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 friends will know him no more until these delicious months are over.

In truth there is no harm in these vernal follies; they are only the fuller expression of that self over which our conventional cunnings have no control. Perhaps if we were honest and not quite so civilised we should dance blithely along Piccadilly every day of our short lives. Perhaps if we understood our neighbours better we should endure every night with the dreamy colours of our desires. As it is, it is only in the spring that we are willing to acknowledge the charm—I might almost say virtue—of wise excess. Over a certain section of one of the London parks there used to rule a policeman so dour that he never wearied of condemning himself for the frivolous character of his dreams. He felt that the midnight caperings of his spirit went far to counteract the rectitude of his conscious life, and over all his asceticism there hung a bitter consciousness of its futility. At last, on a golden day of spring, he proposed to and was accepted by a nursemaid of secure charms, and the kingdom of paradox knew him no more. He traced his fall to a bed of tulips.

But most cruel of all are the dealings of this wanton season with those of us who write about little things with wide, splendid words. Never, it would seem, are our emotions more trivial, never are the words with which we hold them wider and more