d
them on, applying them cautiously to various portions of the innocent
animal's person. Eventually we had to give it up as a bad job, and seek
for professional assistance. I described the scene for the benefit of a
lively lady of my acquaintance, who is a devotee of anything connected
with horses, and she laughed unmercifully at the description, and
expressed the contempt, which she sincerely felt, in no measured terms.
But, after all, it is no part of my business to harness horses; it is a
convenience that there should be persons who possess the requisite
knowledge; for me horses only represent a convenient form of
locomotion. I did not mind her being amused--indeed, that was the
object of my narrative--but her contempt was just as much misplaced as
if I had despised her for not being able to tell the difference between
sapphics and alcaics, which it was my business to know.

It is the complacency, the self-satisfaction, that results from the
worship of games, which is one of its most serious features. I wish
with all my heart that I could suggest a remedy for it; but the only
thing that I can do is to pursue my own inclinations, with a fervent
conviction that they are at least as innocent as the pursuit of
athletic exercises; and I can also, as I have said, wave a little flag
of revolt, and rally to my standard the quieter and more simple-minded
persons, who love their liberty, and decline to part with it unless
they can find a better reason than the merely comfortable desire to do
what every one else is doing.

XVI

SPIRITUALISM

I was sitting the other day in a vicarage garden with my friend the
vicar. It was a pretty, well-kept place, with old shrubberies and
umbrageous trees; to the right, the tower of the church rose among its
elms. We sate out of the wind, looking over a rough pasture field,
apparently a common, divided from the garden by a little ha-ha of
brick. The surface of the field was very irregular, as though there had
been excavations made in it for gravel at some time or other; in
certain parts of the field there appeared fragments of a stone wall,
just showing above the ground.

The vicar pointed to the field. "Do you see that wall?" he said; "I
will tell you a very curious story about that. When I came here, forty
years ago, I asked the old gardener what the field was, as I never saw
any one in it, or any beasts grazing there; and yet it was unfenced,
and appeared to be common land--i