dered attractive, would surely have been
of greater benefit to us if they had remained absorbed in their earlier
skittles. If the famous magician, who, with several others, is winning
the war by suggestion, and that true soldier, General FitzChutney, and
that earnest and eloquent publicist, Mr. Blufflerlow, had been persuaded
to stick to marbles, what misleading excitement and unprofitable anxiety
would have been spared to the commonweal! Boys should be warned against
and protected from Great Careers. Better still if embryologists could
discover something which would enable midwives unfailingly to recognize
Strong Men at birth. It would be easy then to issue to those ladies
secret but specific instructions.

There is a street which turns abruptly from my straight road to the
station. It goes like a sudden resolution to get out of this daily hurry
and excitement. It is a pre-war street. It is an ancient thoroughfare of
ours, a rambling and unfrequented by-way. It is more than four years
since it was a habit of mine to loiter through it, with a man with whom I
shall do no more pleasant idling. We enjoyed its old and ruinous shops
and its stalls, where all things could be bought at second-hand,
excepting young doves, ferrets, and dogs. I saw it again this morning,
and felt, somehow, that it was the first time I had noticed it since the
world suddenly changed. Where had it been in the meantime? It was empty
this morning, it was still, it was luminous. It might have been waiting,
a place that was, for the return of what can never return. Its sunlight
was different from the glare in the hurrying road to the station. It was
the apparition of a light which has gone out. I stopped, and was a little
fearful. Was that street really there? I thought its illumination might
be a ghostly sunlight haunting an avenue leading only to the nowhere of
the memory. Did the others who were passing see that by-way? I do not
think so. They never paused. They did not glance sideways in surprise,
stare in an expectancy which changed almost at once into regret for what
was good, but is not.

Who would not retire into the near past, and stay there, if it were
possible? (What a weakness!) Retrospection was once a way of escape for
those who had not the vitality to face their own fine day with its
exacting demands. Yet who now can look squarely at the present, except
officials, armament shareholders, and those in perambulators? This
side-turning offe