have
suffered before one gets the full savour out of joy. And I do not
grumble at the price I have to pay for the sensation of basking, at
length, in solitude and the glow of my own fireside.

Too tired to undress, too tired to think, I am more than content to
watch the noble and ever-changing pageant of the fire. The finest part
of this spectacle is surely when the flames sink, and gradually the
red-gold caverns are revealed, gorgeous, mysterious, with inmost
recesses of white heat. It is often thus that my fire welcomes me when
the long day's task is done. After I have gazed long into its depths, I
close my eyes to rest them, opening them again, with a start, whenever
a coal shifts its place, or some belated little tongue of flame spurts
forth with a hiss.... Vaguely I liken myself to the watchman one sees
by night in London, wherever a road is up, huddled half-awake in his
tiny cabin of wood, with a cresset of live coal before him.... I have
come down in the world, and am a night-watchman, and I find the life as
pleasant as I had always thought it must be, except when I let the fire
out, and awake shivering.... Shivering I awake, in the twilight of
dawn. Ashes, white and grey, some rusty cinders, a crag or so of coal,
are all that is left over from last night's splendour. Grey is the lawn
beneath my window, and little ghosts of rabbits are nibbling and
hobbling there. But anon the east will be red, and, ere I wake, the sky
will be blue, and the grass quite green again, and my fire will have
arisen from its ashes, a cackling and comfortable phoenix.

SEEING PEOPLE OFF

I am not good at it. To do it well seems to me one of the most
difficult things in the world, and probably seems so to you, too.

To see a friend off from Waterloo to Vauxhall were easy enough. But we
are never called on to perform that small feat. It is only when a
friend is going on a longish journey, and will be absent for a longish
time, that we turn up at the railway station. The dearer the friend,
and the longer the journey, and the longer the likely absence, the
earlier do we turn up, and the more lamentably do we fail. Our failure
is in exact ratio to the seriousness of the occasion, and to the depth
of our feeling.

In a room, or even on a door-step, we can make the farewell quite
worthily. We can express in our faces the genuine sorrow we feel. Nor
do words fail us. There is no awkwardness, no restraint, on either
side. The thread o