Getting up to breakfast means something different now; it means coming down to breakfast.  To come down to breakfast brings one immediately in contact with the morning.  The world flows past the window, that small and (as it seems to me) particularly select portion of the world which finds itself in our quiet street; I can see it as I drink my tea.  When I lived in a flat (days and days ago) anything might have happened to London, and I should never have known it until the afternoon.  Everybody else could have perished in the night, and I should settle down as complacently as ever to my essay on making the world safe for democracy.  Not so now.  As soon as I have reached the bottom of my delightful staircase I am one with the outside world.

Also one with the weather, which is rather convenient.  On the third floor it is almost impossible to know what sort of weather they are having in London.  A day which looks cold from a third-floor window may be very sultry down below, but by that time one is committed to an overcoat.  How much better to live in a house, and to step from one’s front door and inhale a sample of whatever day the gods have sent.  Then one can step back again and dress accordingly.

But the best of a house is that it has an outside personality as well as an inside one.  Nobody, not even himself, could admire a man’s flat from the street; nobody could look up and say, “What very delightful people must live behind those third-floor windows.”  Here it is different.  Any of you may find himself some day in our quiet street, and stop a moment to look at our house; at the blue door with its jolly knocker, at the little trees in their blue tubs standing within a ring of blue posts linked by chains, at the bright-coloured curtains.  You may not like it, but we shall be watching you from one of the windows, and telling each other that you do.  In any case, we have the pleasure of looking at it ourselves, and feeling that we are contributing something to London, whether for better or for worse.  We are part of a street now, and can take pride in that street.  Before, we were only part of a big unmanageable building.  It is a solemn thought that I have got this house for (apparently) eighty-seven years.  One never knows, and it may be that by the end of that time I shall be meditating an article on the advantages of living in a flat.  A flat, I shall say, is so convenient.

The Ideal Author

Samuel Butler made a habit (and urged it upon every young writer) of carrying a notebook about with him.  The most profitable ideas, he felt, do not come from much seeking, but rise unbidden in the mind, and if they are not put down at once on paper, they may be lost for ever.  But with a notebook in the pocket you are safe; no thought is too fleeting to escape you.  Thus, if an inspiration for a five-thousand word story comes suddenly to you during the dessert,