The Second Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

It was only a piece of broken glass.  From its shape and colour, I should say it had, in its happier days, formed portion of a cheap scent-bottle.  Lying isolated on the grass, shone upon by the early morning sun, it certainly appeared at its best.  It attracted him.

He cocked his head, and looked at it with his right eye.  Then he hopped round to the other side, and looked at it with his left eye.  With either optic it seemed equally desirable.

That he was an inexperienced young rook goes without saying.  An older bird would not have given a second glance to the thing.  Indeed, one would have thought his own instinct might have told him that broken glass would be a mistake in a bird’s nest.  But its glitter drew him too strongly for resistance.  I am inclined to suspect that at some time, during the growth of his family tree, there must have occurred a mésalliance, perhaps worse.  Possibly a strain of magpie blood?—one knows the character of magpies, or rather their lack of character—and such things have happened.  But I will not pursue further so painful a train: I throw out the suggestion as a possible explanation, that is all.

He hopped nearer.  Was it a sweet illusion, this flashing fragment of rainbow; a beautiful vision to fade upon approach, typical of so much that is un-understandable in rook life?  He made a dart forward and tapped it with his beak.  No, it was real—as fine a lump of jagged green glass as any newly-married rook could desire, and to be had for the taking.  She would be pleased with it.  He was a well-meaning bird; the mere upward inclination of his tail suggested earnest though possibly ill-directed endeavour.

He turned it over.  It was an awkward thing to carry; it had so very many corners.  But he succeeded at last in getting it firmly between his beak, and in haste, lest some other bird should seek to dispute with him its possession, at once flew off with it.

A second rook who had been watching the proceedings from the lime tree, called to a third who was passing.  Even with my limited knowledge of the language I found it easy to follow the conversation: it was so obvious.

“Issachar!”

“Hallo!”

“What do you think?  Zebulan’s found a piece of broken bottle.  He’s going to line his nest with it.”

“No!”

“God’s truth.  Look at him.  There he goes, he’s got it in his beak.”

“Well, I’m—!”

And they both burst into a laugh.

But Zebulan heeded them not.  If he overheard, he probably put down the whole dialogue to jealousy.  He made straight for his tree.  By standing with my left cheek pressed close against the window-pane, I was able to follow him.  He is building in what we call the Paddock elms—a suburb commenced only last season, but rapidly growing.  I wanted to see what his wife would say.

At first she said nothing.  He laid it carefully down on the branch near the half-finished nest, and she stretched up her head and looked at it.

Then she looked at him.  For about a minute neither spoke.  I could see that the situation was becoming strained.  When she did open her beak, it was with a subdued tone, that had a vein of weariness running through it.

“What is it?” she asked.

He was evidently chilled by her manner.  As I have explained, he is an inexperienced young rook.  This is clearly his first wife, and he stands somewhat in awe of her.

“Well, I don’t exactly know what it’s called,” he answered.

“Oh.”

“No.  But it’s pretty, isn’t it?” he added.  He moved it, trying to get it where the sun might reach it.  It was evident he was admitting to himself that, seen in the shade, it lost much of its charm.

“Oh, yes; very pretty,” was the rejoinder; “perhaps you’ll tell me what you’re going to do with it.”

The question further discomforted him.  It was growing upon him that this thing was not going to be the success he had anticipated.  It would be necessary to proceed warily.

“Of course, it’s not a twig,” he began.

“I see it isn’t.”

“No.  You see, the nest is nearly all twigs as it is, and I thought—”

“Oh, you did think.”

“Yes, my dear.  I thought—unless you are of opinion that it’s too showy—I thought we might work it in somewhere.”

Then she flared out.

“Oh, did you?  You thought that a good idea.  An A1 prize idiot I seem to have married, I do.  You’ve been gone twenty minutes, and you bring me back an eight-cornered piece of broken glass, which you think we might ‘work into’ the nest.  You’d like to see me sitting on it for a month, you would.  You think it would make a nice bed for the children to lie on.  You don’t think you could manage to find a packet of mixed pins if you went down again, I suppose.  They’d look pretty ‘worked in’ somewhere, don’t you think?—Here, get out of my way.  I’ll finish this nest by myself.”  She always had been short with him.

She caught up the offending object—it was a fairly heavy lump of glass—and flung it out of the tree with all her force.  I heard it crash through the cucumber frame.  That makes the seventh pane of glass broken in that cucumber frame this week.  The couple in the branch above are the worst.  Their plan of building is the most extravagant, the most absurd I ever heard of.  They hoist up ten times as much material as they can possibly use; you might think they were going to build a block, and let it out in flats to the other rooks.  Then what they don’t want they fling down again.  Suppose we built on such a principle?  Suppose a human husband and wife were to start erecting their house in Piccadilly Circus, let us say; and suppose the man spent all the day steadily carrying bricks up the ladder while his wife laid them, never asking her how many she wanted, whether she didn’t think he had brought up sufficient, but just accumulating bricks in a senseless fashion, bringing up every brick he could find.  And then suppose, when evening came, and looking round, they found they had some twenty cart-loads of bricks lying unused upon the scaffold, they were to commence flinging them down into Waterloo Place.  They would get themselves into trouble; somebody would be sure to speak to them about it.  Yet that is precisely what those birds do, and nobody says a word to them.  They are supposed to have a President.  He lives by himself in the yew tree outside the morning-room window.  What I want to know is what he is supposed to be good for.  This is the sort of thing I want him to look into.  I would like him to be worming underneath one evening when those two birds are tidying up: perhaps he would do something then.  I have done all I can.  I have thrown stones at them, that, in the course of nature, have returned to earth again, breaking more glass.  I have blazed at them with a revolver; but they have come to regard this proceeding as a mere expression of light-heartedness on my part, possibly confusing me with the Arab of the Desert, who, I am given to understand, expresses himself thus in moments of deep emotion.  They merely retire to a safe distance to watch me; no doubt regarding me as a poor performer, inasmuch as I do not also dance and shout between each shot.  I have no objection to their building there, if they only would build sensibly.  I want somebody to speak to them to whom they will pay attention.

You can hear them in the evening, discussing the matter of this surplus stock.

“Don’t you work any more,” he says, as he comes up with the last load, “you’ll tire yourself.”

“Well, I am feeling a bit done up,” she answers, as she hops out of the nest and straightens her back.

“You’re a bit peckish, too, I expect,” he adds sympathetically.  “I know I am.  We will have a scratch down, and be off.”

“What about all this stuff?” she asks, while titivating herself; “we’d better not leave it about, it looks so untidy.”

