It is not cast from any obvious mould of sentiment. It is not a
memorial urn, nor a ruined tower, nor any of those things which he who
runs may weep over. Though not less really deplorable than they, it
needs, I am well aware, some sort of explanation to enable my reader to
mourn with me. For it is merely a hat-box.
It is nothing but that--an ordinary affair of pig-skin, with a brass
lock. As I write, it stands on a table near me. It is of the kind that
accommodates two hats, one above the other. It has had many tenants,
and is sun-tanned, rain-soiled, scarred and dented by collision with
trucks and what not other accessories to the moving scenes through
which it has been bandied. Yes! it has known the stress of many
journeys; yet has it never (you would say, seeing it) received its
baptism of paste: it has not one label on it. And there, indeed, is the
tragedy that I shall unfold.
For many years this hat-box had been my travelling companion, and was,
but a few days since, a dear record of all the big and little journeys
I had made. It was much more to me than a mere receptacle for hats. It
was my one collection, my collection of labels. Well! last week its
lock was broken. I sent it to the trunk-makers, telling them to take
the greatest care of it. It came back yesterday. The idiots, the
accursed idots! had carefully removed every label from its surface. I
wrote to them--it matters not what I said. My fury has burnt itself
out. I have reached the stage of craving general sympathy. So I have
sat down to write, in the shadow of a tower which stands bleak, bare,
prosaic, all the ivy of its years stripped from it; in the shadow of an
urn commemorating nothing.
I think that every one who is or ever has been a collector will pity me
in this dark hour of mine. In other words, I think that nearly every
one will pity me. For few are they who have not, at some time, come
under the spell of the collecting spirit and known the joy of
accumulating specimens of something or other. The instinct has its
corner, surely, in every breast. Of course, hobby-horses are of many
different breeds; but all their riders belong to one great cavalcade,
and when they know that one of their company has had his steed shot
under him, they will not ride on without a backward glance of sympathy.
Lest my fall be unnoted by them, I write this essay. I want that glance.
Do not, reader, suspect that because I am choosing my words nicely, and
playing with metaphor, and putting my commas in their proper places, my
sorrow is not really and truly poignant. I write elaborately, for that
is my habit, and habits are less easily broken than hearts. I could no
more 'dash off' this my cri de coeur than I could an elegy on a
broomstick I had never seen. Therefore, reader, bear with me, despite
my sable plumes and purple; and weep with me, though my prose be, like
those verses which Mr. Beamish wrote over Chloe's grave, 'of a
character to cool emotion.' For indeed my anguish is very real. The
collection I had amassed so carefully, during so many years, the
collection I loved and revelled in, has been obliterated, swept away,
destroyed utterly by a pair of ruthless, impious, well-meaning,
idiotic, unseen hands. It cannot be restored to me. Nothing can
compensate me for it gone. It was part and parcel of my life.
Orchids, jade, majolica, wines, mezzotints, old silver, first editions,
harps, copes, hookahs, cameos, enamels, black-letter folios,
scarabaei--such things are beautiful and fascinating in themselves.
Railway-labels are not, I admit. For the most part, they are crudely
coloured, crudely printed, without sense of margin or spacing; in fact,
quite worthless as designs. No one would be a connoisseur in them. No
one could be tempted to make a general collection of them. My own
collection of them was strictly personal: I wanted none that was not a
symbol of some journey made by myself, even as the hunter of big game
cares not to possess the tusks, and the hunter of women covets not the
photographs, of other people's victims. My collection was one of those
which result from man's tendency to preserve some obvious record of his
pleasures--the points he has scored in the game. To Nimrod, his tusks;
to Lothario, his photographs; to me (who cut no dash in either of those
veneries, and am not greedy enough to preserve menus nor silly enough
to preserve press-cuttings, but do delight in travelling from place to
place), my railway-labels. Had nomady been my business, had I been a
commercial traveller or a King's Messenger, such labels would have held
for me no charming significance. But I am only by instinct a nomad. I
have a tether, known as the four-mile radius. To slip it is for me
always an event, an excitement. To come to a new place, to awaken in a
strange bed, to be among strangers! To have dispelled, as by sudden
magic, the old environment! It is on the scoring of such points as
these that I preen myself, and my memory is always ringing the
'changes' I have had, complacently, as a man jingles silver in his
pocket. The noise of a great terminus is no jar to me. It is music. I
prick up my ears to it, and paw the platform. Dear to me as the
bugle-note to any war-horse, as the first twittering of the birds in
the hedgerows to the light-sleeping vagabond, that cry of 'Take your
seats please!' or--better still--'En voiture!' or 'Partenza!' Had I the
knack of rhyme, I would write a sonnet-sequence of the journey to
Newhaven or Dover--a sonnet for every station one does not stop at. I
await that poet who shall worthily celebrate the iron road. There is
one who describes, with accuracy and gusto, the insides of engines; but
he will not do at all. I look for another, who shall show us the heart
of the passenger, the exhilaration of travelling by day, the
exhilaration and romance and self-importance of travelling by night.
