should invite me, without misgiving. And to this day I am rather proud
of having been mentioned, though not by name, and not consciously, and
unfavourably, by Swinburne.

I wonder that I cannot recall more than I do recall of those hours at
The Pines. It is odd how little remains to a man of his own past--how
few minutes of even his memorable hours are not clean forgotten, and
how few seconds in any one of those minutes can be recaptured... I am
middle-aged, and have lived a vast number of seconds. Subtract one
third of these, for one mustn't count sleep as life. The residual
number is still enormous. Not a single one of those seconds was
unimportant to me in its passage. Many of them bored me, of course;
but even boredom is a positive state: one chafes at it and hates it;
strange that one should afterwards forget it! And stranger still that
of one's actual happinesses and unhappinesses so tiny and tattered a
remnant clings about one! Of those hours at The Pines, of that past
within a past, there was not a minute nor a second that I did not
spend with pleasure. Memory is a great artist, we are told; she
selects and rejects and shapes and so on. No doubt. Elderly persons
would be utterly intolerable if they remembered everything.
Everything, nevertheless, is just what they themselves would like to
remember, and just what they would like to tell to everybody. Be sure
that the Ancient Mariner, though he remembered quite as much as his
audience wanted to hear, and rather more, about the albatross and the
ghastly crew, was inwardly raging at the sketchiness of his own mind;
and believe me that his stopping only one of three was the merest
oversight. I should like to impose on the world many tomes about The
Pines.

But, scant though my memories are of the moments there, very full and