“Oh, we’ll soon get rid of that,” he answers.  “I’ll have that down in a jiffy.”

To help him, she seizes a stick and is about to drop it.  He darts forward and snatches it from her.

“Don’t you waste that one,” he cries, “that’s a rare one, that is.  You see me hit the old man with it.”

And he does.  What the gardener says, I will leave you to imagine.

Judged from its structure, the rook family is supposed to come next in intelligence to man himself.  Judging from the intelligence displayed by members of certain human families with whom I have come in contact, I can quite believe it.  That rooks talk I am positive.  No one can spend half-an-hour watching a rookery without being convinced of this.  Whether the talk be always wise and witty, I am not prepared to maintain; but that there is a good deal of it is certain.  A young French gentleman of my acquaintance, who visited England to study the language, told me that the impression made upon him by his first social evening in London was that of a parrot-house.  Later on, when he came to comprehend, he, of course, recognized the brilliancy and depth of the average London drawing-room talk; but that is how, not comprehending, it impressed him at first.  Listening to the riot of a rookery is much the same experience.  The conversation to us sounds meaningless; the rooks themselves would probably describe it as sparkling.

There is a Misanthrope I know who hardly ever goes into Society.  I argued the question with him one day.  “Why should I?” he replied; “I know, say, a dozen men and women with whom intercourse is a pleasure; they have ideas of their own which they are not afraid to voice.  To rub brains with such is a rare and goodly thing, and I thank Heaven for their friendship; but they are sufficient for my leisure.  What more do I require?  What is this ‘Society’ of which you all make so much ado?  I have sampled it, and I find it unsatisfying.  Analyze it into its elements, what is it?  Some person I know very slightly, who knows me very slightly, asks me to what you call an ‘At Home.’  The evening comes, I have done my day’s work and I have dined.  I have been to a theatre or concert, or I have spent a pleasant hour or so with a friend.  I am more inclined for bed than anything else, but I pull myself together, dress, and drive to the house.  While I am taking off my hat and coat in the hall, a man enters I met a few hours ago at the Club.  He is a man I have very little opinion of, and he, probably, takes a similar view of me.  Our minds have no thought in common, but as it is necessary to talk, I tell him it is a warm evening.  Perhaps it is a warm evening, perhaps it isn’t; in either case he agrees with me.  I ask him if he is going to Ascot.  I do not care a straw whether he is going to Ascot or not.  He says he is not quite sure, but asks me what chance Passion Flower has for the Thousand Guineas.  I know he doesn’t value my opinion on the subject at a brass farthing—he would be a fool if he did, but I cudgel my brains to reply to him, as though he were going to stake his shirt on my advice.  We reach the first floor, and are mutually glad to get rid of one another.  I catch my hostess’ eye.  She looks tired and worried; she would be happier in bed, only she doesn’t know it.  She smiles sweetly, but it is clear she has not the slightest idea who I am, and is waiting to catch my name from the butler.  I whisper it to him.  Perhaps he will get it right, perhaps he won’t; it is quite immaterial.  They have asked two hundred and forty guests, some seventy-five of whom they know by sight, for the rest, any chance passer-by, able, as the theatrical advertisements say, ‘to dress and behave as a gentleman,’ would do every bit as well.  Indeed, I sometimes wonder why people go to the trouble and expense of invitation cards at all.  A sandwich-man outside the door would answer the purpose.  ‘Lady Tompkins, At Home, this afternoon from three to seven; Tea and Music.  Ladies and Gentlemen admitted on presentation of visiting card.  Afternoon dress indispensable.’  The crowd is the thing wanted; as for the items, well, tell me, what is the difference, from the Society point of view, between one man in a black frock-coat and another?

“I remember being once invited to a party at a house in Lancaster Gate.  I had met the woman at a picnic.  In the same green frock and parasol I might have recognized her the next time I saw her.  In any other clothes I did not expect to.  My cabman took me to the house opposite, where they were also giving a party.  It made no difference to any of us.  The hostess—I never learnt her name—said it was very good of me to come, and then shunted me off on to a Colonial Premier (I did not catch his name, and he did not catch mine, which was not extraordinary, seeing that my hostess did not know it) who, she whispered to me, had come over, from wherever it was (she did not seem to be very sure) principally to make my acquaintance.  Half through the evening, and by accident, I discovered my mistake, but judged it too late to say anything then.  I met a couple of people I knew, had a little supper with them, and came away.  The next afternoon I met my right hostess—the lady who should have been my hostess.  She thanked me effusively for having sacrificed the previous evening to her and her friends; she said she knew how seldom I went out: that made her feel my kindness all the more.  She told me that the Brazilian Minister’s wife had told her that I was the cleverest man she had ever met.  I often think I should like to meet that man, whoever he may be, and thank him.

“But perhaps the butler does pronounce my name rightly, and perhaps my hostess actually does recognize me.  She smiles, and says she was so afraid I was not coming.  She implies that all the other guests are but as a feather in her scales of joy compared with myself.  I smile in return, wondering to myself how I look when I do smile.  I have never had the courage to face my own smile in the looking-glass.  I notice the Society smile of other men, and it is not reassuring.  I murmur something about my not having been likely to forget this evening; in my turn, seeking to imply that I have been looking forward to it for weeks.  A few men shine at this sort of thing, but they are a small percentage, and without conceit I regard myself as no bigger a fool than the average male.  Not knowing what else to say, I tell her also that it is a warm evening.  She smiles archly as though there were some hidden witticism in the remark, and I drift away, feeling ashamed of myself.  To talk as an idiot when you are an idiot brings no discomfort; to behave as an idiot when you have sufficient sense to know it, is painful.  I hide myself in the crowd, and perhaps I’ll meet a woman I was introduced to three weeks ago at a picture gallery.  We don’t know each other’s names, but, both of us feeling lonesome, we converse, as it is called.  If she be the ordinary type of woman, she asks me if I am going on to the Johnsons’.  I tell her no.  We stand silent for a moment, both thinking what next to say.  She asks me if I was at the Thompsons’ the day before yesterday.  I again tell her no.  I begin to feel dissatisfied with myself that I was not at the Thompsons’.  Trying to get even with her, I ask her if she is going to the Browns’ next Monday.  (There are no Browns, she will have to say, No.)  She is not, and her tone suggests that a social stigma rests upon the Browns.  I ask her if she has been to Barnum’s Circus; she hasn’t, but is going.  I give her my impressions of Barnum’s Circus, which are precisely the impressions of everybody else who has seen the show.

