finite capacity, some so microscopic as to escape us at one end of the
scale, some so vast and intangible as to escape us at the other end. I went
into the garden just now to pick some strawberries. One of them tempted me
forthwith by its ripe and luxuriant beauty. I bit into it and found it
hollowed out in the centre, and in that luscious hollow was a colony of
earwigs. For them that strawberry was the world, and a very jolly world
too--abundance of food, a soft bed to lie on, and a chamber of exquisite
perfumes. What, I wonder, was the thought of the little creatures as their
comfortable world was suddenly shattered by some vast, inexplicable power
beyond the scope of their vision and understanding? I could not help idly
wondering whether the shell of our comfortable world has been broken by
some power without which is as far beyond our apprehension as I was beyond
the apprehension of the happy dwellers in the strawberry.

And it is not only the worlds which are peculiar to the myriad creatures of
diverse instincts and faculties which are so strangely separate. We
ourselves all dwell in worlds of infinite variety. I do not mean the social
and professional worlds in which we move, though here, too, the world is
not one but many. There is not much in common between the world as it
appears to Sarah Ellen, who "runs" four looms in a Lancashire weaving shed
during fifty-one weeks in the year, and my Lady Broadacres, who suns
herself in Mayfair.

But I am speaking here of our individual world, the world of our private
thought and emotions. My world is not your world, nor yours mine. We sit
and talk with each other, we work together and play together, we exchange
confidences and share our laughter and our experiences. But ultimately we
can neither of us understand the world of the other--that world which is
the sum of a million factors of unthinkable diversity, trifles light as
air, memories, experiences, physical emotions, the play of light and colour