O days without guile!  If anybody had told me then that a devoted household, having a generally exaggerated idea of my talents and importance, would be put into a state of tremor and flurry by the fuss I would make because of a suspicion that somebody had touched my sacrosanct pen of authorship, I would have never deigned as much as the contemptuous smile of unbelief.  There are imaginings too unlikely for any kind of notice, too wild for indulgence itself, too absurd for a smile.  Perhaps, had that seer of the future been a friend, I should have been secretly saddened.  “Alas!” I would have thought, looking at him with an unmoved face, “the poor fellow is going mad.”

I would have been, without doubt, saddened; for in this world where the journalists read the signs of the sky, and the wind of heaven itself, blowing where it listeth, does so under the prophetical management of the Meteorological Office, but where the secret of human hearts cannot be captured either by prying or praying, it was infinitely more likely that the sanest of my friends should nurse the germ of incipient madness than that I should turn into a writer of tales.

To survey with wonder the changes of one’s own self is a fascinating pursuit for idle hours.  The field is so wide, the surprises so varied, the subject so full of unprofitable but curious hints as to the work of unseen forces, that one does not weary easily of it.  I am not speaking here of megalomaniacs who rest uneasy under the crown of their unbounded conceit—­who really never rest in this world, and when out of it go on fretting and fuming on the straitened circumstances of their last habitation, where all men must lie in obscure equality.  Neither am I thinking of those ambitious minds who, always looking forward to some aim of aggrandisement, can spare no time for a detached, impersonal glance upon themselves.

And that’s a pity.  They are unlucky.  These two kinds, together with the much larger band of the totally unimaginative, of those unfortunate beings in whose empty and unseeing gaze (as a great French writer has put it) “the whole universe vanishes into blank nothingness,” miss, perhaps, the true task of us men whose day is short on this earth, the abode of conflicting opinions.  The ethical view of the universe involves us at last in so many cruel and absurd contradictions, where the last vestiges of faith, hope, charity, and even of reason itself, seem ready to perish, that I have come to suspect that the aim of creation cannot be ethical at all.  I would fondly believe that its object is purely spectacular:  a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate, if you like, but in this view—­and in this view alone—­never for despair!  Those visions, delicious or poignant, are a moral end in themselves.  The rest is our affair—­the laughter, the tears, the tenderness, the indignation, the high tranquillity of a steeled heart, the detached curiosity of a subtle mind—­that’s