the constant apprehension, that hung over one like a cloud, of punishment, and even ill-usage.  I was not unduly punished at school, and I was certainly never ill-used.  But one saw others suffer, and my own sensitive and timid nature perpetually foreboded disaster.  Day after day as a little boy I longed for home surroundings and home affections as eagerly as the hart desires the water-brooks.  But memory pushes all that aside, and obstinately insists on regarding the whole period in an idyllic and buoyant light.

I walk round the borders, which are all full of the little glossy spikes of snowdrops pushing up, struggling through the crusted earth.  The sad hero of Maud walked “in a ghastly glimmer,” and found “the shining daffodil dead.”  I walk in the soft twilight, that is infinitely tender, soothing, and sweet, and find the daffodil taking on his new life; and there rises in my heart an uplifted yearning, not so much for the good days that are dead, but that I may somehow come to possess the peace that underlies the memory of them all—­not handle it for a moment and lay it down, but possess it or be possessed by it for ever.

Yet these busy days through which I have been passing are good for me, I believe.  I have seen and talked to a number of people; and so far from finding that my solitary life makes me unfit for society, I think that it gives me a good-humoured contentment in the interchange of talk and argument, which I lacked in old days when I was fighting for my position.  The things seem to matter so little to me now.  I do not care in the least what impression I make, so long as people are kind and friendly.  Life is no longer a race, where I wish to get ahead of others; it is a pilgrimage in which we are all alike bound.  But it is good for me to be in the middle of it all, not only because of the contrast which it presents to the life I have chosen, but because it is like the strong scour of a current sweeping through the mind and leaving it clean and sweet.  The danger of the quiet life is that one gets too comfortable, too indolent.  It does me good to have to mix with people, to smile and bow, to try and say the right thing, to argue a point courteously, to weigh an opponent’s arguments, to make efforts, to go where I do not desire to go; and I have no longer an axe of my own to grind; I only desire that the right conclusion should be reached.

But the things which people consider amusing and entertaining bewilder me more and more.  I went to an evening party on one of the evenings I spent in town.  There was a suite of fine rooms, hung with beautiful pictures and full of works of art.  A courteous host and hostess received us, said a few amiable words to each, and passed us on into the rooms:  we circulated, stood, sate, looked, talked.  I suppose it is a question of temperament, but I felt that every single element of social, intellectual, and aesthetic pleasure was absent from the scene.  One had no