"JULIA ELIZABETH.

"P.S.—Give Christie's love to Ma."

Mrs. O'Reilly sank again to her chair.

Her mouth was partly open. She breathed with difficulty. Her eyes were fixed on space, and she seemed to be communing with the guardians of Chaos—

"Married!" said she in a musing whisper. "Christie!" said she. She turned to her husband—"What an amazing thing. Doesn't it make you think, O'Reilly, of the poem, 'The World Recedes, it Disappears'?"

"It does not, ma'm," said her husband savagely.

"And what is this young gentleman going to do?" she continued, gazing tearfully at the suitor.

"He's going to go home," replied her husband fiercely. "He ought to be in bed long ago."

"A broken heart," said his wife, "is a sad companion to go home with. Doesn't it make you think of the song——?"

"It does not, ma'm," roared her husband. "I'm going back to my work," and once again the door banged and the room shook.

Young Mr. O'Grady arose timidly. The world was swimming about him. Love had deserted him, and etiquette was now his sole anchor; he shook hands with Mrs. O'Reilly—

"I think I had better be going now," said he. "Good-bye, Mrs. O'Reilly."

"Must you really go?" said that lady with the smile of a maniac.

"I'm afraid so," and he moved towards the door.

"Well," said she, "give my love to your mother and your Aunt Jane."

"I will," was his reply, "and," with firm politeness, "thank you for a very pleasant evening."

"Don't mention it, Mr. O'Grady. Good-bye."

Mrs. O'Reilly closed the door and walked back towards the table smiling madly. She sank into a chair. Her eye fell on the butter-knife—

"I haven't had a bit to eat this day," said she in a loud and threatening voice, and once again she pulled the loaf towards her.

II

His mother finished reading the story of the Beautiful Princess, and it was surely the saddest story he had ever heard. He could not bear to think of that lovely and delicate lady all alone in the great, black forest waiting until the giant came back from killing her seven brothers. He would return with their seven heads swinging pitifully from his girdle, and, when he reached the castle gates, he would gnash his teeth through the keyhole with a noise like the grinding together of great rocks, and would poke his head through the fanlight of the door, and say, fee-faw-fum in a voice of such exceeding loudness that the castle would be shaken to its foundation.

Thinking of this made his throat grow painful with emotion, and then his heart swelled to the most uncomfortable dimensions, and he resolved to devote his whole life to the rescue of the Princess, and, if necessary, die in her defence.

Such was his impatience that he could not wait for anything more than his dinner, and this he ate so speedily that his father called him a Perfect-Young-Glutton, and a Disgrace-To-Any-Table. He bore these insults in a meek and heroic spirit, whereupon his mother said that he must be ill, and it was only by a violent and sustained outcry that he escaped being sent to bed.

Immediately after dinner he set out in search of the giant's castle. Now there is scarcely anything in the world more difficult to find than a giant's castle, for it is so large that one can only see it through the wrong end of a telescope; and, furthermore, he did not even know this giant's name. He might never have found the place if he had not met a certain old woman on the common.

She was a very nice old woman. She had three teeth, a red shawl, and an umbrella with groceries inside it; so he told her of the difficulty he was in.

She replied that he was in luck's way, and that she was the only person in the world who could assist him. She said her name was Really-and-Truly, and that she had a magic head, and that if he cut her head off it would answer any questions he asked it. So he stropped his penknife on his boot, and said he was ready if she was.

The old woman then informed him that in all affairs of this delicate nature it was customary to take the will for the deed, and that he might now ask her head anything he wanted to know—so he asked the head what was the way to the nearest giant, and the head replied that if he took the first turning to the left, the second to the right, and then the first to the left again, and if he then knocked at the fifth door on the right-hand side, he would see the giant.

He thanked the old woman very much for the use of her head, and she permitted him to lend her one threepenny-piece, one pocket-handkerchief, one gun-metal watch, one cap, and one boot-lace. She said that she never took two of anything, because that was not fair, and that she wanted these for a very particular, secret purpose, about which she dare not speak, and, as to which she trusted he would not press her, and then she took a most affectionate leave of him and went away.

He followed her directions with the utmost fidelity, and soon found himself opposite a house which, to the eyes of any one over seven years of age, looked very like any other house, but which, to the searching eye of six and three quarters, was patently and palpably a giant's castle.

He tried the door, but it was locked, as, indeed, he had expected it would be. Then he crept very cautiously, and peeped through the first floor window. He could see in quite plainly. There was a polar bear crouching on the floor, and the head looked at him so directly and vindictively that if he had not been a hero he would have fled. The unexpected is always terrible, and when one goes forth to kill a giant it is unkind of Providence to complicate one's adventure with a gratuitous and wholly unnecessary polar bear. He was, however, reassured by the sight of a heavy chair standing on the polar bear's stomach, and in the chair there sat the most beautiful woman in the world.

An ordinary person would not have understood so instantly that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, because she looked very stout, and much older than is customary with princesses—but that was owing to the fact that she was under an enchantment, and she would become quite young again when the giant was slain and three drops of his blood had been sprinkled on her brow.

She was leaning forward in the chair, staring into the fire, and she was so motionless that it was quite plain she must be under an enchantment. From the very first instant he saw the princess he loved her, and his heart swelled with pity to think that so beautiful a damsel should be subjected to the tyranny of a giant. These twin passions of pity and love grew to so furious a strength within him that he could no longer contain himself. He wept in a loud and very sudden voice which lifted the damsel out of her enchantment and her chair, and hurled her across the room as though she had been propelled by a powerful spring.

He was so overjoyed at seeing her move that he pressed his face against the glass and wept with great strength, and, in a few moments, the princess came timidly to the window and looked out. She looked right over his head at first, and then she looked down and saw him, and her eyebrows went far up on her forehead, and her mouth opened; and so he knew that she was delighted to see him. He nodded to give her courage, and shouted three times, "Open Sesame, Open Sesame, Open Sesame," and then she opened the window and he climbed in.

The princess tried to push him out again, but she was not able, and he bade her put all her jewels in the heel of her boot and fly with him. But she was evidently the victim of a very powerful enchantment, for she struggled violently, and said incomprehensible things to him, such as "Is it a fire, or were you chased?" and "Where is the cook?" But after a little time she listened to the voice of reason, and recognised that these were legitimate and heroic embraces from which she could not honourably disentangle herself.

When her first transports of joy were somewhat abated she assured him that excessive haste had often undone great schemes, and that one should always look before one leaped, and that one should never be rescued all at once, but gradually, in order that one might become accustomed to the severe air of freedom—and he was overjoyed to find that she was as wise as she was beautiful.

He told her that he loved her dearly, and she admitted, after some persuasion, that she was not insensible to the charms of his heart and intellect, but she confessed that her love was given to another.

At these tidings his heart withered away within him, and when the princess admitted she loved the giant his amazement became profound and complicated. There was a rushing sound in his ears. The debris of his well-known world was crashing about him, and he was staring upon a new planet, the name of which was Incredulity. He looked round with a queer feeling of insecurity. At any moment the floor might stand up on one of its corners, or the walls might begin to flap and waggle. But none of these things happened. Before him sat the princess in an attitude of deep dejection, and her lily-white hands rested helplessly on her lap. She told him in a voice that trembled that she would have married him if he had asked her ten years earlier, and urged that she could not fly with him now, because, in the first place, she had six children, and, in the second place, it would be against the law, and, in the third place, his mother might object. She admitted that she was unworthy of his love, and that she should have waited, and she bore his reproaches with a meekness which finally disarmed him.

He stropped his penknife on his boot, and said that there was nothing left but to kill the giant, and that she had better leave the room while he did so, because it would not be a sight for a weak woman, and he wondered audibly how much hasty-pudding would fall out of the giant if he stabbed him right to the heart. The princess begged him not to kill her husband, and assured him that this giant had not got any hasty-pudding in his heart at all, and that he was really the nicest giant that ever lived, and, further, that he had not killed her seven brothers, but the seven brothers of quite another person entirely, which was only a reasonable thing to do when one looked at it properly, and she continued in a strain which proved to him that this unnatural woman really loved the giant.

It was more in pity than in anger that he recognised the impossibility of rescuing this person. He saw at last that she was unworthy of being rescued, and told her so. He said bitterly that he had grave doubts of her being a princess at all, and that if she was married to a giant it was no more than she deserved, and further he had a good mind to rescue the giant from her, and he would do so in a minute, only that it was against his principles to rescue giants.—And, saying so, he placed his penknife between his teeth and climbed out through the window again.

He stood for a moment outside the window with his right hand extended to the sky and the moonlight blazing on his penknife—a truly formidable figure, and one which the princess never forgot; and then he walked slowly away, hiding behind a cold and impassive demeanour a mind that was tortured and a heart that had plumbed most of the depths of human suffering.

III

Aloysius Murphy went a-courting when the woods were green. There were grapes in the air and birds in the river. A voice and a song went everywhere, and the voice said, "Where is my beloved?" and the song replied, "Thy beloved is awaiting thee, and she stretches her hands abroad and laughs for thy coming; bind then the feather of a bird to thy heel and a red rose upon thy hair, and go quickly."

