flashing answering glances to catch the lasses' eyes; an endless conversation going on without voices whispering a word; they look at each other and laugh, and the incipient mystery of the thing slips into their blood.

I was once reluctant to relinquish youth. Its passions and pleasure made my life intensely joyous in a clean, healthy way. I resented the horrid fact that with encroaching years I was no longer able to wake the old thrill of existence by any of the old methods. The call came to me, but nature responded not to its alluring voice. The spent fires could not be rekindled; and in a tragic moment the truth stood uncovered in its stark nakedness: "I am growing old!" I had to readjust my bearings in life to meet the new situation. I found it better to walk in step with the years and melt into middle life with all the gentle conciliations of an easy mind than to clutch at the hem of the garment of departing youth and hold on frantically to a corpse; and so it came to pass youth, with its frank, jovial, devil-may-care lightheartedness, was surrendered ground, and I put on a splendid face, taking up a new position in the rear as an old fogy, a little moss-grown, but still alive, healthy, happy, and hearty.

II

THE LURE OF HAPPINESS

The joy of living is to grasp life in its fullness just as it comes to us clean and sweet from the hand of God; to eat the grapes that grow in our own vineyard; to feed on the honey captured from our own hives; and to bask in the sunshine blessing our own garden plot. Some people cannot do this. They were born sour and fail to ripen. They remind me of the Church of St. Lorenzo at Florence, built but never finished, and showing a dejected mien to the passer-by. They hold on to life timidly with cold and clammy hands, and smile with glum visage and call it all vanity and vexation of spirit. Happiness frets them like a lump of undigested pickle lying heavy on their chest; they want to throw it off and be at ease in their misery. They consider it wickedness to enjoy things--to wallow in sunshine. They say we ought to content ourselves with bare commodities needful for existence. The primitive man was happy. He had no shirt to wash, no taxes to pay, no barns to fill with plenty. We must be primitive to be happy. Deplete the wealthy of their wealth; sink society to a common ground-level (allow us boots to wear in this muddy climate, if you please), and then everyone will be healthy, happy, and poor. Stepping out of his well-appointed motor-car, the up-to-date man spurns the primitive craze and blazes forth, "Is thy servant a dog that he should house in a kennel?" Surely civilization means creature comfort; everyone wants something larger than bare necessities to embellish life. The Creator rears us on finer lines than He raises cattle on the marshes. Year by year He lavishes before our eyes Nature's prodigal store of ornament. Every yard of hedgerow, "those liberal homes of unmarketable beauty," contradict the crank who would confine us to the needful.

The dusty utilitarian sees the world only as a crowded granary, a chattering marketplace in which to buy and sell and get gain. The Divine Artist enriches the picture by painting in exquisitely the flowering hawthorn and fragrant violets, and by tuning the throat of the skylark to rarest melody; and concurrently He attunes the soul of man, which thrills appreciation, and delights in these manifestations of Sovereign goodness. He not merely appeases the hunger of the human body, but feeds the rarer appetites of the human mind with radiant viands; and the more godlike in stature man grows, the more fully he appreciates God-given art and beauty flung like flowers across his pathway.

Everybody is happy in his own order. The history of many a man's life is the story of a soul's wandering in search of happiness. Some people are happy in their misery. Even when nursing their spleen they do it comfortably. They dilate on their grief with real zest of morbid enthusiasm that it flings a blazing cheerfulness over their cold grey lives. It sets them purring with sweet content when an auditor listens to their woeful outpourings. This is the cheapest form of happiness, and reflects an impoverished mind thrown back upon itself.

Hazlitt, the essayist, gently prods these crazy egoists with a sharp pen and says, "Pure pleasures are in their judgment cloying and insipid; an ounce of sour is worth a pound of sweet." Farquhar, the lively dramatist, mocks their folly when portraying the gushing Lady Constance, who, on finding the miniature of her absent lover lying on the floor, picks it up and exclaims: "Now I am fitted out for sorrow. With this I'll sigh, with this converse, gaze on his image till I grow blind with weeping. It is the only thing could give me joy, because it will increase my grief."

Happiness is a gift of temperament. The occupation that makes one man happy the day long would be capital punishment to another man. I have known people to possess everything and enjoy nothing; others, who possess little, dwell in paradise. It is a braver thing to extract honey from the hive of life than to leave it rotting in the comb. Alas! these weak-kneed, nervous mortals who are afraid of being too happy: they tremble as they sit at the banquet. They toy with a lean and hungry fate and dare not clasp a full-bosomed blessing. They prefer misery as a diet, with a spice of religion thrown in to flavour it. They fancy self-inflicted misery is a virtue to be cultivated, and a grace to be counted for righteousness. We shrewdly detect in such conduct a pose. It lacks the grace of sincerity. Such people, overfed on misery, fatten on it incontinently. It is the diet of a low, melancholy temperament.

There is no standard-pattern happiness planned to suit the temperament of everybody like the map of a city which all travellers follow to find their bearings. Happiness is a city that each person maps out for himself; its highways and byways are of his own engineering and grow to match his own requirements. Happiness is not a sloppy garment like a ready-made coat that you buy in a store. Happiness must be made to fit. In fact, every man makes his own happiness.

We all distil pleasure out of life in our peculiar way. Only our ways differ as the poles asunder. One man cannot understand where the other man's relish for life comes in. What is nauseous as bitter herbs in one mouth tastes delicate as the wines of Orvieto on another palate. A famous American millionaire found greater satisfaction in the simple pleasure of attending funerals than in all the superb luxuries which his millions brought him. We do not envy his simple pleasure. It was an innocent method of enjoyment peculiarly his own.

I knew a man who made an income of over £10,000 a year by hard work, and his pleasure was immense in doing it. One half of his relaxation in life was making more income, and the other half his amusement consisted in lecturing people on the evil of extravagance if they spent "tuppence" on a bus fare instead of walking three-pennyworth of leather off the soles of their boots. He never spent "tuppence" himself if he could save it. He drove life at high pressure, and enjoyed the sensations of a quick run. People called him a money-making machine devoid of fine feeling. People made a mistake. His nature was highly strung. He was keenly sensitive to pleasure--the pleasure of money-making. It was the poetry, the luxury, the fine art of life all rolled into one, and it quickened the gay emotions within him that seeing a good play,