nutes' wonder of the small children of the street, who will cry,
"Oo-er" when my coffin is borne out by poor men whose names I can't
ever know! Not that it really matters, I suppose; and yet, we all of
us hope to satisfy our artistic sense, especially when we're helpless
to help ourselves. Yes, I should like to pass the twilight of my life
in a garden from which there would be a view of the sea. A garden is
nearly always beautiful, and the sea always, always promises adventure,
even when we have reached that time of life when to "pass over" is the
only chance of adventure left to us. It seems to beckon us to leave
the monotonous in habits, people and things in general, and seek
renewed youthfulness, the thrill of novelty, the promise of romance
amid lands and people far, far away. And we all of us hope that we may
not die before we have had one _real_ adventure. Adventure, I suppose,
always comes to the really adventurous, but so many people are only
half-adventurous; they have all the yearning and the longing, but
Nature has bereft them of the power to act. So they wait for adventure
to come to them, the while they grow older and staler all the time.
And sometimes it never does come to them; or, perhaps, it only comes to
them too late. There are some, of course, who never feel this wild
longing to escape. They are the human turnips; and, so long as they
have a plot of ground on which to expand and grow, they look for
nothing else other than to be "mashed" from time to time by someone of
the opposite sex. These people are quite content to live and die in a
row, and to have an impressive funeral is to them a sufficient argument
for having lived at all. But their propinquity is one of the reasons
why I should not like to grow old in a crowd. I know there are
turnips--human turnips, I mean--living amid the Alps. But these don't
depress you, for the simple reason that, besides them, you have the
Alps anyway. And the Alps have something of that spirit of eternity
which the sea possesses.

_Travel_

Do you know those men and women who, to paraphrase Omar Khayyam, "come
like treacle and like gall they go"? Well, it seems to me that life is
rather like such as they. You may live for something, you may live for
someone, but some time, sooner or later, you will be thrown back upon
your own garden, the "inner plot" of land which you have cultivated in
your own heart, to find what flowers thereon you may. Li