So he took his hat from behind the door and his stick from beside the bed and went out into the evening.

He had been engaged to Miss Nora MacMahon for two ecstatic months, and held the opinion that the earth and the heavens were aware of the intensity of his passion, and applauded the unique justice of his choice.

By day he sat humbly in a solicitor's office, or scurried through the thousand offices of the Four Courts, but with night came freedom, and he felt himself to be of the kindred of the gods and marched in pomp. By what subterranean workings had he become familiar with the lady? Suffice it that the impossible is possible to a lover. Everything can be achieved in time. The man who wishes to put a mountain in his pocket can do so if his pocket and his wish be of the requisite magnitude.

Now the lady towards whom the raging torrent of his affections had been directed was the daughter of his employer, and this, while it notated romance, pointed also to tragedy. Further, while this fact was well within his knowledge, it was far from the cognizance of the lady. He would have enlightened her on the point, but the longer he delayed the revelation, the more difficult did it become. Perpetually his tongue ached to utter the truth. When he might be squeezing her hand or plunging his glance into the depths of her eyes, consciousness would touch him on the shoulder with a bony hand and say, "That is the boss's daughter you are hugging"—a reminder which was provocative sometimes of an almost unholy delight, when to sing and dance and go mad was but natural; but at other times it brought with it moods of woe, abysses of blackness.

In the solitude of the room wherein he lodged he sometimes indulged in a small drama, wherein, as the hero, he would smile a slightly sad and quizzical smile, and say gently, "Child, you are Mr. MacMahon's daughter, I am but his clerk"—here the smile became more sadly quizzical—"how can I ask you to forsake the luxury of a residence in Clontarf for the uncongenial, nay, bleak surroundings of a South Circular Road habitation?" And she, ah me! She vowed that a hut and a crust and the love of her heart. . .! No matter!

So, nightly, Aloysius Murphy took the tram to Clontarf, and there, wide-coated and sombreroed like a mediaeval conspirator, he trod delicately beside his cloaked and hooded inamorata, whispering of the spice of the wind and the great stretches of the sea.

Now a lover who comes with the shades of night, harbinger of the moon, and hand in glove with the stars, must be a very romantic person indeed, and, even if he is not, a lady whose years are tender can easily supply the necessary gauze to tone down his too-rigorous projections. But the bird that flies by night must adduce for our curiosity substantial reason why his flight has deserted the whiteness of the daytime; else we may be tempted to believe that his advent in darkness is thus shrouded for even duskier purposes.—Miss MacMahon had begun to inquire who Mr. Murphy was, and he had, accordingly, begun to explain who he was not. This explanation had wrapped his identity in the most labyrinthine mystery, but Miss MacMahon detected in the rapid, incomprehensible fluctuations of his story a heart torn by unmerited misfortune, and whose agony could only be alleviated by laying her own dear head against its turmoil.

To a young girl a confidant is almost as necessary as a lover, and when the rendezvous is clandestine, the youth mysterious, and his hat broad-leafed and flapping, then the necessity for a confidant becomes imperative.

Miss MacMahon confided the knowledge of all her happiness to the thrilled ear of her younger sister, who at once hugged her, and bubbled query, conjecture, and admonishment. ". . . Long or short? . . . Dark or fair?" ". . . and slender . . . with eyes . . . dove . . . lightning . . . hair . . . and so gentle . . . and then I said . . . and then he said . . .!" "Oh, sweet!" sighed the younger sister, and she stretched her arms wide and crushed the absent excellences of Mr. Murphy to her youthful breast.

On returning next day from church, having listened awe-stricken to a sermon on filial obedience, the little sister bound her mother to secrecy, told the story, and said she wished she were dead. Subsequently the father of Clann MacMahon was informed, and he said "Hum" and "Ha," and rolled a fierce, hard eye, and many times during the progress of the narrative he interjected with furious energy these words, "Don't be a fool, Jane," and Mrs. MacMahon responded meekly, "Yes, dear," and Mr. MacMahon then said "Hum" and "Ha" and "Gr-r-r-up" in a truly terrible and ogreish manner; and in her distant chamber Miss MacMahon heard the reverberation of that sonorous grunt, and whispered to her little sister, "Pa's in a wax," and the little sister pretended to be asleep.

The spectacle of an elderly gentleman, side-whiskered, precise and grey, disguising himself with mufflers and a squash hat, and stalking with sombre fortitude the erratic wanderings of a pair of young featherheads, is one which mirth may be pleased to linger upon. Such a spectacle was now to be observed in the semi-rural outskirts of Clontarf. Mr. MacMahon tracked his daughter with considerable stealth, adopting unconsciously the elongated and nervous stride of a theatrical villain. He saw her meet a young man wearing a broad-brimmed hat, whose clothing was mysteriously theatrical, and whose general shape, when it could be glimpsed, was oddly familiar.

"I have seen that fellow somewhere," said he.

The lovers met and kissed, and the glaring father spoke rapidly but softly to himself for a few moments. He was not accustomed to walking, and it appeared as if these two intended to walk for ever, but he kept them in sight, and when the time came for parting he was close at hand.

The parting was prolonged, and renewed, and rehearsed again with amendments and additions: he could not have believed that saying good-bye to a person could be turned into so complicated and symbolic a ceremony: but, at last, his daughter, with many a backward look and wave of hand, departed in one direction, and the gentleman, after similar signals, moved towards the tramway.

"I know that fellow, whoever he is," said Mr. MacMahon.

Passing a lamp-post, Mr. Aloysius Murphy stayed for a moment to light his pipe, and Mr. MacMahon stared, he ground his teeth, he foamed at the mouth, and his already prominent eyes bulged still further and rounder—

"Well, I'm——!" said he.

He turned and walked homewards slowly, murmuring often to himself and to the night, "All right! wait, though! Hum! Ha! Gr-r-r-up!"

That night he repeatedly entreated his wife "not to be a fool, Jane," and she as repeatedly replied, "Yes, dear." Long after midnight he awoke her by roaring violently from the very interior depths of a dream, "Cheek of the fellow! Pup! Gr-r-r-up!"

At breakfast on the following morning he suggested to his wife and elder daughter that they should visit his office later on in the day—

"You have never seen it, Nora," said he, "and you ought to have a look at the den where your poor old daddy spends his time grinding dress material for his family from the faces of the poor. I've got some funny clerks, too: one of them is a curiosity." Here, growing suddenly furious, he gave an egg a clout.

His daughter giggled—

"Oh, Pa," said she, "you are not breaking that egg, you are murdering it."

He looked at her gloomily—

"It wasn't the egg I was hitting," said he. "Gr-r-r-up," said he suddenly, and he stabbed a piece of butter, squashed it to death on a slice of bread, and tore it to pieces with his teeth.

The young lady looked at him with some amazement, but she said nothing, for she believed, as most ladies do, that men are a little mad sometimes, and are foolish always.

Her father intercepted that glance, and instantly snarled—

"Can you cook, young woman?" said he.

"Of course, father," replied the perplexed maiden.

He laid aside his spoon and gave her his full attention.

"Can you cook potatoes?" said he. "Can you mash 'em, eh? Can you mash 'em? What! You can. They call them Murphies in this country, girl. Can you mash Murphys, eh? I can. There's a Murphy I know, and, although it's been mashed already, by the Lord Harry, I'll mash it again. Did you ever know that potatoes had eyes, miss? Did you ever notice it when you were cooking them? Did you ever look into the eyes of a Murphy, eh? When you mashed it, what? Don't answer me, girl."

"I don't know what you are talking about, Pa," said the young lady.

"Don't you, now?" grinned the furious gentleman, and his bulging eyes looked like little round balls of glass. "Who said you did, miss? Gr-r-r-up," said he, and the poor girl jumped as though she had been prodded with a pin.

Mr. Aloysius Murphy's activities began at ten o'clock in the morning by opening the office letters with an ivory instrument and handing them to his employer; then, as each letter was read, he entered its receipt and date in a book kept for that purpose.

When Mr. MacMahon came in on the morning following the occurrences I have detailed he neglected, for the first time in many years, to respond to his clerk's respectfully-cordial salutation. To the discreet "Good-morning, sir," he vouchsafed no reply. Mr. Murphy was a trifle indignant and a good deal perturbed, for to an unquiet conscience a word or the lack of it is a goad. Once or twice, looking up from his book, he discovered his employer's hard eyes fixed upon him with a regard too particular to be pleasant.

An employer seldom does more than glance at his clerk, just the sideward glint of a look which remarks his presence without admitting his necessity, and in return the clerk slants a hurried eye on his employer, notes swiftly if his aspect be sulky or benign, and stays his vision at that. But, now, Mr. Murphy, with sudden trepidation, with a frightful sinking in the pit of his stomach, became aware that his employer was looking at him stealthily; and, little by little, he took to sneaking glances at his employer. After a few moments neither seemed to be able to keep his eyes from straying—they created opportunities in connection with the letters; the one looking intent, wide-eyed, and with a cold, frigid, rigid, hard stare, and the other scurrying and furtive, in-and-away, hit-and-miss-and-try-again, wink, blink, and twitter.

