Not that a young man should be very humble in his choice of a problem, for it is with students as with empire makers, who would do very little if a bold indiscretion were unfruitful. Let us have faith in the sunburnt cockiness of extreme youth. When it hunts the far horizon as if mirages of self-deception were the butterflies of ambition, easy to catch and easy to preserve, it is guided by the genius of research; and certainly it has done far more for the world than will ever be done by a reasoning caution that looks too far ahead. [Illustration: RAILWAY BRIDGE AT ALBI IN FRANCE] About five-and-twenty years ago, when I began in my leisure time to be a pontist, a good old slippered antiquary gave me some hints on what he called “a discreet fervour in the study of bridges.” I was to choose an English county, perhaps Derbyshire, and for eight or nine years I was to live all day long with the bridges, getting them photographed from many points of view, and recovering bits of their stories from dusty old records and forgotten muniment chests. Then a clay-cold book in two volumes was to be written, with a frigid zeal for the accuracy of minute data, and with enough glacial footnotes on every page to strike terror into that general reader who does generally read. No thought at all was to be given to the public, whose vulgar mind had neglected the many antiquaries who had told the historic truth unflinchingly, with a desperate effort to be impartial, unemotional, and yet effective also, like icebergs. I told my adviser that his ideals were those of a studious millionaire. He could afford to write without heart and to be pleased with a bad circulation; could afford also to forget that old English bridges, though at times as charmingly rustic as the Robin Hood Ballads, were not great masterpieces of art, like a good many old bridges on the Continent. If I invited readers to dine with me on Brazil nuts, unaided by nutcrackers, how in the world could I expect to receive company? But argument was useless. The antiquary had two homes--himself and the past, and in both he lived as a rapt dreamer. I see him still, a lean and dusty figure, unkempt, unwashed, for he “hated immersion” like Dr. Johnson. His favourite aim--and he never realised it--was to put a spade tenderly against a human skull buried in Pliocene deposits. “I would sooner do that,” he declared one evening, “than be married to all the prettiest women in England--girls, not widows, of course.” Courage was not his forte--except in one pugnacious habit which he shared with most antiquaries: not only did he love facts with a zeal that was always ready to defend them, but he regarded every fact as a big truth.