The true hero is he who unites the two qualities. The physical element is the more plentiful. For one man who will count the cost of sacrifice and, having counted it, pay the price with unfaltering heart, there are many who will answer the sudden call to meet peril with swift defiance. The courage that snatches a comrade from under the guns of the enemy or a child from the flames is, happily, not uncommon. It is inspired by an impulse that takes men out of themselves and by a certain spirit of challenge to fate that every one with a sporting instinct loves to take. But the act of the sailor of the Formidable was a much bigger thing. Here was no thrill of gallantry and no sporting risk. He dealt in cold certainties: the boat and safety; the ship and death; his life or the other's. And he thought of his comrade's old parents at home and chose death.

It was a great end. I wonder whether you or I would be capable of it. I would give much to feel that I could answer in the affirmative—that I could take my stand on the spiritual plane of that unknown sailor.



ON SPENDTHRIFTS

While every one, I suppose, agrees that Lady Ida Sitwell richly deserves her three months' imprisonment, there are many who will have a sneaking pity for her. And that not because she is a woman of family who will suffer peculiar tortures from prison life. On the contrary, I have no doubt that a spell of imprisonment is just what she needs. In fact, it is what most of us need, especially most of those who live a life of luxurious idleness. To be compelled to get up early, to clean your cell, to wear plain clothes, to live on plain food, to observe regular hours, and do regular duties—this is no matter for tears, but for thankfulness. It is the sort of discipline that we ought to undergo periodically for our spiritual and even bodily health.

No, the sympathy that will be felt for Lady Ida is the sympathy which is commonly felt for the spendthrift—for the person who, no matter what his income, is congenitally incapable of making ends meet. The miser has no friends; but the spendthrift has generally too many. We avoid Harpagon as though he were a leper; but Falstaff, who, like Lady Ida, could "find no cure for this intolerable consumption of the purse," never lacked friends, and even Justice Shallow, it will be remembered, lent him a thousand crowns. There is no record of its having been repaid, though Falstaff was once surprised, in a moment of bitter humiliation, into admitting the debt. And Charles Surface and Micawber—who can deny them a certain affection? I have no doubt that Mrs. Micawber's papa, who "lived to bail Mr. Micawber out many times until he died lamented by a wide circle of friends," loved the fellow as you and I love him. I should deem it a privilege to bail out Micawber. But Elwes, the miser—ugh! the very name chills the blood.

The difference, I suppose, proceeds from the idea that while the miser is the soul of selfishness, the spendthrift is at bottom a good-natured fellow and a lover of his kind. No doubt the vice of the spendthrift has a touch of generosity, but it is often generosity at other people's expense, and is not seldom as essentially selfish as the vice of the miser. It is rather like the generosity of the man who, according to Sydney Smith, was so touched by a charity sermon that he picked his neighbour's pocket of a guinea and put it in the plate. I have no doubt that Lady Ida if she had got Miss Dobbs's money would have scattered it about with a very free hand, and would have contributed to the collection plate quite handsomely. But she was selfish none the less. It was her form of selfishness to enjoy the luxury of spending money she hadn't got, just as it was Elwes's form of selfishness to enjoy the luxury of saving money that he had got.

The point was very well stated by a famous miser whose son has since been in Parliament (I will not say on which side). The old man had accumulated a vast fortune, but, in the Scotch phrase, would have grudged you "the smoke off his porridge." (He died, by the way, properly enough, through walking home in the rain because he was too mean to take a cab.) He was once asked why he was so anxious to increase his riches, since his son would probably squander them, and he replied, "If my son gets as much pleasure out of squandering my money as I have had out of saving it, I shall not mind." Both the hoarding and the spending, you see, were in his view equally a matter of mere selfish pleasure.

But I admit that the uncalculating spirit that lands people in debt is a more engaging frailty than the calculating spirit of the miser. I know a delightful man who seems to have no more knowledge of the relation of income and expenditure than a kitten. If he gets L100 unexpectedly he does not look at it in relation to his whole needs. He does not remember rent, rates, taxes, baker, butcher, tailor. No. On the strength of it, he will order a new piano in the morning, buy his wife a sealskin jacket in the afternoon, and by the next day be deeper in the mire than ever, and wonder how he got there. And there is Jones's young wife, a charming woman, who is dragging her husband into debt with the same kittenish irresponsibility. She will leave Jones on the pavement with a remark that suggests that she is going into the shop to buy some pins, and will come out with a request for L10 for some "perfectly lovely" thing that has caught her eye. And Jones, being elderly, and still a little astonished at having won the affection of such a divinity, has not the courage to say "No."

To the people afflicted with these loose spending habits I would commend the lesson of a little incident I saw in a tram on the Embankment the other evening. There entered and sat beside me a working man, carrying his "kit" in a handkerchief, and wearing a scarf round his neck, a cloth cap, and corduroy trousers—obviously a labourer earning perhaps 25s. a week. He paid his fare, and then he took from his pocket a packet tied up in a handkerchief. He untied the knot, and there came forth a neat pocket-book with pencil attached. He opened it, and began to write. My curiosity was too much for my manners. Out of the tail of my eye I watched the motion of his fingers, and this is what he wrote: "Tram 1-1/2 d." In a flash I seemed to see the whole orderly life of that poor labourer. He had an anchorage in the tossing seas of this troublesome world. He had got hold of a lesson that Lady Ida Sitwell ought to try and learn during the next three months. It is this: Watch your spendings.

