i had a glimpse of eden last night. it came, as visions should come, out of the misery of things. in all these tragic years no night spent in a newspaper office had been more depressing than this, with its sense of impending peril, its disquieting communiqué, wytschaate lost, won, lost again; the eager study of the map with its ever retreating british line; the struggle to write cheerfully in spite of a sick and foreboding heart—and then out into the night with the burden of it all hanging like a blight upon the soul. and as i stood in the dark and the slush and the snow by the law courts i saw careering towards me a motor-bus with great head-lights that shone like blast furnaces on a dark hillside. it seemed to me like a magic bus pounding through the gloom with good tidings, jolly tidings, and scattering the darkness with its jovial lamps. heavens, thought i, what strangers we are to good tidings; but here surely they come, breathless and radiant, for such a glow never sat on the brow of fear. the bus stopped and i got inside, and inside it was radiant too—so brilliant that you could not only see that your fellow-passengers were real people of flesh and blood and not mere phantoms in the darkness, but that you could read the paper with luxurious ease.

but i did not read the paper. i didn't want to read the paper. i only wanted just to sit back and enjoy the forgotten sensation of a well-lit bus. it was as though at one stride i had passed out of the long and bitter night of the black years into the careless past, or forward into the future when all the agony would be a tale that was told. one day, i said to myself, we shall think nothing of a bus like this. all the buses will be like this, and we shall go galumphing home at midnight through streets as bright as day. the gloom will have vanished from trafalgar square and the fairyland of piccadilly circus will glitter once more with ten thousand lights singing the praises of oxo and bovril and somebody's cigarettes and somebody else's pills. we shall look up at the stars and not fear them and at the moon and not be afraid. the newspaper will no longer be a chronicle of hell, nor slaughter the tyrannical occupation of our thoughts.

and as i sat in the magic bus and saturated myself with this intoxicating vision of the eden that will come when the madness is past, i wondered what i should do on entering that blessed realm that was lost and that we yearn to regain. yes, i think i should fall on my knees. i think we shall all want to fall on our knees. what other attitude will there be for us? even my barber will fall on his knees. "if i thought peace was coming to-morrow," he said firmly the other day, "i'd fall on my knees this very night." he spoke as though nothing but peace would induce him to do such a desperate, unheard-of thing. i tried to puzzle out his scheme of faith, but found it beyond me. it rather resembled the naked commercialism of king theebaw, who when his favourite wife lay ill promised his gods most splendid gifts if she recovered, and when she died brought up a park of artillery and blew their temple down. but my barber, nevertheless, had the root of the matter in him, and i would certainly follow his example.

but then—what then? well i should want to get on to some high and solitary place—alone, or with just one companion who knows when to be silent and when to talk—there to cleanse my soul of this debauch of horror. i would take the midnight train and ho! for keswick. and in the dawn of a golden day—it must be a golden day—i would see the sun

flatter the mountain tops with sovran eye

and set out by the lapping waves of derwentwater for glorious sty head and hear the murmurs from glaramara's inmost caves and scramble up great gable and over by eskhause and scafell and down into the green pastures of langdale. and there in that sanctuary with its starry dome and its encompassing hills i should find the thing i sought.

then, like the barber, i shall be moved to do something desperate. i shall want some oblation to lay on the altar, and if i know my companion he will not have forgotten his hundred foot of rope or his craft of the mountains and together we will

leave our rags on pavey ark,

our cards on pillar grim.

and then, the consecration and the offering complete, back to the world that is shuddering, white-faced and wondering, into its paradise regained.... why, here is st. john's wood already. and lord's! of course, i must have a day at lord's. it will be a part of the ritual of reconciliation. the old players will not be there, for the gulf with the past is wide and the bones of many a great artist lie on distant fields. but we must recapture their music and pay homage to their memory. yes, i will take my lunch to lord's—or perchance the oval—and sit in the sunshine and hear the merry tune of bat and ball, and walk over the greensward in the interval and look at the wicket, and talk for a whole day with my companion of the giants of old and of the doughty things we have seen them do. haig and hindenburg, tirpitz and jellicoe, all the names that have filled our nightmare shall be forgotten: there shall fall from our lips none but the names of the goodly game—"w.g." and ranji, johnny briggs and lohmann, spofforth and bonner, ulyett and barnes (a brace of them) and all the jolly host. we'll not forget one of them. not one. for a whole day we will go it, hammer and tongs.

and there are ever so many more things i shall want to do. i shall want to go and see the chestnuts at bushey park on chestnut sunday. i shall want to send christmas cards, and light bonfires on the fifth, and make my young friends april fools on the first, and feel what a tennis racket is like, and have hot cross buns on good friday and pancakes on shrove tuesday. i shall want to go and sit on the sands and hear nigger minstrels again, and talk about the prospects of the boat race, and take up all the pleasant threads of life that fell from our hands nearly four years ago. in short, i shall plunge into all the old harmless gaieties that we have forgotten, have no time for, no heart for, no use for to-day.

but the bus has stopped and i am turned out of eden into the snow and the slush and the never-ending night. the magic chariot goes on with its blazing lights, and a bend in the road quenches the pleasant vision in darkness.