“Or if luck be against me, she is possibly a smart woman, that is to say, her conversation is a running fire of spiteful remarks at the expense of every one she knows, and of sneers at the expense of every one she doesn’t.  I always feel I could make a better woman myself, out of a bottle of vinegar and a penn’orth of mixed pins.  Yet it usually takes one about ten minutes to get away from her.

“Even when, by chance, one meets a flesh-and-blood man or woman at such gatherings, it is not the time or place for real conversation; and as for the shadows, what person in their senses would exhaust a single brain cell upon such?  I remember a discussion once concerning Tennyson, considered as a social item.  The dullest and most densely-stupid bore I ever came across was telling how he had sat next to Tennyson at dinner.  ‘I found him a most uninteresting man,’ so he confided to us; ‘he had nothing to say for himself—absolutely nothing.’  I should like to resuscitate Dr. Samuel Johnson for an evening, and throw him into one of these ‘At Homes’ of yours.”

My friend is an admitted misanthrope, as I have explained; but one cannot dismiss him as altogether unjust.  That there is a certain mystery about Society’s craving for Society must be admitted.  I stood one evening trying to force my way into the supper room of a house in Berkeley Square.  A lady, hot and weary, a few yards in front of me was struggling to the same goal.

“Why,” remarked she to her companion, “why do we come to these places, and fight like a Bank Holiday crowd for eighteenpenny-worth of food?”

“We come here,” replied the man, whom I judged to be a philosopher, “to say we’ve been here.”

I met A— the other evening, and asked him to dine with me on Monday.  I don’t know why I ask A— to dine with me, but about once a month I do.  He is an uninteresting man.

“I can’t,” he said, “I’ve got to go to the B—s’; confounded nuisance, it will be infernally dull.”

“Why go?” I asked.

“I really don’t know,” he replied.

A little later B— met me, and asked me to dine with him on Monday.

“I can’t,” I answered, “some friends are coming to us that evening.  It’s a duty dinner, you know the sort of thing.”

“I wish you could have managed it,” he said, “I shall have no one to talk to.  The A—s are coming, and they bore me to death.”

“Why do you ask him?” I suggested.

“Upon my word, I really don’t know,” he replied.

But to return to our rooks.  We were speaking of their social instincts.  Some dozen of them—the “scallywags” and bachelors of the community, I judge them to be—have started a Club.  For a month past I have been trying to understand what the affair was.  Now I know: it is a Club.

And for their Club House they have chosen, of course, the tree nearest my bedroom window.  I can guess how that came about; it was my own fault, I never thought of it.  About two months ago, a single rook—suffering from indigestion or an unhappy marriage, I know not—chose this tree one night for purposes of reflection.  He woke me up: I felt angry.  I opened the window, and threw an empty soda-water bottle at him.  Of course it did not hit him, and finding nothing else to throw, I shouted at him, thinking to frighten him away.  He took no notice, but went on talking to himself.  I shouted louder, and woke up my own dog.  The dog barked furiously, and woke up most things within a quarter of a mile.  I had to go down with a boot-jack—the only thing I could find handy—to soothe the dog.  Two hours later I fell asleep from exhaustion.  I left the rook still cawing.

The next night he came again.  I should say he was a bird with a sense of humour.  Thinking this might happen, I had, however, taken the precaution to have a few stones ready.  I opened the window wide, and fired them one after another into the tree.  After I had closed the window, he hopped down nearer, and cawed louder than ever.  I think he wanted me to throw more stones at him: he appeared to regard the whole proceeding as a game.  On the third night, as I heard nothing of him, I flattered myself that, in spite of his bravado, I had discouraged him.  I might have known rooks better.

What happened when the Club was being formed, I take it, was this:

“Where shall we fix upon for our Club House?” said the secretary, all other points having been disposed of.  One suggested this tree, another suggested that.  Then up spoke this particular rook:

“I’ll tell you where,” said he, “in the yew tree opposite the porch.  And I’ll tell you for why.  Just about an hour before dawn a man comes to the window over the porch, dressed in the most comical costume you ever set eyes upon.  I’ll tell you what he reminds me of—those little statues that men use for decorating fields.  He opens the window, and throws a lot of things out upon the lawn, and then he dances and sings.  It’s awfully interesting, and you can see it all from the yew tree.”

That, I am convinced, is how the Club came to fix upon the tree next my window.  I have had the satisfaction of denying them the exhibition they anticipated, and I cheer myself with the hope that they have visited their disappointment upon their misleader.

There is a difference between Rook Clubs and ours.  In our clubs the respectable members arrive early, and leave at a reasonable hour; in Rook Clubs, it would appear, this principle is reversed.  The Mad Hatter would have liked this Club—it would have been a club after his own heart.  It opens at half-past two in the morning, and the first to arrive are the most disreputable members.  In Rook-land the rowdy-dowdy, randy-dandy, rollicky-ranky boys get up very early in the morning and go to bed in the afternoon.  Towards dawn, the older, more orderly members drop in for reasonable talk, and the Club becomes more respectable.  The tree closes about six.  For the first two hours, however, the goings-on are disgraceful.  The proceedings, as often as not, open with a fight.  If no two gentlemen can be found to oblige with a fight, the next noisiest thing to fall back upon is held to be a song.  It is no satisfaction to me to be told that rooks cannot sing.  I know that, without the trouble of referring to the natural history book.  It is the rook who does not know it; he thinks he can; and as a matter of fact, he does.  You can criticize his singing, you can call it what you like, but you can’t stop it—at least, that is my experience.  The song selected is sure to be one with a chorus.  Towards the end it becomes mainly chorus, unless the soloist be an extra powerful bird, determined to insist upon his rights.

The President knows nothing of this Club.  He gets up himself about seven—three hours after all the others have finished breakfast—and then fusses round under the impression that he is waking up the colony, the fat-headed old fool.  He is the poorest thing in Presidents I have ever heard of.  A South American Republic would supply a better article.  The rooks themselves, the married majority, fathers of families, respectable nestholders, are as indignant as I am.  I hear complaints from all quarters.

Reflection comes to one as, towards the close of these chill afternoons in early spring, one leans upon the paddock gate watching the noisy bustling in the bare elms.

So the earth is growing green again, and love is come again unto the hearts of us old sober-coated fellows.  Oh, Madam, your feathers gleam wondrous black, and your bonnie bright eye stabs deep.  Come, sit by our side, and we’ll tell you a tale such as rook never told before.  It’s the tale of a nest in a topmost bough, that sways in the good west wind.  It’s strong without, but it’s soft within, where the little green eggs lie safe.  And there sits in that nest a lady sweet, and she caws with joy, for, afar, she sees the rook she loves the best.  Oh, he has been east, and he has been west, and his crop it is full of worms and slugs, and they are all for her.

