s of respected people, odd indecorums,
backbitings, bigamies, embezzlements, and attempted chastities--the
surprising leaps they make now and then out of propriety into the
police-courts--somehow news-items of this kind do not altogether--how
shall I put it?--well, they don't absolutely blacken the sunshine for
me.

And Clergymen? If a Clergyman slips up, do not, I pray you, gentle
Reader, grieve on my account too much.

JOY

Sometimes at breakfast, sometimes in a train or empty bus, or on the
moving stairs at Charing Cross, I am happy; the earth turns to gold, and
life becomes a magical adventure. Only yesterday, travelling alone to
Sussex, I became light-headed with this sudden joy. The train seemed to
rush to its adorable destination through a world new-born in splendour,
bathed in a beautiful element, fresh and clear as on the morning of
Creation. Even the coloured photographs of South Coast watering-places
in the railway carriage shone with the light of Paradise upon them.
Brighton faced me; next to it divine Southsea beckoned; then I saw the
beach at Sidmouth, the Tilly Whim caves near Swanage--was it in those
unhaunted caves, or amid the tumult of life which hums about the
Worthing bandstand, that I should find Bliss in its quintessence?

Or on the pier at St Peter Port, perhaps, in the Channel Islands, amid
that crowd who watch in eternal ecstasy the ever-arriving
never-disembarking Weymouth steamer?

IN ARCADY

When I retire from London to my rural solitudes, and taste once more, as
always, those pure delights of Nature which the Poets celebrate--walks
in the unambitious meadows, and the ever-satisfying companionship of
vegetables and flowers--I am nevertheless haunted now and then (but tell
it not to Shelley's Skylark, nor whisper to Wordsworth's Daffodils, the
disconcerting secret)--I am incongruously beset by longings of which the
Lake Poets never sang. Echoes and images of the abandoned City
discompose my arcadisings: I hear, in the babbling of brooks, the
delicious sound of London gossip, and newsboys' voices in the cries of
birds. Sometimes the gold-splashed distance of a country lane seems to
gleam at sunset with the posters of the evening papers; I dream at dawn
of dinner-invitations, when, like a telephone-call, I hear the
Greenfinch trill his electric bell.

WORRIES

In the woods about my garden and familiar precincts lurk the fears of
life; all threaten me, some I m