According to the daylight-saving law, the time might be half-past seven when I take my walk; in reality it is half-past six. With arms crossed behind my back I stroll through the tender sunshine down the poplar-lined avenue, barred by the long shadows of the trees. From here I cannot see the river, but its broad and even flow is audible. There is a soft whispering in the trees, the penetrating twittering, fluting, chirping, and sob-like trill of the songbirds fills the air. Under the moist blue heavens an aeroplane coming from the east, a stark mechanical bird with a roaring voice, now swelling, and now softly ebbing away, steers its independent way across land and river, and Bashan delights my eye with beautiful leaps at full length to and fro across the low fence of the grass plot to the left. Bashan is jumping because he actually knows that I take pleasure in his jumping. Often by means of calls and knockings upon the fence, have I encouraged him in it and praised him when he had fulfilled my wishes. And now, too, he comes after almost every jump so that I may tell him that he is a daring and elegant fence-vaulter, at which he also ventures a jump or two towards my face and beslobbers my thrust-out, defensive arm with the slaver of his mouth. These exercises, however, he likewise intends to be a kind of gymnastic morning toilet, for he smooths his ruffled coat by means of these athletic movements and rids himself of the straws which had disfigured it. It is good thus to go walking in the morning, the senses rejuvenated, the spirit purged by the healing bath and long Lethean draught of the night. You look upon the day that lies before you, regard it with strong, serene confidence, but you hesitate lazily to begin it—you are master of an unusually free and unburdened span of time lying between the dream and the day, your reward for the good use you have made of your time. The illusion that you are leading a life that is constant, simple, undissipated and benignly introspective, the illusion that you belong utterly to yourself, renders you happy. Man is disposed to regard his case or condition of the moment, be this glad or troubled, peaceful or passionate, for the true, essential, and permanent aspect of his life, and above all is in fancy inclined to elevate every happy _ex tempore_ to a radiant rule and an unbreakable habit, whereas he is really condemned to live by improvisation, from hand to mouth, so to speak.