Mr. MacMahon spoke—

"Murphy!"

"Yes, sir."

"Have you anything in Court to-day?"

"Yes, sir, an ex parte application, Donald and Cluggs."

"Let O'Neill attend to it. I shall want you to draft a deed for some ladies who will call here at noon. You can come down at ten minutes after twelve."

"Yes, sir," said Murphy.

He grabbed his share of the letters and got to the door bathed in perspiration and forebodings. He closed the door softly behind him, and stood for a few seconds staring at the handle. "Blow you!" said he viciously to nothing in particular, and he went slowly upstairs.

"He can't know," said he on the first landing. On the second floor he thought, "She couldn't have told for she didn't know herself." He reached his desk. "I wish I had a half of whisky," said the young man to himself.

Before, however, twelve o'clock arrived he had journeyed on the hopeful pinions of youth from the dogmatic "could not be" to the equally immovable "is not," and his mind resumed its interrupted equilibrium.

At twelve o'clock Mrs. and Miss MacMahon arrived, and were at once shown into the private office. At ten minutes past, Mr. Murphy's respectful tap was heard. "Don't, Eddie," said Mrs. MacMahon in a queer, flurried voice. "Come in," said her husband. Nora was examining some judicial cartoons pinned over the mantelpiece. Mr. Murphy opened the door a few inches, slid through the aperture, and was at once caught and held by his employer's eye, which, like a hand, guided him to the table with his notebook. Under the almost physical pressure of that authoritative glare he did not dare to look who was in the room, but the rim of his eye saw the movement of a skirt like the far-away, shadowy canter of a ghost's robe. He fixed his attention on his note-book.

Mr. MacMahon began to dictate a Deed of Conveyance from a precedent deed in his hand. After dictating for some few minutes—

"Murphy," said he, and at the word the young lady studying the cartoons stiffened, "I've rather lost the thread of that clause; please read what you have down."

Murphy began to read, and, at the first word, the girl made a tiny, shrill, mouse's noise, and then stood stock-still, tightened up and frightened, with her two wild eyes trying to peep around her ears.

Mr. Murphy heard the noise and faltered—he knew instinctively. Something told him with the bellowing assurance of a cannon who was there. He must look. He forced his slack face past the granite image that was his employer, saw a serge-clad figure that he knew, one ear and the curve of a cheek. Then a cascade broke inside his head. It buzzed and chattered and crashed, with now and again the blank brutality of thunder bashing through the noise. The serge-clad figure swelled suddenly to a tremendous magnitude, and then it receded just as swiftly, and the vast earth spun minutely on a pin's point ten million miles away, and she was behind it, her eyes piercing with scorn. . . . Through the furious winds that whirled about his brain he heard a whisper, thin and cold, and insistent as a razor's edge, "Go on, Murphy; go on, Murphy." He strove to fix his attention on his shorthand notes—To fight it down, to stand the shock like a man, and then crawl into a hole somewhere and die; but his mind would not grip, nor his eyes focus. The only words which his empty brain could pump up were these, irrelevant and idiotic, "'A frog he would a-wooing go, heigho,' said Rowley"; and they must not be said. "It is a bit difficult, perhaps," said the whispering voice that crept through the tumult of winds and waters in his head. "Never mind, take down the rest of it," and the far-away whisper began to say things all about nothing, making queer little noises and pauses, running for a moment into a ripple of sound, and eddying and dying away and coming back again—buz-z-z! His notebook lying on the table was as small as a postage stamp, while the pencil in his hand was as big as an elephant's leg. How can a man write on a microscopic blur with the stump of a fir tree? He poked and prodded, and Mr. MacMahon watched for a few moments his clerk poking his note-book with the wrong end of a pencil. He silently pulled his daughter forward and made her look. After a little—

"That will do, Murphy," said he, and Mr. Murphy, before he got out, made two severe attempts to walk through a wall.

For half an hour he sat at his desk in a trance, with his eyes fixed upon an ink-bottle. At last, nodding his head slowly—

"I'll bet you a shilling," said he to the ink-bottle, "that I get the sack to-night."

And the ink-bottle lost the wager.



THE BLIND MAN

He was one who would have passed by the Sphinx without seeing it. He did not believe in the necessity for sphinxes, or in their reality, for that matter—they did not exist for him. Indeed, he was one to whom the Sphinx would not have been visible. He might have eyed it and noted a certain bulk of grotesque stone, but nothing more significant.

He was sex-blind, and, so, peculiarly limited by the fact that he could not appreciate women. If he had been pressed for a theory or metaphysic of womanhood he would have been unable to formulate any. Their presence he admitted, perforce: their utility was quite apparent to him on the surface, but, subterraneously, he doubted both their existence and their utility. He might have said perplexedly—Why cannot they do whatever they have to do without being always in the way? He might have said—Hang it, they are everywhere and what good are they doing? They bothered him, they destroyed his ease when he was near them, and they spoke a language which he did not understand and did not want to understand. But as his limitations did not press on him neither did they trouble him. He was not sexually deficient, and he did not dislike women; he simply ignored them, and was only really at home with men. All the crudities which we enumerate as masculine delighted him—simple things, for, in the gender of abstract ideas, vice is feminine, brutality is masculine, the female being older, vastly older than the male, much more competent in every way, stronger, even in her physique, than he, and, having little baggage of mental or ethical preoccupations to delay her progress, she is still the guardian of evolution, requiring little more from man than to be stroked and petted for a while.

He could be brutal at times. He liked to get drunk at seasonable periods. He would cheerfully break a head or a window, and would bandage the one damage or pay for the other with equal skill and pleasure. He liked to tramp rugged miles swinging his arms and whistling as he went, and he could sit for hours by the side of a ditch thinking thoughts without words—an easy and a pleasant way of thinking, and one which may lead to something in the long run.

Even his mother was an abstraction to him. He was kind to her so far as doing things went, but he looked over her, or round her, and marched away and forgot her.

Sex-blindness carries with it many other darknesses. We do not know what masculine thing is projected by the feminine consciousness, and civilisation, even life itself, must stand at a halt until that has been discovered or created, but art is the female projected by the male: science is the male projected by the male—as yet a poor thing, and to remain so until it has become art; that is, has become fertilised and so more psychological than mechanical. The small part of science which came to his notice (inventions, machinery, etc.) was easily and delightedly comprehended by him. He could do intricate things with a knife and a piece of string, or a hammer and a saw: but a picture, a poem, a statue, a piece of music—these left him as uninterested as they found him: more so, in truth, for they left him bored and dejected.

His mother came to dislike him, and there were many causes and many justifications for her dislike. She was an orderly, busy, competent woman, the counterpart of endless millions of her sex, who liked to understand what she saw or felt, and who had no happiness in reading riddles. To her he was at times an enigma, and at times again a simpleton. In both aspects he displeased and embarrassed her. One has one's sense of property, and in him she could not put her finger on anything that was hers. We demand continuity, logic in other words, but between her son and herself there was a gulf fixed, spanned by no bridge whatever; there was complete isolation; no boat plied between them at all. All the kindly human things which she loved were unintelligible to him, and his coarse pleasures or blunt evasions distressed and bewildered her. When she spoke to him he gaped or yawned; and yet she did not speak on weighty matters, just the necessary small-change of existence—somebody's cold, somebody's dress, somebody's marriage or death. When she addressed him on sterner subjects, the ground, the weather, the crops, he looked at her as if she were a baby, he listened with stubborn resentment, and strode away a confessed boor. There was no contact anywhere between them, and he was a slow exasperation to her.—What can we do with that which is ours and not ours? either we own a thing or we do not, and, whichever way it goes, there is some end to it; but certain enigmas are illegitimate and are so hounded from decent cogitation.

She could do nothing but dismiss him, and she could not even do that, for there he was at the required periods, always primed with the wrong reply to any question, the wrong aspiration, the wrong conjecture; a perpetual trampler on mental corns, a person for whom one could do nothing but apologise.

They lived on a small farm and almost the entire work of the place was done by him. His younger brother assisted, but that assistance could have easily been done without. If the cattle were sick he cured them almost by instinct. If the horse was lame or wanted a new shoe he knew precisely what to do in both events. When the time came for ploughing he gripped the handles and drove a furrow which was as straight and as economical as any furrow in the world. He could dig all day long and be happy; he gathered in the harvest as another would gather in a bride; and, in the intervals between these occupations, he fled to the nearest publichouse and wallowed among his kind.

He did not fly away to drink; he fled to be among men.—Then he awakened. His tongue worked with the best of them, and adequately too. He could speak weightily on many things—boxing, wrestling, hunting, fishing, the seasons, the weather, and the chances of this and the other man's crops. He had deep knowledge about brands of tobacco and the peculiar virtues of many different liquors. He knew birds and beetles and worms; how a weazel would behave in extraordinary circumstances; how to train every breed of horse and dog. He recited goats from the cradle to the grave, could tell the name of any tree from its leaf; knew how a bull could be coerced, a cow cut up, and what plasters were good for a broken head. Sometimes, and often enough, the talk would chance on women, and then he laughed as heartily as any one else, but he was always relieved when the conversation trailed to more interesting things.

