e men calmly
strolling up and down platforms while railway companies unblushingly
rob them of time, which is more than money. Hundreds of thousands of
hours are thus lost every day simply because my typical man thinks so
little of time that it has never occurred to him to take quite easy
precautions against the risk of its loss.

He has a solid coin of time to spend every day--call it a sovereign. He
must get change for it, and in getting change he is content to lose
heavily.

Supposing that in selling him a ticket the company said, "We will
change you a sovereign, but we shall charge you three halfpence for
doing so," what would my typical man exclaim? Yet that is the
equivalent of what the company does when it robs him of five minutes
twice a day.

You say I am dealing with minutiae. I am. And later on I will justify
myself.

Now will you kindly buy your paper and step into the train?

V

TENNIS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL

You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and
majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry.
You know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you.
As your glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of
songs on the outer pages, your air is the air of a leisured man,
wealthy in time, of a man from some planet where there are a hundred
and twenty-four hours a day instead of twenty-four. I am an
impassioned reader of newspapers. I read five English and two French
dailies, and the news-agents alone know how many weeklies, regularly.
I am obliged to mention this personal fact lest I should be accused of
a prejudice against newspapers when I say that I object to the reading
of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers are produced with
rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in my daily
programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments. But I
do read them. The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive
minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly
immerse one's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent,
withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow
you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness.
You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you
have no more time than I have. No newspaper reading in trains! I have
already "put by" about three-quarters of an hour for use.

Now