We are old, old rooks, so many of us.  The white is mingling with the purple black upon our breasts.  We have seen these tall elms grow from saplings; we have seen the old trees fall and die.  Yet each season come to us again the young thoughts.  So we mate and build and gather that again our old, old hearts may quiver to the thin cry of our newborn.

Mother Nature has but one care, the children.  We talk of Love as the Lord of Life: it is but the Minister.  Our novels end where Nature’s tale begins.  The drama that our curtain falls upon, is but the prologue to her play.  How the ancient Dame must laugh as she listens to the prattle of her children.  “Is Marriage a Failure?” “Is Life worth Living?”  “The New Woman versus the Old.”  So, perhaps, the waves of the Atlantic discuss vehemently whether they shall flow east or west.

Motherhood is the law of the Universe.  The whole duty of man is to be a mother.  We labour: to what end? the children—the woman in the home, the man in the community.  The nation takes thought for its future: why?  In a few years its statesmen, its soldiers, its merchants, its toilers, will be gathered unto their fathers.  Why trouble we ourselves about the future?  The country pours its blood and treasure into the earth that the children may reap.  Foolish Jacques Bonhomie, his addled brain full of dreams, rushes with bloody hands to give his blood for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.  He will not live to see, except in vision, the new world he gives his bones to build—even his spinning word-whipped head knows that.  But the children! they shall live sweeter lives.  The peasant leaves his fireside to die upon the battle-field.  What is it to him, a grain in the human sand, that Russia should conquer the East, that Germany should be united, that the English flag should wave above new lands? the heritage his fathers left him shall be greater for his sons.  Patriotism! what is it but the mother instinct of a people?

Take it that the decree has gone forth from Heaven: There shall be no more generations, with this life the world shall die.  Think you we should move another hand?  The ships would rot in the harbours, the grain would rot in the ground.  Should we paint pictures, write books, make music? hemmed in by that onward creeping sea of silence.  Think you with what eyes husband and wife would look on one another.  Think you of the wooing—the spring of Love dried up; love only a pool of stagnant water.

How little we seem to realize this foundation of our life.  Herein, if nowhere else, lies our eternity.  This Ego shall never die—unless the human race from beginning to end be but a passing jest of the Gods, to be swept aside when wearied of, leaving room for new experiments.  These features of mine—we will not discuss their æsthetic value—shall never disappear; modified, varied, but in essential the same, they shall continue in ever increasing circles to the end of Time.  This temperament of mine—this good and evil that is in me, it shall grow with every age, spreading ever wider, combining, amalgamating.  I go into my children and my children’s children, I am eternal.  I am they, they are I.  The tree withers and you clear the ground, thankful if out of its dead limbs you can make good firewood; but its spirit, its life, is in fifty saplings.  The tree dies not, it changes.

These men and women that pass me in the street, this one hurrying to his office, this one to his club, another to his love, they are the mothers of the world to come.

This greedy trickster in stocks and shares, he cheats, he lies, he wrongs all men—for what?  Follow him to his luxurious home in the suburbs: what do you find?  A man with children on his knee, telling them stories, promising them toys.  His anxious, sordid life, for what object is it lived?  That these children may possess the things that he thinks good for them.  Our very vices, side by side with our virtues, spring from this one root, Motherhood.  It is the one seed of the Universe.  The planets are but children of the sun, the moon but an offspring of the earth, stone of her stone, iron of her iron.  What is the Great Centre of us all, life animate and inanimate—if any life be inanimate?  Is the eternal universe one dim figure, Motherhood, filling all space?

This scheming Mother of Mayfair, angling for a rich son-in-law!  Not a pleasing portrait to look upon, from one point of view.  Let us look at it, for a moment, from another.  How weary she must be!  This is her third “function” to-night; the paint is running off her poor face.  She has been snubbed a dozen times by her social superiors, openly insulted by a Duchess; yet she bears it with a patient smile.  It is a pitiful ambition, hers: it is that her child shall marry money, shall have carriages and many servants, live in Park Lane, wear diamonds, see her name in the Society Papers.  At whatever cost to herself, her daughter shall, if possible, enjoy these things.  She could so much more comfortably go to bed, and leave the child to marry some well-to-do commercial traveller.  Justice, Reader, even for such.  Her sordid scheming is but the deformed child of Motherhood.

Motherhood! it is the gamut of God’s orchestra, savageness and cruelty at the one end, tenderness and self-sacrifice at the other.

The sparrow-hawk fights the hen: he seeking food for his brood, she defending hers with her life.  The spider sucks the fly to feed its myriad young; the cat tortures the mouse to give its still throbbing carcase to her kittens, and man wrongs man for children’s sake.  Perhaps when the riot of the world reaches us whole, not broken, we shall learn it is a harmony, each jangling discord fallen into its place around the central theme, Motherhood.

I was pacing the Euston platform late one winter’s night, waiting for the last train to Watford, when I noticed a man cursing an automatic machine.  Twice he shook his fist at it.  I expected every moment to see him strike it.  Naturally curious, I drew near softly.  I wanted to catch what he was saying.  However, he heard my approaching footsteps, and turned on me.  “Are you the man,” said he, “who was here just now?”

“Just where?” I replied.  I had been pacing up and down the platform for about five minutes.

“Why here, where we are standing,” he snapped out.  “Where do you think ‘here’ is—over there?”  He seemed irritable.

“I may have passed this spot in the course of my peregrinations, if that is what you mean,” I replied.  I spoke with studied politeness; my idea was to rebuke his rudeness.

“I mean,” he answered, “are you the man that spoke to me, just a minute ago?”

“I am not that man,” I said; “good-night.”

“Are you sure?” he persisted.

“One is not likely to forget talking to you,” I retorted.

His tone had been most offensive.  “I beg your pardon,” he replied grudgingly.  “I thought you looked like the man who spoke to me a minute or so ago.”

I felt mollified; he was the only other man on the platform, and I had a quarter of an hour to wait.  “No, it certainly wasn’t me,” I returned genially, but ungrammatically.  “Why, did you want him?”

“Yes, I did,” he answered.  “I put a penny in the slot here,” he continued, feeling apparently the need of unburdening himself: “wanted a box of matches.  I couldn’t get anything put, and I was shaking the machine, and swearing at it, as one does, when there came along a man, about your size, and—you’re sure it wasn’t you?”

“Positive,” I again ungrammatically replied; “I would tell you if it had been.  What did he do?”

