MISADVENTURES
By L. PEARSALL SMITH
At Solemn Music
I SAT there, hating the exuberance of her bust and her high-coloured wig. And how could I listen to the music in the close proximity of those loud stockings?
Then our eyes met: in both of us the enchanted chord was touched; we both looked through the same window into Heaven. In that moment of musical, shared delight—these awful things will happen—our souls joined hands and sang like the morning stars together.
The Platitude
"It's after all, the little things in life that really matter!" I exclaimed, to my own surprise and the general consternation. I was as much chagrined as they were flabbergasted by this involuntary outbreak; but from my reading of the Chinese mystics, and from much practice in crowded railway carriages, I have become expert in that Taoist art of disintegration which Yen Hui described to Confucius as the art of "sitting and forgetting." I have learnt to lay aside my personality in awkward moments, to dissolve this self of mine into the All Pervading; to fall back, in fact, into the universal flux, and sit, as I now sat there, a blameless lump of matter, rolled on, according to the heaven's rolling, inert and unconcerned, with rocks and stones and trees.