adventure for the day. The morning's passion for experience and possession
is satisfied, and your ambitions have shrunk to the dimensions of an easy
chair.

And so I think it is with that other evening when the late blackbird is
fluting its last vesper song and the toys of the long day are put aside,
and the plans of new conquests are waste-paper. I remember hearing Sir
Edward Grey saying once how he looked forward to the time when he would
burn all his Blue-books and mulch his rose-trees with the ashes. And Mr.
Belloc has given us a very jolly picture of the way in which he is going to
spend his evening:

If I ever become a rich man,
Or if ever I grow to be old,
I will build a house with deep thatch
To shelter me from the cold,
And there shall the Sussex songs be sung
And the story of Sussex told.
I will hold my house in the high woods
Within a walk of the sea,
And the men that were boys when I was a boy
Shall sit and drink with me.

There is Mr. Birrell, too, who, as I have remarked elsewhere, once said
that when he retired he would take his modest savings into the country "and
really read Boswell."

These are typical, I suppose, of the dreams that most of us cultivate about
old age. I, too, look forward to a cottage under the high beech woods, to a
well-thumbed Boswell, and to a garden where I shall mulch my rose-trees and