Pilgrimage. We should never go to Snow Hill without memories of Fagin, or to Eastcheap without seeing Falstaff swaggering along its pavements. Bread Street would resound to us with the tread of young Milton, and Southwark with the echoes of Shakespeare's voice and the jolly laughter of the Pilgrims at the Tabard. Hogarth would accompany us about Covent Garden, and out of Bolt Court we should see the lumbering figure of Johnson emerging into his beloved Fleet Street. We would sit by the fountain in the Temple with Tom Pinch, and take a wherry to Westminster with Mr. Pepys. We should see London then as a great spiritual companionship, in which it is our privilege to have a fleeting part.

ON CATCHING THE TRAIN

Thank heaven! I have caught it…. I am in a corner seat, the compartment is not crowded, the train is about to start, and for an hour and a half, while we rattle towards that haven of solitude on the hill that I have written of aforetime, I can read, or think, or smoke, or sleep, or talk, or write as I choose. I think I will write, for I am in the humour for writing. Do you know what it is to be in the humour for writing—to feel that there is a head of steam somewhere that must blow off? It isn't so much that you have something you want to say as that you must say something. And, after all, what does the subject matter? Any peg will do to hang your hat on. The hat is the thing. That saying of Rameau fits the idea to perfection. Some one was asking that great composer if he did not find difficulty in selecting a subject. "Difficulty? A subject?" said Rameau. "Not at all. One subject is as good as another. Here, bring me the Dutch Gazette."

That is how I feel now, as the lights of London fade in our wake and the fresh air of the country blows in at the window. Subject? Difficulty? Here bring me the Dutch Gazette. But while any subject would serve there is one of particular interest to me at this moment. It came into my mind as I ran along the platform just now. It is the really important subject of catching trains. There are some people who make nothing of catching trains. They can catch trains with as miraculous an ease as Cinquevalli catches half-a-dozen billiard-balls. I believe they could catch trains in their sleep. They are never too early and never too late. They leave home or office with a quiet certainty of doing the thing that is simply stupefying. Whether they walk, or take a bus, or call a taxi, it is the same: they do not hurry, they do not worry, and when they find they are in time and that there's plenty of room they manifest no surprise.

I have in mind a man with whom I once went walking among the mountains on the French-Italian border. He was enormously particular about trains and arrangements the day or the week before we needed them, and he was wonderfully efficient at the job. But as the time approached for catching a train he became exasperatingly calm and leisured. He began to take his time over everything and to concern himself with the arrangements of the next day or the next week, as though he had forgotten all about the train that was imminent, or was careless whether he caught it or not. And when at last he had got to the train, he began to remember things. He would stroll off to get a time-table or to buy a book, or to look at the engine—especially to look at the engine. And the nearer the minute for starting the more absorbed he became in the mechanism of the thing, and the more animated was his explanation of the relative merits of the P.L.M. engine and the North-Western engine. He was always given up as lost, and yet always stepped in as the train was on the move, his manner aggravatingly unruffled, his talk pursuing the quiet tenor of his thought about engines or about what we should do the week after next.

Now I am different. I have been catching trains all my life, and all my life I have been afraid I shouldn't catch them. Familiarity with the habits of trains cannot get rid of a secret conviction that their aim is to give me the slip if it can be done. No faith in my own watch can affect my doubts as to the reliability of the watch of the guard or the station clock or whatever deceitful signal the engine-driver obeys. Moreover, I am oppressed with the possibilities of delay on the road to the station. They crowd in on me like the ghosts into the tent of King Richard. There may be a block in the streets, the bus may break down, the taxi-driver may be drunk or not know the way, or think I don't know the way, and take me round and round the squares as Tony Lumpkin drove his mother round and round the pond, or—in fact, anything may happen, and it is never until I am safely inside (as I am now) that I feel really happy.

Now, of course this is a very absurd weakness. I ought to be ashamed to confess it. I am ashamed to confess it. And that is the advantage of writing under a pen name. You can confess anything you like, and nobody thinks any the worse of you. You ease your own conscience, have a gaol delivery of your failings—look them, so to speak, straight in the face, and pass sentence on them—and still enjoy the luxury of not being found out. You have all the advantages of a conviction without the nuisance of the penalty. Decidedly, this writing under a pen name is a great easement of the soul.

It reminds me of an occasion on which I was climbing with a famous rock climber. I do not mind confessing (over my pen name) that I am not good on rocks. My companion on the rope kept addressing me at critical moments by the name of Saunders. My name, I rejoice to say, is not Saunders, and he knew it was not Saunders, but he had to call me something, and in the excitement of the moment could think of nothing but Saunders. Whenever I was slow in finding a handhold or foothold, there would come a stentorian instruction to Saunders to feel to the right or the left, or higher up or lower down. And I remember that I found it a great comfort to know that it was not I who was so slow, but that fellow Saunders. I seemed to see him as a laborious, futile person who would have been better employed at home looking after his hens. And so in these articles, I seem again to be impersonating the ineffable Saunders, of whom I feel at liberty to speak plainly. I see before me a long vista of self-revelations, the real title of which ought to be "The Showing Up of Saunders."

But to return to the subject. This train-fever is, of course, only a symptom. It proceeds from that apprehensiveness of mind that is so common and incurable an affliction. The complaint has been very well satirised by one who suffered from it. "I have had many and severe troubles in my life," he said, "but most of them never happened." That is it. We people who worry about the trains and similar things live in a world of imaginative disaster. The heavens are always going to fall on us. We look ahead, like Christian, and see the lions waiting to devour us, and when we find they are only poor imitation lions, our timorous imagination is not set at rest, but invents other lions to scare us out of our wits.

And yet intellectually we know that these apprehensions are worthless. Experience has taught us that it is not the things we fear that come to pass, but the things of which we do not dream. The bolt comes from the blue. We take elaborate pains to guard our face, and get a thump in the small of the back. We propose to send the fire-engine to Ulster, and turn to see Europe in flames. Cowper put the case against all "fearful saints" (and sinners) when he said:

    The clouds ye so much dread
    Are big with mercy, and will break
    With blessings on your head.

It is the clouds you don't dread that swamp you. Cowper knew, for he too was an apprehensive mortal, and it is only the apprehensive mortal who really knows the full folly of his apprehensiveness.

Now, save once, I have never lost a train in my life. The exception was at Calais when the Brussels express did, in defiance of the time-table, really give me and others the slip, carrying with it my bag containing my clothes and the notes of a most illuminating lecture. I chased that bag all through Northern France and Belgium, inquiring at wayside stations, wiring to junctions, hunting among the mountains of luggage at Lille.

It was at Lille that—-But the train is slowing down. There is the slope of the hillside, black against the night sky, and among the trees I see the glimmer of a light beckoning me as the lonely lamp in Greenhead Ghyll used to beckon Wordsworth's Michael. The night is full of stars, the landscape glistens with a late frost: it will be a jolly two miles' tramp to that beacon on the hill.