I could not at the time imagine.  It was only later that I heard the trivial and mechanical reason.  He could not burn the papers in his flat, because he had no fire—­only the electric radiator.  You try, in these circumstances, to destroy five or six thousand sheets of thick paper, and see how you get on.  Jaffery had his idea, when he transferred the manuscript from Adrian’s study; on his next voyage he would take the portmanteau with him, weight it with the cannon-ball, which he used after his bath for physical exercise, and throw it overboard.  By singular ill-luck, he had started on his two voyages that year—­if a channel crossing can be termed a voyage—­at a moment’s notice.  In each case he had not had occasion to call at his chambers, and the destroying journey had yet to be made.  As for discovery of the secrets lying in unlocked receptacles, who was there to discover them?  Such friends as he had would never pry into his private concerns; and as for housemaids and waiters and porters, the whole matter to them was unintelligible.  While he was living in St. Quentin’s Mansions, he considered himself secure.  When he realised, at Havre, that he would be absent for some months, he put things into my charge.  That I bitterly regretted not having put tinder lock and key or taken steps to destroy papers and manuscripts, I need not say.  For a long time I felt the guiltiest wretch outside prison in the three kingdoms.  If I had been a wild man of the jungle like Jaffery, it would not have mattered; but I have always prided myself on being—­not the last word, for that would not be consonant with my natural modesty—­but, say, the penultimate word of our modern civilisation; and the memory of having acted like an ingenuous child of nature still burns whenever it floats across my brain.  Metaphorically, Jaffery and I sobbed with remorse on each other’s bosoms, and called ourselves all the picturesque synonyms for careless fools we could think of; but that, naturally, did not a bit of good to anybody.

The fact was accomplished.  Our dear Humpty-Dumpty had had his great fall, and not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could ever set Humpty-Dumpty up again.

Greek tragedies are all very well in their way.  They are vastly interesting in the inevitableness of their prearranged doom. Moi qui vous parle, I have read all of them; and I like them.  I have even seen some of them acted.  I have seen, for instance, the Agamemnon given by the boys of Bradfield College, in their model open-air Greek theatre, built out of a chalk-pit, and I have sat gripped from beginning to end by the tremendous drama.  I am not talking foolishly.  I know as much as the ordinary man need know about Greek tragedy.  But in spite of Aristotle (who ought to have been strangled at birth, like all other bland doctrinaires—­and of all the doctrinaires on art, there has none been so blandly egregious since the early morning long ago when the pre-historic artist who drew an elk on the