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Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant.  Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought.  But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’ in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.

Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really think deserves to become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of its form.

“Toward the end of September,” Stevenson writes, “when school-time was drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull’s-eye lantern.  The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary.  We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat.  They smelled noisomely of blistered tin.  They never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers.  Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more.  The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull’s-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen.  The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen.  Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely.  But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.

“When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious ’Have you got your lantern?’ and a gratified ‘Yes!’ That was the shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell.  Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them,—­for the cabin was usually locked,—­or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead.  Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the bull’s-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge, windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges