rson resents. I must try and comfort myself by thinking that my very
capacity for vexing myself over the business is probably the very thing
which makes it easy as a rule for me to succeed.

Well, I must turn to my books and my bicycle and my writing for
consolation, and to the blessed sense of freedom which luxuriates about
my tired brain. But books and art and the beauties of nature, I begin
to have a dark suspicion, are of the nature of melancholy consolations
for the truer stuff of life--for friendships and loves and dearer
things.

I sit writing in my study, the house above me strangely silent. The
evening sun lies golden on the lawn and among the apple-trees of my
little orchard; but the thought of the sweet time ended lies rather
heavy on my heart--the wonder what it all means, why we should have
these great hopes and desires, these deep attachments in the short days
that God gives us. "What a world it is for sorrow," wrote a wise and
tender-hearted old schoolmaster on a day like this; "and how dull it
would be if there were no sorrow." I suppose that this is true; but to
be near things and yet not to grasp them, to desire and not to attain,
and to go down to darkness in the end, like the shadow of a dream--what
can heal and sustain one in the grip of such a mood?--Ever yours,

T. B.

UPTON,
Aug. 4, 1904.

MY DEAR HERBERT,--I have just been over to Woodcote; I have had a few
days here alone at the end of the half, and was feeling so stupid and
lazy this morning that I put a few sandwiches in my pocket and went off
on a bicycle for the day. It is only fifteen miles from here, so that I
had two or three hours to spend there. You know I was born at Woodcote
and lived there till I was ten years old. I don't know the present
owner of the Lodge, where we lived; but if I had written and asked to
go and see the house, they would have invited me to luncheon, and all
my sense of freedom would have gone.

It is thirty years since we left, and I have not been there, near as it
is, for twenty years. I did not know how deeply rooted the whole scene
was in my heart and memory, but the first sight of the familiar places
gave me a very curious thrill, a sort of delicious pain, a yearning for
the old days--I can't describe it or analyse it. It seemed somehow as
if the old life must be going on there behind the pine-woods if I could
only find it; as if I could have peeped over the palings and seen
myself going grave