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Dreams.................................................................................................................................................................1

Jerome K. Jerome .....................................................................................................................................1

The most extraordinary dream I ever had was one in which I fancied that, as I was going into a theater, the

cloakroom attendant stopped me in the lobby and insisted on my leaving my legs behind me.

I was not surprised; indeed, my acquaintanceship with theater harpies would prevent my feeling any surprise

at such a demand, even in my waking moments; but I was, I must honestly confess, considerably annoyed. It

was not the payment of the cloakroom fee that I so much mindedI offered to give that to the man then

I said I had never heard of such a rule being attempted to be put in force at any respectable theater before, and

that I considered it a most absurd and vexatious regulation. I also said I should write to The Times about it.

The man replied that he was very sorry, but that those were his instructions. People complained that they

could not get to and from their seats comfortably, because other people's legs were always in the way; and it

had, therefore, been decided that, in future, everybody should leave their legs outside.

It seemed to me that the management, in making this order, had clearly gone beyond their legal right; and,

under ordinary circumstances, I should have disputed it. Being present, however, more in the character of a

guest than in that of a patron, I hardly like to make a disturbance; and so I sat down and meekly prepared to

I had never before known that the human leg did unscrew. I had always thought it was a fixture. But the man

The discovery did not surprise me any more than the original request that I should take them off had done.

I dreamed once that I was going to be hanged; but I was not at all surprised about it. Nobody was. My

relations came to see me off, I thought, and to wish me "Goodby!" They all came, and were all very

pleasant; but they were not in the least astonishednot one of them. Everybody appeared to regard the

They bore the calamity, besides, with an amount of stoicism that would have done credit to a Spartan father.

There was no fuss, no scene. On the contrary, an atmosphere of mild cheerfulness prevailed.

Yet they were very kind. Somebodyan uncle, I thinkleft me a packet of sandwiches and a little

something in a flask, in case, as he said, I should feel peckish on the scaffold.

It is "those twinjailers of the daring" thought, Knowledge and Experience, that teach us surprise. We are

surprised and incredulous when, in novels and plays, we come across good men and women, because

Knowledge and Experience have taught us how rare and problematical is the existence of such people. In

waking life, my friends and relations would, of course, have been surprised at hearing that I had committed a

murder, and was, in consequence, about to be hanged, because Knowledge and Experience would have taught

them that, in a country where the law is powerful and the police alert, the Christian citizen is usually pretty

successful in withstanding the voice of temptation, prompting him to commit crime of an illegal character.

But into Dreamland, Knowledge and Experience do not enter. They stay without, together with the dull, dead

clay of which they form a part; while the freed brain, released from their narrowing tutelage, steals softly past

the ebon gate, to wanton at its own sweet will among the mazy paths that wind through the garden of

Nothing that it meets with in that eternal land astonishes it because, unfettered by the dense conviction of our

waking mind, that nought outside the ken of our own vision can in this universe be, all things to it are

possible and even probable. In dreams, we fly and wonder notexcept that we never flew before. We go

naked, yet are not ashamed, though we mildly wonder what the police are about that they do not stop us. We

converse with our dead, and think it was unkind that they did not come back to us before. In dreams, there

happens that which human language cannot tell. In dreams, we see "the light that never was on sea or land,"

It is only in sleep that true imagination ever stirs within us. Awake, we never imagine anything; we merely

alter, vary, or transpose. We give another twist to the kaleidoscope of the things we see around us, and obtain

another pattern; but not one of us has ever added one tiniest piece of new glass to the toy.

A Dean Swift sees one race of people smaller, and another race of people larger than the race of people that

live down his own streets. And he also sees a land where the horses take the place of men. A Bulwer Lytton

lays the scene of one of his novels inside the earth instead of outside. A Rider Haggard introduces us to a lady

whose age is a few years more than the average woman would care to confess to; and pictures crabs larger

than the usual shilling or eighteenpenny size. The number of so called imaginative writers who visit the

moon is legion, and for all the novelty that they find, when they get there, they might just as well have gone

to Putney. Others are continually drawing for us visions of the world one hundred or one thousand years

hence. There is always a depressing absence of human nature about the place; so much so, that one feels great

consolation in the thought, while reading, that we ourselves shall be comfortably dead and buried before the

picture can be realized. In these prophesied Utopias everybody is painfully good and clean and happy, and all

