the cafes. Most people who knew him contend that he talked even better
than he wrote; but one gets a good enough example of his ruling mood and
attitude in the fine essay called _On Saying Good-bye._ Meditating on
life as "a sustained good-bye," he writes:

Life is a cheap _table d'hote_ in a rather dirty restaurant, with
Time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything.

We were bewildered at school to be told that walking was a
perpetual falling. But life is, in a far more significant way, a
perpetual dying. Death is not an eccentricity, but a settled habit
of the universe. The drums of to-day call to us, as they call to
young Fortinbras in the fifth act of _Hamlet_, over corpses piled
up in such abundance as to be almost ridiculous. We praise the
pioneer, but we praise him on wrong grounds. His strength lies not
in his leaning out to new things--that may be mere curiosity--but
in his power to abandon old things. All his courage is a courage of
adieus.

This meditativeness on the passing nature of things is one of the old
moods of mankind. Kettle, however, was one of the men of our time in
whom it has achieved imaginative expression. I remember his once saying,
in regard to some hostile criticisms that had been passed on his own
"power to abandon old things": "The whole world is nothing but the story
of a renegade. The bud is renegade to the tree, and the flower to the
bud, and the fruit to the flower." Though he rejoiced in change as a
politician, however, he bewaited the necessity of change as a
philosopher. His praise of death in the essay I have just quoted from is
the praise of something that will put an end to changes and goodbyes

There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain
our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death,
normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without
any of its horrors. The old woman--

an old woman previously mentioned who complained that "the only
bothersome thing about walking was that the miles began at the wrong
end"--

the old woman when she comes to that road will find the miles
beginning at the right end. We shall all bid our first real adieu
to those brother-jesters of ours, Time; and Space; and though the
handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat
or defeat us. "However amusing