“Well, he saw what had happened, or guessed it.  He said, ‘They are troublesome things, those machines; they want understanding.’  I said, ‘They want taking up and flinging into the sea, that’s what they want!’  I was feeling mad because I hadn’t a match about me, and I use a lot.  He said, ‘They stick sometimes; the thing to do is to put another penny in; the weight of the first penny is not always sufficient.  The second penny loosens the drawer and tumbles out itself; so that you get your purchase together with your first penny back again.  I have often succeeded that way.’  Well, it seemed a silly explanation, but he talked as if he had been weaned by an automatic machine, and I was sawney enough to listen to him.  I dropped in what I thought was another penny.  I have just discovered it was a two-shilling piece.  The fool was right to a certain extent; I have got something out.  I have got this.”

He held it towards me; I looked at it.  It was a packet of Everton toffee.

“Two and a penny,” he remarked, bitterly.  “I’ll sell it for a third of what it cost me.”

“You have put your money into the wrong machine,” I suggested.

“Well, I know that!” he answered, a little crossly, as it seemed to me—he was not a nice man: had there been any one else to talk to I should have left him.  “It isn’t losing the money I mind so much; it’s getting this damn thing, that annoys me.  If I could find that idiot Id ram it down his throat.”

We walked to the end of the platform, side by side, in silence.

“There are people like that,” he broke out, as we turned, “people who will go about, giving advice.  I’ll be getting six months over one of them, I’m always afraid.  I remember a pony I had once.”  (I judged the man to be a small farmer; he talked in a wurzelly tone.  I don’t know if you understand what I mean, but an atmosphere of wurzels was the thing that somehow he suggested.)  “It was a thoroughbred Welsh pony, as sound a little beast as ever stepped.  I’d had him out to grass all the winter, and one day in the early spring I thought I’d take him for a run.  I had to go to Amersham on business.  I put him into the cart, and drove him across; it is just ten miles from my place.  He was a bit uppish, and had lathered himself pretty freely by the time we reached the town.

“A man was at the door of the hotel.  He says, ‘That’s a good pony of yours.’

“‘Pretty middling,’ I says.

“‘It doesn’t do to over-drive ’em, when they’re young,’ he says.

“I says, ‘He’s done ten miles, and I’ve done most of the pulling.  I reckon I’m a jolly sight more exhausted than he is.

“I went inside and did my business, and when I came out the man was still there.  ‘Going back up the hill?’ he says to me.

“Somehow, I didn’t cotton to him from the beginning.  ‘Well, I’ve got to get the other side of it,’ I says, ‘and unless you know any patent way of getting over a hill without going up it, I reckon I am.’

“He says, ‘You take my advice: give him a pint of old ale before you start.’

“‘Old ale,’ I says; ‘why he’s a teetotaler.’

“‘Never you mind that,’ he answers; ‘you give him a pint of old ale.  I know these ponies; he’s a good ’un, but he ain’t set.  A pint of old ale, and he’ll take you up that hill like a cable tramway, and not hurt himself.’

“I don’t know what it is about this class of man.  One asks oneself afterwards why one didn’t knock his hat over his eyes and run his head into the nearest horse-trough.  But at the time one listens to them.  I got a pint of old ale in a hand-bowl, and brought it out.  About half-a-dozen chaps were standing round, and of course there was a good deal of chaff.

“‘You’re starting him on the downward course, Jim,’ says one of them.  ‘He’ll take to gambling, rob a bank, and murder his mother.  That’s always the result of a glass of ale, ’cording to the tracts.’

“‘He won’t drink it like that,’ says another; ‘it’s as flat as ditch water.  Put a head on it for him.’

“‘Ain’t you got a cigar for him?’ says a third.

“‘A cup of coffee and a round of buttered toast would do him a sight more good, a cold day like this,’ says a fourth.

“I’d half a mind then to throw the stuff away, or drink it myself; it seemed a piece of bally nonsense, giving good ale to a four-year-old pony; but the moment the beggar smelt the bowl he reached out his head, and lapped it up as though he’d been a Christian; and I jumped into the cart and started off, amid cheers.  We got up the hill pretty steady.  Then the liquor began to work into his head.  I’ve taken home a drunken man more than once and there’s pleasanter jobs than that.  I’ve seen a drunken woman, and they’re worse.  But a drunken Welsh pony I never want to have anything more to do with so long as I live.  Having four legs he managed to hold himself up; but as to guiding himself, he couldn’t; and as for letting me do it, he wouldn’t.  First we were one side of the road, and then we were the other.  When we were not either side, we were crossways in the middle.  I heard a bicycle bell behind me, but I dared not turn my head.  All I could do was to shout to the fellow to keep where he was.

“‘I want to pass you,’ he sang out, so soon as he was near enough.

“‘Well, you can’t do it,’ I called back.

“‘Why can’t I?’ he answered.  ‘How much of the road do you want?’

“‘All of it and a bit over,’ I answered him, ‘for this job, and nothing in the way.’

“He followed me for half-a-mile, abusing me; and every time he thought he saw a chance he tried to pass me.  But the pony was always a bit too smart for him.  You might have thought the brute was doing it on purpose.

“‘You’re not fit to be driving,’ he shouted.  He was quite right; I wasn’t.  I was feeling just about dead beat.

“‘What do you think you are?’ he continued, ‘the charge of the Light Brigade?’  (He was a common sort of fellow.)  ‘Who sent you home with the washing?’

“Well, he was making me wild by this time.  ‘What’s the good of talking to me?’  I shouted back.  ‘Come and blackguard the pony if you want to blackguard anybody.  I’ve got all I can do without the help of that alarm clock of yours.  Go away, you’re only making him worse.’

“‘What’s the matter with the pony?’ he called out.

“‘Can’t you see?’ I answered.  ‘He’s drunk.’

“Well, of course it sounded foolish; the truth often does.

“‘One of you’s drunk,’ he retorted; ‘for two pins I’d come and haul you out of the cart.’

“I wish to goodness he had; I’d have given something to be out of that cart.  But he didn’t have the chance.  At that moment the pony gave a sudden swerve; and I take it he must have been a bit too close.  I heard a yell and a curse, and at the same instant I was splashed from head to foot with ditch water.  Then the brute bolted.  A man was coming along, asleep on the top of a cart-load of windsor chairs.  It’s disgraceful the way those wagoners go to sleep; I wonder there are not more accidents.  I don’t think he ever knew what had happened to him.  I couldn’t look round to see what became of him; I only saw him start.  Half-way down the hill a policeman holla’d to me to stop.  I heard him shouting out something about furious driving.  Half-a-mile this side of Chesham we came upon a girls’ school walking two and two—a ‘crocodile’ they call it, I think.  I bet you those girls are still talking about it.  It must have taken the old woman a good hour to collect them together again.