There is somewhat too much electricity, for my taste, in these worlds to come. One is reminded of those

pictorial enamelpaint advertisements that one sees about so often now, in which all the members of an

extensive household are represented as gathered together in one room, spreading enamelpaint over

everything they can lay their hands upon. The old man is on a stepladder, daubing the walls and ceiling with

"cuckoo'segg green," while the parlormaid and the cook are on their knees, painting the floor with

"sealingwax red." The old lady is doing the picture frames in "terra cotta." The eldest daughter and her

young man are making sly love in a corner over a pot of "high art yellow," with which, so soon as they have

finished wasting their time, they will, it is manifest, proceed to elevate the piano. Younger brothers and

sisters are busy freshening up the chairs and tables with "strawberryjam pink " and "jubilee magenta." Every

blessed thing in that room is being coated with enamel paint, from the sofa to the fireirons, from the

sideboard to the eightday clock. If there is any paint left over, it will be used up for the family Bible and the

It is claimed for this invention that a little child can make as much mess with it as can a grownup person,

and so all the children of the family are represented in the picture as hard at work, enameling whatever few

articles of furniture and household use the grasping selfishness of their elders has spared to them. One is

painting the toasting fork in a "skimmilk blue," while another is giving aesthetical value to the Dutch oven

by means of a new shade of art green. The bootjack is being renovated in "old gold," and the baby is sitting

on the floor, smothering its own cradle with "flushuponamaiden's cheek peach color."

One feels that the thing is being overdone. That family, before another month is gone, will be among the

strongest opponents of enamel paint that the century has produced. Enamel paint will be the ruin of that once

happy home. Enamel paint has a cold, glassy, cynical appearance. Its presence everywhere about the place

will begin to irritate the old man in the course of a week or so. He will call it, "This damn'd sticky stuff!" and

will tell the wife that he wonders she didn't paint herself and the children with it while she was about it. She

will reply, in an exasperatingly quiet tone of voice, that she does like that. Perhaps he will say next, that she

did not warn him against it, and tell him what an idiot he was making of himself, spoiling the whole house

with his foolish fads. Each one will persist that it was the other one who first suggested the absurdity, and

The children having acquired a taste for smudging the concoction about, and there being nothing else left

untouched in the house, will try to enamel the cat; and then there will be bloodshed, and broken windows,

and spoiled infants, and sorrows and yells. The smell of the paint will make everybody ill; and the servants

will give notice. Tradesmen's boys will lean up against places that are not dry and get their clothes enameled

and claim compensation. And the baby will suck the paint off its cradle and have fits.

But the person that will suffer most will, of course, be the eldest daughter's young man. The eldest daughter's

young man is always unfortunate. He means well, and he tries hard. His great ambition is to make the family

love him. But fate is ever against him, and he only succeeds in gaining their undisguised contempt. The fact

of his being "gone" on their Emily is, of itself, naturally sufficient to stamp him as an imbecile in the eyes of

Emily's brothers and sisters. The father finds him slow, and thinks the girl might have done better; while the

best that his future motherinlaw (his sole supporter) can say for him is, that he seems steady.

There is only one thing that prompts the family to tolerate him, and that is the reflection that he is going to

The eldest daughter's young man, in this particular case, will, you may depend upon it, choose that exact

moment when the baby's life is hovering in the balance, and the cook is waiting for her wages with her box in

the hall, and a coalheaver is at the front door with a policeman, making a row about the damage to his

trousers, to come in, smiling, with a specimen pot of some new high art, squashedtomatoshade enamel

Then Emily will go off into hysterics, and Emily's male progenitor will firmly but quietly lead that illstarred

yet truehearted young man to the public side of the gardengate; and the engagement will be "off."

Too much of anything is a mistake, as the man said when his wife presented him with four new healthy

children in one day. We should practice moderation in all matters. A little enamel paint would have been

good. They might have enameled the house inside and out, and have left the furniture alone. Or they might

have colored the furniture, and let the house be. But an entirely and completely enameled homea home,

such as enamelpaint manufacturers love to picture on their advertisements, over which the yearning eye

wanders in vain, seeking one single square inch of unenameled matteris, I am convinced, a mistake. It

may be a home that, as the testimonials assure us, will easily wash. It may be an "artistic" home; but the

average man is not yet educated up to the appreciation of it. The average man does not care for high art. At a

So, in these coming Utopias, in which out unhappy grandchildren will have to drag out their colorless

existence, there will be too much electricity. They will grow to loathe electricity.