For it is the people who are more concerned about getting money than about how they spend it who come to grief. A very acute observer once told me that the principal difference between the Scotch people and the Lancashire people was that the former thought most about how they spent, and the latter most about how much they got. And the difference, he said, was the difference between a thrifty and an unthrifty people. I think that is true. Nothing is more common than to find people worse off as they get better off. They have learned the art of getting money and lost the art of spending it wisely. They pay their way on L200 a year and get hopelessly into debt on L500. They are safe in a rowing boat, but capsize in a sailing boat.

Here is an axiom which I offer to all spendthrifts: We cannot command our incomings; but we can control outgoings.



ON A TOP-HAT

A few days ago I went to a christening to make vows on behalf of the offspring of a gallant young officer now at the front. I conceived that the fitting thing on such an occasion was to wear a silk hat, and accordingly I took out the article, warmed it before the fire, and rubbed it with a hat pad until it was nice and shiny, put it on my head, and set out for the church. But I soon regretted the choice. It had no support from any one else present, and when later I got out of the Tube and walked down the Strand I found that I was a conspicuous person, which, above all things, I hate to be. My hat, I saw, was observed. Eyes were turned towards me with that mild curiosity with which one remarks any innocent oddity or vanity of the streets.

I became self-conscious and looked around for companionship, but as my eye travelled along the crowded pavement I could see nothing but bowlers and trilbys and occasional straws. "Ah, here at last," said I, "is one coming." But a nearer view only completed my discomfiture, for it was one of those greasy-shiny hats which go with frayed trousers and broken boots, and which are the symbol of "better days," of hopes that are dead, and "drinks" that dally, of a social status that has gone and of a suburban villa that has shrunk to a cubicle in a Rowton lodging-house. I looked at greasy-hat and greasy-hat looked at me, and in that momentary glance of fellowship we agreed that we were "out of it."

I put my silk hat away at night with the firm resolution that nothing short of an invitation to Buckingham Palace, or some similar incredible disaster, should make me drag it into the light again. For the truth is that the war has given the top-hat a knock-out blow. It had been tottering on our brows for some time. There was a very hot summer a few years ago which began the revolution. The tyranny of the top-hat became intolerable, and quite "respectable" people began to be seen in the streets with Panamas and straws. But these were only concessions to an irresponsible climate, and the silk hat still held its ancient sway as the crown and glory of our City civilisation. And now it has toppled down and is on the way, perhaps, to becoming as much a thing of the past as wigs or knee-breeches. It is almost as rare in the Strand as it is in Market Street, Manchester. Cabinet Ministers and other sublime personages still wear it, coachmen still wear it, and my friend greasy-hat still wears it; but for the rest of us it is a splendour that is past, a memory of the world before the deluge.

It may be that it will revive. It would not be the first time that such a result of a great catastrophe was found to be only temporary. I remember that Pepys records in his Diary that one result of the Great Plague was that the wig went out of fashion. People were afraid to wear wigs that might be made of the hair of those who had died of infection. But the wig returned again for more than a century, though you may remember that in The Rivals there is an early hint of its final disappearance. There was never probably a more crazy fashion, and, like most crazy fashions, it began, as the "Alexandra limp" of our youth began, in snobbery. Was it not a fact that a bald-headed King wore a wig to conceal his baldness, which set all the flunkey-world wearing wigs to conceal their hair? This aping of the great is always converting some defect or folly into a virtue. When Lady Percy in Henry IV. is lamenting Hotspur she says:—

... he was, indeed, the glass Wherein the noble youth did dress themselves. He had no legs that practised not his gait; And speaking thick, which nature made his blemish, Became the accents of the valiant; For those that could speak low and tardily, Would turn their own perfection to abuse. To seem like him.

In the case of the top-hat the disappearance is due to the psychology of the war. The great tragedy has brought us down to the bed-rock of things and has made us feel somehow that ornament is out of place, and that the top-hat is a falsity in a world that has become a battlefield. I don't think women have shared this feeling to the same extent. I am told there were never so many sealskin coats to be seen as during last winter. But, perhaps, the women will say that men have been only too glad to use the war as an excuse for getting rid of an incubus. And they may be right. We had better not make too great a virtue of what is, after all, a comfortable change. Let us enjoy it without boasting.

Our enjoyment may be short-lived. We must not be surprised if this incredible hat returns in triumph with peace. It has survived the blasts of many centuries and infinite changes of fashion. It is, I suppose, the most ancient survival in the dress that men wear. There is in the Froissart collection at the British Museum an illumination (dating from the fifteenth century) showing the expedition of the French and English against the Barbary corsairs. And there seated in the boats are men clad in armour. They have put their helmets aside and are wearing top-hats! And it may be that when Macaulay's New Zealander, centuries hence, takes his seat on that broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's, he will sit under the shelter of a top-hat that has out-lasted all our greatness.

