it--I have rarely clasped. The disgraceful amount of dirt allowed to
accumulate upon it is another drawback from the climber's point of view.
By the time you have swarmed up your third post a positive distaste for
"gaiety" steals over you. Your desire is towards arnica and a bath.

Nor in jokes at the expense of policemen is the fun entirely on your
side. Maybe I did not proceed with judgment. It occurs to me now,
looking back, that the neighbourhoods of Covent Garden and Great
Marlborough Street were ill-chosen for sport of this nature. To bonnet
a fat policeman is excellent fooling. While he is struggling with his
helmet you can ask him comic questions, and by the time he has got
his head free you are out of sight. But the game should be played in
a district where there is not an average of three constables to every
dozen square yards. When two other policemen, who have had their eye
on you for the past ten minutes, are watching the proceedings from just
round the next corner, you have little or no leisure for due enjoyment
of the situation. By the time you have run the whole length of Great
Titchfield Street and twice round Oxford Market, you are of opinion
that a joke should never be prolonged beyond the point at which there is
danger of its becoming wearisome; and that the time has now arrived
for home and friends. The "Law," on the other hand, now raised by
reinforcements to a strength of six or seven men, is just beginning to
enjoy the chase. You picture to yourself, while doing Hanover Square,
the scene in Court the next morning. You will be accused of being drunk
and disorderly. It will be idle for you to explain to the magistrate (or
to your relations afterwards) that you were only trying to live up to
a man who did this sort of thing in a book and was admired for it. You
will be fined the usual forty shillings; and on the next occasion of
your calling at the Mayfields' the girls will be out, and Mrs. Mayfield,
an excellent lady, who has always taken a motherly interest in you, will
talk seriously to you and urge you to sign the pledge.

Thanks to your youth and constitution you shake off the pursuit at
Notting Hill; and, to avoid any chance of unpleasant contretemps on
the return journey, walk home to Bloomsbury by way of Camden Town and
Islington.

I abandoned sportive tendencies as the result of a vow made by myself
to Providence, during the early hours of a certain Sunday morning, while
clinging to the