In these circumstances I refuse to be depressed.  I console myself with the thought that if 25th June is the beginning of winter, at least there is a next summer to which I may look forward.  Next summer anything may happen.  I suppose a scientist would be considerably surprised if the sun refused to get up one morning, or, having got up, declined to go to bed again.  It would not surprise me.  The amazing thing is that Nature goes on doing the same things in the same way year after year; any sudden little irrelevance on her part would be quite understandable.  When the wise men tell us so confidently that there will be an eclipse of the sun in 1921, invisible at Greenwich, do they have no qualms of doubt as the day draws near?  Do they glance up from their whitebait at the appointed hour, just in case it is visible after all?  Or if they have journeyed to Pernambuco, or wherever the best view is to be obtained, do they wonder ... perhaps ... and tell each other the night before that, of course, they were coming to Pernambuco anyhow, to see an aunt?

Perhaps they don’t.  But for myself I am not so certain, and I have hopes that, certainly next year, possibly even this year, the days will go on lengthening after midsummer is over.

At the Bookstall

I have often longed to be a grocer.  To be surrounded by so many interesting things—­ sardines, bottled raspberries, biscuits with sugar on the top, preserved ginger, hams, brawn under glass, everything in fact that makes life worth living; at one moment to walk up a ladder in search of nutmeg, at the next to dive under a counter in pursuit of cinnamon; to serve little girls with a ha’porth of pear drops and lordly people like you and me with a pint of cherry gin —­is not this to follow the king of trades?  Some day I shall open a grocer’s shop, and you will find me in my spare evenings aproned behind the counter.  Look out for the currants in the window as you come in—­I have an idea for something artistic in the way of patterns there; but, as you love me, do not offer to buy any.  We grocers only put the currants out for show, and so that we may run our fingers through them luxuriously when business is slack.  I have a good line in shortbreads, madam, if I can find the box, but no currants this evening, I beg you.

Yes, to be a grocer is to live well; but, after all, it is not to see life.  A grocer, in as far as it is possible to a man who sells both scented soap and pilchards, would become narrow.  We do not come into contact with the outside world much, save through the medium of potted lobster, and to sell a man potted lobster is not to have our fingers on his pulse.  Potted lobster does not define a man.  All customers are alike to the grocer, provided their money is good.  I perceive now that I was over-hasty in deciding to become a grocer.  That is rather for one’s old age.  While one is young, and interested in persons rather than in things, there is only one profession to follow—­the profession of bookstall clerk.