There must be some virtue in a thing that is so immortal. If the doctrine of the survival of the fittest applies to dress, it is the fittest thing we have. Trousers are a thing of yesterday with us, but our top-hat carries us back to the Wars of the Roses and beyond. It is not its beauty that explains it. I have never heard any one deny that it is ugly, though custom may have blunted our sense of its ugliness. It is not its utility. I have never heard any one claim that this strange cylinder had that quality. It is not its comfort It is stiff, it is heavy, it is unmanageable in a wind and ruined by a shower of rain. It needs as much attention as a peevish child or a pet dog. It is not even cheap, and when it is disreputable it is the most disreputable thing on earth. What is the mystery of its strange persistence? Is it simply a habit that we cannot throw off or is there a certain snobbishness about it that appeals to the flunkeyism of men? That is perhaps the explanation. That is perhaps why it has disappeared when snobbishness is felt to be inconsistent with the world of stern realities and bitter sorrows in which we live. We are humble and serious and out of humour with the pretentious vanity of our top-hat.



ON LOSING ONE'S MEMORY

The case of the soldier in the Keighley Hospital who has lost his memory in the war and has been identified by rival families as a Scotchman, a Yorkshireman, and so on is one of the most singular personal incidents of the war. On the face of it it would seem impossible that a mother should not know her own son, or a brother his brother. Yet in this case it is clear that some of the claimants are mistaken. The incident is not, of course, without precedent. The most notorious case of the sort was that of Arthur Orton, the impudent Tichborne claimant, whose strongest card in his imposture was that Lady Tichborne believed him to be her long-lost son. In that case, no doubt, the maternal passion was the source of a credulity that blinded the old lady to the flagrant evidence of the fraud.

But, generally speaking, our memory of other faces is extremely vague and elusive. I have just come in from a walk with a friend of mine whom I have known intimately for many years. Yet for the life of me I could not at this moment tell you the colour of his eyes, nor could I give a reasonable account of his nose or of the shape of his face. I have a general sense of his appearance, but no absolute knowledge of the details, and if he were to meet me to-morrow with a blank stare and a shaven upper lip I should pass him without a thought of recognition.

Memory, in fact, is largely reciprocal, and when one of the parties has lost his power of response the key is gone. If the lock won't yield to the key, you are satisfied that the key is the wrong one, no matter how much it looks like the right one. I think I could tell my dog from a thousand other dogs; but if the creature were to lose his memory and to pass me in the street without answering my call, I should pass on, simply observing that he bore a remarkable likeness to my animal.

Most of us, I suppose, have experienced in a momentary and partial degree a sudden stoppage of the apparatus of memory. You are asked, let us say, to spell "parallelogram." In an ordinary way you could do it on your head or in your sleep; but the sudden demand gives you a mental jerk that makes the wretched word a hopeless chaos of r's and l's, and the more you try to sort them out the less convincing do they seem. Or walking with a friend you meet at a turn in the street that excellent woman, Mrs. Orpington-Smith. You know her as well as you know your own mother, but the fact that you have got to introduce her by her name forthwith sends her name flying into space. The passionate attempt to capture it before it escapes only makes its escape more certain, and you are reduced to the pitiful expedient of mumbling something that is inaudible.

The worst experience of a lapse of memory that ever came to me was in the midst of a speech which I had to make before a large gathering in a London hall. I had got to the middle of what I had to say when it seemed to me that the whole machine of the mind suddenly ceased to work. It was as though an immense loneliness descended on me. I saw the audience before me, but apart from vision I seemed bereft of all my faculties. If I had in that instant been asked for my name I am doubtful whether I could have got anywhere near it. Happily some one in a front row, thinking I was pausing for a word, threw out a suggestion. It was like magic. I felt the machine of memory start again with an almost audible "puff, puff," and I went on to the end quite comfortably. The pause had seemed terribly long to me, but I was surprised afterwards to find that it had been so brief as to be generally unnoticed or regarded as an artful way of emphasising a point. I let it go at that, but I knew myself that in that moment I had lost my memory.

Even distinguished and expert orators have been known to suffer from this absolute lapse of memory. The Rosebery incident—was it in the Chesterfield speech?—is perhaps the best known, but I once heard Mr. Redmond, the calmest and most assured of speakers, come to an impasse in the House of Commons that held him up literally for minutes.

We are creatures of memory, and when, as in the Keighley case, memory is gone personality itself has gone. Nothing is left but the empty envelope. The more fundamental functions of memory, the habits of respiration, of walking and physical movement, of mastication, and so on, remain. The Keighley man still eats and walks with all the knowledge of a lifetime. He probably preserves his taste for tobacco. But these things have nothing to do with personality. That is the product of the myriad mental impressions that you have stored up in your pilgrimage. There is not a moment in your life that is not charged with the significance of memory. You cannot hear the blackbird singing in the low bough in the evening without the secret music of summer eves long past being stirred within you. It is that response of the inner harp of memory that gives the song its beauty. And so everything we do and see and hear is touched with a thousand influences which we cannot catalogue, but which constitute our veritable selves. An old hymn tune, or an old song, a turn of phrase, a scent in the garden, a tone of voice, a curve in the path—everything comes to us weighted with its own treasures of memory, bitter or sweet, but always significant.