His mother died and left the farm to the younger instead of the elder son; an unusual thing to do, but she did detest him. She knew her younger son very well. He was foreign to her in nothing. His temper ran parallel with her own, his tastes were hers, his ideas had been largely derived from her, she could track them at any time and make or demolish him. He would go to a dance or a picnic and be as exhilarated as she was, and would discuss the matter afterwards. He could speak with some cogency on the shape of this and that female person, the hat of such an one, the disagreeableness of tea at this house and the goodness of it at the other. He could even listen to one speaking without going to sleep at the fourth word. In all he was a decent, quiet lad who would become a father the exact replica of his own, and whose daughters would resemble his mother as closely as two peas resemble their green ancestors.—So she left him the farm.

Of course, there was no attempt to turn the elder brother out. Indeed, for some years the two men worked quietly together and prospered and were contented; then, as was inevitable, the younger brother got married, and the elder had to look out for a new place to live in, and to work in—things had become difficult.

It is very easy to say that in such and such circumstances a man should do this and that well-pondered thing, but the courts of logic have as yet the most circumscribed jurisdiction. Just as statistics can prove anything and be quite wrong, so reason can sit in its padded chair issuing pronouncements which are seldom within measurable distance of any reality. Everything is true only in relation to its centre of thought. Some people think with their heads—their subsequent actions are as logical and unpleasant as are those of the other sort who think only with their blood, and this latter has its irrefutable logic also. He thought in this subterranean fashion, and if he had thought in the other the issue would not have been any different.

Still, it was not an easy problem for him, or for any person lacking initiative—a sexual characteristic. He might have emigrated, but his roots were deeply struck in his own place, so the idea never occurred to him; furthermore, our thoughts are often no deeper than our pockets, and one wants money to move anywhere. For any other life than that of farming he had no training and small desire. He had no money and he was a farmer's son. Without money he could not get a farm; being a farmer's son he could not sink to the degradation of a day labourer; logically he could sink, actually he could not without endangering his own centres and verities—so he also got married.

He married a farm of about ten acres, and the sun began to shine on him once more; but only for a few days. Suddenly the sun went away from the heavens; the moon disappeared from the silent night; the silent night itself fled afar, leaving in its stead a noisy, dirty blackness through which one slept or yawned as one could. There was the farm, of course, one could go there and work; but the freshness went out of the very ground; the crops lost their sweetness and candour; the horses and cows disowned him; the goats ceased to be his friends—It was all up with him. He did not whistle any longer. He did not swing his shoulders as he walked, and, although he continued to smoke, he did not look for a particular green bank whereon he could sit quietly flooded with those slow thoughts that had no words.

For he discovered that he had not married a farm at all. He had married a woman—a thin-jawed, elderly slattern, whose sole beauty was her farm. How her jaws worked! The processions and congregations of words that fell and dribbled and slid out of them! Those jaws were never quiet, and in spite of all he did not say anything. There was not anything to say, but much to do from which he shivered away in terror. He looked at her sometimes through the muscles of his arms, through his big, strong hands, through fogs and fumes and singular, quiet tumults that raged within him. She lessoned him on the things he knew so well, and she was always wrong. She lectured him on those things which she did know, but the unending disquisition, the perpetual repetition, the foolish, empty emphasis, the dragging weightiness of her tongue made him repudiate her knowledge and hate it as much as he did her.

Sometimes, looking at her, he would rub his eyes and yawn with fatigue and wonder—there she was! A something enwrapped about with petticoats. Veritably alive. Active as an insect! Palpable to the touch! And what was she doing to him? Why did she do it? Why didn't she go away? Why didn't she die? What sense was there in the making of such a creature that clothed itself like a bolster, without any freedom or entertainment or shapeliness?

Her eyes were fixed on him and they always seemed to be angry; and her tongue was uttering rubbish about horses, rubbish about cows, rubbish about hay and oats. Nor was this the sum of his weariness. It was not alone that he was married; he was multitudinously, egregiously married. He had married a whole family, and what a family—

Her mother lived with her, her eldest sister lived with her, her youngest sister lived with her—and these were all swathed about with petticoats and shawls. They had no movement. Their feet were like those of no creature he had ever observed. One could hear the flip-flap of their slippers all over the place, and at all hours. They were down-at-heel, draggle-tailed, and futile. There was no workmanship about them. They were as unfinished, as unsightly as a puddle on a road. They insulted his eyesight, his hearing, and his energy. They had lank hair that slapped about them like wet seaweed, and they were all talking, talking, talking.

The mother was of an incredible age. She was senile with age. Her cracked cackle never ceased for an instant. She talked to the dog and the cat; she talked to the walls of the room; she spoke out through the window to the weather; she shut her eyes in a corner and harangued the circumambient darkness. The eldest sister was as silent as a deep ditch and as ugly. She slid here and there with her head on one side like an inquisitive hen watching one curiously, and was always doing nothing with an air of futile employment. The youngest was a semi-lunatic who prattled and prattled without ceasing, and was always catching one's sleeve, and laughing at one's face.—And everywhere those flopping, wriggling petticoats were appearing and disappearing. One saw slack hair whisking by the corner of one's eye. Mysteriously, urgently, they were coming and going and coming again, and never, never being silent.

More and more he went running to the public-house. But it was no longer to be among men, it was to get drunk. One might imagine him sitting there thinking those slow thoughts without words. One might predict that the day would come when he would realise very suddenly, very clearly all that he had been thinking about, and, when this urgent, terrible thought had been translated into its own terms of action, he would be quietly hanged by the neck until he was as dead as he had been before he was alive.



SWEET-APPLE

At the end of the bough, at the top of the tree (As fragrant, as high, and as lovely as thou) One sweet apple reddens which all men may see, At the end of the bough.

Swinging full to the view, tho' the gatherers now Pass, and evade, and o'erlook busily: Overlook! nay, but pluck it! they cannot tell how.

For it swings out of reach as a cloud, and as free As a star, or thy beauty, which seems too, I vow, Remote as the sweet rosy apple—ah me! At the end of the bough.



THREE HAPPY PLACES

I

One awakened suddenly in those days. Sleep was not followed by the haze which trails behind more mature slumbers. One's eyes opened wide and bright, and brains and legs became instantly active. If by a chance the boy lying next to you was still asleep, it was the thing to hit him with a pillow. Even among boys, however, there are certain morose creatures who are ill-tempered in the morning, and these, on being struck with a pillow, become malignantly active, and desire to fight with fists instead of pillows.

Bull was such a boy. He was densely packed with pugnacity. He lived for ever on the extreme slope of a fight, down which he slid at a word, a nod, a wink, into strenuous and bloodthirsty warfare. He was never seen without a black eye, a bruised lip, or something wrong with his ear. He had the most miscellaneous collection of hurts that one could imagine, and he was always prepared to exhibit his latest injury in exchange for a piece of toffee. If this method of barter was not relished, he would hit the proprietor of the toffee and confiscate the goods to his own use.

His knowledge of who had sweets was uncanny. He had an extra sense in that direction, which was a trouble to all smaller boys. No matter how cunningly one concealed a sticky treasure, just when one was secretly enjoying it he came leaping out of space with the most offensive friendliness crinkling all over his face, and his desire to participate in the confection was advanced without any preliminary courtesies—

"What have you got? Show! Give us a bit. Can't you give a fellow a bit?"

When the bit was tendered he snatched it, swallowed it, and growled—

"Do you call that a bit? Give us a real bit."

There are plenty of boys who will defend their toffee with their lives. Such boys he liked to meet, for their refusal to surrender a part gave him an opportunity to fight and a reason for confiscating the whole of the ravished sweetmeat. One often had to devour one's sweets at a full gallop. It was no uncommon thing to see a small boy scudding furiously around a field with Bull pounding behind, intent as a bloodhound, and as horribly vocal. A close examination would discover that the small boy's jaws were moving with even greater rapidity than his legs. If he managed to get his stuff devoured before he was caught it was all right, but he got hammered anyhow when he was caught. However, Bull's approach was usually managed with great skill and strategy, and before the small boy was aware Bull was squatting beside him using blandishments both moral and minatory.

He was a very gifted boy. He had no bent for learning lessons but he had a great gift for collecting and turning to his own use the property of other people. Sometimes three or four boys swore a Solemn League and Covenant against him. His perplexity then was extreme. He saw toffee being devoured and none of it coming his way. Possibly his method of thinking was in pictures, and he could visualise with painful clarity the alien gullets down which toffee was traveling, and, simultaneously, he could see the woeful emptiness of his own red lane. He must have felt that all was not right with a Providence which could allow such happenings. A world wherein there was toffee for others and none for him was certainly a world out of joint. His idea of Utopia would be a place where there were lots of things for him to eat and a circle of hungry boys who watched his deliberate jaws with envy and humility. Furthermore, the idea that smaller boys could have, not the courage, but the heart to congregate against him, must have come to him with a shock. He was appalled by a sense of the sinfulness of human nature, and dismayed by the odds against which virtue has to fight.

