on.

THE BUBBLE

Walking home at night, troubled by the world's affairs, and with the
National Debt crushing down my weak shoulders, I sometimes allow my
Thoughts an interlude of solace. From the jar in which I keep my vanity
bottled, I remove the cork; out rushes that friendly Jinn and swells up
and fills the sky. I walk on lightly through another world, a world in
which I cut a very different figure.

I shall not describe that exquisite, evanescent universe; even for me
'tis but the bubble of a moment; I soon snuff it out, or of itself it
melts in the thin air.

CAUTION

With all that I know about life, all this cynical and sad knowledge of
what happens and must happen, all the experience and caution and
disillusion stored and packed in the uncanny, cold, grey matter of my
cerebrum--with all this inside my head, how can I ever dream of banging
it against the Stars?

DESIRES

These exquisite and absurd fancies of mine--little curiosities, and
greedinesses, and impulses to kiss and touch and snatch, and all the
vanities and artless desires that nest and sing in my heart like birds
in a bush--all these, we are now told, are an inheritance from our
pre-human past, and were hatched long ago in very ancient swamps and
forests. But what of that? I like to share in the dumb delights of birds
and animals, to feel my life drawing its sap from roots deep in the soil
of Nature. I am proud of those bright-eyed, furry, four-footed
progenitors, and not at all ashamed of my cousins, the Tigers and Apes
and Peacocks.

MOMENTS

'Awful moments? Why, yes, of course,' I said, 'life is full of them--let
me think--'

'To find other people's unposted letters in an old pocket; to be seen
looking at oneself in a street-mirror, or overhead talking of the Ideal
to a duchess; to refuse Nuns who come to the door to ask for
subscriptions, or to be lent by a beautiful new acquaintance a book she
has written full of mystical slipslop, or dreadful musings in an
old-world garden--'

THE EPITAPH

'But perhaps he is a friend of yours?' said my lips. 'Is it safe?' my
eyes asked, 'Dare I tell you what I think of him?'

It was safe; only silence fell upon them, those Sad Ones, who at my
decease should murmur, 'He never said of any one an unkind word.' 'Alas,
Farewell!' breathed that boyish daydream of my funeral, as it faded.

INTERRUPTION

'Life,' said a gaunt widow, with a reputation fo