'Paris!' How it thrills me when, on a night in spring, in the hustle
and glare of Victoria, that label is slapped upon my hat-box! Here,
standing in the very heart of London, I am by one sweep of a
paste-brush transported instantly into that white-grey city across the
sea. To all intents and purposes I am in Paris already. Strange, that
the porter does not say, 'V'la', M'sieu'!' Strange, that the evening
papers I buy at the bookstall are printed in the English language.
Strange, that London still holds my body, when a corduroyed magician
has whisked my soul verily into Paris. The engine is hissing as I hurry
my body along the platform, eager to reunite it with my soul... Over
the windy quay the stars are shining as I pass down the gangway,
hat-box in hand. They twinkle brightly over the deck I am now
pacing--amused, may be, at my excitement. The machinery grunts and
creaks. The little boat quakes in the excruciating throes of its
departure. At last!... One by one, the stars take their last look at
me, and the sky grows pale, and the sea blanches mysteriously with it.
Through the delicate cold air of the dawn, across the grey waves of the
sea, the outlines of Dieppe grow and grow. The quay is lined with its
blue-bloused throng. These porters are as excited by us as though they
were the aborigines of some unknown island. (And yet, are they not
here, at this hour, in these circumstances, every day of their lives?)
These gestures! These voices, hoarse with passion! The dear music of
French, rippling up clear for me through all this hoarse confusion of
its utterance, and making me happy!... I drink my cup of steaming
coffee--true coffee!--and devour more than one roll. At the tables
around me, pale and dishevelled from the night, sit the people whom I
saw--years ago!--at Charing Cross. How they have changed! The coffee
sends a glow throughout my body. I am fulfilled with a sense of
material well-being. The queer ethereal exaltation of the dawn has
vanished. I climb up into the train, and dispose myself in the
dun-cushioned coupe'. 'Chemins de Fer de l'Ouest' is perforated on the
white antimacassars. Familiar and strange inscription! I murmur its
impressive iambs over and over again. They become the refrain to which
the train vibrates on its way. I smoke cigarettes, a little drowsily
gazing out of the window at the undulating French scenery that flies
past me, at the silver poplars. Row after slanted row of these
incomparably gracious trees flies past me, their foliage shimmering in
the unawoken landscape Soon I shall be rattling over the cobbles of
unawoken Paris, through the wide white-grey streets with their unopened
jalousies. And when, later, I awake in the unnatural little bedroom of
walnut-wood and crimson velvet, in the bed whose curtains are white
with that whiteness which Paris alone can give to linen, a Parisian sun
will be glittering for me in a Parisian sky.