The others, strong in numbers, followed him on such occasions chewing their tuck with grave deliberation, descanting minutely and loudly on the taste of each bit, the splendid length of time it took to dissolve, and the blessedly large quantity which yet remained to be eaten. He threatened them, but his threats were received with yawns. He wheedled (a thing he could do consummately well) but they were not to be blandished. He mapped out on his own person the particular and painful places where later on he would hit them unless he was bound over to the peace by toffee. And they sucked their sweetstuff and made diagrams on each other of the places where they could hit Bull if they had a mind to, and told each other and him that he was not worth hitting and, would probably die if he were hit. But they were careful not dissolve partnership until the sweets were eaten and beyond even the wildest hopes of salvage. Then, in the later-on that had been predicted, Bull captured them in detail, and, as he had promised, he "lammed the stuffing" out of them.

He had all the grave wisdom of the stupid, and the extraordinary energy and persistence which perpetuates them. He never could learn a lesson, but he could, and did, pinch the boy next to him into adept prompting, and would intimidate any one into doing his sums. Indeed, the man of whom he was the promise had no need for ordinary learning. The lighter accomplishments of life had no appeal, nor would the deeper lessons have any meaning for him. He is simply a big, physical appetite, untrammelled by anything like introspection or conscience, and working in perfect innocence for the fulfilment of its simple wants. For at base his species are surely the most simple of human creatures. In spite of their complex physical structure they are one-celled organisms driven through life with only a passionate hunger as their motive power, and with no complexities of thought or emotion to hamper their loud progressions. None but those of their own kind can suffer from their ravages, and, even so, they fly the contact of each other with horror.

Doubtless by this time Bull is a prosperous and wealthy citizen somewhere, the proprietor of a curved waistcoat and a gold watch. Possessions other than these he would regard with the amiable tolerance of a philosopher regarding a child with toys. So strongly acquisitive a nature must win the particular little battles which it is fitted to wage. When a conscienceless mind is buttressed by a pugnacious temperament then houses and land, and cattle and maidservants, and such-like, the small change of existence, are easily gotten.

II

The sunlight of youth has a special quality which will never again be known until we rediscover it in Paradise. What a time it was! How the sun shone, and how often it shone! I remember playing about in a parched and ragged field with a leaf from a copy-book stuck under my cap to aid its quarter-inch peak in keeping off the glare of that tremendous sunshine.

Tip-and-Tig, Horneys and Robbers, Relievo we played, and another game, the name of which did not then seem at all strange, but which now wears an amazing appearance—it was, Twenty-four Yards on the Billy-Goat's Tail. I wonder now what was that Billy-Goat, and was he able to wag the triumphant tail of which twenty-four yards was probably no more than an inconsiderable moiety. There were other games: Ball-in-the-Decker, Cap-on-the-Back, and Towns or Rounders. These were all summer games.

With the lightest effort of imagination I can see myself and other tireless atoms scooting across reaches of sunlight. I can hear the continuous howl which accompanied our play, and can see that ragged, parched field spreading, save for the cluster of boys, wide and silent to the further, greener fields, where the cows were lying down in great coloured lumps, and one antic deer, a pet, would make such astonishing journeys, jumping the entire circuit of the field on four thin and absolutely rigid legs; for when it made these peculiar excursions it never seemed to use its legs—these were held quite rigidly, and the deer bounded by some powerful, spring-like action, its brown coat flashing in the sunlight, and its movement a rhythmic glory which the boys watched with ecstasy and laughter.

An old ass was native to that field also. He had been a bright, kind-hearted donkey at one time: a donkey whose nose might be tickled, and who would allow one to climb upon his back. But the presence of boys grew disturbing as he grew old, and the practical jokes of which his youth took no heed induced a kind of insanity in his latter age. He took to kicking the cows as they browsed peacefully, and, later, he developed a horrid appetite for fowl, and would stalk and kill and eat hens whenever possible. Later still he directed this unhealthy appetite towards small boys, and after he had eaten part of one lad's shoulder and the calf from another boy's leg he disappeared—whether he was sold to some innocent person, or had been slaughtered mysteriously, we did not know. We professed to believe that he had died of the horrible taste of the boys he had bitten, and, afterwards, whenever we played cannibals, we refused, greatly to their chagrin, to kill and eat these two boys, on the ground that their flesh was poisonous; but the others we slaughtered and fed on with undiminished gusto.

There were only two trees in the field—great, gnarled monsters casting a deep shade. In that shade the grass grew long and green and juicy. After a game the boys would fling themselves down in the shadow of the trees to chew the sweet grass, and play "knifey," and talk.—Such talk!—endless and careless, and loud as the converse of young bulls. What did we talk about? Delightful and inconsequent shoutings—

"That is a hawk up there, he's going to soar. How does he keep so steady without moving his wings? Watch now! down he drops like a stone. . . . If you give your rabbit too many cabbage leaves he'll die of the gripes. . . . Did you ever play jack-stones? a fellow showed me how, look! . . . When we were at the sea yesterday Jimmy Nelson wouldn't go out from the shore. He was afraid of his life—he wouldn't even duck down. I swam nearly out of sight, didn't I, Sam? So did Sam. . . . You could climb right up to the top of that tree if you tried. No you couldn't.—Yes I could, it's forked all the way up. . . . The new master wears specs—Old Four-Eyes! and he grins at a fellow. I don't think he's much. . . . How do midges get born? . . . My brother has one with four blades and a thing for poking stones out of a horse's hoof. . . . A horse-hair won't break the cane at all: it's all bosh: rosin is the only thing. . . ."

There was a little stream which twisted a six-foot path through the field, the sunshine dashing off its waters in brilliant flashes. The top of the water swarmed with flying insects and strange, small spider-things skimmed over its surface with amazing swiftness. We believed there were otters in that stream—they came out at nightfall and, unless you had the good fortune to be rescued by a Newfoundland dog, they would hold you down under water until you were drowned. We also held there were leeches in the stream—they would grip you by the hundred thousand and suck you to death in five minutes, and they clung so tightly that one could not prise their mouths open with a poker. We hoped there were whales in it, but not one of us desired a shark because it is the Sailor's Enemy.

An iron railing ran by part of the field. Every hole and joint of it was crammed with earwigs, and these could be poked out of the crevices with a straw. When an amazing number of them had been poked out there was always another one left. The very last earwig that could be discovered was the King. He was able and willing to bite ten times as badly as any of the others, and he was awfully vicious when his nest was broken into. Furthermore, he had the ability to put a curse on you before he died, and he always did this because he was so vicious. If a King Earwig had time to curse you before he was killed terrible things might happen. His favourite curse was to translate himself into the next piece of bread you would eat, and then you would see one-half of him waggling in a hole in the bread: the other half you had already eaten.—For this reason the King Earwig was always allowed to go free until he was not looking, then he was killed with great suddenness.

I remember how the slow evening shadows drew over the quiet fields. The sunlight slowly faded to a mist of gold, into which the great trees thrust timorous, shy fingers, and these gradually widened, until, at last, the whole horizon bowed into the twilight.

Across the field there could be heard the voice of the river, a furtive, desolate hoarseness in the dusk. The cows in the far fields had long ago wandered home to be milked, scarcely a bird moved in the high silences, the gnats had hidden themselves away in the deep, rugged bark of the trees, and, through the dimness, the heavy beetles were hurling like stones, and dropping and rising again in a laborious flight.

III

He could remember that he had wept to be allowed go to school. Even more vivid was his recollection of the persuasive and persistent tears which he had shed to be allowed to stay at home.

Most of the joys of school were exhausted after he had submitted to one hour of dreary discipline.—To be compelled to sit still when every inch of one's being clamoured to move about; to have to stand up and stare at a blackboard upon which meaningless white scrawls were perpetually being drawn, and as perpetually being wiped out to a master's meaningless, monotonous verbal accompaniment; to have to join in a chant which began with "a, b, c," and droned steadily through a complexity of sounds to a ridiculously inadequate "z"—such things became desperately boring. One was not even let go to sleep, and if one wept from sheer ennui, then one was clouted. School, he shortly decided, was not worth anybody's while, but he also discovered that a torment had commenced which was not by any artifice to be evaded.

Along the road to school there ran a succession of meadows—the path was really a footway through fields—and how not to stray into these meadows was a problem demanding the entire of one's attention. Sometimes a rabbit bolted almost from under one's feet—it flapped away through the grass, and bobbed up and down in a great hurry. Then his heart filled with envy. He said to himself—

"That rabbit is not going to school: if it was it wouldn't run so quickly."

It was paltry comfort to hurl a wad of grass after it.

Through most of the journey there was an immense, lazy bee with a bass voice, and he droned defiance three feet away from one's cap which almost jolted to be put over him. He seemed to understand that at such an hour he was not in any danger, and so he would drop to the grass, roll on his back, and cock up his legs in ecstasy.

