escape from the plane of life into
its third dimension.

Children have the true understanding of maps. They never yield slavishly
to them. If they want a pirates' den they put it where it is handiest,
behind the couch in the sitting-room, just beyond the glimmer of
firelight. If they want an Indian village, where is there a better place
than in the black space under the stairs, where it can be reached without
great fatigue after supper? Farthest Thule may be behind the asparagus
bed. The North Pole itself may be decorated by Annie on Monday afternoon
with the week's wash. From whatever house you hear a child's laugh, if it
be a real child and therefore a great poet, you may know that from the
garret window, even as you pass, Sinbad, adrift on the Indian Ocean, may
be looking for a sail, and that the forty thieves huddle, daggers drawn,
in the coal hole. Then it is a fine thing for a child to run away to
sea--well, really not to sea, but down the street, past gates and gates
and gates, until it comes to the edge of the known and sees a collie or
some such terrible thing. I myself have fine recollection of running away
from a farmhouse. Maybe I did not get more than a hundred paces, but I
looked on some broad heavens, saw a new mystery in the night's shadows,
and just before I became afraid I had a taste of a new life.

To me it is strange that so few people go down rabbit-holes. We cannot be
expected to find the same delight in squeezing our fat selves behind the
couch of evenings, nor can we hope to find that the Chinese Mountains
actually lie beyond our garden fence. We cannot exactly run away either;
after one is twenty, that takes on an ugly and vagrant look, commendable
as it may be on the early marches. Prince Hal is always a more amiable
spectacle than John Falstaff, much as we love the knight. But there are
men, however few, who although they are beyond forty, retain in themselves
a fine zest for adventure. A man who, I am proud to say, is a friend of
mine and who is a devil for work by which he is making himself known in
the world, goes of evenings into the most delightful truantry with his
music. And it isn't only music, it is flowers and pictures and books. Of
course he has an unusual brain and few men can hope to equal him. He is
like Disraeli in that respect, who, it is said, could turn in a flash from
the problem of financing the Suez Canal to the contemplation of the
daffodils nodding along the fence. But