am always trustful, has said that the
hallmark of Bohemianism is a tendency to use things for purposes to
which they are not adapted. You are a Bohemian, says Mr. MacCarthy, if
you would gladly use a razor for buttering your toast at breakfast, and
you aren't if you wouldn't. I think he would agree that the choice of
a home is a surer index than any fleeting action, however strange, and
that really the best-certified Bohemians are they who choose to reside
in railway-cars on stilts. But--why particularly railway-cars? That is
a difficult question. A possible answer is that the Bohemian, as tending
always to nomady, feels that the least uncongenial way of settling
down is to stow himself into a thing fashioned for darting hither and
thither. Yet no, this answer won't do. It is ruled out by the law I laid
down in my first paragraph. There's nothing sadder to eye or heart than
a very mobile thing made immovable.

No house, especially if you are by way of being nomadic, can be so ill
to live in as one that in its heyday went gadding all over the place.
And, on the other hand, what house more eligible than one that can gad?
I myself am not restless, and am fond of comfort: I should not care to
live in a caravan. But I have always liked the idea of a caravan. And if
you, alas, O reader, are a dweller in a railway-car, I commend the idea
to you. Take it, with my apologies for any words of mine that may have
nettled you. Put it into practice. Think of the white road and the
shifting hedgerows, and the counties that you will soon lose count of.
And think what a blessing it will be for you to know that your house is
not the one in which the Merstham Tunnel murder was committed.

WILLIAM AND MARY 1920.

Memories, like olives, are an acquired taste. William and Mary (I give
them the Christian names that were indeed theirs--the joint title by
which their friends always referred to them) were for some years an
interest in my life, and had a hold on my affection. But a time came
when, though I had known and liked them too well ever to forget them, I
gave them but a few thoughts now and then. How, being dead, could they
keep their place in the mind of a young man surrounded with large and
constantly renewed consignments of the living? As one grows older, the
charm of novelty wears off. One finds that there is no such thing as
novelty--or, at any rate, that one has lost the faculty for perceiving
it. One sees every newcomer not