Electricity is going to light them, warm them, carry them, doctor them, cook for them, execute them, if

necessary. They are going to be weaned on electricity, rocked in their cradles by electricity, slapped by

electricity, ruled and regulated and guided by electricity, buried by electricity. I may be wrong, but I rather

In the new world of our progressionist teachers, it is electricity that is the real motivepower. The men and

But it was not to speak of the electricity in them, but of the originality in them, that I referred to these works

of fiction. There is no originality in them whatever. Human thought is incapable of originality. No man ever

The sailor, when he was asked what he would do with a fortune, promptly replied:

"What would you buy after thatafter you had bought up all the rum and tobacco there was in the

"After that? Oh! 'um!" (a long pause). "Oh!" (with inspiration) "why, more 'baccy!"

Rum and tobacco he knew something of, and could therefore imagine about. He did not know any other

So if you ask one of these Utopiandreaming gentry what, after they had secured for their world all the

electricity there was in the Universe, and after every mortal thing in their ideal Paradise, was done and said

and thought by electricity, they could imagine as further necessary to human happiness, they would probably

They know electricity. They have seen the electric light, and heard of electric boats and omnibuses. They

Therefore, knowing that electricity does three things, they can go on and "imagine" electricity doing three

hundred things, and the very great ones among them can imagine it doing three thousand things; but for them,

or anybody else, to imagine a new force, totally unconnected with and different from anything yet known in

Human thought is not a firework, ever shooting off fresh forms and shapes as it burns; it is a tree, growing

very slowlyyou can watch it long and see no movementvery silently, unnoticed. It was planted in the

world many thousand years ago, a tiny, sickly plant. And men guarded it and tended it, and gave up life and

fame to aid its growth. In the hot days of their youth, they came to the gate of the garden and knocked,

begging to be let in, and to be counted among the gardeners. And their young companions without called to

them to come back, and play the man with bow and spear, and win sweet smiles from rosy lips, and take their

part amid the feast, and dance, not stoop with wrinkled brows, at weaklings' work. And the passers by

mocked them and called shame, and others cried out to stone them. And still they stayed there laboring, that

And the tree grew fair and strong. The storms of ignorance passed over it, and harmed it not. The fierce fires

of superstition soared around it; but men leaped into the flames and beat them back, perishing, and the tree

grew. With the sweat of their brow have men nourished its green leaves. Their tears have moistened the earth

The seasons have come and passed, and the tree has grown and flourished. And its branches have spread far

and high, and ever fresh shoots are bursting forth, and ever new leaves unfolding to the light. But they are all

part of the one treethe tree that was planted on the first birthday of the human race. The stem that bears

them springs from the gnarled old trunk that was green and soft when whitehaired Time was a little child;

the sap that feeds them is drawn up through the roots that twine and twist about the bones of the ages that are

The human mind can no more produce an original thought than a tree can bear an original fruit. As well

might one cry for an original note in music as expect an original idea from a human brain.

One wishes our friends, the critics, would grasp this simple truth, and leave off clamoring for the impossible,

and being shocked because they do not get it. When a new book is written, the highclass critic opens it with

feelings of faint hope, tempered by strong conviction of coming disappointment. As he pores over the pages,

his brow darkens with virtuous indignation, and his lip curls with the Godlike contempt that the exceptionally

great critic ever feels for everybody in this world, who is not yet dead. Buoyed up by a touching, but totally

fallacious, belief that he is performing a public duty, and that the rest of the community is waiting in

breathless suspense to learn his opinion of the work in question, before forming any judgment concerning it

themselves, he, nevertheless, wearily struggles through about a third of it. Then his longsuffering soul

"Why, there is no originality whatever in this," he says. "This book is taken bodily from the Old Testament. It

is the story of Adam and Eve all over again. The hero is a mere man! with two arms, two legs, and a head (so

called). Why, it is only Moses's Adam under another name! And the heroine is nothing but a woman! and she

is described as beautiful, and as having long hair. The author may call her 'Angelina,' or any other name he

chooses; but he has evidently, whether he acknowledges it or not, copied her direct from Eve. The characters

are barefaced plagiarisms from the book of Genesis! Oh! to find an author with originality!"

