interest is pleasant.  Who does not like looking over prospectuses of lectures and classes at the beginning of the winter session?  “I should like to go to that course on Greek Art.  Oh, it is on Mondays, then that is no good.  German, elementary and conversation.  How useful that would be!  Gymnasium and physical culture; how I wish I had another evening in the week to spare!”

Railway books, again, and guides and travel bills—­how delightful they are!  It is easy to plan out tours for one’s holidays up to the age of 100.  “Brittany; oh yes, I must go there one day.  And Norway, that must really be my next trip.”  The Rockies, the cities of the East, coral islands of the Pacific—­they all seem to enrich our lives by the very thought of their possibilities.

 Again, who does not love a library catalogue?  To go through with a
 pencil, noting down the names of books one wants to read is a form of
 castle-building by no means to be despised.

Some people get the same pleasure out of house-hunting; they see an empty house and go and get the key in order to see over it.  The chances of their ever living there are practically none, but the view gives a stimulus to their inventive activity:  they plan out how they would furnish the rooms and fill the empty hearths with dreams.

Is not the same thing the explanation of shop-gazing?  The woman who has bought her winter coat and hat does not as a rule refrain from looking any more into shop windows till the spring; instead, she clothes herself in imagination in all the beautiful stuffs she sees displayed, and if some of the things demand ballroom, racecourse, golf links or perhaps the Alps for the background, why, so much the better, the suggestion puts, as it were, a view from the windows of her castle in the air.

A garden—­a dozen square yards or reckoned in acres—­is full of material for our imagination; indeed, a seedsman’s catalogue or a copy of “Amateur Gardening” will often be enough to start us; long lines of greenhouses will build themselves for us, or rockeries, or wild glens with streams in them, and the world will blossom round about us.

Sometimes it is ambition that calls us, personal or professional; we get beforehand the sweet taste of power upon the tongue.  It may perhaps be sometimes the rewards of work, riches and honour and so on, but more often, I think, the dreams of youth circle round the work itself.  We will be of use in the world, we will find new paths and make them safe for those coming after us to walk in, we will get rid of that evil and set up a ladder towards that good; we will heal, teach, feed, amuse, uplift or cherish the other human beings round about us.  We will store only for the sake of distributing; we will climb only to be better able to give a helping hand.

Well, there are some danger signals at