If I May

by A. A. Milne

So I feel--indeed, I seem to remember--that the years were not so wasted after all. When I should have been looking after my quaternions, I was doing something else, something not so useful to one who would be a mathematician, but perhaps more useful to a writer who had already learnt enough to count the words in an article and to estimate the number of guineas due to him. But whether this be so or not, at least I have another reason for gratitude that I treated some of these volumes so reverently. For I have now sold them all to a secondhand bookseller, and he at least was influenced by the clean look of those which I had placed upon the top.

So they stand now, my books, in a shelf outside the shop waiting for a new master. Fifteen shillings I paid for some of them, and you or anybody else can get them for three and sixpence, with my autograph inside and the “R” and “RR” of some of our most learned mathematicians. I should like to hear from the purchaser, and to know that he is giving my books as kind a home as I gave them, treating them as reverently, exercising them as gently. He can never be a mathematician, or anything else, unless he has them on his shelves, but let him not force his attentions upon them. Left to themselves they will exert their own influence.

I shall wonder sometimes what he is going to be, this young fellow who is now reading the books on which I was brought up. Spurred on by the differential equations, will he decide to be a lawyer, or will the dynamics of a particle help him to realize his ambition of painting? Well, whatever he becomes, I wish him luck. And when he sells the books again, may he get a better price than I did.

A Haunted House

We have been trying to hide it from each other, but the truth must now come out. Our house is haunted.

Well, of course, anybody’s house might be haunted. Anybody might have a headless ghost walking about the battlements or the bath-room at midnight, and if it were no more than that, I should not trouble you with the details. But our house is haunted in a peculiar way. No house that I have heard of has ever been affected in quite this way before.

I must begin by explaining that it is a new house, built just before the war. (Before the war, not after; this is a true story.) Its first and only tenant was a Mrs. Watson-Watson, who lived here with her daughter. Add her three servants, and you have filled the house. No doubt she could have stowed people away in the cellar, but I have never heard that she did; she preferred to keep it for such coal and wood as came her way. When Mrs. Watson-Watson decided six months ago to retire to the country, we took the house, and have lived here since. And very comfortably, except for this haunting business.

As was to be expected, we were busy for the first few weeks in sending on Mrs. Watson-Watson’s letters. Gradually, as the news of her removal got round to her less intimate friends, the flow of them grew less, and at last--to our great relief, for we were always mislaying her address--it ceased altogether. It was not until then that we felt ourselves to be really in possession of our house.

We were not in possession for long. A month later a letter arrived for Lady Elizabeth Mullins. Supposing this to be a nom-de-guerre of Mrs. Watson-Watson’s, we searched for, and with great difficulty found, the missing address, and sent the letter on. Next day there were two more letters for Lady Elizabeth; by the end of the week there were half a dozen; and for the rest of that month they came trickling in at the rate of one a day. Mrs. Watson-Watson’s address was now definitely lost, so we tied Lady-Elizabeth’s letters up in a packet and sent them to the ground-landlord’s solicitors. Solicitors like letters.

It was annoying at this time, when one was expecting, perhaps, a very important cheque or communication from the Prime Minister, to go downstairs eagerly at the postman’s knock and find a couple of letters for Lady Elizabeth and a belated copy of the Church Times for Mrs. Watson-Watson. It was still more annoying, that, just when we were getting rid of Lady Elizabeth, Mr. J. Garcia should have arrived to take her place.