It is a mistake to suppose that memory is merely a capacity to remember facts. In that respect there is the widest diversity of experience. Macaulay could recite Paradise Lost, while Rossetti was a little doubtful whether the sun went round the earth or the earth round the sun. I once met an American elocutionist who could recite ten of Shakespeare's plays, and he showed me the wonderful system of mnemonics by which he achieved the miracle. But he was a mere recording machine—a dull fellow. The true argosy of memory is not facts, but a perfume compounded of all the sunsets we have ever seen, all the joys and friendships, pleasures and sorrows we have ever known, all the emotions we have felt, all the brave and mean things we have done, all the broken hopes we have suffered. To have lost that argosy is to be dead, no matter how healthy an appetite we retain.



ON WEARING A FUR-LINED COAT

A friend of mine—one of those people who talk about money with an air of familiarity that suggests that they have got an "out-crop" of the Rand reef in their back-gardens—said to me the other day that I ought to buy a fur-lined coat. There never was such a time as this for buying a fur-lined coat or a sealskin jacket, said he. What with the war, and the "sales," and the tradesmen's need of cash, they were simply being thrown at you. You could have them almost for the trouble of carrying them away. A trifle of fifteen or twenty pounds would buy one a coat that would be cheap at sixty guineas. And, remember, there was wear for twenty years in it. And think of the saving in doctor's bills—for you simply can't catch colds if you wear a fur coat. In short, not to buy a fur coat at this moment was an act of gross improvidence, a wrong to one's family, a ... a ... And then he looked, with the cold disapproval of a connoisseur, at the coat I was wearing. And in the light of that glance I saw for the first time that it was ... yes ... certainly, it was not what it had been.

Now I am not going to pretend that I have a soul above fur-lined coats. I haven't; I love them. And by fur coats I don't mean those adorned with astrakhan collars, which I abominate. A man in an astrakhan coat is to me a suspicious character, a stage baron, one who is probably deep in treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The suspicion is unjust to the gentleman in the astrakhan coat, of course. Most suspicions are unjust. And if you ask me to give reasons for this unreasoning hostility to astrakhan, I do not know that I could find them. Perhaps it is the dislike I have for artificial curls; perhaps it is that the astrakhan collar reminds me of those unhappy pet dogs who look as though they had been put in curl papers overnight and sent out into the streets by their owners as a poor jest. Yes, I think it must be that sense of artificiality which is at the root of the dislike. No doubt the curls are natural. No doubt the woolly sheep of Astrakhan do wear their coats in these little heaven-sent ringlets. But ... well ... "I do not like thee, Doctor Fell."

But fur-lined coats, with fine fur collars, are quite another affair. If I had the "magic nib," I could grow lyrical over them. I could, indeed. In place-of this article I would write an ode to a fur-lined coat. I would sing of the Asian wilds from whence it came, of its wondrous lines and its soft and silken texture, of its generous warmth and its caressing touch. I would set up such a universal hunger for fur coats that the tradesmen in Oxford Street and Regent Street would come and offer me a guinea a word to write advertisements for them.

And yet I shall not buy a fur-lined coat, and I will tell you why. A fur coat is not an article of clothing: it is a new way of life. You cannot say with reckless prodigality, "Here, I will have a fur coat and make an end of this gnawing passion." The fur coat is not an end: it is a beginning. You have got to live up to it. You have got to take the fur-coat point of view of your relations to society. When Chauncey Depew, as a boy, bought a beautiful spotted dog at a fair and took it home, the rain came down and the spots began to run into stripes. He took the dog back to the man of whom he had bought it and demanded an explanation. "But you had an umbrella with that dog," said the man. "No," said the boy. "Oh!" said the man, "there's an umbrella goes with that dog."

And so it is with the fur-lined coat. So many things "go with it." It is in this respect like that grand piano to which you succumbed in a moment of paternal weakness—or after a lucky stroke in rubber. The old furniture, which had seemed so unexceptionable before, suddenly became dowdy in the presence of this princely affair. You wanted new chairs and rugs and hangings to make the piano accord with its setting. Even the house fell under suspicion, and perhaps you date all your difficulties from the day that you bought that grand piano, and found that it had set you going on a new way of life just beyond your modest means.

If I bought a fur-lined coat I know that I should want to buy a motor-car to keep it company. It is possible, of course, to wear a fur coat in a motor-bus, but if you do you will assuredly have a sense that you are a little over-dressed, a trifle conspicuous, that the fellow-passengers are mentally remarking that such a coat ought to have a carriage of its own. It would provoke the comment that I heard the other night as two ladies in evening dress left a bus in a pouring rain. "Well," said one of the other lady passengers—a little enviously I thought, but still pertinently—"if I could afford to wear such fine clothes I think I would take a Cab." Yes, decidedly, the fur-lined coat would not be complete without the motor-car.

And then consider how it limits your freedom and raises the tariff against you. The tip that would be gratefully received if you were getting into that modest coat that you have discarded would be unworthy of the fur-lined standard that you have deliberately adopted. The recipient would take it frigidly, with a glance at the luxurious garment into which he had helped you—a glance that would cut you to the quick. Your friends would have to be fur-lined, too, and your dinners would no longer be the modest affairs of old, but would soar to the champagne standard. It would not be possible to slip unnoticed into your favourite little restaurant in Soho to take your simple chop, or to go in quest of that wonderful restaurant of Arne's of which "Aldebaran" keeps the secret. The modesty of Arne's would make you blush for your fur-lined coat.

