he direction of the parting figure,
"The poor General is a good deal misinformed. I didn't choose to say
anything, but I know something about the subject, because I was private
secretary to the Secretary for War."

That was the right attitude, I thought, for the gentlemanly
philosopher; and I have learnt from my old friend the lesson not to
choose to say anything if a turbulent and pompous person lays down the
law on subjects with which I happen to be acquainted.

Again, there is another gain that results from advancing years. I think
it is true that there were sharper ecstasies in youth, keener
perceptions, more passionate thrills; but then the mind also dipped
more swiftly and helplessly into discouragement, dreariness, and
despair. I do not think that life is so rapturous, but it certainly is
vastly more interesting. When I was young there were an abundance of
things about which I did not care. I was all for poetry and art; I
found history tedious, science tiresome, politics insupportable. Now I
may thankfully say it is wholly different. The time of youth was the
opening to me of many doors of life. Sometimes a door opened upon a
mysterious and wonderful place, an enchanted forest, a solemn avenue, a
sleeping glade; often, too, it opened into some dusty work-a-day place,
full of busy forms bent over intolerable tasks, whizzing wheels, dark
gleaming machinery, the din of the factory and the workshop. Sometimes,
too, a door would open into a bare and melancholy place, a hillside
strewn with stones, an interminable plain of sand; worst of all, a
place would sometimes be revealed which was full of suffering, anguish,
and hopeless woe, shadowed with fears and sins. From such prospects I
turned with groans unutterable; but the air of the accursed place would
hang about me for days. These surprises, these strange surmises,
crowded in fast upon me. How different the world was from what the
careless forecast of boyhood had pictured it! How strange, how
beautiful, and yet how terrible! As life went on the beauty increased,
and a calmer, quieter beauty made itself revealed; in youth I looked
for strange, impressive, haunted beauties, things that might deeply
stir and move; but year by year a simpler, sweeter, healthier kind of
beauty made itself felt; such beauty as lies on the bare, lightly
washed, faintly tinted hillside of winter, all delicate greens and
browns, so far removed from the rich summer luxuriance, and yet so
au