wilderness. And one day, perhaps—suddenly, it may be, as that vision of the great white mountains of the Oberland breaks upon the sight of the traveller—we shall see whither the long adventure leads. "Say not the struggle naught availeth," said a poet who was not given to cultivating illusions. And he went on:—

    For while the tired waves, vainly breaking.
      Seem here no painful inch to gain,
    Far back, through creeks and inlets making.
      Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

But though I want to see a vision as much as anybody, I am out of touch with the company of the credulous. I am with Doubting Thomas. I have no capacity for believing the impossible, and have an entire distrust of dark rooms and magic. People with bees in their bonnets leave me wondering, but cold. I know a man—a most excellent man—whose life is a perfect debauch of visions and revelations. He seems to discover the philosopher's stone every other day. Sometimes it is brown bread that is the way to salvation. If you eat brown bread you will never die, or at any rate you will live until everybody is tired of you. Sometimes it is a new tax or a new sort of bath that is the secret key to the whole contraption. For one period he could talk of nothing but dried milk; for another, acetic acid was the thing. Rub yourself with acetic acid and you would be as invulnerable to the ills of the body as Achilles was after he had been dipped by Thetis in the waters of Styx. The stars tell him anything he wishes to believe, and he can conjure up spirits as easily as another man can order a cab. It is not that he is a fool. In practical affairs he is astonishingly astute. It is that he has an illimitable capacity for belief. He is always on the road to Damascus.

For my part I am content to wait. I am for Wordsworth's creed of "wise passiveness." I should as soon think of reading my destiny on the sole of my boot as in the palm of my hand. The one would be just as illuminating as the other. It would tell me what I chose to make it tell me. That and no more. And so with the stars. People who pretend to read the riddle of our affairs in the pageant of the stars are deceiving themselves or are trying to deceive others. They are giving their own little fancies the sanction of the universe. The butterfly that I see flitting about in the sunshine outside might as well read the European war as a comment on its aimless little life. The stars do not chatter about us, but they have a balm for us if we will be silent. The "huge and thoughtful night" speaks a language simple, august, universal.

It is one of the smaller consolations of the war that it has given us in London a chance of hearing that language. The lamps of the street are blotted out, and the lamps above are visible. Five nights of the week all the year round I take the last bus that goes northward from the City, and from the back seat on the top I watch the great procession of the stars. It is the most astonishing spectacle offered to men. Emerson said that if we only saw it once in a hundred years we should spend years in preparing for the vision. It is hung out for us every night, and we hardly give it a glance. And yet it is well worth glancing at. It is the best corrective for this agitated little mad-house in which we dwell and quarrel and fight and die. It gives us a new scale of measurement and a new order of ideas. Even the war seems only a local affair of some ill-governed asylum in the presence of this ordered march of illimitable worlds. I do not worry about the vision; I do not badger the stars to give me their views about the war. It is enough to see and feel and be silent.

And now I hope Althea will waste no more postage stamps in sending me her desecrating gibberish.

ON BLACK SHEEP

When I was in France a few weeks ago I heard much about the relative qualities of different classes of men as soldiers. And one of the most frequent themes was the excellence of the "black sheep." It was not merely that he was brave. That one might expect. It was not even that he was unselfish. That also did not arouse surprise. The pride in him, I found, was chiefly due to the fact that he was so good a soldier in the sense of discipline, enthusiasm, keenness, even intelligence. It is, I believe, a well-ascertained fact that an unusually high proportion of reformatory boys and other socially doubtful men have won rewards for exceptional deeds, and every one knows the case of the man with twenty-seven convictions against him who won the V.C. for one of the bravest acts of the war.

It must not be assumed from this that to be a successful soldier you must be a social failure. On the contrary, nothing has been so conclusively proved by this war as the widespread prevalence of the soldierly instinct. Heroes have sprung up from all ranks and all callings—from drapers' shops and furniture vans, from stools in the city and looms in Lancashire, from Durham pits and bishops' palaces. Whatever else the war has done, it has knocked on the head the idea that the cult of militarism is necessary to preserve the soul of courage and chivalry in a people. We, with a wholly civic tradition, have shown that in the hour of need we can draw upon an infinite reservoir of heroism, as splendid as anything in the annals of the human race.

But the case of the black sheep has a special significance for us. The war has discovered the good that is in him, and has released it for useful service. After all, the black sheep is often only black by the accident of circumstance, upbringing, or association. He is a misfit. In him, as in all of us, there is an infinite complexity—good and ill together. No one who has faithfully examined his own life can doubt how trifling a weight turns the scales for or against us. An accidental meeting, a casual friendship, a phrase in a book—and the current of life takes a definite direction this way or that. There are no doubt people in whom the elements are so perfectly adjusted that the balance is never in doubt. Their character is superior to circumstance. But they are rare. They are the stars that dwell apart from our human struggles. Most of us know what it is to be on the brink of the precipice—know, if we are quite honest with ourselves, how narrow a shave we have had from joining the black sheep. Perhaps, if we are still honest with ourselves, we shall admit that the thing that turned the balance for us was not a very creditable thing—that we were protected from ourselves not by any high virtue, but by something mean, a touch of cowardice, a paltry ambition, a consideration that we should be ashamed to confess.

We are so strangely compact that we do not ourselves know what the ordeal will discover in us. You have no doubt read that incident of the sergeant who, in a moment of panic, fled, was placed under arrest and sentenced to be shot. Before the sentence was ratified by the Commander-in-Chief, there came a moment of extreme peril to the line, when irretrievable disaster was imminent and every man who could fill a gap was needed. The condemned man was called out to face the enemy, and, even in the midst of brave men, fought with a bravery that singled him out for the Victoria Cross. Tell me—which was the true man? I saw the other day a letter from a famous doctor dealing with the question of the psychology of war. He was against shooting a man for cowardice, because cowardice was not necessarily a quality of character. It was often a temporary collapse due to physical fatigue, or a passing condition of mind. "Five times," he said, "I have been at work in circumstances in which my life was in imminent peril. On four occasions I worked with a curious sense of exaltation. On the fifth occasion I was seized with a sudden and unreasoning panic that paralysed me. Perhaps it was a failure of digestion,