"Bees," said he to himself in amazement and despair, "do not go to school."

Each bush and tree seemed, for the moment, to be inhabited by a bird whose song was unfamiliar and the markings on whom he could not remember to have seen before; and he had no time to stay and note them. He dragged beyond these objects reluctantly, pondering on the unreasonable savagery of parents who sent one to school when the sun was shining.

But the greatest obstacle to getting to school was the river which danced briskly through the fields. The footpath went for a stretch along this stream, and, during that piece of the journey, haste was not possible. There are so many things in a river to look at. The movement of the water in itself exercises fascinations over a boy. There are always bubbles, based strongly in froth, sailing gallantly along.—One speculates how long a bubble will swim before it hits a rock, or is washed into nothing by an eddy, or is becalmed in a sheltered corner to ride at jaunty anchor with a navy of similar delicate tonnage.

Further, if one finds a twig on the path, or a leaf, there is nothing more natural than to throw these into the river and see how fast or how erratically they sail. Pebbles also clamour to be cast into the stream. Perhaps a dragon-fly whirls above the surface of the water to hold one late from school. The grasses and rushes by the marge may stir as a grey rat slips out to take to the water and swim low down and very fast on some strange and important journey. The inspection of such an event cannot be hurried. One must, if it is possible, discover where he swims to, and if his hole is found it has to be blocked up with stones, even though the persistent bell is clanging down over the fields.

Perhaps a big frog will push out from the grass and go in fat leaps down to the water—plop! and away he swims with his sarcastic nose up and his legs going like fury. The strange, very-little-boy motions of a frog in water is a thing to ponder over. There are small frogs also, every bit as interesting, thin-legged, round-bellied anatomies who try to jump two ways at once when they are observed, and are caught so easily that it is scarcely worth one's trouble to chase them at all.

Just where the path turned there was an arch under which the river flowed.—It was covered in with an iron grating. Surely it was a place of mystery. Through the bars the dark, swirling waters were dimly visible—there were things in there. Black lumps rose out of the water, and, for a little distance, the slimy, shimmering, cold-looking walls could be seen. Beyond there was a deeper gloom, and, beyond that again, a blank, mysterious darkness. Through the grating the voice of the stream came back with a strange note. On the outside, under the sun, it was a tinkle and a rush, a dance indeed, but within it was a low snarl that deepened to a grim whisper. There was an edge of malice to the sound: something dark and very terrible brooded on the face of those hidden waters. It was the home of surmise.—What might there not be there? There might be gully-holes where the waters whirled in wide circles, and then flew smoothly down, and down, and down. If one could have got in there to see! To crawl along by the slippery edge in the darkness and solitude! It was very hard to get away from this place.

A little farther on two goats were tethered. As one passed they would cease to pluck the grass and begin to dance slowly, such dainty, antic steps, with their heads held down and their pale eyes looking upwards with a joke in them. They did not really want to fight; they wanted to play but were too shy to admit it.

And here the schoolhouse was in sight. The bell had stopped: it was now time to run.

He gripped the mouth of his satchel with one hand to prevent the lesson books from jumping out as he ran, he gripped his pocket with the other hand to prevent his lunch from being jolted into the road.

Another few yards and he was at the gate—some one was glaring out through a window. It was a big face rimmed with spectacles and whiskers—a master. He knew that when yonder severe eye had lifted from him it had dropped to look at a watch, and he also knew exactly what the owner of the severe eye would say to him as he sidled in.



THE MOON

If the Moon had a hand I wonder would she Stretch it down unto me?

If she did, I would go To her glacier land, To her ice-covered strand.

I would run, I would fly, Were the cold ever so, And be warm in the snow.

O Moon of all Light, Sailing far, sailing high In the infinite sky.

Do not come down to me, Lest I shriek in affright, Lest I die in the night Of your chill ecstasy.



THERE IS A TAVERN IN THE TOWN

I

The old gentleman entered, and was about to sit down, when a button became detached from some portion of his raiment and rolled upon the floor. He picked the button up and observed that he would keep it for his housekeeper to sew on, and, while speaking on the strangeness of housekeeping and buttons, he came slowly to the subject of matrimony—

"Like so many other customs," said he, "marriage is not native to the human race, nor is it altogether peculiar to it. So far as I am aware no person was ever born married, and in extreme youth bachelors and spinsters are so common as to call for no remark. Nature strives, not for duality as in the case of the Siamese Twins but for individuality. We are all born strongly separated, and I am often inclined to fancy that this ceremony of joining appears very like flying in the face of Providence. I have also thought, on the other hand, that the segregation of humanity into male and female is not an economic practice, but I fear the foundation of the sex habit is by this time so deeply trenched in our natures as to be practically ineradicable.

"Throughout nature the male and female habit is usual: all beasts are born of one or the other gender, and this is also the case in the vegetable kingdom: but I am not aware that the ridiculous and wasteful preparations with which we encumber matrimony obtain also among plants and animals. Certainly, among some animals courtship, as we understand it, is practised—Wolves, for instance, are an extraordinarily acute people who make good husbands and fathers, and in these relations they display a tenderness and courtesy which one only acquainted with their out-of-door manners would scarcely credit them with. Their courtship is conducted under circumstances of extraordinary rigour. A he-wolf who becomes enamoured of a female from another tribe is forced, in attempting to wed her, to set his life upon the venture, and, disdaining all the fury of her numerous relatives, he must forcibly detach her from her family, kill or maim all her other suitors, sustain in a wounded and desperate condition a prolonged chase over the snow-clad Russian Steppes, and, ultimately, consummate his nuptials, if he can, with as many limbs as his lady's family have failed to collect off him. This is a courtship admirably fitted to evolve a hardy and Spartan race strong in the virtues of reliance and self-control.

"Spiders, on the other hand, are a people whom I despise on several counts, but must admire on others. They conduct their love affairs in an even more tragic style. In every event matrimony is a tragedy, but in the case of spiders it is a catastrophe. Spiders are a very sour and pessimistic people who live in walls, corners of hotel bedrooms and holes generally, in which places they weave very delicate webs, and sit for a long period in a state of philosophic ecstasy, contemplating the infinite. Their principal pastimes are killing flies and committing suicide—both of which games should be encouraged. Like so many other unhappy creatures they are born with a gender from which there is no escape. The male spider is very much smaller than the female, and he does not care greatly for his life. When he does not desire to live any longer he commits matrimony or suicide. He weds a large and fierce wife, who, when in expectation of progeny, kills him, and, being a thorough-going person as all females are, she also eats him, possibly at his own request, and thus she relieves her husband of the tedium of existence and herself of the necessity for seeking immediate victual. I do not know whether male spiders are very plentiful or extremely scarce, but I cite this as an example of the extravagance and economy of the female gender.

"Of the courting habits of fish I have scanty knowledge. Fish are very ugly, dirty creatures who appear to live entirely in water, and they have been known to follow a ship for miles in the disgusting hope of garbage being thrown to them by the steward. Their chief pastime is weighing each other, for which purpose they are liberally provided with scales. They can be captured by nets, or rods and lines, or, when they are cockles, they can be captured by the human hand, but, in this latter case, they cannot be tamed, having very little intelligence. The cockle has no scale, and feels the deprivation keenly, hiding himself deep in the sea and seldom venturing forth except at night-time. He is composed of two shells and a soft piece, is chiefly useful for poisoning children and is found at Sandymount, a place where nobody but a cockle would live. Other fish may be generally described as, crabs, pinkeens, red herrings and whales. How these conduct their matrimonial adventures I do not know—the statement that whales are fond of pinkeens is true only in a food sense, for these races have never been observed to intermarry.

"A great many creatures capture or captivate their mates by singing.—These are usually, but not always, birds, and include wily wagtails, larks, canary birds and the crested earwig. Poets, music hall comedians and cats may also be included in this category. Dogs are imperative and dashing wooers, but they seldom sing. Peacocks expand their tails before the astonished gaze of their brides, showing how the female sex is over-borne by minor, unimportant advantages. Frogs, I believe, make love in the dark, which is a wise thing for them to do—they are very witty folk, but confirmed sentimentalists. Grocers' assistants attract their mates by exposing very tall collars and brown boots. Drapers' assistants follow suit, with the comely addition of green socks and an umbrella—they are never known to fail. Some creatures do not marry at all. At a certain period they break in two halves, and each half, fully equipped for existence, waggles away from the other.—They are the only perfectly happy folk of whom I am aware. For myself, I was born single and I will remain so, I will never be a slave to the disgusting habit of matrimony."

Having said this with great firmness, the old gentleman shed two more buttons from his waistcoat, and, after sticking three nails and a piece of twine through his garments, he departed very happily. The gentleman-in-waiting sneezed three times in a loud voice, and gave a war-whoop, but I took no notice of these impertinences.