Yes! In my whole collection the Paris specimens were dearest to me,
meant most to me, I think. But there was none that had not some
tendrils on sentiment. All of them I prized, more or less. Of the
Aberdeen specimens I was immensely fond. Who can resist the thought of
that express by which, night after night, England is torn up its
centre? I love well that cab-drive in the chill autumnal night through
the desert of Bloomsbury, the dead leaves rustling round the horse's
hoofs as we gallop through the Squares. Ah, I shall be across the
Border before these doorsteps are cleaned, before the coming of the
milk-carts. Anon, I descry the cavernous open jaws of Euston. The
monster swallows me, and soon I am being digested into Scotland. I sit
ensconced in a corner of a compartment. The collar of my ulster is
above my ears, my cap is pulled over my eyes, my feet are on a
hot-water tin, and my rug snugly envelops most of me. Sleeping-cars are
for the strange beings who love not the act of travelling. Them I
should spurn even if I could not sleep a wink in an ordinary
compartment. I would liefer forfeit sleep than the consciousness of
travelling. But it happens that I, in an ordinary compartment, am blest
both with the sleep and with the consciousness, all through the long
night. To be asleep and to know that you are sleeping, and to know,
too, that even as you sleep you are being borne away through darkness
into distance--that, surely, is to go two better than Endymion. Surely,
nothing is more mysteriously delightful than this joint consciousness
of sleep and movement. Pitiable they to whom it is denied. All through
the night the vibration of the train keeps one-third of me awake, while
the other two parts of me profoundly slumber. Whenever the train stops,
and the vibration ceases, then the one-third of me falls asleep, and
the other two parts stir. I am awake just enough to hear the
hollow-echoing cry of 'Crewe' or 'York,' and to blink up at the
green-hooded lamp in the ceiling. May be, I raise a corner of the
blind, and see through the steam-dim window the mysterious, empty
station. A solitary porter shuffles along the platform. Yonder, those
are the lights of the refreshment room, where, all night long, a
barmaid is keeping her lonely vigil over the beer-handles and the
Bath-buns in glass cases. I see long rows of glimmering milk-cans, and
wonder drowsily whether they contain forty modern thieves. The engine
snorts angrily in the benighted silence. Far away is the faint,
familiar sound--clink-clank, clink-clank--of the man who tests the
couplings. Nearer and nearer the sound comes. It passes, recedes It is
rather melancholy.... A whistle, a jerk, and the two waking parts of me
are asleep again, while the third wakes up to mount guard over them,
and keeps me deliciously aware of the rhythmic dream they are dreaming
about the hot bath and the clean linen, and the lovely breakfast that I
am to have at Aberdeen; and of the Scotch air, crisp and keen, that is
to escort me, later along the Deeside.
Little journeys, as along the Deeside, have a charm of their own.
Little journeys from London to places up the river, or to places on the
coast of Kent--journeys so brief that you lunch at one end and have tea
at the other--I love them all, and loved the labels that recalled them
to me. But the labels of long journeys, of course, took precedence in
my heart. Here and there on my hat-box were labels that recalled to me
long journeys in which frontiers were crossed at dead of night--dim
memories of small, crazy stations where I shivered half-awake, and was
sleepily conscious of a strange tongue and strange uniforms, of my
jingling bunch of keys, of ruthless arms diving into the nethermost
recesses of my trunks, of suspicious grunts and glances, and of
grudging hieroglyphics chalked on the slammed lids. These were things
more or less painful and resented in the moment of experience, yet even
then fraught with a delicious glamour. I suffered, but gladly. In the
night, when all things are mysteriously magnified, I have never crossed
a frontier without feeling some of the pride of conquest. And, indeed,
were these conquests mere illusions? Was I not actually extending the
frontiers of my mind, adding new territories to it? Every crossed
frontier, every crossed sea, meant for me a definite success--an
expansion and enrichment of my soul. When, after seven days and nights
of sea traversed, I caught my first glimpse of Sandy Hook, was there no
comparison between Columbus and myself? To see what one has not seen
before, is not that almost as good as to see what no one has ever seen?
Romance, exhilaration, self-importance these are what my labels
symbolised and recalled to me. That lost collection was a running
record of all my happiest hours; a focus, a monument, a diary. It was
my humble Odyssey, wrought in coloured paper on pig-skin, and the one
work I never, never was weary of. If the distinguished Ithacan had
travelled with a hat-box, how finely and minutely Homer would have
described it--its depth and girth, its cunningly fashioned lock and
fair lining withal! And in how interminable a torrent of hexameters
would he have catalogued all the labels on it, including those
attractive views of the Hotel Circe, the Hotel Calypso, and other
high-class resorts. Yet no! Had such a hat-box existed and had it been
preserved in his day, Homer would have seen in it a sufficient record,
a better record than even he could make, of Odysseus' wanderings. We
should have had nothing from him but the Iliad. I, certainly never felt
any need of commemorating my journeys till my labels were lost to me.
And I am conscious how poor and chill is the substitute.
