ass, that did not seem to go about with a bright face. It was a
present that overflowed with kindness, though everybody except the ox
and the ass believed that it was only by the skin of our teeth that
any of us would escape being burnt alive for eternity. Perhaps we
thought little enough about it except on Sundays or at prayers.
Certainly no one was gloomy about it before children. William John
McNabb, the huge labourer who looked after the horses, greeted us all
as cheerfully as if we had been saved and ready for paradise.

It would be unfair to human beings, however, to suggest that they are
less lavish with their smiles than they were thirty years or so ago.
Everybody--or almost everybody--still smiles. We can hardly stop to
talk to a man in the street without a duet of smiles. The Prince of
Wales smiles across the world from left to right, and the Crown Prince
of Japan smiles across the world from right to left. We cannot open an
illustrated paper without seeing smiling statesmen, cricketers,
jockeys, oarsmen, bridegrooms, clergymen, actresses and
undergraduates. Yet somehow we are no longer made happy by a smile. We
no longer take it, as we used to take it, as evidence that the person
smiling is either happy or kind. It then seemed to come from the
heart. It now seems a formula. It is, we may admit, a pleasant and
useful formula. But a man might easily be a burglar or a murderer or a
Cabinet Minister and smile. Some people are supposed to smile merely
in order to show what good teeth they have. William John McNabb, I am
sure, never did that.

We need not grumble at our contemporaries, however, for not being so
fine as William John McNabb. To children, for all we know, the world
may still seem to be full of people who laugh because they are happy
and smile because they are kind. The world will always remain to a
child the chief of toys, and the hum of insects as enchanting as the
hum of a musical top. Even those of us who are grown up can recover
this enchantment, not only through the pleasures of memory but through
the endless pleasures of watching the things that inhabit the earth.
The world is always waiting to be discovered in full, and yet no life
is long enough to discover the whole of a single county, or even the
whole of a single parish. Who alive, for instance, knows all the moles
of Sussex? I confess I got my first sight of one a few days ago, and,
though I had seen dead moles hanging from trees and had