r,
rather than a bricklayer, or a baker, or anything else, I suddenly
started upright, and remembered my pockets. I was carrying about with
me an unknown treasury. I had a British Museum and a South Kensington
collection of unknown curios hung all over me in different places. I
began to take the things out.

.....

The first thing I came upon consisted of piles and heaps of Battersea
tram tickets. There were enough to equip a paper chase. They shook
down in showers like confetti. Primarily, of course, they touched my
patriotic emotions, and brought tears to my eyes; also they provided me
with the printed matter I required, for I found on the back of them some
short but striking little scientific essays about some kind of pill.
Comparatively speaking, in my then destitution, those tickets might
be regarded as a small but well-chosen scientific library. Should my
railway journey continue (which seemed likely at the time) for a
few months longer, I could imagine myself throwing myself into the
controversial aspects of the pill, composing replies and rejoinders pro
and con upon the data furnished to me. But after all it was the symbolic
quality of the tickets that moved me most. For as certainly as the cross
of St. George means English patriotism, those scraps of paper meant all
that municipal patriotism which is now, perhaps, the greatest hope of
England.

The next thing that I took out was a pocket-knife. A pocket-knife, I
need hardly say, would require a thick book full of moral meditations
all to itself. A knife typifies one of the most primary of those
practical origins upon which as upon low, thick pillows all our human
civilisation reposes. Metals, the mystery of the thing called iron and
of the thing called steel, led me off half-dazed into a kind of dream.
I saw into the intrails of dim, damp wood, where the first man among
all the common stones found the strange stone. I saw a vague and violent
battle, in which stone axes broke and stone knives were splintered
against something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man.
I heard all the hammers on all the anvils of the earth. I saw all the
swords of Feudal and all the weals of Industrial war. For the knife is
only a short sword; and the pocket-knife is a secret sword. I opened it
and looked at that brilliant and terrible tongue which we call a blade;
and I thought that perhaps it was the symbol of the oldest of the needs
of man. The next moment I knew th