Clerical as ever and makes a principle of having nothing to do with
Dante. Look!--there's Algernon going into the water again! He'll tire
himself out, he'll catch cold, he'll--' and here the old man rises and
hurries down to the sea's edge. `Now, Algernon,' he roars, `I don't
want to interfere with you, but I do think, my dear old friend,'--and
then, with a guffaw, he breaks off, remembering that his friend is not
deaf now nor old, and that here in Elysium, where no ills are, good
advice is not needed.



A LETTER THAT WAS NOT WRITTEN
1914.

One morning lately I saw in my newspaper an announcement that enraged
me. It was made in the driest, most casual way, as though nobody would
care a rap; and this did but whet the wrath I had in knowing that Adam
Street, Adelphi, was to be undone. The Tivoli Music Hall, about to be
demolished and built anew, was to have a frontage of thirty feet, if
you please, in Adam Street. Why? Because the London County Council,
with its fixed idea that the happiness of mankind depends on the
widening of the Strand, had decreed that the Tivoli's new frontage
thereon should be thirty feet further back, and had granted as
consolation to the Tivoli the right to spread itself around the corner
and wreck the work of the Brothers Adam. Could not this outrage be
averted? There sprang from my lips that fiery formula which has sprung
from the lips of so many choleric old gentlemen in the course of the
past hundred years and more: `I shall write to The Times.'

If Adam Street were a thing apart I should have been stricken enough,