How cool an old house is in summer!  The thick walls and the stone floors give them an almost icy feeling in the early morning.  Even as I write my thermometer stands at 58 deg. within, whilst the one out of doors registers 65 deg. in the shade.  This is the ideal temperature, neither too hot nor too cold.  But it is not summer yet, only the fickle month of May.

Tom Peregrine is getting very anxious.  He meets me every evening with the same story of trout rising all the way up the stream and nobody trying to catch them.  I can see by his manner that he disapproves of my “muddling” over books and papers instead of trying to catch trout.  He cannot understand it all.  Meanwhile one sometimes asks oneself the question which Peregrine would also like to propound, only he dare not, Why and wherefore do we tread the perilous paths of literature instead of those pleasant paths by the river and through the wood?  The only answer is this:  The daemon prompts us to do these things, even as it prompted the men of old time.

     “There is a divinity that shapes our ends,
      Rough hew them how we will.”

If there is such a thing as a “call” to any profession, there is a call to that of letters.  So with an enthusiasm born of inexperience and delusive hope we embark as in a leaky and untrustworthy sailing ship, built, for ought we know, “in the eclipse, and rigged with curses dark,” and at the mercy of every chance breeze are wafted by the winds of heaven through chaos and darkness into the boundless ocean of words and of books.  When the waves run high they resemble nothing so much as lions with arched crests and flowing manes going to and fro seeking whom they may devour, or savage dogs rushing hither and thither foaming at the mouth; and when old Father Neptune lets loose his hungry sea-dogs of criticism, then look out for squalls!

But again the daemon, that still small voice echoing from the far-off shores of the ocean of time, whispers in our ear, “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thine hand; for thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or that, or whether they both shall be alike good.”

So we sow in weakness and in fear and trembling, “line upon line, line upon line; here a little and there a little,” sometimes in mirth and laughter, sometimes in tears.  Let us not ask to be raised in power.  Let us resign all glory and honour and power to the Ancient of Days, prime source of the strength of wavering, weak mankind.  Rather let us be thankful that by turning aside from “the clamour of the passing day” to tread the narrow paths of literature, however humble, however obscure our lot may have been, we gained an insight into the nobler destinies of the human soul, and learnt a lesson which might otherwise have been postponed until we were hovering on the threshold of Eternity.