This morning there was an indignant man to breakfast at Cookham. Nothing pleased the creature, and the crowded coffee-room was well advised of his discontent, for he took care to proclaim it to all and sundry. He had begun the morning badly, so it seemed, and was like to continue thus throughout the day. The birds began it by arousing him from sleep at dawn, and surely never had birds of any sort been so anathematised since the time of that famous jackdaw of Rheims. The rooks and crows, the sparrows and pigeons, that cawed and chattered and murmured with the coming of day in neighbouring elms and hedgerows, on roof-tops and in pigeon-cots, had awakened him and kept him counting the dawning hours, and that was why the toast, the tea, the eggs and the butter were all at fault to this man. He badgered the coffee-room waiter, who--poor fool!--respected him the more for it at the expense of the less contentious of the guests, and he plied all that waiter’s attention with a grumbling commentary, that went far to show him in the character of the fault-finder on principle. You see, that man who has a great capacity for indignation, with a voice of roaring and words of fury, is the man who gets on in this world. He who takes the world by the throat, and grips it hard and shakes it violently, and kicks it where honour is the more readily wounded, is the man who, at the end of the struggle, comes out “upper dog.” But the cultivation of the furious manner is a wearing cult, and besides, does not sit well on a man of little chest, small voice, and gentle eye. Other things, too, are wanting to a complete success. Let me put them all together, like Mrs. Glass, the historic, the well-beloved:-- Take a goodly presence, one pair of sound lungs, some original sin, and a small pinch of merit. Throw them all into your avocation, and, adding some impudence to taste, let the whole boil vigorously until public attention is attracted. Then serve up hot.[1] Possibly that reader of a frankness so unmistakable, who annotates the margins of books from his Mudie (or even, goodness knows! from his Public Library), may disagree with these views, and fill these fair margins with criticisms of this view of life; but (a word in your ear, my friend) consider awhile, the view is sound. This by the way. Excuse, if you please, the digression. At Cookham we were bitten with a fancy for taking our meals _al fresco_, so when the time came for departure, imagine us stowing away into what I suppose are called the “stern sheets” of our boat sufficient provender for the day. There was a loaf and a pot of raspberry jam, some butter and a tin of some sort of meat. A couple of plates furnished us luxuriantly in the crockery department, and as for a table-knife, why, we forgot all about it, and when, in a quiet backwater, the time came for luncheon, we did our little best, which indeed was little enough, with a pocket-knife. [Illustration: DOVE COTE, HURLEY.]