to have a clear and civilised sentence, telling him when he will come out.  And these are literally and exactly the things that he now cannot get.  That is the almost cloying humour of the present situation.  I can say abnormal things in modern magazines.  It is the normal things that I am not allowed to say.  I can write in some solemn quarterly an elaborate article explaining that God is the devil; I can write in some cultured weekly an aesthetic fancy describing how I should like to eat boiled baby.  The thing I must not write is rational criticism of the men and institutions of my country.

The present condition of England is briefly this:  That no Englishman can say in public a twentieth part of what he says in private.  One cannot say, for instance, that—­But I am afraid I must leave out that instance, because one cannot say it.  I cannot prove my case—­because it is so true.

THE HYPOTHETICAL HOUSEHOLDER

We have read of some celebrated philosopher who was so absent-minded that he paid a call at his own house.  My own absent-mindedness is extreme, and my philosophy, of course, is the marvel of men and angels.  But I never quite managed to be so absent-minded as that.  Some yards at least from my own door, something vaguely familiar has always caught my eye; and thus the joke has been spoiled.  Of course I have quite constantly walked into another man’s house, thinking it was my own house; my visits became almost monotonous.  But walking into my own house and thinking it was another man’s house is a flight of poetic detachment still beyond me.  Something of the sensations that such an absent-minded man must feel I really felt the other day; and very pleasant sensations they were.  The best parts of every proper romance are the first chapter and the last chapter; and to knock at a strange door and find a nice wife would be to concentrate the beginning and end of all romance.

Mine was a milder and slighter experience, but its thrill was of the same kind.  For I strolled through a place I had imagined quite virgin and unvisited (as far as I was concerned), and I suddenly found I was treading in my own footprints, and the footprints were nearly twenty years old.

It was one of those stretches of country which always suggests an almost unnatural decay; thickets and heaths that have grown out of what were once great gardens.  Garden flowers still grow there as wild flowers, as it says in some good poetic couplet which I forget; and there is something singularly romantic and disastrous about seeing things that were so long a human property and care fighting for their own hand in the thicket.  One almost expects to find a decayed dog-kennel; with the dog evolved into a wolf.