“It was market-day in Chesham; and I guess there has not been a busier market-day in Chesham before or since.  We went through the town at about thirty miles an hour.  I’ve never seen Chesham so lively—it’s a sleepy hole as a rule.  A mile outside the town I sighted the High Wycombe coach.  I didn’t feel I minded much; I had got to that pass when it didn’t seem to matter to me what happened; I only felt curious.  A dozen yards off the coach the pony stopped dead; that jerked me off the seat to the bottom of the cart.  I couldn’t get up, because the seat was on top of me.  I could see nothing but the sky, and occasionally the head of the pony, when he stood upon his hind legs.  But I could hear what the driver of the coach said, and I judged he was having trouble also.

“‘Take that damn circus out of the road,’ he shouted.  If he’d had any sense he’d have seen how helpless I was.  I could hear his cattle plunging about; they are like that, horses—if they see one fool, then they all want to be fools.

“‘Take it home, and tie it up to its organ,’ shouted the guard.

“Then an old woman went into hysterics, and began laughing like an hyena.  That started the pony off again, and, as far as I could calculate by watching the clouds, we did about another four miles at the gallop.  Then he thought he’d try to jump a gate, and finding, I suppose, that the cart hampered him, he started kicking it to pieces.  I’d never have thought a cart could have been separated into so many pieces, if I hadn’t seen it done.  When he had got rid of everything but half a wheel and the splashboard he bolted again.  I remained behind with the other ruins, and glad I was to get a little rest.  He came back later in the afternoon, and I was pleased to sell him the next week for a five-pound-note: it cost me about another ten to repair myself.

“To this day I am chaffed about that pony, and the local temperance society made a lecture out of me.  That’s what comes of following advice.”

I sympathized with him.  I have suffered from advice myself.  I have a friend, a City man, whom I meet occasionally.  One of his most ardent passions in life is to make my fortune.  He button-holes me in Threadneedle Street.  “The very man I wanted to see,” he says; “I’m going to let you in for a good thing.  We are getting up a little syndicate.”  He is for ever “getting up” a little syndicate, and for every hundred pounds you put into it you take a thousand out.  Had I gone into all his little syndicates, I could have been worth at the present moment, I reckon, two million five hundred thousand pounds.  But I have not gone into all his little syndicates.  I went into one, years ago, when I was younger.  I am still in it; my friend is confident that my holding, later on, will yield me thousands.  Being, however, hard-up for ready money, I am willing to part with my share to any deserving person at a genuine reduction, upon a cash basis.  Another friend of mine knows another man who is “in the know” as regards racing matters.  I suppose most people possess a friend of this type.  He is generally very popular just before a race, and extremely unpopular immediately afterwards.  A third benefactor of mine is an enthusiast upon the subject of diet.  One day he brought me something in a packet, and pressed it into my hand with the air of a man who is relieving you of all your troubles.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Open it and see,” he answered, in the tone of a pantomime fairy.

I opened it and looked, but I was no wiser.

“It’s tea,” he explained.

“Oh!” I replied; “I was wondering if it could be snuff.”

“Well, it’s not exactly tea,” he continued, “it’s a sort of tea.  You take one cup of that—one cup, and you will never care for any other kind of tea again.”

He was quite right, I took one cup.  After drinking it I felt I didn’t care for any other tea.  I felt I didn’t care for anything, except to die quietly and inoffensively.  He called on me a week later.

“You remember that tea I gave you?” he said.

“Distinctly,” I answered; “I’ve got the taste of it in my mouth now.”

“Did it upset you?” he asked.

“It annoyed me at the time,” I answered; “but that’s all over now.”

He seemed thoughtful.  “You were quite correct,” he answered; “it was snuff, a very special snuff, sent me all the way from India.”

“I can’t say I liked it,” I replied.

“A stupid mistake of mine,” he went on—“I must have mixed up the packets!”

“Oh, accidents will happen,” I said, “and you won’t make another mistake, I feel sure; so far as I am concerned.”

We can all give advice.  I had the honour once of serving an old gentleman whose profession it was to give legal advice, and excellent legal advice he always gave.  In common with most men who know the law, he had little respect for it.  I have heard him say to a would-be litigant—

“My dear sir, if a villain stopped me in the street and demanded of me my watch and chain, I should refuse to give it to him.  If he thereupon said, ‘Then I shall take it from you by brute force,’ I should, old as I am, I feel convinced, reply to him, ‘Come on.’  But if, on the other hand, he were to say to me, ‘Very well, then I shall take proceedings against you in the Court of Queen’s Bench to compel you to give it up to me,’ I should at once take it from my pocket, press it into his hand, and beg of him to say no more about the matter.  And I should consider I was getting off cheaply.”

Yet that same old gentleman went to law himself with his next-door neighbour over a dead poll parrot that wasn’t worth sixpence to anybody, and spent from first to last a hundred pounds, if he spent a penny.

“I know I’m a fool,” he confessed.  “I have no positive proof that it was his cat; but I’ll make him pay for calling me an Old Bailey Attorney, hanged if I don’t!”

We all know how the pudding ought to be made.  We do not profess to be able to make it: that is not our business.  Our business is to criticize the cook.  It seems our business to criticize so many things that it is not our business to do.  We are all critics nowadays.  I have my opinion of you, Reader, and you possibly have your own opinion of me.  I do not seek to know it; personally, I prefer the man who says what he has to say of me behind my back.  I remember, when on a lecturing tour, the ground-plan of the hall often necessitated my mingling with the audience as they streamed out.  This never happened but I would overhear somebody in front of me whisper to his or her companion—“Take care, he’s just behind you.”  I always felt so grateful to that whisperer.

At a Bohemian Club, I was once drinking coffee with a Novelist, who happened to be a broad-shouldered, athletic man.  A fellow-member, joining us, said to the Novelist, “I have just finished that last book of yours; I’ll tell you my candid opinion of it.”  Promptly replied the Novelist, “I give you fair warning—if you do, I shall punch your head.”  We never heard that candid opinion.

Most of our leisure time we spend sneering at one another.  It is a wonder, going about as we do with our noses so high in the air, we do not walk off this little round world into space, all of us.  The Masses sneer at the Classes.  The morals of the Classes are shocking.  If only the Classes would consent as a body to be taught behaviour by a Committee of the Masses, how very much better it would be for them.  If only the Classes would neglect their own interests and devote themselves to the welfare of the Masses, the Masses would be more pleased with them.

