ntially
themselves. But to cut them up, as you do, and leave the fragments lying
around anywhere on the floor--I can't tell you how cruel and heartless
and wrong I think it!'

THE AGE

Again, as the train drew out of the station, the old gentleman pulled
out of his pocket his great shining watch; and for the fifth, or, as it
seemed to me, the five-hundredth time, he said (we were in the carriage
alone together) 'To the minute, to the very minute! It's a marvellous
thing, the Railway; a wonderful age!'

Now I had been long annoyed by the old gentleman's smiling face,
platitudes, and piles of newspapers; I had no love for the Age, and an
impulse came on me to denounce it.

'Allow me to tell you,' I said, 'that I consider it a wretched, an
ignoble age. Where's the greatness of life? Where's dignity, leisure,
stateliness; where's Art and Eloquence? Where are your great scholars,
statesmen? Let me ask you, sir,' I cried glaring at him, 'where's your
Gibbon, your Burke or Chatham?'

COMFORT

People often said that there was nothing sadder, she mourned, than the
remembrance of past happiness; but to her it seemed that not the way we
remembered, but the way we forgot, was the real tragedy of life.
Everything faded from us; our joys and sorrows vanished alike in the
irrevocable flux; we could not stay their fleeting. Did I not feel, she
asked, the sadness of this forgetting, this out-living all the things we
care for, this constant dying, so to speak, in the midst of life?

I felt its sadness very much; I felt quite lugubrious about it. 'And
yet,' I said (for I did really want to think of something that might
console this lamentable lady), 'and yet can we not find, in this fading
of recollection, some recompense, after all? Think, for instance--' But
what, alas, could I suggest?

'Think,' I began once more after a moment of reflection, 'think of
forgetting, and reading over and over again, all Jane Austen's novels!'

APPEARANCE AND REALITY

It is pleasant to saunter out in the morning sun and idle along the
summer streets with no purpose.

But is it Right?

I am not really bothered by these Questions--the hoary old puzzles of
Ethics and Philosophy, which lurk around the London corners to waylay
me. I have got used to them; and the most formidable of all, the biggest
bug of Metaphysics, the Problem which nonplusses the wisest heads on
this Planet, has become quite a familiar companion of mi