One spring I went a walking tour in the country. It was a glorious spring. Not the sort of spring they give us

in these miserable times, under this shameless governmenta mixture of east wind, blizzard, snow, rain,

slush, fog, frost, hail, sleet and thunderstormsbut a sunny, bluesky'd, joyous spring, such as we used to

It was an exceptionally beautiful spring, even for those golden days; and as I wandered through the waking

land, and saw the dawning of the coming green, and watched the blush upon the hawthorn hedge, deepening

each day beneath the kisses of the sun, and looked up at the proud old mother trees, dandling their myriad

baby buds upon their strong fond arms, holding them high for the soft west wind to caress as he passed

laughing by, and marked the primrose yellow creep across the carpet of the woods, and saw the new flush of

the field and saw the new light on the hills, and heard the newfound gladness of the birds, and heard from

copse and farm and meadow the timid callings of the little newborn things, wondering to find themselves

alive, and smelt the freshness of the earth, and felt the promise in the air, and felt a strong hand in the wind,

my spirit rose within me. Spring had come to me also, and stirred me with a strange new life, with a strange

new hope I, too, was part of nature, and it was spring! Tender leaves and blossoms were unfolding from my

heart. Bright flowers of love and gratitude were opening round its roots. I felt new strength in all my limbs.

New blood was pulsing through my veins. Nobler thoughts and nobler longings were throbbing through my

As I walked, Nature came and talked beside me, and showed me the world and myself, and the ways of God

It seemed to me a pity that all the beautiful and precious thoughts and ideas that were crowding in upon me

should be lost to my fellowmen, and so I pitched my tent at a little cottage, and set to work to write them

"It has been complained of me," I said to myself, "that I do not write literary and high class workat least,

not work that is exceptionally literary and highclass. This reproach shall be removed. I will write an article

that shall be a classic. I have worked for the ordinary, everyday reader. It is right that I should do something

And I wrote a grand essaythough I say it who should not, though I don't see why I shouldn'tall about

spring, and the way it made you feel, and what it made you think. It was simply crowded with elevated

thoughts and highclass ideas and cultured wit, was that essay. There was only one fault about that essay: it

was too brilliant. I wanted commonplace relief. It would have exhausted the average reader; so much

I wish I could remember some of the beautiful things in that essay, and here set them down; because then you

would be able to see what they were like for yourselves, and that would be so much more simpler than my

explaining to you how beautiful they were. Unfortunately, however, I cannot now call to mind any of them.

I was very proud of this essay, and when I got back to town I called on a very superior friend of mine, a critic,

and read it to him. I do not care for him to see any of my usual work, because he really is a very superior

person indeed, and the perusal of it appears to give him pains inside. But this article, I thought, would do him

"Splendid," he replied, "excellently arranged. I never knew you were so well acquainted with the works of the

old writers. Why, there is scarcely a classic of any note that you have not quoted from. But wherewhere,"

he added, musing, "did you get that last idea but two from? It's the only one I don't seem to remember. It isn't

He said that, if so, he should advise me to leave it out. Not that it was altogether bad, but that the

interpolation of a modern thought among so unique a collection of passages from the ancients seemed to spoil

And he enumerated the various deadandburied gentlemen from whom he appeared to think I had collated

"But," I replied, when I had recovered my astonishment sufficiently to speak, "it isn't a collection at all. It is

all original. I wrote the thoughts down as they came to me. I have never read any of these people you

Of course Shakespeare was bound to be among them. I am getting to dislike that man so. He is always being

held up before us young authors as a model, and I do hate models. There was a model boy at our school, I

remember, Henry Summers; and it was just the same there. It was continually, "Look at Henry Summers! he

doesn't put the preposition before the verb, and spell business biz!" or, "Why can't you write like Henry

Summers? He doesn't get the ink all over the copybook and halfway up his back!" We got tired of this

everlasting "Look at Henry Summers!" after a while, and so, one afternoon, on the way home, a few of us

lured Henry Summers up a dark court; and when he came out again he was not worth looking at.

Now it is perpetually, "Look at Shakespeare!" "Why don't you write like Shakespeare?" "Shakespeare never

If you are in the playwriting line it is still worse for you. "Why don't you write plays like Shakespeare's?"

they indignantly say. "Shakespeare never made his comic man a penny steamboat captain." "Shakespeare

never made his hero address the girl as 'ducky.' Why don't you copy Shakespeare?" If you do try to copy

Shakespeare, they tell you that you must be a fool to attempt to imitate Shakespeare.

"I cannot help that," replied my critical friendto return to our previous question"the germ of every

thought and idea you have got in that article can be traced back to the writers I have named. If you doubt it, I

But I declined the offer. I said I would take his word for it, and would rather not see the passages referred to.

I felt indignant. "If," as I said, "these menthese Platos and Socrateses and Ciceros and Sophocleses and

Aristophaneses and Aristotles and the rest of them had been taking advantage of my absence to go about the

world spoiling my business for me, I would rather not hear any more about them."

