satisfying as that I enter when I take down the chessmen and marshal my
knights and squires on the chequered field. It is then I am truly happy. I
have closed the door on the infinite and inexplicable and have come into a
kingdom where justice reigns, where cause and effect follow "as the night
the day," and where, come victory or come defeat, the sky is always clear
and the joy unsullied.




ON THE DOWNS


We spread our lunch on the crown of one of those great billows of the downs
that stand along the sea. Down in the hollows tiny villages or farmsteads
stood in the midst of clumps of trees, and the cultivated lands looked like
squares of many-coloured carpets, brown carpets and yellow carpets and
green carpets, with the cloud shadows passing over them and moving like
battalions up the gracious slopes of the downs beyond. A gleam of white in
the midst of one of the brown fields caught the eye. It seemed like a patch
of snow that had survived the rigours of the English summer, but suddenly
it rose as if blown by the wind and came towards us in tiny flakes of white
that turned to seagulls. They sailed high above us uttering that querulous
cry that seems to have in it all the unsatisfied hunger of the sea.

In this splendid spaciousness the familiar forms seem incredibly
diminutive. That little speck moving across one of the brown carpets is a
ploughman and his team. That white stream that looks like milk flowing over
the green carpet is a flock of sheep running before the sheep-dog to
another pasture. And the ear no less than the eye learns to translate the