"The genteel thing," said Tony Lumpkin's friend, "is the genteel thing at any time, if so be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation according-ly." That is it. The fur-lined coat is a genteel thing; but you have to be "in a concatenation according-ly." And there's the rub. It is not the coat, but its trimmings, so to speak, that give us pause. When you put on the coat you insensibly put off your old way of life. You set up a new standard, and have got to adapt your comings and goings, your habits and your expenditure to it. I once knew a man who had a fur-lined coat presented to him. It was a disaster. He could not live "in a concatenation according-ly." He lost his old friends without getting new ones. And his end ... Well, his end confirmed me in the conviction of the unwisdom of wearing a fur-lined coat before you are able, or disposed, to mould your life to the fur-lined standard.



IN PRAISE OF WALKING

I started out the other day from Keswick with a rucksack on my back, a Baddeley in my pocket, and a companion by my side. I like a companion when I go a-walking. "Give me a companion by the way," said Sterne, "if it be only to remark how the shadows lengthen as the sun declines." That is about enough. You do not want a talkative person. Walking is an occupation in itself. You may give yourself up to chatter at the beginning, but when you are warmed to the job you are disposed to silence, drop perhaps one behind the other, and reserve your talk for the inn table and the after-supper pipe. An occasional joke, an occasional stave of song, a necessary consultation over the map—that is enough for the way.

At the head of the Lake we got in a boat and rowed across Derwentwater to the tiny bay at the foot of Catbells. There we landed, shouldered our burdens, and set out over the mountains and the passes, and for a week we enjoyed the richest solitude this country can offer. We followed no cut-and-dried programme. I love to draw up programmes for a walking tour, but I love still better to break them. For one of the joys of walking is the sense of freedom it gives you. You are tied to no time-table, the slave of no road, the tributary of no man. If you like the road you follow it; if you choose the pass that is yours also; if your fancy (and your wind) is for the mountain tops, then over Great Gable and Scawfell, Robinson and Helvellyn be your way. Every short cut is for you, and every track is the path of adventure. The stream that tumbles down the mountain side is your wine cup. You kneel on the boulders, bend your head, and take such draughts as only the healthy thirst of the mountains can give. And then, on your way again singing:—

Bed in the bush with the stars to see. Bread I dip in the river— There's the life for a man like me. There's the life for ever.

What liberty is there like this? You have cut your moorings from the world, you are far from telegraphs and newspapers and all the frenzies of the life you have left behind you, you are alone with the lonely hills and the wide sky and the elemental things that have been from the beginning and will outlast all the tortured drama of men. The very sounds of life—the whistle of the curlew, the bleating of the mountain sheep—add to the sense of primeval solitude. To these sounds the crags have echoed for a thousand and ten thousand years; to these sounds and to the rushing of the winds and the waters they will echo ten thousand years hence. It is as though you have passed out of time into eternity, where a thousand years are as one day. There is no calendar for this dateless world. The buzzard that you have startled from its pool in the gully and that circles round with wide-flapping wings has a lineage as ancient as the hills, and the vision of the pikes of Langdale that bursts on you as you reach the summit of Esk hause is the same vision that burst on the first savage who adventured into these wild fastnesses of the mountains.

And then as the sun begins to slope to the west you remember that, if you are among immortal things, you are only a mortal yourself, that you are getting footsore, and that you need a night's lodging and the comforts of an inn. Whither shall we turn? The valleys call us on every side. Newlands wide vale we can reach, or cheerful Borrowdale, or lonely Ennerdale, or—yes, to-night we will sup at Wastdale, at the jolly old inn that Auld Will Ritson used to keep, that inn sacred to the cragsman, where on New Year's Eve the gay company of climbers foregather from their brave deeds on the mountains and talk of hand-holds and foot-holds and sing the song of "The rope, the rope," and join in the chorus as the landlord trolls out:

I'm not a climber, not a climber, Not a climber now, My weight is going fourteen stone— I'm not a climber now.

We shall not find Gaspard there to-night—Gaspard, the gay and intrepid guide from the Dauphine, beloved of all who know the lonely inn at Wastdale. He is away on the battle-field fighting a sterner foe than the rocks and precipices of Great Gable and Scawfell. But Old Joe, the shepherd, will be there—Old Joe, who has never been in a train or seen a town and whose special glory is that he can pull uglier faces than any man in Cumberland. He will not pull them for anybody—only when he is in a good humour and for his cronies in the back parlour. To-night, perchance, we shall see his eyes roll as he roars out the chorus of "D'ye ken John Peel?" Yes, Wastdale shall be to-night's halt. And so over Black Sail, and down the rough mountain side to the inn whose white-washed walls hail us from afar out of the gathering shadows of the valley.

To-morrow? Well, to-morrow shall be as to-day. We will shoulder our rucksacks early, and be early on the mountains, for the first maxim in going a journey is the early start. Have the whip-hand of the day, and then you may loiter as you choose. If it is hot, you may bathe in the chill waters of those tarns that lie bare to the eye of heaven in the hollows of the hills—tarns with names of beauty and waters of such crystal purity as Killarney knows not. And at night we will come through the clouds down the wild course of Rosset Ghyll and sup and sleep in the hotel hard by Dungeon Ghyll, or, perchance, having the day well in hand, we will push on by Blea Tarn and Yewdale to Coniston, or by Easedale Tarn to Grasmere, and so to the Swan at the foot of Dunmail Raise. For we must call at the Swan. Was it not the Swan that Wordsworth's "Waggoner" so triumphantly passed? Was it not the Swan to which Sir Walter Scott used to go for his beer when he was staying with Wordsworth at Rydal Water? And behind the Swan is there not that fold in the hills where Wordsworth's "Michael" built, or tried to build, his sheepfold? Yes, we will stay at the Swan whatever befalls.

