sinful Fray God my mind run mind run not too much upon it.".

Is it; then, mere change of work that makes the best holiday? Scarcely. The master cotton-spinner would not find it sport to spend his August in ruling a dye-works. There is no rush of Civil Service clerks for a month's diversion, each year, among the ledgers of joint-stock banks in the City. A doubtful legend, as we all know, reports that if ever one of the old London drivers of horsed 'buses had a holiday—and even this is uncertain— he spent it in driving his wife and himself out into the country in a small trap. Suppose it was true. Yet even

then, mark you, a small trap of the period had only one horse. And that leads to the point. What most charms us as play is not merely some other kind of work than our It is some kind more elementary.

own.

Not that we want to bestow on this holiday work anything less than the whole of our energy. On our Bank Holidays do not we bend up every corporal agent to the sport? We sweat in the eye of Phoebus; we take it out of ourselves, yea, all of it. Just what we want, in our hearts, is to put forth our powers, for once in a while, upon some occupation in which our endeavour shall go, or at least seem to go, a mighty long way, and not go it in some direction which we have never intended. Most of our working time is spent in making for some distant objective -fame, or the good of our kind, or a golden wall or spire, or some other estimable thing. But the line of approach to these goals is not very clear, and then there is always the plaguy chance that, if ever we get there, the gold may

turn out to be gilt. If we be parsons, Heaven knows when we shall have the parish reasonably sober. If we be doctors, perhaps casting out one bacterial devil by letting another loose at it, how can we feel secure against making some deadly slip in the dark, like the man who let the first rabbit loose in Australia? In any kind of responsible work, be it only the work of rearing a family decently well, the way is dark and we are far from home. That is the real curse of Adam; not the work in itself but the worry and doubt of ever getting it done; perhaps the doubt, also, whether, after all, it ought to be done, or done at the price. All your working year you chase some phantom moment at which you might fairly say "Now I am there." Then Easter comes; you sail your own boat through a night of dirty weather from the Mersey to the Isle of Man; and, as you lower sail in Douglas harbour, you are there; no phantom this time; the curse of Adam is taken clean off you, at any rate for that morning. Or those seeds that you sowed in the back garden on that thrilling Saturday evening amaze and exalt you by coming up, and and you learn in your proper person what the joys of discovery and creation are; you have, so far, succeeded in life and done what it piqued you to do in this world. All play, of course, and the victory tiny. Still, on its own scale and for its miniature lifetime, the little model is perfect; the humble muddler has come nearer than anything else is likely to bring him to feeling what the big triumphs of human power must taste like.

II

Man's job on the earth seems to be always becoming more intricate and advanced. Quite early he has to plunge on and on into deepening forests of complexity as his youth penetrates with uncertain feet the central wilds and dark places of algebra-books. The toughness of our task, as compared with that of a hen, is said to be roughly indicated by the contrast between the preparation required for each; the hen is fairly ripe for its labours the day it is born; a man is by no means always efficient after he has afforded employment to a cohort of nurses, governesses, schoolmasters, tutors and professors for more than a score of years. And so, as we proceed with this obscure and intractable undertaking, we dearly like, on our days off, to turn back and do over again, for the fun and easiness of the thing, what we or others really had to do, for dear life, in the infancy of the race.

When Easter releases the child, in any provincial suburb, from his inveterate bondage to grammar and sums, you will see him refreshing himself with sportive revivals of one of the earliest anxieties of man. Foraging round like a magpie or rook, he collects odd bits of castaway tarpaulin and sacking, dusters, old petticoats, broken broom-sticks and fragments of corrugated iron. Assembling these building materials on some practicable patch of waste grass, preferably in the neighbourhood of water, he raises for himself a simple dwelling. The blessing of a small fire crowns these provisions for domestic felicity, and marvellous numbers of small persons may be seen

sitting round these rude hearths, conversing with the gravity of Sioux chieftains or, at a menace of rain, packing themselves into incredibly small cubic spaces of wigwam.

Houses, of course, have been somewhat scarce in late years. Parents, no doubt, have shaken their heads over the dearth, and this may have reinforced in their young the primitive human craving to start by getting a roof over one's head. The war, too, with all its talk of tent and hut, dug-out and bivouac, may have fortified the old impulse. Still, it is there, always and anyhow. It is the holiday impulse of self-rescue from that strange and desolating blindness which comes of knowing things too well and taking them as matters of course. Most of us have long become so used to the idea of living in a house that the idea has lost its old fascination. Of course we do value a house, in a way. That is, we are sorely put out if we cannot obtain one. And, having obtained it, we feel deeply wronged if we have forgotten the latch-key some night and cannot get in. But sheer delight in the very notion of a house, the chuckling, thigh-slapping triumph of early man when first he built one-this has died down in us, just as has the grinning and capering glee of the same pioneer when he got the first fire to kindle.

In the orally transmitted Scriptures of some of the Australian blacks the Creator, Pund-jel, was so well pleased when he had fashioned the first man out of clay and bark that he danced for joy round this admirable piece of handiwork. Even the more staid Jehovah of our own Book of Genesis went on from finding his earlier products "good" to find the whole week's work

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'very good," the exultant complacency of the artist increasing, as it always does, pari passu with the activity of his invention. Man has been proceeding, ever since, with the work that was thus started. A house, a bed, a wheel, a boat, a plough-rapturously must his mind have capered, like Pund-jel's, round each of these happy masterpieces when it was new. So, too, would it caper now, but for some pestilent bar that familiarity interposes between us and the deft miracles of gumption that make us able to sit and look out, dry and warm, half an inch from a tempest of snow, and lie ensconced in tiny cubes of snug stillness hoisted up as high as the top of a tree amidst the raving and whining of violent winter winds.

In poets, perhaps, and in a few other people doubly charged with relish for all the contents of existence, some traces of that jubilation persist. Any child who is happily placed and wisely reared has his chance of reviving it for himself. There come to him exultant ecstasies of climbing in trees with the zest of the first tree-dweller in his ancient pedigree; he huddles in holes that he has digged for himself with all the gusto and pride of a pioneer caveman; then from the joys of the domestic cave he passes on to the sweets of the original ramshackle tent, symbol of the opening of the nomad stage in the life of his kind. Packed as miraculously tight into his own small life as a hyacinth, flower and leaves and all, is compressed in the bulb, there unfolds itself for his diversion a stirring recapitulation of the adventurous life of mankind on the earth: he re-lives with relish the whole career of his race; he has been with other ape-like figures in the upper boughs