rance, but in fine phrases. The thought of gazing on life's
Evening Star makes of ugly old age a pleasing prospect; if I call Death
mighty and unpersuaded, it has no terrors for me; I am perfectly content
to be cut down as a flower, to flee as a shadow, to be swallowed like a
snowflake on the sea. These similes soothe and effectually console me. I
am sad only at the thought that Words must perish like all things
mortal; that the most perfect metaphors must be forgotten when the human
race is dust.

'But the iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy.'

DISENCHANTMENT

Life, I often thought, would be so different if I only had one; but in
the meantime I went on fastening scraps of paper together with pins.

Opalescent, infinitely desirable, in the window of a stationer's shop
around the corner, gleamed the paste-pot of my daydreams. Every day I
passed it, but every day my thoughts were distracted by some hope or
disenchantment, some metaphysical perplexity, or giant preoccupation
with the world's woe.

And then one morning my pins gave out. I met this crisis with manly
resolution; putting on my hat, I went round the corner and bought three
paste-pots and calmly took them home. At last the spell was broken; but
Oh, at what a cost!

Unnerved and disenchanted, I sat facing those pots of nauseating paste,
with nothing to wait for now but death.

ASK ME NO MORE

Where are the snows of yesteryear? Ask me no more the fate of
Nightingales and Roses, and where the old Moons go, or what becomes of
last year's Oxford Poets.

FAME

Somewhat furtively I bowed to the new Moon in Knightsbridge; the little
old ceremony was a survival, no doubt, of dark superstition, but the
Wish that I breathed was an inheritance from a much later epoch. 'Twas
an echo of Greece and Rome, the ideal ambition of poets and heroes; the
thought of it seemed to float through the air in starlight and music; I
saw in a bright constellation those stately Immortals; their great names
rang in my ears.

'May I, too,----' I whispered, incredulous, as I lifted my hat to the
unconcerned Moon.

NEWS-ITEMS

In spite of the delicacy of my moral feelings, and my unrelaxed
solicitude for the maintenance of the right principles of conduct, I
find I can read without tears of the retired Colonels who forge cheques,
and the ladies of unexceptionable position who are caught pilfering furs
in shops. Somehow the sudden lapse