ran along the platform just now. It is the really important subject of
catching trains. There are some people who make nothing of catching trains.
They can catch trains with as miraculous an ease as Cinquevalli catches
half-a-dozen billiard-balls. I believe they could catch trains in their
sleep. They are never too early and never too late. They leave home or
office with a quiet certainty of doing the thing that is simply stupefying.
Whether they walk, or take a bus, or call a taxi, it is the same: they do
not hurry, they do not worry, and when they find they are in time and that
there's plenty of room they manifest no surprise.

I have in mind a man with whom I once went walking among the mountains on
the French-Italian border. He was enormously particular about trains and
arrangements the day or the week before we needed them, and he was
wonderfully efficient at the job. But as the time approached for catching a
train he became exasperatingly calm and leisured. He began to take his time
over everything and to concern himself with the arrangements of the next
day or the next week, as though he had forgotten all about the train that
was imminent, or was careless whether he caught it or not. And when at last
he had got to the train, he began to remember things. He would stroll off
to get a time-table or to buy a book, or to look at the engine--especially
to look at the engine. And the nearer the minute for starting the more
absorbed he became in the mechanism of the thing, and the more animated was
his explanation of the relative merits of the P.L.M. engine and the
North-Western engine. He was always given up as lost, and yet always
stepped in as the train was on the move, his manner aggravatingly
unruffled, his talk pursuing the quiet tenor of his thought about engines
or about what we should do the week after next.

Now I am different. I have been catching trains all my life, and all my
life I have been afraid I shouldn't catch them. Familiarity with the habits