There are some, too, whose behaviour cannot be reconciled with the hallucination of a hotel, and they must take the house for a public institution of some kind, though of what kind I cannot guess. There was an extremely bashful youth, for instance, who roamed the garden for a while on the day after the late Duke of Cambridge's funeral, and, suddenly dashing in by the back door, wanted to know why our flag was not at half-mast. There was also a lady who called on the excuse that she had made a life-study of the Brontes, and after opining (in a guarded manner) that they came, originally, from somewhere in Yorkshire, desired to be informed how many servants we kept. I have sometimes thought of rechristening our house The Hotel of the Four Seasons, and thereby releasing its true name (The Haven) to a friend who covets it for his own. On the whole, however, these visitors disturb the house and the view from my window very little. The upper halves of them, as they pass up and down the road, appear above my garden wall much as the shadows that passed in Plato's cave. They come, enjoy their holiday, and go, leaving the window intent upon the harbour, its own folk and its own business. And now for the book, which is really not a book at all, but a chapter of one. Last autumn I returned from a holiday to find that the publishing season had begun. This was announced by a stack of new books, review copies and presentation copies, awaiting me on my window-seat. I regarded it sourly. A holiday is the most unsettling thing in the world. At the end of it I regain the well-worn chair with a sigh of pleasure and reach for the familiar tobacco-jar, wondering how I could have been fool enough to leave them; yet somehow this lively sense of repurchased habit does not go far enough and compel me to work. Being at home is a game, and so good a game that I play at it merely, rearranging my shelves and, under pretence of dealing with arrears of correspondence, skimming the literary papers and book-catalogues found amid the pile of letters. It happened that the first postal-wrapper to be broken enclosed a copy of _The Academy_, and _The Academy_ opened with this sentence: "Since our last issue we have received one hundred and nineteen new books and reprints." I looked across to the pile on my window-seat and felt it to be insignificant, though it interfered with my view of the English Channel. One hundred and nineteen books in a single week! Yet who was I to exclaim at their number?--I, who (it appeared) had contributed one of them? With that I remembered something which had happened just before my holiday, and began to reflect on it, for the first time seriously.