Spartan Hearts, by Beatrice Harraden, was first published in a volume entitled"Untold Tales of the Past"; Big Steamers, by Rudyard Kipling, in "A Historyof England," by C. R. L. Fletcher and Rudyard Kipling; Bimbashi Joyce, byArthur Conan Doyle, in "The Green Flag, and other Stories"; and we have to thankMessrs. William Blackwood & Sons, The Oxford University Press, and Messrs. Smith,Elder & Co. for permission to include these contributions in Princess Mary'sGift Book. With these exceptions the poems and stories in this book have not previously been issuedin volume form. The illustrations have all been specially painted and drawn, and anexhibition of the work of the artists who have thus contributed to Princess Mary'sGift Book will be held at the Leicester Galleries, Leicester Square, W.C., and theoriginals sold in aid of the Queen's "Work for Women" Fund.
Painting by W. RUSSELL FLINT, A.R.W.S., and Drawings by C. E. BROCK
People have tried a holiday in bed before now, and found it a failure, but that was because they were ignorant of the rules. They went to bed with the open intention of staying there, say, three days, and found to their surprise that each morning they wanted to get up. This was a novel experience to them; they flung about restlessly, and probably shortened their holiday. The proper thing is to take your holiday in bed with a vague intention of getting up in another quarter of an hour. The real pleasure of lying in bed after you are awake is largely due to the feeling that you ought to get up. To take another quarter of an hour then becomes a luxury. You are, in short, in the position of the man who dined on larks. Had he seen the hundreds that were ready for him, all set out on one monster dish, they would have alarmed him; but getting them two at a time, he went on eating till all the larks were gone. His feeling of uncertainty as to whether these might not be his last two larks is your feeling that, perhaps, you will have to get up in a quarter of an hour. Deceive yourself in this way, and your holiday in bed will pass only too quickly.
Sympathy is what all the world is craving for, and sympathy is what the ordinary holiday-maker never gets. How can we be expected to sympathise with you when we know you are off to Perthshire to fish? No; we say we wish we were you, and forget that your holiday is sure to be a hollow mockery; that your child will jam her finger in the railway carriage, and scream to the end of the journey; that you will lose your luggage; that the guard will notice your dog beneath the seat, and insist on its being paid for; that you will be caught in a Scotch mist on the top of a mountain, and be put on gruel for a fortnight; that your wife will fret herself into a fever about the way the servant, who has been left at home, is treating her cousins, the milkman, and the policeman; and that you will be had up for trespassing. Yet, when you tell us you are off to-morrow, we have never the sympathy to say, "Poor fellow, I hope you'll pull through somehow." If it is an exhibition you go to gaze at, we never picture you dragging your weary legs from one department to another, and wondering why your back aches. Should it be the seaside, we talk heartlessly to you about the "briny," though we must know, if we would stop to think, that if there is one holiday more miserable than all the others, it is that spent at the seaside, when you wander along the weary beach and fling pebbles at the sea, and wonder how long it will be till dinner-time. Were we to come down to see you, we should probably find you, not on the beach, but moving slowly through the village, looking in at the one milliner's window, or laboriously reading what the one grocer's labels say on the subject of pale ale, compressed beef, or vinegar. There was never an object that called aloud for sympathy more than you do, but you get not a jot of it. You should take the first train home and go to bed for three days.
