The essay I set to-day was this:—"Imagine that you are an old lady who ordered a duck from Gamage\'s, and imagine that they sent you an aeroplane in a crate by mistake. Then describe in the first person the feelings of the aviator who found the duck awaiting him at breakfast time."

One girl wrote:—"Dear Mr. Gamage, I have not opened the basket, but it seems to be an ostrich that you have sent. What will I feed it on?"

A boy, as the aviator, wrote: "If you think I am going to risk my life on the machine you sent you are wrong. It hasn\'t got a petrol tank."

The theme was too difficult for the bairns; they could not see the ludicrous side. I don\'t think one of them visualised the poor old woman gazing in dismay on the workmen unloading the crate. H. M. Bateman would[Pg 205] have made an excellent drawing of the incident.

I tried another theme.

"A few days ago I gave you a ha\'penny each," I said. "Write a description of how you spent it, and I\'ll give sixpence to the one who tells the biggest lie."

I got some tall yarns. One chap bought an aeroplane and torpedoed a Zeppelin with it; one girl bought a thousand motor-cars. But Jack Hood, the dunce of the class, wrote these words: "I took it to the church on Sunday and put it in the clecshun bag."

I gave him the tanner, although I knew that he had won it by accident. I don\'t think that Jack will ever get so great a surprise again in this life.

*         *         *

We rambled out to sketch this afternoon. It was very hot, and we lay down under a tree and slept for half-an-hour. Suddenly Violet Brown started up.

"Here\'s Antonio!" she cried, and the Italian drew his van to the side of the road.

"A slider for each of us," I said, and he began to hustle. My turn came last.

[Pg 206]

"You like a glass, zir, instead of a zlider?" said Antonio.

"Yes," I replied, "a jolly good suggestion; I haven\'t had the joy of licking an ice-cream glass dry for many a long day."

It was glorious.

On the way back a girl bought sweets at the village shop. She gave me one.

"Please, sir, it\'s one of them changing kind," she said.

"Eh?" I hastily took it out and looked at it.

"By George, so it is, Katie!" I cried, "I thought they were dead long since." It was white at first but it changed to blue, then red, then green, then purple. Unfortunately, I bit it unthinkingly, and I never discovered its complete spectrum.

I call this a lucky day; ice cream and changing balls in one afternoon are the quintessence of luck. But man is insatiable; to-night I have a great craving for a stick of twisted sugarelly—the polite call it liquorice.

*         *         *

A couple of Revivalists came to the village a week ago, and they have made a few [Pg 207]converts. One of them stopped me on the road to-night and asked if I were saved.

"I am, or, at least, was, a journalist," I said, and walked on chuckling. Of course he gaped, for he did not know why I chuckled. I was thinking of the reporter sitting in the back seat at a Salvationist Meeting. A Salvation lass bent over him. "Are you saved, my friend?" she whispered. He looked up in alarm.

"I\'m a journalist," he said hastily.

"O! I beg your pardon," she said, and moved on.

I don\'t like Revivalism. A couple of preachers came to our village when I was a lad, and for a month I thought of nothing but hell. "Only believe!" one of them used to say when he met you on the road; the other one had a shorter salutation: "Glory!" he shouted at you fiercely. Incidentally, the village was a hotbed of petty strife when they departed. And the young women who had stood up to give their "Testimony" were back to the glad-eye phase again within three weeks.

Lizzie Jane Gunn was a typical convert. Lizzie Jane used to describe the night of her[Pg 208] testimony-giving thus:—"Mind you, Aw was gaein\' alang the road, and Aw had just been gieing ma testimony, and it was gye dark and Aw was by ma leensome. Weel, a\' at eence something fell into ma hand, and Aw thocht that it was a message frae the Loard; so Aw just grippit ma hand ticht, an\' Aw didna look to see fat it wuz. Fan Aw got hame Aw lookit to see fat wuz in ma hand, an\' d\'ye ken fat it wus?... a button aff ma jaicket!"

I have no sympathy with all this "saving" business. It\'s a cowardly selfish religion that makes people so anxious about their tuppence-ha\'penny souls. When I think of all the illiterate lay preachers I have listened to I feel like little Willie at the Sunday School.

"Hands up all those who would like to go to Heaven!" said the teacher. Willie alone did not put his hand up.

"What! Mean to tell me, Willie, that you don\'t want to go to Heaven?"

Willie jerked a contemptuous thumb towards the others.

"No bloomin\' fear," he muttered, "not if that crowd\'s goin\'."

Shelley says that "most wretched men[Pg 209] are cradled into poetry through wrong." I think that most wretched preachers are cradled into preaching through conceit. It is thrilling to have an audience hang upon your words; we all like the limelight. Usually we have to master a stiff part before we can face the audience. Preaching needs no preparation, no thinking, no merit; all you do is to stand up and say: "Deara friendsa, when I was in the jimmynasium at Peebles, a fellow lodger of mine blasphemeda. From that daya, deara friendsa, that son of the devila nevera prospereda. O, friendsa! If you could only looka into your evila heartsa...."

I note that when Revivalists come to a village the so-called village lunatic is always among the first to give his testimony. Willie Baffers has been whistling Life, Life, Eternal Life all the week, but I was glad to note that he was back to Stop yer Ticklin\', Jock, to-night.

*         *         *

I have introduced two new text-books—Secret Remedies, and More Secret Remedies. These books are published by the British[Pg 210] Medical Association at a shilling each, and they give the ingredients and cost of popular patent medicines.

These books should be in every school. Everyone should know the truth about these medicines, and unless our schools tell the truth, the public will never know it. No daily newspaper would think of giving the truth, for the average daily is kept alive by patent medicine advertisements.

I marvel at the mentality of the man who can sell a farthing\'s worth of drugs for three and sixpence. I don\'t blame the man; I merely marvel at him. What is his standard of truth? What does he imagine the purpose of life to be?

Poor fellow! I fancy he is a man born with a silver knife in his mouth, as Chesterton says in another context; either that, or he is born poor in worldly goods and in spirit. He is dumped down in an out-of-joint world where money and power are honoured, where honesty is never the best policy; the poor, miserable little grub realises that he has not the ability to earn money or power honestly; but he knows that people are fools, and that a knave always gets the better of a fool.

[Pg 211]

Our laws are really funny. I can swindle thousands by selling a nostrum, but if I sign Andrew Carnegie\'s name on a cheque I am sent to Peterhead Prison. Britain is individualistic to the backbone. The individual must be protected, but the crowd can look after itself. If I steal a pair of boots and run for it, I am a base thief; if I turn bookie and become a welsher I have entered the higher realms of sport, and I get a certain amount of admiration ... from those who didn\'t plunge at my corner. I have seen a cheap-jack swindle a crowd of Forfarshire ploughmen out of a month\'s earnings, but not one of them thought of dusting the street with him.

Honesty must be a relative thing. Personally I will "swick" a railway company by travelling without a ticket on any possible occasion; yet, when a cycle agent puts a new nut on my motor-bike and charges a shilling I call him a vulgar thief. Of course he is; there is no romance in making a broken-down motor-cyclist pay through the nose, but a ten mile journey without a ticket is the only romantic experience left in a drab world.

[Pg 212]

I ............