These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind
permission of the Editor of the dailynews,
in which paper they appeared. They amount to
no more than a sort of sporadic diary—a
diary recording one day in twenty which happened to
stick in the fancy— the only kind of diary
the author has ever been able to keep. Even that
diary he could only keep by keeping it in public,
for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the
topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread
of motive. As the reader’s eye strays,
with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably
alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a
window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one
that the reader is looking at something that he has
never seen: that is, never realised. He
could not write an essay on such a post or wall:
he does not know what the post or wall mean.
He could not even write the synopsis of an essay;
as “The Bed-Post; Its Significance—Security
Essential to Idea of Sleep—Night Felt as
Infinite—Need of Monumental Architecture,”
and so on. He could not sketch in outline his
theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even in
the form of a summary. “The Window-Blind—
Its Analogy to the Curtain and Veil—Is Modesty
Natural? —Worship of and Avoidance
of the Sun, etc., etc.” None
of us think enough of these things on which the eye
rests. But don’t let us let the eye rest.
Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise
the eye until it learns to see startling facts that
run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence.
Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write
essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud. I
have attempted some such thing in what follows; but
anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will
only try.
Contents Chapter
I Tremendous
Trifles
II A Piece of Chalk
III The Secret of a Train
IV The Perfect Game
V The Extraordinary
Cabman
VI An Accident
VII The Advantages of Having
One Leg
VIII The End of the World
IX In the Place de
la Bastille
X On Lying in
Bed
XI The Twelve Men
XII The Wind and the Trees
XIII The Dickensian
XIV In Topsy-Turvy Land
XV What I Found in
My Pocket
XVI The Dragon’s Grandmother
XVII The Red Angel
XVIII The Tower
XIX How I Met the President
XX The Giant
XXI The Great Man
XXII The Orthodox Barber
XXIII The Toy Theatre
XXIV A Tragedy of Twopence
XXV A Cab Ride Across Country
XXVI The Two Noises
XXVII Some Policemen and a Moral
XXVIII The Lion
XXIX Humanity: An Interlude
XXX The Little Birds Who
Won’t Sing
XXXI The Riddle of the Ivy
XXXII The Travellers in State
XXXIII The Prehistoric Railway Station
XXXIV The Diabolist
XXXV A Glimpse of My Country
XXXVI A Somewhat Improbable Story
XXXVII The Shop of Ghosts
XXXVIII The Ballade of a Strange Town
XXXIX The Mystery of a Pageant
