ssed me. What had I done or left undone? And
the shadowy figures that seemed to menace and pursue me? Yes, I had
wronged them; it was again those Polish Poets, it was Mickiewicz,
Slowacki, Szymonowicz, Krasicki, Kochanowski, of all whose works I had
never read a word.

CADOGAN GARDENS

Out of the fog a dim figure accosted me. 'I beg your pardon, Sir, but
could you tell me how to get to Cadogan Gardens?'

'Cadogan Gardens? I am afraid I am lost myself. Perhaps, Sir,' I added
(we two seemed oddly alone and intimate in that white world of mystery
together), 'perhaps, Sir, you can tell me where I can find the Gardens I
am looking for?' I breathed their name.

'Hesperian Gardens?' the voice repeated. 'I don't think I have ever
heard of Hesperian Gardens.'

'Oh, surely!' I cried, 'The Gardens of the Sunset and the singing
Maidens!'

'But what I am really looking for,' I confided to that dim-seen figure,
'what I am always hoping to find is the Fortunate Abodes, the Happy
Orchard, the Paradise our parents lost so long ago.'

THE RESCUE

As I sat there, hopeless, with my coat and hat on in my bedroom, I felt
I had no hold on life, no longer the slightest interest in it. To gain
all that the world could give I would not have raised a listless finger;
and it was entirely without intention that I took a cigarette, and felt
for matches in my pocket. It was the act of an automaton, of a corpse
that twitches a little after life has left it.

But when I found that I hadn't any matches, that--hang it!--there wasn't
a box of matches anywhere, then, with this vexation, life came flooding
back--the warm, familiar sense of my own existence, with all its
exasperation, and incommunicable charm.

CHARM

'Speaking of Charm,' I said, 'there is one quality which I find very
attractive, though most people don't notice it, and rather dislike it if
they do. That quality is Observation. You read of it in
eighteenth-century books--"a Man of much Observation," they say. So few
people,' I went on, 'really notice anything--they live in theories and
thin dreams, and look at you with unseeing eyes. They take very little
interest in the real world; but the Observers I speak of find it a
source of inexhaustible fascination. Nothing escapes them; they can tell
at once what the people they meet are like, where they belong, their
profession, the kind of houses they live in. The slightest thing is
enough for them to judge b