Certain sour-faced socialists would explain everything by the economic situation--yet surely here was poetry pure and simple--nothing but poetry. It was on Lough Dan I caught my first trout, just under a dark cliff rising straight out of the water. And many a fish I've caught in that spot. I was staying there with my father and mother when my father was seized with rheumatic fever, further aggravated by gout, and I helped my mother to nurse him. Some years afterwards I myself had that fever. I know all about it. Your soul turns to blackness, wrath overpowers you and fills you with a sort of devilry. For a few days I was as Swift or Carlyle at their fiercest. I hated everyone. I had such insight and gift of utterance that I knew how to wound anyone who approached me. It is not surprising, therefore, that my father, suffering from this fever, should for once have been unreasonable. He asked me to move him in bed. In a great flutter of fear and anxiety I tried to do so. If you touched him he groaned, and though I tried my very best I could not satisfy him. Beside himself with pain and with my awkwardness, he called out impatiently 'Place me diagonally in the bed.' The word 'diagonal' I knew only in Euclid. Yet he would only repeat 'Place me diagonally.' Afterwards, amidst all his pain, he laughed and apologised, and said that he got the word, not from Euclid at all but from Tristram Shandy, where years afterwards I found it. When they had retired behind their bed-curtains, Mrs. Shandy said to Mr. Shandy 'I think Uncle Toby is going to be married.' Then said Mr. Shandy 'He won't be able to lie diagonally in bed any more.' It was always an annoyance to Mr. Shandy that he could not puzzle Mrs. Shandy, because she never bestowed a further thought upon anything that she did not understand at once. But my father, when he flung at me the word 'diagonal,' knew that he was inflicting on me the pain of puzzledom and that was a passing satisfaction to him, even though the effect was to increase my awkwardness and prolong his own discomfort. Is it because of the sociable instinct that when we are ourselves in pain we desire to share it with somebody else? A man worried about his business doesn't like his smiling wife to go on smiling, and yet if she doesn't smile, it is a breach of all the proprieties that should control a wife's behaviour.