And I put on my hat and came out, and I have never tried to write anything original since.

I dreamed a dream once. (It is the sort of thing a man would dream. You cannot very well dream anything

else, I know. But the phrase sounds poetical and biblical, and so I use it.) I dreamed that I was in a strange

countryindeed, one might say an extraordinary country. It was ruled entirely by critics.

The people in this strange land had a very high opinion of criticsnearly as high an opinion of critics as the

critics themselves had, but not, of course, quitethat not being practicableand they had agreed to be

guided in all things by the critics. I stayed some years in that land. But it was not a cheerful place to live in,

There were authors in this country, at first, and they wrote books. But the critics could find nothing original

in the books whatever, and said it was a pity that men, who might be usefully employed hoeing potatoes,

should waste their time and the time of the critics, which was of still more importance, in stringing together a

collection of platitudes, familiar to every schoolboy, and dishing up old plots and stories that had already

been cooked and recooked for the public until everybody had been surfeited with them.

And the writers read what the critics said and sighed, and gave up writing books, and went off and hoed

potatoes; as advised. They had had no experience in hoeing potatoes, and they hoed very badly; and the

people whose potatoes they hoed strongly recommended them to leave hoeing potatoes, and to go back and

There were artists also in this strange world, at first, and they painted pictures, which the critics came and

"Nothing whatever original in them," said the critics; "same old colors, same old perspective and form, same

old sunset, same old sea and land, and sky and figures. Why do these poor men waste their time, painting

pictures, when they might be so much more satisfactorily employed on ladders painting houses?"

Nothing, by the by, you may have noticed, troubles your critic more than the idea that the artist is wasting his

time. It is the waste of time that vexes the critic; he has such an exalted idea of the value of other people's

time. "Dear, dear me!" he says to himself, "why, in the time the man must have taken to paint this picture or

to write this book, he might have blacked fifteen thousand pairs of boots, or have carried fifteen thousand

It never occurs to him that, but for that picture or book, the artist would, in all probability, have been

It reminds me of the way people used to talk to me when I was a boy. I would be sitting, as good as gold,

reading "The Pirate's Lair," when some cultured relative would look over my shoulder and say: "Bah! what

are you wasting your time with rubbish for? Why don't you go and do something useful?" and would take the

book away from me. Upon which I would get up, and go out to "do something useful;" and would come

home an hour afterward, looking like a bit out of a battle picture, having tumbled through the roof of Farmer

Bate's greenhouse and killed a cactus, though totally unable to explain how I came to be on the roof of

Farmer Bate's greenhouse. They had much better have left me alone, lost in "The Pirate's Lair!"

The artists in this land of which I dreamed left off painting pictures, after hearing what the critics said, and

Because, you see, this country of which I dreamed was not one of those vulgar, ordinary countries, such as

exist in the waking world, where people let the critics talk as much as ever they like, and nobody pays the

slightest attention to what they say. Here, in this strange land, the critics were taken seriously, and their

As for the poets and sculptors, they were very soon shut up. The idea of any educated person wanting to read

modern poetry when he could obtain Homer, or caring to look at any other statue while there was still some

of the Venus de Medicis left, was too absurd. Poets and sculptors were only wasting their time

What new occupation they were recommended to adopt, I forget. Some calling they knew nothing whatever

The musicians tried their art for a little while, but they, too, were of no use. "Merely a repetition of the same

notes in different combinations," said the critics. "Why will people waste their time writing unoriginal music,

One man had written a play. I asked what the critics had said about him. They showed me his tomb.

Then, there being no more artists or _litterateurs_ or dramatists or musicians left for their beloved critics to

criticise, the general public of this enlightened land said to themselves, "Why should not our critics come and

criticise us? Criticism is useful to a man. Have we not often been told so? Look how useful it has been to the

artists and writerssaved the poor fellows from wasting their time? Why shouldn't we have some of its

They suggested the idea to the critics, and the critics thought it an excellent one, and said they would

undertake the job with pleasure. One must say for the critics that they never shirk work. They will sit and

criticise for eighteen hours a day, if necessary, or even, if quite unnecessary, for the matter of that. You can't

give them too much to criticise. They will criticise everything and everybody in this world. They will criticise

everything in the next world, too, when they get there. I expect poor old Pluto has a lively time with them all,

So, when a man built a house, or a farmyard hen laid an egg, the critics were asked in to comment on it.