II

I had not seen the old gentleman for a long time, and when he entered with one foot in a boot and the other in a carpet slipper, I was overjoyed. When the bubbling tankard which I had ordered was placed before him he seized my two hands, wrung them heartily and dashed into the following subject—

"It must be remembered," said he, "that dancing is not an art but a pastime, and should, therefore, be freed from the too-burdensome regulations wherewith an art is encumbered. An art is a highly-specialised matter hedged in on every side by intellectual policemen, a pastime is not specialised, and never takes place in the presence of policemen, who are well known to be the sworn enemies of gaiety. For example, theology is an art but religion is a pastime: we learn the collects only under compulsion, but we sing anthems because it is pleasant to do so. Thus, eating oysters is an art by dint of the elaborate ceremonial including shell-openers, lemons, waiters and pepper, which must be grouped around your oyster before you can conveniently swallow him, but eating nuts, or blackberries, or a privily-acquired turnip—these are pastimes.

"The practice of dancing is of an undoubted antiquity. History teems with reference to this custom, but it is difficult to discover what nationality or what era first witnessed its evolution. I myself believe that the first dance was performed by a domestic hen who found an ostrich's egg, and bounded before Providence in gratitude for something worthy of being sat upon.

"In all places and in all ages dancing has been utilised as a first-aid to language. The function of language is intellectual, that of dancing is emotional. It is scarcely possible to say anything of an emotional nature in words without adventuring into depths or bogs of sentimentality from which one can only emerge greasy with dishonour. When we are happy we cannot say so with any degree of intelligibility: in such a context the spoken word is miserably inadequate, and must be supplemented by some bodily antic. If we are merry we must skip to be understood. If we are happy we must dance. If we are wildly and ecstatically joyous then we will become creators, and some new and beneficent dance-movements will be added to the repertory of our neighborhood.

"Children will dance upon the slightest provocation, so also do lambs and goats; but policemen, and puckauns, and advertisement agents, and fish do not dance at all, and this is because they have hard hearts. Worms and Members of Parliament, between whom, in addition to their high general culture, there is a singular and subtle correspondence, do not dance, because the inelastic quality of their environment forbids anything in the nature of freedom. Frogs, dogs, and very young mountains do dance.

"A frog is a most estimable person. He has a cold body but a warm heart, and a countenance of almost parental benevolence, and the joy of life moves him to an almost ceaseless activity. I can never observe a frog on a journey without fancying that his gusto for travel is directed by a philanthropic impulse towards the bedside of a sick friend or a meeting to discuss the Housing of the Working Classes. He has danced all the way to, he will dance all the way from his objective, but the spectacle of many men dancing is provocative of pain.—To them dancing is a duty, and a melancholy one. If one danced to celebrate a toothache one might take lessons from them. They stand in the happy circle, their features are composed to an iron gravity, their hands are as rigid as those of a graven image, and then, the fatal moment having arrived, they agitate their legs with a cold fury which is distinctly unpleasant. Having finished they dash their partners from their sides and retire to blush and curse in a corner.

"When a man dances he should laugh and crow and snap his fingers and make faces; otherwise, he is not dancing at all, he is taking exercise. No person should be allowed to dance without first swearing that he feels only six years of age. People who admit to feeling more than ten years old should be sent to hospital, and any one proved guilty of fourteen years of age should be lodged in gaol without the option.

"It is peculiar how often opposite emotions may meet on a common plane of expression. The extremes of love and hate strive to get equally close to kiss or to bite the object of their regard. Work and play may be equally strenuous and equally enthralling. Hunger and satiety unite in a common boredom. A happy person will dance from sheer delight, and the man in whom a pin has been secreted can only by dancing express the exquisite sensibility of his cuticle. Whatever one does or refrains from doing one must be tired by bed-time—it is a law—but one may be pleasantly tired.

"I will suspect the morals of a man who cannot dance. I will look curiously into his sugar or statecraft. I will impeach his candour or reticence, and sneer at his method of lighting a fire unless he can frolic when he goes out for a walk with a dog—that is the beginning of dancing: the end of it is the beginning of a world. A young dog is a piece of early morning disguised in an earthly fell, and the man who can resist his contagion is a sour, dour, miserable mistake, without bravery, without virtue, without music, with a cranky body and a shrivelled soul, and with eyes incapable of seeing the sunlight.

"I have often thought that dogs are a very superior race of people. They are certainly more highly organised on the affectional plane than man. A dog will love you just for the fun of it—and that is virtue. Pat a dog on the head and he will dance around you in an ecstasy of good-fellowship. Let us, at least, be the equal of these sagacities. Let us put away our false intellectual pride. Let us learn to be unconscious. The average man trembles into a dance imagining that all eyes are rayed upon him wonderingly or admiringly, whereas, in truth, he will only be looked at if he dances very well or very badly. Both of these extremities of perfection ought to be avoided. We should exercise our very bad or very good qualities in solitude lest average people be saddened by their disabilities in either direction. Let your curses be as private as your prayers for both are purgative operations. In public we must conform to the standard, in private only may we do our best or our worst. Acting so, we will be freed from false pride and cowardly self-consciousness. Let us be brave. Let us caress the waists of our neighbours without fear. Let everybody's chin be our toy. Let us pat one another on the hats as we pass in the melancholy streets.—Thus only shall we learn to be gay and careless who for so long have been miserable and suspicious. We will be fearless and companionable who have been so timid and solitary. A new, a better, a real police force will arrest people who don't dance as they travel to and from their labour. The world will be happy at last, and civilisation will begin to be possible."

Here, in an ecstasy of good-fellowship, the old gentleman seized his pewter with his left hand and my glass with his right hand, and he emptied them both before recognising his mistake. I had, however, run out of tobacco, whereupon he became very angry, and refused to bid me good-night.

III

The old gentleman condescended to accept the last cigar which I had, and, having lit it with my only match, he earnestly advised me never to smoke to excess, because this indulgence brought spots before the eyes, deteriorated the moral character, and was, moreover, exceedingly expensive.—On the subject of smoking and tobacco he spoke as follows—

"I have observed that people who do not smoke are usually of a sour and unsociable disposition. All red-haired people smoke naturally, and they almost invariably use cut-plug. Very dark-haired men smoke twist, and their natural strength and virtue is such that in the intervals of smoking they also chew tobacco. Fair-haired men generally smoke cigarettes—they do this, not for the purpose of enjoyment, but purely in imitation of their betters. However, in later life, when they become bald, as they invariably do, they also became regenerate and smoke pig-tail. Men with mouse-coloured hair do not smoke at all. They collect postage stamps and sea-shells, and are usually to be found sitting round a fire with other girls eating chocolates and seeking for replies to such questions as, when is a door not a door? and why does a chicken cross the road? They are miserable creatures whom I will not further mention.

"The usage of tobacco, or some smokable substitute, is as old as primitive man. Almost all nations of the earth are adepts in this particular habit. It is, of course, an acquired taste, as also are washing and tomatoes. We are born with appetites which are static and unchangeable, but we are also born with a yearning for pleasure which is almost as positive as an appetite and only needs cultivation to become equally imperative. Doubtless, a traveller from some distant planet, who knew nothing of tobacco, would be astonished at the spectacle of a man exhaling smoke from his lips with splendid unconcern, and our traveller's conjectures as to the origin of the smoke and the immunity of the smoker would be highly amusing and instructive.

"I am often surprised on reflecting that our immediate ancestors were debarred from this pleasant indulgence, and I have wondered how they made the evenings pass. The lack of tobacco and pockets in their clothes (both of which are great civilising agents) may have been responsible for the wars, harryings, kidnappings and cattle raids which, alternating with rigorous and austere religious ceremonial, formed the bulk of their pleasures. Nowadays we leave these violent entertainments to children and the semi-literate and take our pleasures more composedly. A man who can put his hands in his pockets will seldom remove them for the purpose of slaying some one whose only fault is that he was born in the County Sligo. A man with a pipe in his teeth will be too much at peace with society to endanger its existence.

"If the blessings of tobacco should be extended to the remainder of the vertebrates (as, why should it not?) I am sure that lions, elephants, and wild boars would avail themselves of it. So, also, would kangaroos, a beautiful and agile race living in Polynesia, or thereabouts—they are beautiful hoppers, and collect large quantities of this plant. In this direction they are especially well equipped, each having a pouch in her stomach in which to carry tobacco and hops, but wherein they now ignorantly secrete their young. Serpents would smoke a pipe with considerable elegance, and might become more benevolent in consequence. Frogs would smoke, but I fancy they would expectorate too elaborately to be neighbourly. Fish, however, would not smoke at all.—They are a cowardly and corrupt people, living in water, which is a singular thing to do. Neither would many birds smoke, they have neither the stamina nor the teeth, but I am certain that crows and jackdaws would chew tobacco eagerly and with true relish. A large proportion of the insecta are too light-minded and frivolous to care for smoking. Beetles, however, a very reserved and dignified race, would smoke cigars, and so would cockroaches, a rather saturnine and cynical people; but no others.

"As for women—I am astonished they have not smoked, by mere contagion, long ago. If they did they would certainly grow more kind-hearted and manly, and I am sure that a deputation of ladies with pipes in their mouths and hands in their pockets would only have to demand the franchise from an astounded ministry to obtain it.

