n't have been there. You suspect
that if after your search, instead of going on with the play you had hidden
behind the hedge and watched, you would have seen the creature come out
from its hole.

I do not expect to have my theory that the golf-ball has an intelligence
accepted. The mystery is explicable, I am told, on the doctrine of the
"fresh eye." You look for a thing so hard that you seem to lose the faculty
of vision. Then you forget all about it and find it. The experience applies
to all the operations of the mind. If I get "stuck" in writing an article I
go and do a bit of physical work, ride a bicycle or merely walk round the
garden, and the current flows again. Or you have a knotty problem to
decide. You think furiously about it all day and get more hopelessly
undecided the longer you think. Then you go to bed, and you wake in the
morning with your mind made up. Hence the phrase, "I will sleep on it." It
is this freshness of the vision, this faculty of passive illumination, that
Wordsworth had in mind when he wrote:

Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

And yet I cannot quite get rid of my fancy that the golf ball does enjoy
the game.

ON A PRISONER OF WAR

There are still a few apples on the topmost branches of the trees in the
orchard. They are there because David, the labourer, who used to come and
lend us a hand in his odd hours--chiefly when the moon was up--is no longer
available. You may remember how David opened his heart to me about
enlisting when he stood on the ladder picking the pears last year. He did
not like to go and he did not like to stay. All the other chaps had gone,
and he didn't feel comfortable like in being left behind, but there was his
mother and his wife and his Aunt Jane, and not a man to do a hand's turn
for 'em or to dig their gardens if he went. And there was the
allotment--that 'ud run to weeds. And ...

Well, the allotment has run to weeds. I passed it to-day and looked over
the hedge and saw the chickweed and the thistles in undisputed possession.
For David has gone. "It will take a long time to turn him into a soldier,"
we said when we saw him leave his thatched roof last spring to join up, and
watched him shambling down the lane to the valley and the distant station.
"The war will be over before he gets into the trenches," I said cheerfully
to his