They found that none of the houses were original. On every floor were passages that seemed mere copies

from passages in other houses. They were all built on the same hackneyed plan; cellars underneath, ground

The critics criticised all things. When a young couple fell in love, they each, before thinking of marriage,

"My dear young lady," the critics would say, after the inspection had taken place, "I can discover nothing new

whatever about the young man. You would simply be wasting your time in marrying him."

"Oh, dear, no! Nothing attractive about the girl at all. Who on earth gave you that notion? Simply a lovely

face and figure, angelic disposition, beautiful mind, stanch heart, noble character. Why, there must have been

nearly a dozen such girls born into the world since its creation. You would be only wasting your time loving

They criticised the birds for their hackneyed style of singing, and the flowers for their hackneyed scents and

colors. They complained of the weather that it lacked originality(true, they had not lived out an English

They criticised the babies. When a fresh infant was published in a house, the critics would call in a body to

pass their judgment upon it, and the young mother would bring it down for them to sample.

"Did you ever see a child anything like that in this world before?" she would say, holding it out to them. "Isn't

it a wonderful baby? _You_ never saw a child with legs like that, I know. Nurse says he's the most

"Tut, tut," they would reply, "there is nothing extraordinary about that childno originality whatever. Why,

it's exactly like every other babybald head, red face, big mouth, and stumpy nose. Why, that's only a weak

imitation of the baby next door. It's a plagiarism, that's what that child is. You've been wasting your time,

madam. If you can't do anything more original than that, we should advise you to give up the business

"Oh! look here, we've had enough of you and your originality," said the people to the critics, after that. "Why,

_you_ are not original, when one comes to think of it, and your criticisms are not original. You've all of you

been saying exactly the same thing ever since the time of Solomon. We are going to drown you and have a

"What, drown a critic!" cried the critics, "never heard of such a monstrous proceeding in our lives!"

"No, we flatter ourselves it is an original idea," replied the public, brutally. "You ought to be charmed with it.

So they took the critics out and drowned them, and then passed a short act, making criticism a capital offense.

After that, the art and literature of the country followed, somewhat, the methods of the quaint and curious

school, but the land, notwithstanding, was a much more cheerful place to live in, I dreamed.

But I never finished telling you about the dream in which I thought I left my legs behind me when I went into

I dreamed that the ticket the man gave me for my legs was No. 19, and I was worried all through the

performance for fear No. 61 should get hold of them, and leave me his instead. Mine are rather a fine pair of

legs, and I am, I confess, a little proud of themat all events, I prefer them to anybody else's. Besides,

Another extraordinary dream I had was one in which I dreamed that I was engaged to be married to my Aunt

Jane. That was not, however, the extraordinary part of it; I have often known people to dream things like that.

I knew a man who once dreamed that he was actually married to his own motherinlaw! He told me that

never in his life had he loved the alarm clock with more deep and grateful tenderness than he did that

morning. The dream almost reconciled him to being married to his real wife. They lived quite happily

No; the extraordinary part of my dream was, that I knew it was a dream. "What on earth will uncle say to this

engagement?" I thought to myself, in my dream. "There's bound to be a row about it. We shall have a deal of

trouble with uncle, I feel sure." And this thought quite troubled me until the sweet reflection came: "Ah! well,

And I made up my mind that I would wake up as soon as uncle found out about the engagement, and leave

It is a very great comfort, when the dream grows troubled and alarming, to feel that it is only a dream, and to

know that we shall awake soon and be none the worse for it. We can dream out the foolish perplexity with a

Sometimes the dream of life grows strangely troubled and perplexing, and then he who meets dismay the

bravest is he who feels that the fretful play is but a dreama brief, uneasy dream of three score years and

ten, or thereabouts, from which, in a little while, he will awakeat least, he dreams so.

How dull, how impossible life would be without dreamswaking dreams, I meanthe dreams that we call

"castles in the air," built by the kindly hands of Hope! Were it not for the mirage of the oasis, drawing his

footsteps ever onward, the weary traveler would lie down in the desert sand and die. It is the mirage of distant

success, of happiness that, like the bunch of carrots fastened an inch beyond the donkey's nose, seems always

just within our reach, if only we will gallop fast enough, that makes us run so eagerly along the road of Life.

Providence, like a father with a tired child, lures us ever along the way with tales and promises, until, at the

frowning gate that ends the road, we shrink back, frightened. Then, promises still more sweet he stoops and

whispers in our ear, and timid yet partly reassured, and trying to hide our fears, we gather up all that is left of

our little stock of hope and, trusting yet half afraid, push out our groping feet into the darkness.