ortant and serious! Bunyan says in his rhymed introduction:

"I only thought to make
I knew not what: nor did I undertake
Thereby to please my neighbour; no, not I:
I did it my own self to gratify."

Another man I love to have at hand is he who writes of Blazing Bosville,
the Flaming Tinman, and of The Hairy Ones.

How Borrow escapes through his books! His object was not to produce
literature but to display his erudition as a master of language and of
outlandish custom, and he went about the task in all seriousness of
demolishing the Roman Catholic Church. We are not now so impressed with
his erudition that we do not smile at his vanity and we are quite
contented, even after reading his books, to let the church survive; but
how shall we spare our friend with his inextinguishable love of life,
his pugilists, his gypsies, his horse traders? We are even willing to
plow through arid deserts of dissertation in order that we may enjoy the
perfect oases in which the man forgets himself!

Reading such books as these and a hundred others, the books of the worn
case at my elbow.

"The bulged and the bruised octavos,
The dear and the dumpy twelves----"

I become like those initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries who, as
Cicero tells us, have attained "the art of living joyfully and of dying
with a fairer hope."

* * * * *

It is late, and the house is still. A few bright embers glow in the
fireplace. You look up and around you, as though coming back to the
world from some far-off place. The clock in the dining-room ticks with
solemn precision; you did not recall that it had so loud a tone. It has
been a great evening, in this quiet room on your farm, you have been
able to entertain the worthies of all the past!

You walk out, resoundingly, to the kitchen and open the door. You look
across the still white fields. Your barn looms black in the near
distance, the white mound close at hand is your wood-pile, the great
trees stand like sentinels in the moonlight; snow has drifted upon the
doorstep and lies there untracked. It is, indeed, a dim and untracked
world: coldly beautiful but silent--and of a strange unreality! You
close the door with half a shiver and take the real world with you up to
bed. For it is past one o'clock.

[Illustration: "The beauty, the wonder, the humour, the tragedy, the
greatness of truth"]

XIII

THE POLITICIAN

In the city, as I now recall it (having