ybody, I am out of touch
with the company of the credulous. I am with Doubting Thomas. I have no
capacity for believing the impossible, and have an entire distrust of dark
rooms and magic. People with bees in their bonnets leave me wondering, but
cold. I know a man--a most excellent man--whose life is a perfect debauch
of visions and revelations. He seems to discover the philosopher's stone
every other day. Sometimes it is brown bread that is the way to salvation.
If you eat brown bread you will never die, or at any rate you will live
until everybody is tired of you. Sometimes it is a new tax or a new sort of
bath that is the secret key to the whole contraption. For one period he
could talk of nothing but dried milk; for another, acetic acid was the
thing. Rub yourself with acetic acid and you would be as invulnerable to
the ills of the body as Achilles was after he had been dipped by Thetis in
the waters of Styx. The stars tell him anything he wishes to believe, and
he can conjure up spirits as easily as another man can order a cab. It is
not that he is a fool. In practical affairs he is astonishingly astute. It
is that he has an illimitable capacity for belief. He is always on the road
to Damascus.

For my part I am content to wait. I am for Wordsworth's creed of "wise
passiveness." I should as soon think of reading my destiny on the sole of
my boot as in the palm of my hand. The one would be just as illuminating as
the other. It would tell me what I chose to make it tell me. That and no
more. And so with the stars. People who pretend to read the riddle of our
affairs in the pageant of the stars are deceiving themselves or are trying
to deceive others. They are giving their own little fancies the sanction of
the universe. The butterfly that I see flitting about in the sunshine
outside might as well read the European war as a comment on its aimless
little life. The stars do not chatter about us, but they have a balm for us
if we will be silent. The "huge and thoughtful night" speaks a language
simple, august, universal.

It is one of the smaller consolations of the war that it has given us in
London a chance of hearing that language. The lamps of the street are
blotted out, and the lamps above are visible. Five nights of the week all
the year round I take the last bus that goes northward from the City, and
from the back seat on the top I watch the great procession of the stars. It
is the most astonishing spectacle offe