Moments there are, it is true, when this traitor spirit tricks you:  when some subtle scent, some broken notes of an old song, nay, even some touch of a fresher air on your cheeks at night —­ a breath of ``le vent qui vient à travers la montagne’’ —­ have power to ravish, to catch you back to the blissful days when you trod the one authentic Paradise.  Moments only, alas!  Then the evil crowd rushes in again, howls in the sacred grove, tramples down and defiles the happy garden; and once more you cry to Our Lady of Sleep, crowned of the white poppy.  And you envy your dog who, for full discharge of a present benefaction having wagged you a hearty, expressive tail, will then pursue it gently round the hearth-rug till, in restful coil, he reaches it at last, and oblivion with it; every one of his half-dozen diurnal sleeps being in truth a royal amnesty.

But whose the hand that shall reach us the herb of healing?  Perdita blesses every guest at the shearing with a handful of blossom; but this gift is not to be asked of her whose best wish to her friends is ``grace and remembrance.’’ The fair Ophelia, rather:  nay, for as a nursling she hugs her grief, and for her the memory of the past is a ``sorrow’s crown of sorrow.’’ What flowers are these her pale hand offers? ``There’s pansies, that’s for thoughts!’’ For me rather, O dear Ophelia, the white poppy of forgetfulness.

A Bohemian in Exile

A Reminiscence

When, many years ago now, the once potent and extensive kingdom of Bohemia gradually dissolved and passed away, not a few historians were found to chronicle its past glories; and some have gone on to tell the fate of this or that once powerful chieftain who either donned the swallow-tail and conformed or, proudly self-exiled, sought some quiet retreat and died as he had lived, a Bohemian.  But these were of the princes of the land.  To the people, the villeins, the common rank and file, does no interest attach?  Did they waste and pine, anæmic, in thin, strange, unwonted air?  Or sit at the table of the scornful and learn, with Dante, how salt was alien bread?  It is of one of those faithful commons I would speak, narrating only ``the short and simple annals of the poor.’’

It is to be noted that the kingdom aforesaid was not so much a kingdom as a United States —­ a collection of self-ruling guilds, municipalities, or republics, bound together by a common method of viewing life. ``There once was a king of Bohemia’’ —­ but that was a long time ago, and even Corporal Trim was not certain in whose reign it was.  These small free States, then, broke up gradually, from various causes and with varying speed; and I think ours was one of the last to go.

With us, as with many others, it was a case of lost leaders. ``Just for a handful of silver he left us’’; though it was not exactly that, but rather that, having got the handful of silver, they wanted a wider horizon to fling it about under than Bloomsbury afforded.