music in the spinet.
  I cannot sail your seas, I cannot wander
    Your cornfield, nor your hill-land, nor your valleys
  Ever again, nor share the battle yonder
    Where the young knight the broken squadron rallies.
  Only stay quiet while my mind remembers
    The beauty of fire from the beauty of embers."

And so I hope that a few of the embers in this little book will help to warm some unknown human heart.

And that is all I ask!

CONTENTS

  Books and the Blind
  The Blind Man's Problem
  Dreams
  How to Help
  On Getting Away from Yourself
  Travel
  Work
  Farewells!
  The "Butters"
  Age that Dyes
  Women in Love
  Pompous Pride in Literary "Lions"
  Seaside Piers
  Visitors
  The Unimpassioned English
  Relations
  Polite Conversation
  Awful Warnings
  It's oh, to be out of England—now that Spring is here
  Bad-tempered People
  Polite Masks
  The Might-have-been
  Autumn Sowing
  What You Really Reap
  Autumn Determination
  Two Lives
  Backward and Forward
  When?
  The Futile Thought
  The London Season
  Christmas
  The New Year
  February
  Tub-thumpers
  I Wonder If . . .
  Types of Tub-thumpers
  If Age only Practised what it Preached!
  Beginnings
  Unlucky in Little Things
  Wallpapers
  Our Irritating Habits
  Away—Far Away!
  "Family Skeletons"
  The Dreariness of One Line of Conduct
  The Happy Discontent
  Book-borrowing Nearly Always Means Book-stealing
  Other People's Books
  The Road to Calvary
  Mountain Paths
  The Unholy Fear
  The Need to Remember
  Humanity
  Responsibility
  The Government of the Future
  The Question
  The Two Passions
  Our "Secret Escapes"
  My Escape and Some Others
  Over the Fireside
  Faith Reached through Bitterness and Loss
  Aristocracy and Democracy
  Duty
  Sweeping Assertions from Particular Instances
  How I came to make "History"
  The Glut of the Ornamental
  On Going "to the Dogs"
  A School for Wives
  The Neglected Art of Eating Gracefully
  Modern Clothes
  A Sense of Universal Pity
  The Few
  The Great and the Really Great
  Love "Mush"
  Wives
  Children
  One of the Minor Tragedies
  The "Glorious Dead"
  Always the Personal Note
  Clergymen
  Their Failure
  Work In the East-end
  Mysticism and the Practical Man
  Abraham Lincoln
  Reconstruction
  Education
  The Inane and Unimaginative
  Great Adventure
  Travel
  The Enthralling Out-of-Reach
  The Things which are not Dreamed of in Our Philosophy
  Faith
  Spiritualism
  On Reality in People
  Life
  Dreams and Reality
  Love of God
  The Will to Faith

OVER THE FIRESIDE

Books and the Blind

Strange as the confession may appear coming from one who, week in, week out, writes about books, I am not a great book-lover! I infinitely prefer to watch and think, think and watch, and listen. All the same, I would not be without books for anything in this world. They are a means of getting away, of forgetting, of losing oneself, the past, the present, and the future, in the story, in the lives, and in the thoughts of other men and women, in the thrill and excitement of extraneous people and things. One of the delights of winter—and in this country winter is of such interminable length and dreariness that we hug any delight which belongs to it alone as fervently as we hug love to our bosoms when we have reached the winter of our lives!—is to snuggle down into a comfy easy-chair before a big fire and, book in hand, travel hither and thither as the author wills—hate, love, despair, or mock as the author inveigles or moves us. I don't think that most of us pay half enough respectful attention to books seeing how greatly we depend upon them for some of the quietest pleasures of our lives. But that is the way of human nature, isn't it? We rarely value anything until we lose it; we sigh most ardently for the thing which is beyond our reach, we count our happiest days those across the record of which we now must scrawl, "Too late!" That is why I always feel so infinitely sorry for the blind. The blind can so rarely get away from themselves, and, when they do, only with that effort which in you and me would demand some bigger result than merely to lose remembrance of our minor worries. When we are in trouble, when we are in pain, when our heart weeps silently and alone, its sorrow unsuspected by even our nearest and dearest, we, I say, can ofttimes deaden the sad ache of the everyday by going out into the world, seeking change of scene, change of environment, something to divert, for the nonce, the unhappy tenor of our lives. But the blind, alas! can do none of these things. Wherever they go, to whatever change of scene they flee for variety, the same haunting darkness follows them unendingly.

The Blind Man's Problem

It is so difficult for them to get away from themselves, to seek that change and novelty which, in our hours of dread and suspense, are our most urgent need. All the time, day in, day out, their perpetual darkness thrusts them back upon themselves. They cannot get away from it. Nothing—or perhaps, so very, very few things—can take them out of themselves, allow them to lose their own unhappiness in living their lives for something, someone outside themselves. Their own needs, their own loss, their own loneliness, are perpetually with them. So their emotions go round and round in a vicious circle, from which there is no possible escape. Never, never can they give. They have so little to offer but love and gratitude. But, although gratitude is so beautiful and so rare, it is not an emotion that we yearn to feel always and always. We want to give, to be thanked ourselves, to cheer, to succour, to do some little good ourselves while yet we may. There is a joy in giving generously, just as there is in receiving generously. Yet, there are many moments in each man's life when no gift can numb the dull ache of the inevitable, when nothing, except getting away—somewhere, somehow, and immediately—can stifle the unspoken pain which comes to all of us and which in not every instance can we so easily cast off. Some men travel; some men go out into the world to lose their own trouble in administering to the trouble of other people; some find forgetfulness in work—hard, strenuous labour; most of us—especially when our trouble be not overwhelming—find solace in art, or music, and especially in books. For books take one suddenly into another world, among other men and women; and sometimes in the problem of their lives we may find a solution of our own trials, and be helped, encouraged, restarted on our way by them. I thought of these things the other day when I was asked to visit the National Library for the Blind in Tufton Street, Westminster. It is hidden away in a side street, but the good work it does is spread all over the world. And, as I wandered round this large building and examined the thousands of books—classic as well as quite recent works—I thought to myself, "How the blind must