passed on to other matters.

Notwithstanding that I was amused at his mistake, the label he had
supplied me with was something to be grateful for, and I am now finding
a use for it. And I think that if he, my labeller, should see this
sketch by chance and recognise himself in it, he will say with his
pleasant smile and wave of the hand, "Oh, that's his line! Yes, yes, I
described him rightly enough, thinking it haberdashery or floral texts
for cottage bedrooms, or something of that kind; I didn't imagine he
was a traveller in anything quite so small as this."




II

THE OLD MAN'S DELUSION


We know that our senses are subject to decay, that from our middle
years they are decaying all the time; but happily it is as if we didn't
know and didn't believe. The process is too gradual to trouble us; we
can only say, at fifty or sixty or seventy, that it is doubtless the
case that we can't see as far or as well, or hear or smell as sharply,
as we did a decade ago, but that we don't notice the difference. Lately
I met an extreme case, that of a man well past seventy who did not
appear to know that his senses had faded at all. He noticed that the
world was not what it had been to him, as it had appeared, for example,
when he was a plough-boy, the time of his life he remembered most
vividly, but it was not the fault of his senses; the mirror was all