But, you ask, what has this to do with putting on my boots?  It is a reasonable question.  I will tell you.  For an hour I had paced my room in my slippers in search of a subject.  I had looked out of the window over the sunlit valley, watched the smoke of a distant train vanishing towards the west, observed the activities of the rooks in a neighbouring elm.  I had pared my nails several times with absent-minded industry, and sharpened every pencil I had on me with elaborate care.  But the more I pared my nails and the more I sharpened my pencils the more perplexed I grew as to the theme for an article.  Subjects crowded on me, “not single spies, but in battalions.”  They jostled each other for preference, they clamoured for notice as I have seen the dock labourers clamouring for a job at the London docks.  They held out their hands and cried, “Here am I:  take me.”  And, distracted by their importunities and starving in the midst of plenty, I fished in my pocket for a pencil I had not sharpened.  There wasn’t one left.

It was at this moment that I remembered my boots.  Yes, I would certainly put on my boots.  There was nothing like putting on one’s boots for helping one to make up one’s mind.  The act of stooping changed the current of the blood.  You saw things in a new light—­like the man who looked between his legs at Bolton Abbey, and cried to his friend:  “Oh, look this way; it’s extraordinary what a fresh view you get.”  So I fetched my boots and sat down to put them on.

The thing worked like a charm.  For in my preoccupied condition I picked up my right boot first.  Then mechanically I put it down and seized the left boot.  “Now why,” said I, “did I do that?” And then the fact flashed on me that all my life I had been putting on my left boot first.  If you had asked me five minutes before which boot I put on first, I should have said that there was no first about it; yet now I found I was in the grip of a habit so fixed that the attempt to put on my right boot first affected me like the scraping of a harsh pencil on a slate.  The thing couldn’t be done.  The whole rhythm of habit would be put out of joint.  I became interested.  How, I wondered, do I put on my jacket?  I rose, took it off, found that my right arm slipped automatically into its sleeve, tried the reverse process, discovered that it was as difficult as an unfamiliar gymnastic operation.  Why, said I, I am a mere bundle of little habits of which I am unconscious.  This thing must be looked into.  And then came into my mind that fascinating book of Samuel Butler’s on Life and Habit.  Yes, certainly, here was a subject that would “go.”  I dismissed all the importunate beggars who had been clamouring in my mind, took out a pencil, seized a writing pad, and sat down to write on “The Force of Habit.”

And here I am.  I have got to the end of my article without reaching my subject.  I have looked up and down the street so long that it is time to go indoors.