"Thou hast felt no Viking's starkness;
Thou hast lost a Christian's throne."
And they drove him forth in the darkness
To find a place of his own.
Evoe.
THE SILENCE OF WAR.
I have a confession to make. Once in the happy far-off days—it seems ages since—I was bored by my fellow-passengers' conversation in the train. I daresay that they were equally bored by mine; but against that view there is the fact that this is my confession and not theirs. Well, I am punished now. I admit that I would give a good deal to hear Griffith's story of how he did the dog-leg hole in three again. There sits Griffith opposite to me, and no one would know that he had ever handled a club. He has become a golf-mute.
Or think of Purvis. The recital of the performances of Purvis's new car lent an additional terror to railway travelling. I have forgotten the very make of his car now. I cannot particularise the number of its cylinders or say if it is electrically started. Purvis is conversationally punctured.
There was, too, one recalls, an Insurance Act. Wilson felt a special grievance because he employed an aged gardener, out of charity, two days a week. He talked, if I remember correctly, about a cruel fourpence and a mythical ninepence. He read fierce letters he had composed for the Press, and when the papers published them, which was seldom, he read them to us all over again. As an anti-insurance agitator Wilson now comes under the unemployment section of the accursed Act.