ing emotions of the thief; I
had a complete ignorance and a profound curiosity as to what I should
find there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me a
tidy person. But I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all my
possessions. I can always tell where they are, and what I have done with
them, so long as I can keep them out of my pockets. If once anything
slips into those unknown abysses, I wave it a sad Virgilian farewell.
I suppose that the things that I have dropped into my pockets are still
there; the same presumption applies to the things that I have dropped
into the sea. But I regard the riches stored in both these bottomless
chasms with the same reverent ignorance. They tell us that on the
last day the sea will give up its dead; and I suppose that on the same
occasion long strings of extraordinary things will come running out of
my pockets. But I have quite forgotten what any of them are; and there
is really nothing (excepting the money) that I shall be at all surprised
at finding among them.

.....

Such at least has hitherto been my state of innocence. I here only wish
briefly to recall the special, extraordinary, and hitherto unprecedented
circumstances which led me in cold blood, and being of sound mind, to
turn out my pockets. I was locked up in a third-class carriage for a
rather long journey. The time was towards evening, but it might have
been anything, for everything resembling earth or sky or light or shade
was painted out as if with a great wet brush by an unshifting sheet of
quite colourless rain. I had no books or newspapers. I had not even a
pencil and a scrap of paper with which to write a religious epic. There
were no advertisements on the walls of the carriage, otherwise I could
have plunged into the study, for any collection of printed words is
quite enough to suggest infinite complexities of mental ingenuity. When
I find myself opposite the words "Sunlight Soap" I can exhaust all the
aspects of Sun Worship, Apollo, and Summer poetry before I go on to the
less congenial subject of soap. But there was no printed word or picture
anywhere; there was nothing but blank wood inside the carriage and blank
wet without. Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can be,
uninteresting. So I stared at the joints of the walls and seats, and
began thinking hard on the fascinating subject of wood. Just as I had
begun to realise why, perhaps, it was that Christ was a carpente