e you home to yourself, do you
hear? You've been poaching in my private atmospheric grounds long
enough, identifying yourself with me and me with everybody. A nice row
there'd be in heaven if Aldebaran caught Sirius by the tail and said,
"Look here, you're not to look so green, you damm dog-star! It's an
offense against star-regulations."

Which reminds me that the Arabs say the shooting stars, meteorites,
are starry stones which the angels fling at the poaching demons whom
they catch sight of prowling too near the palisades of heaven. I must
say I like Arab angels. My heaven would coruscate like a catherine
wheel, with white-hot star-stones. Away, you dog, you prowling
cur.--Got him under the left ear-hole, Gabriel--! See him, see him,
Michael? That hopeful blue devil! Land him one! Biff on your bottom,
you hoper.

But I wish the Arabs wouldn't entice me, or you, dear reader, provoke
me to this. I feel with you, dear reader, as I do with a deaf-man when
he pushes his vulcanite ear, his listening machine, towards my mouth.
I want to shout down the telephone ear-hole all kinds of improper
things, to see what effect they will have on the stupid dear face at
the end of the coil of wire. After all, words must be very different
after they've trickled round and round a long wire coil. Whatever
becomes of them! And I, who am a bit deaf myself, and may in the end
have a deaf-machine to poke at my friends, it ill becomes me to be so
unkind, yet that's how I feel. So there we are.

Help me to be serious, dear reader.

In that little book, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious," I tried
rather wistfully to convince you, dear reader, that you had a solar
plexus and a lumbar ganglion and a few other things. I don't know why
I took the trouble. If a fellow doesn't believe he's got a nose, the
best way to convince him is gently to waft a little pepper into his
nostrils. And there was I painting my own nose purple, and wistfully
inviting you to look and believe. No more, though.

You've got first and foremost a solar plexus, dear reader; and the
solar plexus is a great nerve center which lies behind your stomach. I
can't be accused of impropriety or untruth, because any book of
science or medicine which deals with the nerve-system of the human
body will show it to you quite plainly. So don't wriggle or try to
look spiritual. Because, willy-nilly, you've got a solar plexus, dear
reader, among other things. I'm writing a good sound s