My collection like most collections, began imperceptibly. A man does
not say to himself, 'I am going to collect' this thing or that. True,
the schoolboy says so; but his are not, in the true sense of the word,
collections. He seeks no set autobiographic symbols, for boys never
look back--there is too little to look back on, too much in front. Nor
have the objects of his collection any intrinsic charm for him. He
starts a collection merely that he may have a plausible excuse for
doing something he ought not to do. He goes in for birds' eggs merely
that he may be allowed to risk his bones and tear his clothes in
climbing; for butterflies, that he may be encouraged to poison and
impale; for stamps...really, I do not know why he, why any sane
creature goes in for stamps. It follows that he has no real love of his
collection and soon abandons it for something else. The sincere
collector, how different! His hobby has a solid basis of personal
preference. Some one gives him (say) a piece of jade. He admires it. He
sees another piece in a shop, and buys it; later, he buys another. He
does not regard these pieces of jade as distinct from the rest of his
possessions; he has no idea of collecting jade. It is not till he has
acquired several other pieces that he ceases to regard them as mere
items in the decoration of his room, and gives them a little table, or
a tray of a cabinet, all to themselves. How well they look there! How
they intensify one another! He really must get some one to give him
that little pedestalled Cupid which he saw yesterday in Wardour Street.
Thus awakes in him, quite gradually, the spirit of the collector. Or
take the case of one whose collection is not of beautiful things, but
of autobiographic symbols: take the case of the glutton. He will have
pocketed many menus before it occurs to him to arrange them in an
album. Even so, it was not until a fair number of labels had been
pasted on my hat-box that I saw them as souvenirs, and determined that
in future my hat-box should always travel with me and so commemorate my
every darling escape.
In the path of every collector are strewn obstacles of one kind or
another; which, to overleap, is part of the fun. As a collector of
labels I had my pleasant difficulties. On any much-belabelled piece of
baggage the porter always pastes the new label over that which looks
most recent; else the thing might miss its destination. Now, paste
dries before the end of the briefest journey; and one of my canons was
that, though two labels might overlap, none must efface the inscription
of another. On the other hand, I did not wish to lose my hat-box, for
this would have entailed inquiries, and descriptions, and telegraphing
up the line, and all manner of agitation. What, then, was I to do? I
might have taken my hat-box with me in the carriage? That, indeed, is
what I always did. But, unless a thing is to go in the van, it receives
no label at all. So I had to use a mild stratagem. 'Yes,' I would say,
'everything in the van!' The labels would be duly affixed. 'Oh,' I
would cry, seizing the hat-box quickly, 'I forgot. I want this with me
in the carriage.' (I learned to seize it quickly, because some porters
are such martinets that they will whisk the label off and confiscate
it.) Then, when the man was not looking, I would remove the label from
the place he had chosen for it and press it on some unoccupied part of
the surface. You cannot think how much I enjoyed these manoeuvres.
There was the moral pleasure of having both outwitted a railway company
and secured another specimen for my collection; and there was the
physical pleasure of making a limp slip of paper stick to a hard
substance--that simple pleasure which appeals to all of us and is,
perhaps, the missing explanation of philately. Pressed for time, I
could not, of course, have played my trick. Nor could I have done
so--it would have seemed heartless--if any one had come to see me off
and be agitated at parting. Therefore, I was always very careful to
arrive in good time for my train, and to insist that all farewells
should be made on my own doorstep.
Only in one case did I break the rule that no label must be obliterated
by another. It is a long story; but I propose to tell it. You must know
that I loved my labels not only for the meanings they conveyed to me,
but also, more than a little, for the effect they produced on other
people. Travelling in a compartment, with my hat-box beside me, I
enjoyed the silent interest which my labels aroused in my
fellow-passengers. If the compartment was so full that my hat-box had
to be relegated to the rack, I would always, in the course of the
journey, take it down and unlock it, and pretend to be looking for
something I had put into it. It pleased me to see from beneath my
eyelids the respectful wonder and envy evoked by it. Of course, there
was no suspicion that the labels were a carefully formed collection;
they were taken as the wild-flowers of an exquisite restlessness, of an
unrestricted range in life. Many of them signified beautiful or famous
places. There was one point at which Oxford, Newmarket, and Assisi
converged, and I was always careful to shift my hat-box round in such a
way that this purple patch should be lost on none of my
fellow-passengers. The many other labels, English or alien, they, too,
gave their hints of a life spent in fastidious freedom, hints that I
had seen and was seeing all that is best to be seen of men and cities
and country-houses. I was respected, accordingly, and envied. And I had
keen delight in this ill-gotten homage. A despicable delight, you say?