The Classes sneer at the Masses.  If only the Masses would follow the advice given them by the Classes; if only they would be thrifty on their ten shillings a week; if only they would all be teetotalers, or drink old claret, which is not intoxicating; if only all the girls would be domestic servants on five pounds a year, and not waste their money on feathers; if only the men would be content to work for fourteen hours a day, and to sing in tune, “God bless the Squire and his relations,” and would consent to be kept in their proper stations, all things would go swimmingly—for the Classes.

The New Woman pooh-poohs the Old; the Old Woman is indignant with the New.  The Chapel denounces the Stage; the Stage ridicules Little Bethel; the Minor Poet sneers at the world; the world laughs at the Minor Poet.

Man criticizes Woman.  We are not altogether pleased with woman.  We discuss her shortcomings, we advise her for her good.  If only English wives would dress as French wives, talk as American wives, cook as German wives! if only women would be precisely what we want them to be—patient and hard-working, brilliantly witty and exhaustively domestic, bewitching, amenable, and less suspicious; how very much better it would be for them—also for us.  We work so hard to teach them, but they will not listen.  Instead of paying attention to our wise counsel, the tiresome creatures are wasting their time criticizing us.  It is a popular game, this game of school.  All that is needful is a doorstep, a cane, and six other children.  The difficulty is the six other children.  Every child wants to be the schoolmaster; they will keep jumping up, saying it is their turn.

Woman wants to take the stick now, and put man on the doorstep.  There are one or two things she has got to say to him.  He is not at all the man she approves of.  He must begin by getting rid of all his natural desires and propensities; that done, she will take him in hand and make of him—not a man, but something very much superior.

It would be the best of all possible worlds if everybody would only follow our advice.  I wonder, would Jerusalem have been the cleanly city it is reported, if, instead of troubling himself concerning his own twopenny-halfpenny doorstep, each citizen had gone out into the road and given eloquent lectures to all the other inhabitants on the subject of sanitation?

We have taken to criticizing the Creator Himself of late.  The world is wrong, we are wrong.  If only He had taken our advice, during those first six days!

Why do I seem to have been scooped out and filled up with lead?  Why do I hate the smell of bacon, and feel that nobody cares for me?  It is because champagne and lobsters have been made wrong.

Why do Edwin and Angelina quarrel?  It is because Edwin has been given a fine, high-spirited nature that will not brook contradiction; while Angelina, poor girl, has been cursed with contradictory instincts.

Why is excellent Mr. Jones brought down next door to beggary?  Mr. Jones had an income of a thousand a year, secured by the Funds.  But there came along a wicked Company promoter (why are wicked Company promoters permitted?) with a prospectus, telling good Mr. Jones how to obtain a hundred per cent. for his money by investing it in some scheme for the swindling of Mr. Jones’s fellow-citizens.

The scheme does not succeed; the people swindled turn out, contrary to the promise of the prospectus, to be Mr. Jones and his fellow-investors.  Why does Heaven allow these wrongs?

Why does Mrs. Brown leave her husband and children, to run off with the New Doctor?  It is because an ill-advised Creator has given Mrs. Brown and the New Doctor unduly strong emotions.  Neither Mrs. Brown nor the New Doctor are to be blamed.  If any human being be answerable it is, probably, Mrs. Brown’s grandfather, or some early ancestor of the New Doctor’s.

We shall criticize Heaven when we get there.  I doubt if any of us will be pleased with the arrangements; we have grown so exceedingly critical.

It was once said of a very superior young man that he seemed to be under the impression that God Almighty had made the universe chiefly to hear what he would say about it.  Consciously or unconsciously, most of us are of this way of thinking.  It is an age of mutual improvement societies—a delightful idea, everybody’s business being to improve everybody else; of amateur parliaments, of literary councils, of playgoers’ clubs.

First Night criticism seems to have died out of late, the Student of the Drama having come to the conclusion, possibly, that plays are not worth criticizing.  But in my young days we were very earnest at this work.  We went to the play, less with the selfish desire of enjoying our evening, than with the noble aim of elevating the Stage.  Maybe we did good, maybe we were needed—let us think so.  Certain it is, many of the old absurdities have disappeared from the Theatre, and our rough-and-ready criticism may have helped the happy dispatch.  A folly is often served by an unwise remedy.

The dramatist in those days had to reckon with his audience.  Gallery and Pit took an interest in his work such as Galleries and Pits no longer take.  I recollect witnessing the production of a very blood-curdling melodrama at, I think, the old Queen’s Theatre.  The heroine had been given by the author a quite unnecessary amount of conversation, so we considered.  The woman, whenever she appeared on the stage, talked by the yard; she could not do a simple little thing like cursing the Villain under about twenty lines.  When the hero asked her if she loved him she stood up and made a speech about it that lasted three minutes by the watch.  One dreaded to see her open her mouth.  In the Third Act, somebody got hold of her and shut her up in a dungeon.  He was not a nice man, speaking generally, but we felt he was the man for the situation, and the house cheered him to the echo.  We flattered ourselves we had got rid of her for the rest of the evening.  Then some fool of a turnkey came along, and she appealed to him, through the grating, to let her out for a few minutes.  The turnkey, a good but soft-hearted man, hesitated.

“Don’t you do it,” shouted one earnest Student of the Drama, from the Gallery; “she’s all right.  Keep her there!”

The old idiot paid no attention to our advice; he argued the matter to himself.  “’Tis but a trifling request,” he remarked; “and it will make her happy.”

“Yes, but what about us?” replied the same voice from the Gallery.  “You don’t know her.  You’ve only just come on; we’ve been listening to her all the evening.  She’s quiet now, you let her be.”

“Oh, let me out, if only for one moment!” shrieked the poor woman.  “I have something that I must say to my child.”

“Write it on a bit of paper, and pass it out,” suggested a voice from the Pit.  “We’ll see that he gets it.”

“Shall I keep a mother from her dying child?” mused the turnkey.  “No, it would be inhuman.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” persisted the voice of the Pit; “not in this instance.  It’s too much talk that has made the poor child ill.”

The turnkey would not be guided by us.  He opened the cell door amidst the execrations of the whole house.  She talked to her child for about five minutes, at the end of which time it died.

“Ah, he is dead!” shrieked the distressed parent.

“Lucky beggar!” was the unsympathetic rejoinder of the house.

Sometimes the criticism of the audience would take the form of remarks, addressed by one gentleman to another.  We had been listening one night to a play in which action seemed to be unnecessarily subordinated to dialogue, and somewhat poor dialogue at that.  Suddenly, across the wearying talk from the stage, came the stentorian whisper—

“Jim!”

