ay of a holiday--or any day which
seems so short as the last one. For one thing, at the beginning of
anything you are never your true, natural self. The "pose," which you
carry about with you amid strange surroundings, hangs like a pall upon
your spirits, to bore you as much as it bores those on whom you wish to
make the most endearing impression. Later on, it wears off--and what you
are--_you are_! and for what you are--you are either disliked intensely
or adored. But you are never completely happy until you are completely
natural, and you are never natural at the beginning. That is why you
should forgive beginnings, as you, yourself, hope to be forgiven when
you, yourself, begin.

_Unlucky in Little Things_

They say it is better to be born lucky than beautiful. Which contains,
by the way, only small consolation for those of us who have been born
both lucky and ugly. For, after all, to have been born beautiful is a
nice "chunk" of good luck to build upon, and anyway, if you are a woman,
constitutes a fine capital for the increase of future business. But to
have been born lucky is much more exciting than to have been born
beautiful; moreover the capital reserve does not diminish with time. All
the same, I don't want to write about either lucky people or beautiful
ones. There are already too many people writing about them as it is. I
want to write about the _unlucky_ ones--because I consider myself one of
them. I do so in the hope that my tears will find their tears, and, it
we must drown, metaphorically speaking, it is a crumb of comfort to drown
in company.

Most unlucky people when they speak about their ill-luck always refer to
such incidents as when they backed the Derby "favourite" and it fell down
within a yard of the winning post. True, that is ill-luck amounting
almost to tragedy. But there is another kind of unlucky person--and
about him I can write from experience, because it is my special brand of
misfortune. He is the unlucky person who is unlucky in _little things_.
After all, not many of us back horses, and presently fewer of us than
ever will be able to do more in the gambling line than play
Beg-o'-my-Neighbour with somebody's old aunt for a thr'penny-bit stake.
Let me give a few instances of this ill-luck, in the hope that my plaint
will strike a responsive chord in the hearts of those who read this page.

(_a_) If I am sitting on the top of a 'bus and a fat man gets on that
'bu