with putting on my boots? It is a
reasonable question. I will tell you. For an hour I had paced my room in my
slippers in search of a subject. I had looked out of the window over the
sunlit valley, watched the smoke of a distant train vanishing towards the
west, observed the activities of the rooks in a neighbouring elm. I had
pared my nails several times with absent-minded industry, and sharpened
every pencil I had on me with elaborate care. But the more I pared my nails
and the more I sharpened my pencils the more perplexed I grew as to the
theme for an article. Subjects crowded on me, "not single spies, but in
battalions." They jostled each other for preference, they clamoured for
notice as I have seen the dock labourers clamouring for a job at the London
docks. They held out their hands and cried, "Here am I: take me." And,
distracted by their importunities and starving in the midst of plenty, I
fished in my pocket for a pencil I had not sharpened. There wasn't one
left.

It was at this moment that I remembered my boots. Yes, I would certainly
put on my boots. There was nothing like putting on one's boots for helping
one to make up one's mind. The act of stooping changed the current of the
blood. You saw things in a new light--like the man who looked between his
legs at Bolton Abbey, and cried to his friend: "Oh, look this way; it's
extraordinary what a fresh view you get." So I fetched my boots and sat
down to put them on.

The thing worked like a charm. For in my preoccupied condition I picked up
my right boot first. Then mechanically I put it down and seized the left
boot. "Now why," said I, "did I do that?" And then the fact flashed on me
that all my life I had been putting on my left boot first. If you had asked
me five minutes before which boot I put on first, I should have said that
there was no first about it; yet now I found I was in the grip of a habit
so fixed that the attempt to put on my right boot first affected me like
the scraping of a harsh pencil on a slate. The thing couldn't be done. The
whole rhythm of habit would be put out of joint. I became interested. How,
I wondered, do I put on my jacket? I rose, took it off, found that my right
arm slipped automatically into its sleeve, tried the reverse process,
discovered that it was as difficult as an unfamiliar gymnastic operation.
Why, said I, I am a mere bundle of little habits of which I am unconscious.
This thing must be looked into. And then cam