But now behold the student coming up the street!  He is clad in shining black.  He is thin of shank as becomes a scholar.  He sags with knowledge.  He hungers after wisdom.  He comes opposite the bookshop.  It is but coquetry that his eyes seek the window of the tobacconist.  His heart, you may be sure, looks through the buttons at his back.  At last he turns.  He pauses on the curb.  Now desire has clutched him.  He jiggles his trousered shillings.  He treads the gutter.  He squints upon the rack.  He lights upon a treasure.  He plucks it forth.  He is unresolved whether to buy it or to spend the extra shilling on his dinner.  Now all you cooks together, to save your business, rattle your pans to rouse him!  If within these ancient buildings there are onions ready peeled—­quick!—­throw them in the skillet that the whiff may come beneath his nose!  Chance trembles and casts its vote—­eenie meenie—­down goes the shilling—­he has bought the book.  Tonight he will spread it beneath his candle.  Feet may beat a snare of pleasure on the pavement, glad cries may pipe across the darkness, a fiddle may scratch its invitation—­all the rumbling notes of midnight traffic will tap in vain their summons upon his window.

Any Stick Will Do To Beat A Dog

Reader, possibly on one of your country walks you have come upon a man with his back against a hedge, tormented by a fiend in the likeness of a dog.  You yourself, of course, are not a coward.  You possess that cornerstone of virtue, a love for animals.  If at your heels a dog sniffs and growls, you humor his mistake, you flick him off and proceed with unbroken serenity.  It is scarcely an interlude to your speculation on the market.  Or if you work upon a sonnet and are in the vein, your thoughts, despite the beast, run unbroken to a rhyme.  But pity this other whose heart is less stoutly wrapped!  He has gone forth on a holiday to take the country air, to thrust himself into the freer wind, to poke with his stick for such signs of Spring as may be hiding in the winter’s leaves.  Having been grinding in an office he flings himself on the great round world.  He has come out to smell the earth.  Or maybe he seeks a hilltop for a view of the fields that lie below patched in many colors, as though nature had been sewing at her garments and had mended the cloth from her bag of scraps.

On such a journey this fellow is travelling when, at a turn of the road, he hears the sound of barking.  As yet there is no dog in sight.  He pauses.  He listens.  How shall one know whether the sound comes up a wrathful gullet or whether the dog bays at him impersonally, as at the distant moon?  Or maybe he vents himself upon a stubborn cow.  Surely it is not an idle tune he practices.  He holds a victim in his mind.  There is sour venom on his churlish tooth.  Is it best to go roundabout, or forward with such a nice compound of innocence, boldness and modesty as shall satisfy the beast?  If one