Page:Et Cetera, a Collector's Scrap-Book (1924).djvu/41



F WE ACCEPT Johnson’s definition of madness as a perturbation of the faculties, we must acknowledge that there is more than a conventional association between madness and the earlier months of the year. While the buds are breaking, the faculties of all of us are perturbed with a vengeance, and never a green leaf unrolls beneath the sky but one of us tramples under foot the laws he has made for the guidance of his life. Sometimes our mania is clear to every one, sometimes we are the most cunning of madmen, only wearing the straws in solitude, and duly imitating the lives of our grandfathers before our suspicious neighbors. But, however this may be, we are all mad in the spring and though their perturbations vary as widely as the new leaves, our faculties sing drunken songs together along the wind-swept streets of the world.