round him, maddeningly. This kept on, night after night. The
parson, whom he consulted, said it was only frogs; but Gissing
told the constable he thought God had something to do with it.

Then willow trees and poplars showed a pallid bronze sheen,
forsythias were as yellow as scrambled eggs, maples grew knobby
with red buds. Among the fresh bright grass came, here and there,
exhilarating smells of last year's buried bones. The little
upward slit at the back of Gissing's nostrils felt prickly. He
thought that if he could bury it deep enough in cold beef broth
it would be comforting. Several times he went out to the pantry
intending to try the experiment, but every time Fuji happened to
be around. Fuji was a Japanese pug, and rather correct, so
Gissing was ashamed to do what he wanted to. He pretended he had
come out to see that the icebox pan had been emptied properly.

"I must get the plumber to put in a pukka drain-pipe to take the
place of the pan," Gissing said to Fuji; but he knew that he had
no intention of doing so. The ice-box pan was his private test of
a good servant. A cook who forgot to empty it was too careless,
he thought, to be a real success.

But certainly there was some curious elixir in the air. He went
for walks, and as soon as he was out of sight of the houses he
threw down his hat and stick and ran wildly, with great
exultation, over the hills and fields. "I really ought to turn
all this energy into some sort of constructive work," he said to
himself. No one else, he mused, seemed to enjoy life as keenly
and eagerly as he did. He wondered, too, about the other sex. Did
they feel these violent impulses to run, to shout, to leap and