Perhaps Flecker was the first modern man to find himself in this predicament? The people of the old world had so little they knew surely what they wanted. They knew about Almighty God, who wore a beard and sat in an armchair about a mile above the fields, and life was very short and very long too, for the days were so full of unthinking effort. The people of the recorded olden times wished for a beautiful castle on a high hill and lived therein until death. But the hill was not so high one might see from the windows back along thirty centuries--as one may from a bungalow. In the castle there were no great volumes filled with words and pictures of things dug up by man's relentless curiosity from sand and soil in all comers of the world; there was a sentimental half-belief in dragons, but no knowledge that once upon a time only dragons had lived on the earth--that man's grandfather and grandmother were dragons; there were no movies flickering like thoughts against a white wall, no phonograph, no machinery with which to achieve the sensation of speed; no diagrams of the fourth dimension, no contrasts in life like that of Waterville, Minn., and Paris, France. In the castle the light was weak and flickering, hallways were dark, rooms deeply shadowed. The little outside world was full of shadow, and on the very top of the mind of him who lived in the castle played a dim light--underneath were shadows, fear, ignorance, will-to-ignorance. Most of all, there was not in the castle on the hill the breathless sense of imminent revelation--that today or surely tomorrow Man would at a stroke double his power and change the world again. The ancient tales of magic were the mumbling thoughts of a distant shabby little world--so, at least, thought Flecker, offended. The tales gave him no guidance. There was too much difference between his world and theirs. He wondered if he hadn't dismissed the wish for happiness rather heedlessly? He seemed to get nowhere thinking about it. He was not wise enough. In the old tales a wish for happiness was never made! He wondered why. He might chance it--just to see what would happen. The thought made him tremble. He leaped from his bed and paced the red-tiled floor, rubbing his hands together. "I want to be happy for ever," he whispered, to hear the words, careful not to touch the ring. "_Happy ... for ever_"--the two syllables of the first word, like hard little pebbles, struck musically against the bell of his imagination, but the second was a sigh. _For ever_--his spirit sank under the soft heavy impact of it. Held in his thought the word made a dreary music, fading. "_Happy for ever_"--NO!!