And so the jolly days go by, some wet, some fine, some a mixture of both, but all delightful, and we forget the day of the week, know no news except the changes in the weather and the track over the mountains, meet none of our kind except a rare vagabond like ourselves—with rope across his shoulder if he is a rock-man, with rucksack on back if he is a tourist—and with no goal save some far-off valley inn where we shall renew our strength and where the morrow's uprising to deeds shall be sweet.

I started to write in praise of walking, and I find I have written in praise of Lakeland. But indeed the two chants of praise are a single harmony, for I have written in vain if I have not shown that the way to see the most exquisite cabinet of beauties in this land is by the humble path of the pedestrian. He who rides through Lakeland knows nothing of its secrets, has tasted of none of its magic.



ON REWARDS AND RICHES

We have all been so occupied with the war in Europe that few of us, I suppose, have even heard of another war which has been raging in the law courts for 150 days or so between two South African corporations over some question of property. It seems to have been marked by a good deal of frightfulness. In the closing scenes Mr. Hughes, one of the counsel, complained that he had been called a fool, a liar, a scoundrel, and so on by his opponent, and the judge lamented that the case had been the occasion of so much barristerial bitterness.

But it was not the light which the case threw on the manners of counsel that interested me. After all, these things are part of the game. They have no more reality than the thumping blows which the Two Macs exchange in the pantomime. I have no doubt that after their memorable encounter in the Bardell v. Pickwick case, Serjeant Buzfuz and Serjeant Snubbin went out arm-in-arm, and over their port in the Temple (where the wine is good and astonishingly cheap) made excellent fun of the whole affair. The wise juryman never takes any notice of the passion and tears, the heroics and the indignation of counsel. He knows that they are assumed not to enlighten but to darken his mind. I always recall in this connection the remark of a famous lawyer who rose to great eminence by the exercise of his emotions. He was standing by the graveside of a departed friend and observed that one of the mourners, a fellow—lawyer, was shedding real tears. "What a waste of raw material," he remarked in a whisper to his neighbour. "Those tears would be worth a guinea a drop before a jury."

What interested me in the case was the statement that the legal costs had been L150,000, and that Mr. Upjohn, K.C., alone had had a retainer of L1000, and had been kept going with a "refresher" of L100 a day. I like that word "refresher." It has a fine bibulous smack about it. Or perhaps it is a reminiscence of "the ring." Buzfuz feels a bit pumped by the day's round. He has perspired his L100, as it were, and is doubtful whether he can come up to the scratch without a refresher. And so he is taken to his corner by his client and dosed with another L100. Then all his ardour returns. He sees the thing as clear as daylight—the radiant innocence of the plaintiff, the black perfidy of the defendant. To-morrow evening the vision will have faded again, but another L100 will make it as plain as ever. Yes, it is a good word—"refresher"—a candid word, an honest word. It puts the relation on a sound business footing. There is no sham sentiment about it. Give me another refresher, says Buzfuz, and I'll shed another pailful of tears for you, and blacken both the defendant's eyes for him.

But as I read of these princely earnings I could not help thinking of what an irrational world this is in the matter of rewards. Here are a couple of lawyers hurling epithets and "cases" at each other at L100 a day. At the end a verdict is given for this side or that, and outside the people concerned no one is a penny the better or worse. And not many miles away hundreds of thousands of men are living in the mud of rat-infested trenches, with the sky raining destruction upon them, and death and mutilation the hourly incident of their lives. They have no retaining fee and no refresher. Their reward is a shilling a day, and it would take them 20,000 days to "earn" what one K.C. pockets each night. Could the mind conceive a more grotesque inversion of the law of services and rewards? You die for your country at a shilling a day, while at home Snubbin, K.C., is perspiring for his client at L100 a day.

This is old, cheap, and profitless stuff, you say. What is the good of drawing these contrasts? We know all about them. They are a part of the eternal inequality of things. Services and rewards never have had, and never will have, any relation to each other. Please do not remind us that Charlie Chaplin (or Charles Chaplin as he desires to be known) earns L130,000 a year by playing the fool in front of a camera, and that Wordsworth did not earn enough to keep himself in shoe-laces out of poetry which has become an immortal possession of humanity, and had to beg a noble nobody (the Earl of Lonsdale, I think) to get him a job as a stamp distributor to keep him in bread and butter.

Do not, my dear sir, be alarmed, I am not going to work that ancient theme off on you. And yet I think it is necessary sometimes to remind ourselves of these things. It is especially necessary now when there is so much easy talk about "equality of sacrifice," and so much easy forgetfulness of the inequality of rewards. It is useful, too, to remind ourselves that riches have no necessary relation to service. The genius for getting money is an altogether different thing from the genius for service. I suppose the Guinnesses (to take an example) are the richest people in Ireland. And I suppose Tom Kettle was one of the poorest. But who will dare apply the money test as the real measure of the values of these men to humanity—the one fabulously rich by brewing the "black stuff," as they call it in Ireland; the other glorious in his genius for spending himself, without a thought of return, on every noble cause and dying freely for liberty in the full tide of his powers? Which means the more to the world? Perhaps one effect of the war will be to give us a saner standard of values in these things—will teach us to look behind the money and title to the motives that get the money and the title. It is not the money and title we should distrust so much as the false implications attaching to them.

