vitality which you feel convinced that
you must live for ever, so autumn makes you realise that life is fleeting
and the mind has not yet reached its full development, nor intellectual
ambition its complete fruition. Perhaps it is the touch of winter in the
air which braces your mind and soul and gives you the impression that,
given the long autumn evenings over the fire undisturbed, your brain will
soon be capable of tackling the removal of mountains. If you are
unutterably silly (as so many of us are--alas! for the world's sanity;
but thank heaven for the world's humour!) you will plan a whole
curriculum of intellectual labour for the quiet evenings over the
fireside. Oh, the books--good books, I mean--you will read! Oh, the
subjects you will study! Perhaps you will learn Russian, or maybe
something strange and out-of-the-ordinary, like Arabic! You dream of the
moment when, speaking quite casually, you will inform your friends that
you are reading the whole of the novels of Balzac; that you are studying
for the law and hope to pass your "Final" "just for the fun of the
thing"; that you are learning Persian, and intend to retranslate the
Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and discover other Eastern philosophers. In
fact, there is no end to the things you intend to do in the autumn
evenings over the fireside when your labours of the day are over.
Briefly, you are going to "cultivate your mind"; and when people talk
about "cultivating their minds," they usually regard the mind as a kind
of intellectual allotment which anyone can till--given determination, an
easy-chair near a big fire, and the long, long autumn evenings.

_What You Really Reap_

But alas! all you do . . . all you _really_ do, is . . . Well, as I said
before, the man who first said that "the way to hell is paved with good
intentions," must have said it in the autumn, or perhaps, in the spring,
when he realised how few of the good intentions he had lived up to.
Well, maybe the most enjoyable part of going to hell is paving the way
with, as it were, your back turned to your eventual goal. And sometimes
I rather fancy, in spite of all the moralist may say, the paving-stones
of good intent that you have laid on your way to perdition will be
counted in your favour, and the Recording Angel will place them to your
credit--which she can't do if, metaphorically speaking, you have not
paved a way anywhere, but just been content to live snugly on the little