"Members of Parliament are, I believe, either a separate creation or a composite of the parrot and the magpie. I have not yet discovered their particular function in nature but have observed them with some particularity. They wear top hats and are constantly making speeches, both of which are easy things to do and quite pleasant minor accomplishments.—So far as I can gather their chief use has been to pass something called a Budget. From the fact that this Budget contains a disgraceful imposition on tobacco I must take it that Members of Parliament are among the lower animals who do not smoke—they are also uninteresting in other ways."

Having said this my old friend bowed to me and departed genially with my cigar case in his pocket. The shirt-sleeved Adonis behind the counter wagged his head solemnly at a fly and then clouted it with a dish-cloth.

IV

The old gentleman took an athletic pull at his liquor, and continued his discourse. He had been discussing more to himself than to me the merits of Professor James and Monsieur Bergson, and had inquired was I aware of the nature of the Pragmatic Sanction. The gentleman behind the counter remarked, that he had one on his bicycle, but that they were no good. This statement was denounced by the Philosopher as an unnatural and clumsy falsehood, and, anathematising the ignorance of his interrupter, he came by slow degrees to the following discourse—

"I have but little faith in any of the methods of education with which I am presently acquainted. The objective of every system of teaching should be to enable the person who is being subjected to this repulsive treatment to do something which will fit him to maintain a place in life where he will be as little liable as possible to the changes and vicissitudes of civilised existence.

"The cumbrous and inadequate preparation which is now in vogue can scarcely be spoken of by a person of understanding without the use of language unbefitting one who is a member of (inter alia) the Reformed Church and the highest order of the vertebrates.

"If one walks into any school in this kingdom one is certain to meet a tall, thin, anaemic youth with a draggled moustache and a worried eye who is endeavouring to coerce a mass of indigestible, inelastic and unimportant facts into the heads of divers sleepy and disgusted children. If a small boy, on being asked where Labrador is, replies that it is the most northerly point of the Berlin Archipelago, he may be wrong in quite a variety of ways, but even if he answered correctly he would still know just as little about the matter, while if he were to give the only proper reply to so ridiculous a conundrum, he would tell his tormentor that he did not care a rap where it was, that he had not put it there, and that he would tell his mother if the man did not leave him alone. What has he got to do with Labrador, Terra del Fuego, or the Isles of Greece? Give him a fistful of facts about Donnybrook, and send him away to hunt out the truth of it, with a sandwich in his pocket and the promise of a lump of toffee when he came back with his cargo of truths—that would interest him, the toffee would make the information stick, while the verification of his facts would make his head fat and fertile.

"When we ceased to be natural creatures and put on the oppressive shrouds, wraps and disguises which we label in the villainous aggregate civilisation, we ceased to know either how to teach or how to learn. We exchanged the freedom and spaciousness of life for a cramped existence compounded of spectacles and bad grammar, this complicated still further by the multiplication tables, the dead languages and indigestion tabloids. During his school-days many a healthy boy had to parse ten square miles of dead language. Why? he does not know and he will never be told, for no one else knows any more than he. The only thing of which he is certain is, that he did not do anything to deserve it.

"Civilisation, which is responsible for all the woes of life, such as washing, shaving and buying boots, is responsible for this also. Potatoes are more productive than Latin roots, are twice as nourishing and cannot be parsed. Teach a girl how to recognise an egg by the naked eye, and then teach her how to cook it. Teach a boy how to discover the kind of trees eggs grow on and what is the best kind of soil to plant them in. Teach a girl how to keep her hands from scratching, her tongue from telling lies, and her teeth from dropping out prematurely, and she will, maybe, turn out a healthy kind of mammal having a house filled with brightness and laughter. Teach a boy how to prevent another boy from mashing the head off him, teach him how to be good to his mother when she is old, teach him how to give two-pence to a beggar without imagining that he is investing his savings in Paradise at fifty per cent and a bonus; and then, having eliminated civilisation, education, clothes, tin whistles and soap this earth will not be such a bad old ball-alley for a man to smoke a pipe in.

"Everything is wrong. People should rise to their feet and salute when a farmer or a teacher comes into a room. No man should be allowed into Parliament who has not engaged in one or other of these professions, but because they are the two most important professions in the world their exponents are robbed and harried into slaves and fools."

Having said this with great earnestness the old gentleman absent-mindedly impounded my drink, absorbed it, and strode away wrapped in thought. The gentleman-in-waiting sympathetically asked me if I would have another one, but on learning that I had no more money he said good-night.

V

The old gentleman was in a state of most unusual content. It might have been because the sun was shining, or it might have been because he had just finished his third glass: whatever it was, the smile upon his face was of a depth and a radiance impossible to describe. He spoke for a while upon the pleasant smell of hay passing through a city, and, remarking upon the enviable thirst of hay-makers, he swept gradually to the following weighty monologue—

"From the earliest times," said he, "drinking has been regarded not alone as a necessary lubricant, but also as a pastime, and the ingenuity of every race under the sun has been exercised in the attempt to give variety and distinction to its beverages.

"We may take it that the earliest race of men drank nothing but water, and hot water to boot, for at that era the earth must have been, if not hot, at least tepid. One can easily imagine that the contemporaries of the five-toed horse might have welcomed death as a happy release from their too sultry existence.

"I suppose man is the only brewing animal known to scientific research. All other creatures take their food and drink neat, or in a raw state. Of course, almost all mammals are enabled by a highly ingenious internal mechanism to brew milk, or some other lacteal substitute, but this is performed by a natural, instinctive impulse towards the preservation of their young and conserves none of the spirit of artifice and calculation so necessary to authentic brewing operations.

"Brewing was possible only when the stability of the human race was, more or less, assured and permanent. Our primal ancestors existed in a state as nearly resembling chaos as well might be. They had not yet aggregated into communities, but vast hordes of families—a father, an uncertain number of mothers, and an astounding complexity of children—wandered wherever food seemed most abundant, and fought with or eluded such other families as they chanced upon. This state of existence was too precarious and haphazard to allow of the niceties of brewing being evolved.

"But the natural tendency of families to lengthen, the gregarious instincts of the race, and the need of mutual protection and assistance ultimately welded these indiscriminate families into communities of ever-varying extent, and the movement of these huge troops and transportation of their baggage becoming more and more difficult (vehicles being unknown and horses, perhaps, treble-toed, wily and ferocious) and food, which until then had only been obtained in a fugitive state, becoming less easy of access, these communities were forced to select a settled habitation, scratch the earth for provender, settled down to the breeding of one-toed horses, and exercise the respectable virtues of thrift and industry for their preservation. Thus, laws were formulated, tentative and unsatisfactory at first, and ever tending, as to this day, to become more complex and less satisfactory. Villages took shape, straggled into towns, widened into cities and coalesced into kingdoms and empires: and so, the civilisation of which we are partakers crawled laboriously into being, with the brewer somewhere in the centre, active, rubicund and disputatious, as he has continued to date, with a seat on the County Council which he had swindled some thirsty statesman out of, and more property than he could deal with by himself.

"It is a singular reflection that thirst has very little to do with the consumption of drink, nor is this appetite subject to the vagaries of climate, for the inhabitants of the coldest regions will, it is feared, drink on equal terms with those dwelling in the sun-burnt tropics. In almost all ceremonial observances drinking has had a special place, and this diversion lends itself to an infinite number of objects—we can from the same bowl quaff health to our friends and confusion to our enemies, doubtless with equal results. Here alone men meet on equal terms. There is no religion, nationality or politics in liquor: let it be but sufficiently wet and potent and it matters not if the brew has been fermented in the tub of a Christian or the vessel of a heathen Turk.

"I understand that this latter race are forbidden, by the form of heresy which they call religion, to use liquors more potent than sherbet. Some thinkers believe that this deprivation is possibly the reason of their being Turks.—They are Turks, not from conviction, but from habit, spite, and the bile engendered by a too rigid and bigoted abstinence. In this belief, however, I do not concur, for I consider that a Turk is a Turk naturally, and without any further constraint than those imposed by the laws of geography and primogeniture.

"Meanwhile it is interesting to speculate on the future of an abstinent nation whose politics have the misfortune to be guided by a Peerage instead of a Beerage, and whose national destiny is irrationally divorced from the interests of 'The Trade.' Any departure from the established customs of humanity must be criticised unsparingly, and, if necessary, destructively. To overthrow the customs of antiquity must entail its own punishment and that punishment may be an awe-inspiring and chastening Success. Therefore, this happy whisky-governed land of ours should never forsake its liquor or it may be forced by opportunity and work to become great. The foundations of our civilisation are steeped in beer—let no sacrilegious hand seek to interfere with it, for, even if the foundations were rotten, the interests of the Trade must not be disturbed, the grave and learned members of our Corporation might be horribly reduced to working for their living, and our unfortunate City might have the extraordinary misfortune to scramble out of debt in the absence of its statesmen."

The old gentleman, with a bright smile, said that "he did not mind if he did," and he "did" with such gusto that I had to call a cab.