And, after all, we exaggerate the importance of the material rewards. They must often be very much of a bore. As the late Lord Salisbury once said, a man doesn't sleep any better because he has a choice of forty bedrooms in his house. He can only take one ride even though he has fifty motor-cars. He cannot get more joy out of the sunshine than you or I can. The birds sing and the buds swell for all of us, and in the great storehouse of natural delights there is no money taken and no price on the goods. Mr. Rockefeller's L100 a minute (if that is his income) is poor consolation for his bad digestion, and the late Mr. Pierpoint Morgan would probably have parted with half his millions to get rid of the excrescence that made his nose an unsightly joke. We cannot count our riches at the bank—even on the material side, much less on the spiritual. As I came along the village this morning I saw Jim Squire digging up his potatoes in the golden September light. I hailed him, and inquired how the crop was turning out. "A wunnerful fine crop," he said, "and thank the Lord, there ain't a spot o' disease in 'em." And as he straightened his back, pointed to the tubers strewn about him, and beamed like the sun at his good fortune, he looked the very picture of autumn's riches.



ON TASTE

I was in a feminine company the other day when the talk turned on war economies, with the inevitable allusion to the substitution of margarine for butter. I found it was generally agreed that the substitution had been a success. "Well," said one, "I bought some butter the other day—the sort we used to use—and put it on the table with the margarine which we have learned to eat. My husband took some, thinking it was margarine, made a wry face, and said, 'It won't do. This margarine economy is beyond me. We must return to butter, even if we lose the war.' I explained to him that he was eating butter, the butter, and he said, 'Well, I'm hanged!' Now, what do you think of that?"

I said I thought it showed that taste was a matter of habit, and that imagination played a larger part in our make-up than we supposed. We say of this or that thing that it is "an acquired taste," as though the fact was unusual, whereas the fact would seem to be that we dislike most things until we have habituated ourselves to them. As a youth I abominated the taste of tobacco. It was only by an industrious apprenticeship to the herb that I overcame my natural dislike and got to be its obedient servant. And even my taste here is unstable. I needed a certain tobacco to be happy and thought there was no other tobacco like it. But I discovered that was all nonsense. When the war tax sent the price up, I determined that my expenditure should not go up with it, and I tried a cheaper sort. I found it distasteful at first, but now I prefer it to my old brand, just as the lady's husband finds that he prefers the new margarine to the old butter.

And it is not only gastronomic taste which seems so much the subject of habit. That hat that was so absolute a thing last year is as dowdy and impossible to-day as if it had been the fashion of the Babylonians. It has always been so. "We had scarce worn cloth one year at the Court," says Montaigne, "what time we mourned for our King Henrie the Second, but certainly in every man's opinion all manner of silks were already become so vile and abject that was any man seen to wear them he was presently judged to be some countrie fellow or mechanical man." And you remember that in Utopia gold was held of so small account by comparison with iron that it was used for the baser purposes of the household.

We are adaptable creatures, and easily make our tastes conform to our environment and our customs. There are certain savage tribes who wear rings through their noses. When Mrs. Brown, of Tooting, sees pictures of them she remarks to Mr. Brown on the strange habits of these barbarous people. And Mr. Brown, if he has a touch of humour in him, points to the rings hanging from Mrs. Brown's ears, and says: "But, my dear, why is it barbarous to wear a ring in the nostril and civilised to wear rings in the ears?" The dilemma is not unlike that of the savage tribe whom the Greeks induced to give up cannibalism. But when the cannibals, who had piously eaten their parents, were asked instead to adopt the Greek custom of burning the bodies they were horrified at the suggestion. They would cease to eat them; but burn them? No. I can imagine Mrs. Brown's savages agreeing to take the rings out of their noses, but refusing blankly to put them in their ears.

I have no doubt that the long-haired Cavaliers used to regard the short hair of the Puritans as the "limit" in bad taste, but the man who today dares to walk down the Strand with hair streaming down his back is looked at as a curiosity and a crank, and we all join in that delightful addition to the Litany which Moody invented: "From long-haired men and short-haired women, Good Lord, deliver us." But who shall say that our children will not reverse the prayer?

Even in my own brief span I have seen men's faces pass through every hirsute change under the Protean influence of "good taste." I remember when, to be really a student of good form, a man wore long side-whiskers of the Dundreary type. Then "mutton chops" and a moustache were the thing; then only a moustache; now we have got back to the Romans and the clean shave. But where is the absolute "good taste" in all this? Or take trousers. If you had lived a hundred years ago and had dared to go about in trousers instead of knee-breeches you would have been written down a vulgar fellow. Even the great Duke of Wellington in 1814 was refused admittance to Almack's because he presented himself in trousers. Now we relegate knee-breeches to fancy dress balls and Court functions.

