and old Night seems to linger on inside
me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a
looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a
dream.

THE GHOST

When people talk of Ghosts and Hauntings, I never mention the Apparition
by which I am pestered, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets,
the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, and yet so abhorrent,
which lurks in the plate-glass of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors
to waylay me.

THE HOUR-GLASS

At the corner of Oakley Street I stopped for a moment's chat with my
neighbour, Mrs. Wheble, who was waiting there for a bus.

'Do tell me,' she asked, 'what you have got in that odd-looking parcel?'

'It's an hour-glass,' I said, taking it out of its paper wrapping. 'I
saw it in a shop in the King's Road. I've always wanted an hour-glass to
measure time by. What a mystery Time really is, when you think of it!
See, the sands are running now while we are talking. I've got here in my
hand the most potent, the most enigmatic, the most fleeting of all
essences--Time, the sad cure for all our sorrows--but I say! There's
your bus just starting. You'll miss it if you don't look out!'

THE LATCHKEY

I was astonished, I was almost horror-struck by the sight of the New
Moon at the end of the street. In bewilderment and Blake-like wonder I
stood and gazed at it on my doorstep. For what was I doing there; I, a
wanderer, a pilgrim, a nomad of the desert, with no home save where the
evening found me--what was my business on that doorstep; at what
commonplace had the Moon caught me with a latchkey in my hand?

GOOD PRACTICE

We met in an omnibus last evening. 'And where are you going now?' she
asked, as she looked at me with amusement.

'I am going, if the awful truth must be told, to dine in Grosvenor
Square.'

'Lord!' she colloquially replied, 'and what do you do that for?'

'I do it because I am invited. And besides,' I went on, 'let me remind
you of what the Persian Mystics say of the Saints--that the Saints are
sometimes rich, that God sometimes endows them with an outward show of
wealth to hide them from the profane.'

'Oh, does He? Hides them in Grosvenor Square?'

'Very well, then, I shall tell you the real truth; I shall tell you my
real reason for going to dine there. Do you remember what Diogenes
answered when they asked him why he had asked for a statue at the pub