he has never found time to visit it.

It is so, more or less, with most of us. Apply the test to yourself or to
your friends who live in London, and you will probably be astonished at the
number of precious things that you and they have not seen--not because they
are so distant, but because they are so near. Have you been to the Record
Office, for example? I haven't, although it is within a couple of hundred
yards of where I work and although I know it is rich in priceless
treasures. I am always going, but "never get," as they say in Lancashire.
It is too handy.

I was talking the other day to a City merchant who lives at Sydenham, and
who has never seen Hampstead Heath. He had been travelling from Sydenham to
the City for a quarter of a century, and has worn the rut so deep that he
cannot get out of it, and has hardly more likelihood of seeing the Northern
Heights than of visiting the mountains of the moon. Yet Hampstead Heath,
which he could see in a morning for the cost of a threepenny ride in the
Tube, is one of the incomparable things of Nature. I doubt whether there is
such a wonderful open space within the limits of any other great city. It
has hints of the seaside and the mountain, the moor and the down in most
exquisite union, and the Spaniards Road is as noble a promenade as you will
find anywhere.

This incuriousness is not a peculiarity of Londoners only. It is a part of
that temporising habit that afflicts most of us. If a thing can be done at
any time, then that is just the thing that never gets done. If my Fleet
Street friend knew that the Tower was going to be blown to pieces by a
Zeppelin to-morrow he would, I am sure, rush off to see it this afternoon.
But he is conscious that he has a whole lifetime to see it in, and so he
will never see it. We are most of us slackers at the bottom, and need the
discipline of a timetable to keep us on the move. If I could put off
writing this article till to-morrow I should easily convince myself that I
hadn't time to write it to-day.

The point is very well expressed in that story of the Pope who received
three American visitors in turn. "How long are you staying?" he said to the
first. "Six months, your Holiness," was the reply. "You will be able to see
something of Rome in that time," said the Pope. The second was staying
three months. "You will see a great deal of Rome in three months," said the
Pope. The third was only staying three weeks. "You'll see all there