Most men who have developed any appreciable fund of humour must know how the petty annoyances of life can be laughed away, almost as soon as they are seen advancing. When, for example, your lost pencil is discovered in its hiding-place between the leaves of a rarely consulted book; or, on the other hand, after endowing it with various sorts of mischievous flight, you perceive it lying close by you on the desk, where it has been dutifully {327} complying with its proper law of inertia; you may snatch a compensating laugh from a moment’s reflection on the small ironies of things, or on the vast wastefulness of the world in the matter of hypotheses. Your vexation at the children who are at play in the road in front of your bicycle and refuse to retire till your bell rings a third time, instantly gives way to an agreeable smile as you sympathetically shift the point of view by recalling the fact that they are on their proper playground. The dreary ugliness of a London street in winter will now and again be lit up as with sunshine for you if your eye is focussed for the amusing, as when the driver of a slow van goes on nodding in blissful ignorance, while the driver of your ’bus behind, justly proud of his vehicle’s speed, pelts him mercilessly with the most awakening of epithets. It is much the same with the small vexations inflicted by our social world. We may no doubt feel hurt just for a moment when, at a concert, we see a big hat thrust itself betwixt our eyes and a face which has held them captive, wearing a look of the tragic muse as it leans yearningly over the violin from which it seems, like a mother’s face, to draw the sobbing tones. Yet, even as the nerve smarts, we may half-seize the glorious absurdity of the hat and its bobbings. Or, again, when an untimely call interrupts some bit of nice thinking and leaves the nerves tingling, we may smile for a moment as we catch a glimpse of the simple faith of the visitor in the supreme importance of the cause he pleads, a glimpse sufficient to make us half-aware of a like “subjectivity” in our own estimation of selected tasks. Social bores are vexations which, perhaps, ought not to be called petty. Humorous persons, one suspects, are specially exposed to their attacks, since they are a tolerant folk, preferring on the whole to suffer rather than to hurt others. {328} But here, also, the humorous have their remedies. It suffices, for example, to reflect for a short moment on the droll pathos of the circumstance that persons, between whom and ourselves we find no attaching sympathies, should select us for their importunate attentions. Even when the destinies throw us together with men and women from whom we instinctively recoil, as from creatures of a species at once closely akin to ours yet sundered from us by impassable boundaries, a reflective humour may devise alleviations. The aggressive self-assertion of a plutocrat, with his “buy-you-up” sort of stare, and