ay escape, of others I am the destined
and devoted victim. Sooner or later--and yet in any case how soon!--I
shall fall, as I have seen others fall, touched by an unseen hand.

But I do not think of these Terrors often, though I seem to hear them
sometimes moving in the thickets. It is the little transitory worries
that bite and annoy me, querulous insects, born of the moment, and
perishing with the day.

THINGS TO WRITE

What things there are to write, if one could only write them! My mind is
full of gleaming thoughts; gay moods and mysterious, moth-like
meditations hover in my imagination, fanning their painted wings. They
would make my fortune if I could catch them; but always the rarest,
those freaked with azure and the deepest crimson, flutter away beyond my
reach.

The childish and ever-baffled chase of these filmy nothings often seems,
for one of sober years in a sad world, a trifling occupation. But have I
not read of the great Kings of Persia who used to ride out to hawk for
butterflies, nor deemed this pastime beneath their royal dignity?

PROPERTY

I should be very reluctant to think that there was anything fishy or
fraudulent about the time-honoured institution of Private Property. It
is endorsed by Society, defended by the Church, maintained by the Law;
and the slightest tampering with it is severely punished by Judges in
large horsehair wigs. Oh, certainly it must be all right; I have a
feeling that it is all right; and one of these days I will get some one
to explain why the world keeps on putting adequate sums of its currency
into my pocket.

But of course it's all right--

IN A FIX

To go, or not to go? Did I want or not want to bicycle over to tea with
the Hanbury-Belchers at Pokemore? Wouldn't it be pleasanter to stay at
home?

I liked the Hanbury-Belchers--

Or did I really like them?

Still, it might be pleasant?

But how beforehand can one ever tell? Experience? I was still, I felt,
as ignorant of life as a new-born infant; experience has taught me
nothing; what I needed was some definite, a priori principle, some deep
conception of the meaning of existence, in the light of which problems
of this kind would solve themselves at once.

I leant my bicycle against the gate, and sat down to think the matter
out. Calling to mind the moral debates of the old philosophers, I
meditated on that _Summum Bonum_, or Sovereign Felicity of which they
argued; but from th