ing at sixty miles
an hour or more. But England is hardly spacious enough for a really
sustained inspiration; and the result of being turned out suddenly at
Thurso, N.B., or Penzance is that some opening flower of the human
intellect fails to achieve its perfect bloom, and as likely as not your
golf clubs are left in the rack.

There is also, of course, an influential school which believes strongly in
the early morning tea hour, and people who ought to know tell me that Mr.
WINSTON CHURCHILL plans new uniforms for the Guards as well as the campaign
in Mesopotamia with pink pyjamas on, and that the PRIME MINISTER can never
be persuaded to get up for breakfast until he has hit on a few of those
striking repartees which are subsequently translated by his posse of
interpreters into Russian, Italian, Bohemian and Erse.

For my part, however, I swear by a Chesterfield sofa, a large one, on which
you can lie at full length, as I am lying now; the most comfortable thing
there is on earth, I think, except perhaps a truss of hay, when one has
been riding for about six consecutive hours in an army saddle. But there
are disadvantages even about a Chesterfield sofa. It is, to begin with, in
the drawing-room and in the drawing-room one is not so entirely immune from
the trivial incidents of everyday life as I like to be when I am having
brain-waves. Doors are opened and this creates a draught, and it is not the
slightest use attempting a real work of imagination when people will come
in and ask if I am lying on _The Literary Supplement_ of _The Times_ (as if
it were likely), or the anti-aircraft gun that the children were playing
with after lunch. For this reason I have had to invent an even better thing
than the ordinary Chesterfield sofa, and since it will be, when made, the
noblest piece of scientific upholstery in the world I will ask the printer
to write the next sentence in italics, please.

_It is a Chesterfield sofa enclosed on all four sides._ Thank you.

The marvels of this receptacle for human thought will dawn upon the reader
by slow degrees. Try to imagine yourself ensconced there, having climbed up
by the short flight of steps which will be attached to it, enisled and
remote amidst the surging traffic that sweeps through a drawing-room.
Instead of making a rapid bolt to escape from callers and probably meeting
them full tilt in the hall, you simply stay on, thinking. You have nothing
to fear from them, unless they are