terms.  But, after all, it is no part of my business to harness horses; it is a convenience that there should be persons who possess the requisite knowledge; for me horses only represent a convenient form of locomotion.  I did not mind her being amused—­indeed, that was the object of my narrative—­but her contempt was just as much misplaced as if I had despised her for not being able to tell the difference between sapphics and alcaics, which it was my business to know.

It is the complacency, the self-satisfaction, that results from the worship of games, which is one of its most serious features.  I wish with all my heart that I could suggest a remedy for it; but the only thing that I can do is to pursue my own inclinations, with a fervent conviction that they are at least as innocent as the pursuit of athletic exercises; and I can also, as I have said, wave a little flag of revolt, and rally to my standard the quieter and more simple-minded persons, who love their liberty, and decline to part with it unless they can find a better reason than the merely comfortable desire to do what every one else is doing.

XVI

SPIRITUALISM

I was sitting the other day in a vicarage garden with my friend the vicar.  It was a pretty, well-kept place, with old shrubberies and umbrageous trees; to the right, the tower of the church rose among its elms.  We sate out of the wind, looking over a rough pasture field, apparently a common, divided from the garden by a little ha-ha of brick.  The surface of the field was very irregular, as though there had been excavations made in it for gravel at some time or other; in certain parts of the field there appeared fragments of a stone wall, just showing above the ground.

The vicar pointed to the field.  “Do you see that wall?” he said; “I will tell you a very curious story about that.  When I came here, forty years ago, I asked the old gardener what the field was, as I never saw any one in it, or any beasts grazing there; and yet it was unfenced, and appeared to be common land—­it was full of little thickets and thorn-bushes then.  He was not very willing to tell me, I thought, but by dint of questions I discovered that it was a common, and that it was known locally by the curious name of Heaven’s Walls.  He went on to say that it was considered unlucky to set foot in it; and that, as a matter of fact, no villager would ever dream of going there; he would not say why, but at last it came out that it was supposed to be haunted by a spirit.  No one, it seemed, had ever seen anything there, but it was an unlucky place.

“Well, I thought no more of it at the time, though I often went into the field.  It was a quiet and pretty place enough; full of thickets, as I have said, where the birds built unmolested—­there was generally a goldfinch’s nest there.