But is not yours, too, a fallen nature? The love of impressing
strangers falsely, is it not implanted in all of us? To be sure, it is
an inevitable outcome of the conditions in which we exist. It is a
result of the struggle for life. Happiness, as you know, is our aim in
life; we are all struggling to be happy. And, alas! for every one of
us, it is the things he does not possess which seem to him most
desirable, most conducive to happiness. For instance, the poor nobleman
covets wealth, because wealth would bring him comfort, whereas the
nouveau riche covets a pedigree, because a pedigree would make him of
what he is merely in. The rich nobleman who is an invalid covets
health, on the assumption that health would enable him to enjoy his
wealth and position. The rich, robust nobleman hankers after an
intellect. The rich, robust, intellectual nobleman is (be sure of it)
as discontented, somehow, as the rest of them. No man possesses all he
wants. No man is ever quite happy. But, by producing an impression that
he has what he wants--in fact, by 'bluffing'--a man can gain some of
the advantages that he would gain by really having it. Thus, the poor
nobleman can, by concealing his 'balance' and keeping up appearances,
coax more or less unlimited credit from his tradesman. The nouveau
riche, by concealing his origin and trafficking with the College of
Heralds, can intercept some of the homage paid to high birth. And
(though the rich nobleman who is an invalid can make no tangible gain
by pretending to be robust, since robustness is an advantage only from
within) the rich, robust nobleman can, by employing a clever private
secretary to write public speeches and magazine articles for him,
intercept some of the homage which is paid to intellect.
These are but a few typical cases, taken at random from a small area.
But consider the human race at large, and you will find that 'bluffing'
is indeed one of the natural functions of the human animal. Every man
pretends to have what (not having it) he covets, in order that he may
gain some of the advantages of having it. And thus it comes that he
makes his pretence, also, by force of habit, when there is nothing
tangible to be gained by it. The poor nobleman wishes to be thought
rich even by people who will not benefit him in their delusion; and the
nouveau riche likes to be thought well-born even by people who set no
store on good birth; and so forth. But pretences, whether they be an
end or a means, cannot be made successfully among our intimate friends.
These wretches know all about us--have seen through us long ago. With
them we are, accordingly, quite natural. That is why we find their
company so restful. Among acquaintances the pretence is worth making.
But those who know anything at all about us are apt to find us out.
That is why we find acquaintances such a nuisance. Among perfect
strangers, who know nothing at all about us, we start with a clean
slate. If our pretence do not come off, we have only ourselves to
blame. And so we 'bluff' these strangers, blithely, for all we are
worth, whether there be anything to gain or nothing. We all do it. Let
us despise ourselves for doing it, but not one another. By which I
mean, reader, do not be hard on me for making a show of my labels in
railway-carriages. After all, the question is whether a man 'bluff'
well or ill. If he brag vulgarly before his strangers, away with him!
by all means. He does not know how to play the game. He is a failure.
But, if he convey subtly (and, therefore, successfully) the fine
impression he wishes to convey, then you should stifle your wrath, and
try to pick up a few hints. When I saw my fellow-passengers eyeing my
hat-box, I did not, of course, say aloud to them, 'Yes, mine is a
delightful life! Any amount of money, any amount of leisure! And,
what's more, I know how to make the best use of them both!' Had I done
so, they would have immediately seen through me as an impostor. But I
did nothing of the sort. I let my labels proclaim distinction for me,
quietly, in their own way. And they made their proclamation with
immense success. But there came among them, in course of time, one
label that would not harmonise with them. Came, at length, one label
that did me actual discredit. I happened to have had influenza, and my
doctor had ordered me to make my convalescence in a place which,
according to him, was better than any other for my particular
condition. He had ordered me to Ramsgate, and to Ramsgate I had gone. A
label on my hat-box duly testified to my obedience. At the time, I had
thought nothing of it. But, in subsequent journeys, I noticed that my
hat-box did not make its old effect, somehow. My fellow-passengers
looked at it, were interested in it; but I had a subtle sense that they
were not reverencing me as of yore. Something was the matter. I was not
long in tracing what it was. The discord struck by Ramsgate was the
more disastrous because, in my heedlessness, I had placed that ignoble
label within an inch of my point d'appui--the trinity of Oxford,
Newmarket and Assisi. What was I to do? I could not explain to my
fellow-passengers, as I have explained to you, my reason for Ramsgate.
So long as the label was there, I had to rest under the hideous
suspicion of having gone there for pleasure, gone of my own free will.
I did rest under it during the next two or three journeys. But the
injustice of my position maddened me. At length, a too obvious sneer on
the face of a fellow-passenger steeled me to a resolve that I would,
for once, break my rule against obliteration. On the return journey, I
obliterated Ramsgate with the new label, leaving visible merely the
final TE, which could hardly compromise me.