“Hallo!”

“Wake me up when the play begins.”

This was followed by an ostentatious sound as of snoring.  Then the voice of the second speaker was heard—

“Sammy!”

His friend appeared to awake.

“Eh?  Yes?  What’s up?  Has anything happened?”

“Wake you up at half-past eleven in any event, I suppose?”

“Thanks, do, sonny.” And the critic slept again.

Yes, we took an interest in our plays then.  I wonder shall I ever enjoy the British Drama again as I enjoyed it in those days?  Shall I ever enjoy a supper again as I enjoyed the tripe and onions washed down with bitter beer at the bar of the old Albion?  I have tried many suppers after the theatre since then, and some, when friends have been in generous mood, have been expensive and elaborate.  The cook may have come from Paris, his portrait may be in the illustrated papers, his salary may be reckoned by hundreds; but there is something wrong with his art, for all that, I miss a flavour in his meats.  There is a sauce lacking.

Nature has her coinage, and demands payment in her own currency.  At Nature’s shop it is you yourself must pay.  Your unearned increment, your inherited fortune, your luck, are not legal tenders across her counter.

You want a good appetite.  Nature is quite willing to supply you.  “Certainly, sir,” she replies, “I can do you a very excellent article indeed.  I have here a real genuine hunger and thirst that will make your meal a delight to you.  You shall eat heartily and with zest, and you shall rise from the table refreshed, invigorated, and cheerful.”

“Just the very thing I want,” exclaims the gourmet delightedly.  “Tell me the price.”

“The price,” answers Mrs. Nature, “is one long day’s hard work.”

The customer’s face falls; he handles nervously his heavy purse.

“Cannot I pay for it in money?” he asks.  “I don’t like work, but I am a rich man, I can afford to keep French cooks, to purchase old wines.”

Nature shakes her head.

“I cannot take your cheques, tissue and nerve are my charges.  For these I can give you an appetite that will make a rump-steak and a tankard of ale more delicious to you than any dinner that the greatest chef in Europe could put before you.  I can even promise you that a hunk of bread and cheese shall be a banquet to you; but you must pay my price in my money; I do not deal in yours.”

And next the Dilettante enters, demanding a taste for Art and Literature, and this also Nature is quite prepared to supply.

“I can give you true delight in all these things,” she answers.  “Music shall be as wings to you, lifting you above the turmoil of the world.  Through Art you shall catch a glimpse of Truth.  Along the pleasant paths of Literature you shall walk as beside still waters.”

“And your charge?” cries the delighted customer.

“These things are somewhat expensive,” replies Nature.  “I want from you a life lived simply, free from all desire of worldly success, a life from which passion has been lived out; a life to which appetite has been subdued.”

“But you mistake, my dear lady,” replies the Dilettante; “I have many friends, possessed of taste, and they are men who do not pay this price for it.  Their houses are full of beautiful pictures, they rave about ‘nocturnes’ and ‘symphonies,’ their shelves are packed with first editions.  Yet they are men of luxury and wealth and fashion.  They trouble much concerning the making of money, and Society is their heaven.  Cannot I be as one of these?”

“I do not deal in the tricks of apes,” answers Nature coldly; “the culture of these friends of yours is a mere pose, a fashion of the hour, their talk mere parrot chatter.  Yes, you can purchase such culture as this, and pretty cheaply, but a passion for skittles would be of more service to you, and bring you more genuine enjoyment.  My goods are of a different class.  I fear we waste each other’s time.”

And next comes the boy, asking with a blush for love, and Nature’s motherly old heart goes out to him, for it is an article she loves to sell, and she loves those who come to purchase it of her.  So she leans across the counter, smiling, and tells him that she has the very thing he wants, and he, trembling with excitement, likewise asks the figure.

“It costs a good deal,” explains Nature, but in no discouraging tone; “it is the most expensive thing in all my shop.”

“I am rich,” replies the lad.  “My father worked hard and saved, and he has left me all his wealth.  I have stocks and shares, and lands and factories; and will pay any price in reason for this thing.”

But Nature, looking graver, lays her hand upon his arm.

“Put by your purse, boy,” she says, “my price is not a price in reason, nor is gold the metal that I deal in.  There are many shops in various streets where your bank-notes will be accepted.  But if you will take an old woman’s advice, you will not go to them.  The thing they will sell you will bring sorrow and do evil to you.  It is cheap enough, but, like all things cheap, it is not worth the buying.  No man purchases it, only the fool.”

“And what is the cost of the thing you sell then?” asks the lad.

“Self-forgetfulness, tenderness, strength,” answers the old Dame; “the love of all things that are of good repute, the hate of all things evil—courage, sympathy, self-respect, these things purchase love.  Put by your purse, lad, it will serve you in other ways, but it will not buy for you the goods upon my shelves.”

“Then am I no better off than the poor man?” demands the lad.

“I know not wealth or poverty as you understand it,” answers Nature.  “Here I exchange realities only for realities.  You ask for my treasures, I ask for your brain and heart in exchange—yours, boy, not your father’s, not another’s.”

“And this price,” he argues, “how shall I obtain it?”

“Go about the world,” replies the great Lady.  “Labour, suffer, help.  Come back to me when you have earned your wages, and according to how much you bring me so we will do business.”

Is real wealth so unevenly distributed as we think?  Is not Fate the true Socialist?  Who is the rich man, who the poor?  Do we know?  Does even the man himself know?  Are we not striving for the shadow, missing the substance?  Take life at its highest; which was the happier man, rich Solomon or poor Socrates?  Solomon seems to have had most things that most men most desire—maybe too much of some for his own comfort.  Socrates had little beyond what he carried about with him, but that was a good deal.  According to our scales, Solomon should have been one of the happiest men that ever lived, Socrates one of the most wretched.  But was it so?

Or taking life at its lowest, with pleasure its only goal.  Is my lord Tom Noddy, in the stalls, so very much jollier than ’Arry in the gallery?  Were beer ten shillings the bottle, and champagne fourpence a quart, which, think you, we should clamour for?  If every West End Club had its skittle alley, and billiards could only be played in East End pubs, which game, my lord, would you select?  Is the air of Berkeley Square so much more joy-giving than the atmosphere of Seven Dials?  I find myself a piquancy in the air of Seven Dials, missing from Berkeley Square.  Is there so vast a difference between horse-hair and straw, when you are tired?  Is happiness multiplied by the number of rooms in one’s house?  Are Lady Ermintrude’s lips so very much sweeter than Sally’s of the Alley?  What is success in life?