Civilization, Medieval; Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 1066-1485
the mirror; it recognises its figure with great satisfaction and believes
positively to have found its cub.' (This property of the mirror may
explain the puzzling question why so many ladies persist in dressing like
their own daughters.) Thus the hunters escape while the tiger stops where
it is, and I think that I had better follow the tiger's example.
[Illustration: '_The tiger and the mirror._']
IV
DEATH AND DOCTORS
To read a medical dictionary is to marvel that any man should enjoy even
brief intervals of health, there are so many delicate organs in the body
and so many diseases lying in wait for them. Read the pronouncements of
specialists on diet and the dangers which attend the eating of any food or
the drinking of any liquid, and the marvel grows. Add the extraordinary
facility with which accidents occur, and the margin between life and death
becomes surprisingly narrow. The crew of a destroyer are habitually
separated from the other world by about a quarter of an inch of steel.
With most of us the partition is less obvious, less constant and uniform,
but very nearly as thin in places. For any but the most hardened there
must always be a feeling of pleased surprise upon emerging safely on the
other side of Piccadilly Circus or the Embankment by Blackfriars. (It is
true that in the latter case a paternal, not to say grandmotherly, Council
has provided the unexciting alternative of a subway, but only leisurely
athletes have the time or energy to descend and reascend those stairs.)
The average City man is within inches and seconds of death every day, and
it is only when the inches and seconds become fractional that he realises
for the moment his insecurity of tenure. Which is just as well. Every age
has its own dangers: we have the motor car, unwitting apostle of socialism
in its brutal, individualistic disregard for the rights of others;
mediæval man, I am inclined to think, ran most risk from the quick temper
of his fellows.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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