Steterunt those two letters because I was loth to destroy what was,
primarily, a symbol for myself: I wished to remember Ramsgate, even
though I had to keep it secret. Only in a secondary, accidental way was
my collection meant for the public eye. Else, I should not have
hesitated to deck the hat-box with procured symbols of Seville, Simla,
St. Petersburg and other places which I had not (and would have liked
to be supposed to have) visited. But my collection was, first of all, a
private autobiography, a record of my scores of Fate; and thus
positively to falsify it would have been for me as impossible as
cheating at 'Patience.' From that to which I would not add I hated to
subtract anything--even Ramsgate. After all, Ramsgate was not London;
to have been in it was a kind of score. Besides, it had restored me to
health. I had no right to rase it utterly.
But such tendresse was not my sole reason for sparing those two
letters. Already I was reaching that stage where the collector loves
his specimens not for their single sakes, but as units in the
sum-total. To every collector comes, at last, a time when he does but
value his collection--how shall I say?--collectively. He who goes in
for beautiful things begins, at last, to value his every acquisition
not for its beauty, but because it enhances the worth of the rest.
Likewise, he who goes in for autobiographic symbols begins, at last, to
care not for the symbolism of another event in his life, but for the
addition to the objects already there. He begins to value every event
less for its own sake than because it swells his collection. Thus there
came for me a time when I looked forward to a journey less because it
meant movement and change for myself than because it meant another
label for my hat-box. A strange state to fall into? Yes, collecting is
a mania, a form of madness. And it is the most pleasant form of madness
in the whole world. It can bring us nearer to real happiness than can
any form of sanity. The normal, eclectic man is never happy, because he
is always craving something of another kind than what he has got. The
collector, in his mad concentration, wants only more and more of what
he has got already; and what he has got already he cherishes with a
passionate joy. I cherished my gallimaufry of rainbow-coloured labels
almost as passionately as the miser his hoard of gold. Why do we call
the collector of current coin a miser? Wretched? He? True, he denies
himself all the reputed pleasures of life; but does he not do so of his
own accord, gladly? He sacrifices everything to his mania; but that
merely proves how intense his mania is. In that the nature of his
collection cuts him off from all else, he is the perfect type of the
collector. He is above all other collectors. And he is the truly
happiest of them all. It is only when, by some merciless stroke of
Fate, he is robbed of his hoard, that he becomes wretched. Then,
certainly, he suffers. He suffers proportionately to his joy. He is
smitten with sorrow more awful than any sorrow to be conceived by the
sane. I whose rainbow-coloured hoard has been swept from me, seem to
taste the full savour of his anguish.
I sit here thinking of the misers who, in life or in fiction, have been
despoiled. Three only do I remember: Melanippus of Sicyon, Pierre
Baudouin of Limoux, Silas Marner. Melanippus died of a broken heart.
Pierre Baudouin hanged himself. The case of Silas Marner is more
cheerful. He, coming into his cottage one night, saw by the dim light
of the hearth, that which seemed to be his gold restored, but was
really nothing but the golden curls of a little child, whom he was
destined to rear under his own roof, finding in her more than solace
for his bereavement. But then, he was a character in fiction: the other
two really existed. What happened to him will not happen to me. Even if
little children with rainbow-coloured hair were so common that one of
them might possibly be left on my hearth-rug, I know well that I should
not feel recompensed by it, even if it grew up to be as fascinating a
paragon as Eppie herself. Had Silas Marner really existed (nay! even
had George Eliot created him in her maturity) neither would he have
felt recompensed. Far likelier, he would have been turned to stone, in
the first instance, as was poor Niobe when the divine arrows destroyed
that unique collection on which she had lavished so many years. Or, may
be, had he been a very strong man, he would have found a bitter joy in
saving up for a new hoard. Like Carlyle, when the MS. of his
masterpiece was burned by the housemaid of John Stuart Mill, he might
have begun all over again, and builded a still nobler monument on the
tragic ashes.
That is a fine, heartening example! I will be strong enough to follow
it. I will forget all else. I will begin all over again. There stands
my hat-box! Its glory is departed, but I vow that a greater glory
awaits it. Bleak, bare and prosaic it is now, but--ten years hence! Its
career, like that of the Imperial statesman in the moment of his
downfall, 'is only just beginning.'
There is a true Anglo-Saxon ring in this conclusion. May it appease
whomever my tears have been making angry.