about positive post-mortem pains that he had heard tell of. Burning and freezing were much on his mind, and blowing about, round the world, in the grip of high winds, and rotting without anæsthetics. He knew by heart the pick of all the cruel freaks that men made after the image of beasts used to impute to a god that they had made after the image of themselves. But if the terrified weakling had had any brains he might have been almost as deeply disturbed by a review of the set of sensations commonly advertised in his time as amenities laid up in Heaven to crown the just and the forgiven.

Some of these subtler terrors of death survive in a few unfortunate minds to this day. The last has yet to be heard of the flavourless heaven of tireless limbs and sexless souls, tearless eyes and choirs of effortless and infallible intonation. Imagine eternal youth with no impulse to walk in the ways of its heart, and in the sight of its eyes, and deposed for ever from its august and precarious stewardship of the clean blood of a race! Conceive the light that never was on sea or land, no longer caught in broken gleams through visionary forests, but blazing away like the lamps on common lodging-house stairs; and the peace that passeth all understanding explored and explained, to the last letter, inside and out! Think, if you can bear to do it, what your existence would be without wonder, or any need for valiant hope, or for resolution unassisted by hope, a life no longer salt with savoursome vicissitudes; all the hardy, astringent conditions of joy, and the purchasemoney of rapture, abolished for ever. No, better not think of it. It is too horrible."

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Life must have been pretty hard in some of the ages, that any prospect so dreadful should have illuded people's minds as a compensation or a deliverance. Perhaps if one's body were chained for life to an oar in a galley, or sold into some darksome underground slavery, like a pit pony, one might, without positive meanness or impudence, put in a claim upon God for some portion of pleasure and ease hereafter in lieu of all that one had missed. But you and I! We that grew up by the Thames among roses and apples, and walked home from school of an evening down the nave of St. Paul's and through the courts of the Temple, and heard the chimes from Oxford towers at midnight and lived elately in the rhythms of her jocund choruses and racing oars! We that have failed and thriven and been rich and poor, on our little scale, and have been happy in our love and found work after our hearts and rambled in sun and mist over Pennine and Cumbrian hills and seen sunset and dawn from great peaks of the Alps and across several seas and over lost battles and victories-what sort of peasant slaves should we be to come full from the feast with a whine for victuals more savoury? Away to Mrs. Gamp, wheresoever she be, with talk of vales of tears, and life's dull round, and stony places of pilgrimage. There is no hiding it—we like the stones, and always did, and the round has been a merry-go-round, and against the whole vale there is not one serious word to be said.

Perhaps a proper canniness, a sound business instinct, ought to keep men and women from owning how good a time they have had since they were set down on the

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earth. Early man dealt pretty shrewdly with his gods; he drove hard bargains with them; he even starved or beat them when they had not done as well as they might. And some traces of this prudent instinct are still astir in mankind. Careful souls seem still to whisper to themselves that there may be much to come yet; the great deal" has only begun; were it not rash to let out how pleased and astonished you are with the terms you have hitherto got? For if you do that in a market, the other party sees daylight at once; he thinks what a fool he has been to offer so much, when less would have done: and so he stiffens his terms. And no doubt there is some very respectable warrant for viewing your soul's relations with God as strict business matters.

Whatever, Lord, we lend to Thee
Repaid a thousandfold will be;

Then gladly will we give to Thee.

It sounds like good sense. And yet a sneaking doubt will creep in. We cannot feel so sure about that dour driver of bargains, against whom we are advised to take these sagacious precautions. Another God we can conceive; but not, with any vividness, a God with whom you have to be careful lest He see what a soft thing He has given you.

And then there is another doubt. Haggle we never so wisely, is there any tremendous coup left for our arts to bring off? Heaven is here already; no flaming swords keep from the gate the man that knows how to value the garden. “I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes and

the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here." Of what avail to bargain further, when you have got all? Why not give yourself away, as that heaven gives itself, and recklessly confess the amenity of your condition ever since you first shivered and grinned with a small boy's delight in the feel of a pavement through the thin rubber soles of your shoes, and snuffed up queer and engaging fumes of romance with the mixed smell of engines and fog under the resonant roof of Waterloo station?

So, at least, it befits me to plead, having to make, in the pages that follow, some undiplomatic admissions of full satisfaction with certain contents of life on the earth. The only misgiving about them which strikes me now as worth entertaining is Solomon's, lest the grinders should cease because they are few, and those that look out of the window be darkened. So here goes, before the panes have time to be fogged, or a grasshopper, such as the work of writing a little book, to become a burden.

HOLIDAYS

Holidays-the only kind of cake that makes bread eat better after it.

C

I

ANON.

HILDREN are often too tired to sleep, and the worst thing about overwork is the way it may

make you unfit for a holiday. You may be left able only to stand still and blink, like used-up horses when put out to grass, while the man who has worked in reason, and worried no more than he should, is off for the day or the month, to plunge into some kind of work not his own, just for the fun of the thing.

For all the best sport is the doing, for once, of somebody else's work. The wise cashier puts in a spell of steady exertion as a gardener. Statesmen, prelates and judges of appeal come as near as they can to fulfilling the functions of good professional golfers, fishermen or chauffeurs. The master minds who run our railways for us may seem to flee the very sight of a permanent way; but they don rucksacks for ten-hour tramps over rock, peat and bracken, such as the lighter kind of porters used to take for their living in the days before steam. The new-made husband and head of a house, released from his desk in a public office, will labour absorbedly from morning until dewy eve to put the attic in order or get the whole of the toolshed painted while yet it is light, proud and happy as Pepys when after a day of such application he put the glorious result down in his diary, adding-lest pride should grow