But sometimes the canons of good taste are astonishingly irrational. Who was it who set Christendom wearing black, sad, hopeless black as the symbol of mourning? The Roman ladies, who had never heard of the doctrine of the Resurrection, clothed themselves in white for mourning. It is left for the Christian world, which looks beyond the grave, to wear the habiliments of despair. If I go to a funeral I am as conventional as anybody else, for I have not the courage of a distinguished statesman whom I saw at his brother's funeral wearing a blue overcoat, check trousers, and a grey waistcoat, and carrying a green umbrella. I can give you his name if you doubt me—a great name, too. And he would not deny the impeachment. I am not prepared to endorse his idea of good taste; but I hate black. "Why should I wear black for the guests of God?" asked Ruskin. And there is no answer. Perhaps among the consequences of the war there will be a repudiation of this false code of taste.



ON A HAWTHORN HEDGE

As I turned into the lane that climbs the hillside to the cottage under the high beech woods I was conscious of a sort of mild expectation that I could not explain. It was late evening. Venus, who looks down with such calm splendour upon this troubled earth in these summer nights, had disappeared, but the moon had not yet risen. The air was heavy with those rich odours which seem so much more pungent by night than by day—those odours of summer eves that Keats has fixed for ever in the imagination:—

I cannot see what flowers are at my feet. Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs; But, in embalmed darkness, guess each sweet Wherewith the seasonable month endows The grass, the thicket, and the fruit-tree wild; White hawthorn....

Ah, that was it. I remembered now. A fortnight ago, when I last came up this lane by night, it was the flash of the white hawthorn in the starlight that burst upon me with such a sudden beauty. I knew the spot. It was just beyond here, where the tall hedgerow leans over the grass side-track and makes a green arbour by the wayside. I should come to it in a minute or two, and catch once more that ecstasy of spring.

And when I reached the spot the white hawthorn had vanished. The arbour was there, but its glory had faded. The two weeks I had spent in Fleet Street had stripped it of its crown, and the whole pageant of the year must pass before I could again experience that sudden delight of the hedgerows bursting into foam. I do not mind confessing that I continued my way up the lane with something less than my former exhilaration. Partly no doubt this was due to the fact that the hill at this point begins its job of climbing in earnest, and is a stiff pull at the end of a long day's work and a tiresome journey—especially if you are carrying a bag.

But the real reason of the slight shadow that had fallen on my spirit was the vanished hawthorn. Poor sentimentalist, you say, to cherish these idle fancies in this stern world of blood and tears. Well, perhaps it is this stern world of blood and tears that gives these idle fancies their poignancy. Perhaps it is through those fancies that one feels the transitoriness of other things. The coming and the parting in the round of nature are so wonderfully mingled that we can never be quite sure whether the joy of the one triumphs over the regret for the other. It is always "Hail" and "Farewell" in one breath. I heard the cuckoo calling across the meadows to-day, and already I noticed a faltering in his second note. Soon the second note will be silent altogether, and the single call will sound over the valley like the curfew bell of spring.

Who, I thought, would not fix these fleeting moments of beauty if he could? Who would not keep the cuckoo's twin shout floating for ever over summer fields and the blackbird for ever fluting his thanksgiving after summer showers? Who can see the daffodils nodding their heads in sprightly dance without sharing the mood of Herrick's immortal lament that that dance should be so brief:—

Fair daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon; As yet the early-rising sun Has not attain'd its noon. Stay, stay. Until the hasting day Has run But to the evensong; And, having prayed together, we Will go with you along.

Yes, I think Herrick would have forgiven me for that momentary lapse into regretfulness over the white hawthorn. He would have understood. You will see that he understood if you will recall the second stanza, which, if you are the person I take you for, you will do without needing to turn to a book.

It is the same sense of the transience of beauty that inspired the "Ode to a Grecian Urn" on which pastoral beauty was fixed in eternal rapture:—

Ah, happy, happy boughs I that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu.

And there we touch the paradox of this strange life. We would keep the fleeting beauty of Nature, and yet we would not keep it. The thought of those trees whose leaves are never shed, and of that eternal spring to which we never bid adieu, is pleasant to toy with, but after all we would not have it so. It is no more seriously tenable than the thought that little Johnny there should remain for ever at the age of ten. You may feel that you would like him to remain at the age of ten. Indeed you are a strange parent if you do not look back a little wistfully to the childhood of your children, and wish you could see them as you once saw them. But you would not really have Johnny stick at ten. After five years of the experience you would wish little Johnny dead. For life and its beauty are a living thing, and not a pretty fancy sculptured on a Grecian urn.

And so with the pageant of Nature. If the pageant stopped, the wonder itself would stop. I should have no sudden shock of delight at hearing the first call of the cuckoo in spring or seeing my hawthorn hedge burst into snowy blossoms. I should no longer remark the jolly clatter of the rooks in the February trees which forms the prologue of spring, nor look out for the coming of the first primrose or the arrival of the first swallow. I should cease, it is true, to have the pangs of "Farewell," but I should cease also to have the ecstasy of "Hail." I should have my Grecian urn, but I should have lost the magic of the living world.

By the time I had reached the gate I had buried my regrets for the vanished hawthorn. I knew that to-morrow I should find new miracles in the hedgerows—the wild rose and the honeysuckle, and after them the blackberries, and after these again the bright-hued hips and haws. And though the cuckoo's note should fail him, there would remain the thrush, and after the thrush that constant little fellow in the red waistcoat would keep the song going through the dark winter days.

THE END