powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle will become merely exciting and not exasperating.  Imagine that you are tugging up a lifeboat out of the sea.  Imagine that you are roping up a fellow-creature out of an Alpine crevass.  Imagine even that you are a boy again and engaged in a tug-of-war between French and English.”  Shortly after saying this I left him; but I have no doubt at all that my words bore the best possible fruit.  I have no doubt that every day of his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed face and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts to himself, and seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding ring.

So I do not think that it is altogether fanciful or incredible to suppose that even the floods in London may be accepted and enjoyed poetically.  Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have been caused by them; and inconvenience, as I have said, is only one aspect, and that the most unimaginative and accidental aspect of a really romantic situation.  An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.  An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.  The water that girdled the houses and shops of London must, if anything, have only increased their previous witchery and wonder.  For as the Roman Catholic priest in the story said:  “Wine is good with everything except water,” and on a similar principle, water is good with everything except wine.

THE VOTE AND THE HOUSE

Most of us will be canvassed soon, I suppose; some of us may even canvass.  Upon which side, of course, nothing will induce me to state, beyond saying that by a remarkable coincidence it will in every case be the only side in which a high-minded, public-spirited, and patriotic citizen can take even a momentary interest.  But the general question of canvassing itself, being a non-party question, is one which we may be permitted to approach.  The rules for canvassers are fairly familiar to any one who has ever canvassed.  They are printed on the little card which you carry about with you and lose.  There is a statement, I think, that you must not offer a voter food or drink.  However hospitable you may feel towards him in his own house, you must not carry his lunch about with you.  You must not produce a veal cutlet from your tail-coat pocket.  You must not conceal poached eggs about your person.  You must not, like a kind of conjurer, produce baked potatoes from your hat.  In short, the canvasser must not feed the voter in any way.  Whether the voter is allowed to feed the canvasser, whether the voter may give the canvasser veal cutlets and baked potatoes, is a point of law on which I have never been able to inform myself.  When I found myself canvassing a gentleman, I have sometimes felt tempted to ask him if there was any rule against his giving me food and drink; but the matter seemed a delicate one to approach.  His attitude to me also sometimes suggested a doubt as to whether he would, even if he could.  But there are voters who might find it worth while to discover if there is any law against bribing a canvasser.  They might bribe him to go away.