Walking to-day, like a stranger dropped upon this planet, towards Victoria, I chanced to see a female of this species, a certain Mrs. Jones of my acquaintance, approaching from the opposite direction. Immediately I found myself performing the oddest set of movements and manoeuvres. I straightened my back and simpered, I lifted my hat in the air; and then, seizing the paw of this female, I moved it up and down several times, giving utterance to a set formula of articulated sounds. These anthropological gestures and vocalisations, and my automatic performance of them, reminded me that it was after all from inside one of them, that I was observing these Bipeds. CHAOS Punctual, commonplace, keeping all appointments, as I go my round in the obvious world, a bit of Chaos and old Night seems to linger on inside me; a dark bewilderment of mind, a nebulous sea of speculation, a looming of shadowy universes out of nothing, and their collapse, as in a dream. THE GHOST When people talk of Ghosts and Hauntings, I never mention the Apparition by which I am pestered, the Phantom that shadows me about the streets, the image or spectre, so familiar, so like myself, and yet so abhorrent, which lurks in the plate-glass of shop-windows, or leaps out of mirrors to waylay me. THE HOUR-GLASS At the corner of Oakley Street I stopped for a moment's chat with my neighbour, Mrs. Wheble, who was waiting there for a bus. 'Do tell me,' she asked, 'what you have got in that odd-looking parcel?' 'It's an hour-glass,' I said, taking it out of its paper wrapping. 'I saw it in a shop in the King's Road. I've always wanted an hour-glass to measure time by. What a mystery Time really is, when you think of it! See, the sands are running now while we are talking. I've got here in my hand the most potent, the most enigmatic, the most fleeting of all essences--Time, the sad cure for all our sorrows--but I say! There's your bus just starting. You'll miss it if you don't look out!' THE LATCHKEY I was astonished, I was almost horror-struck by the sight of the New Moon at the end of the street. In bewilderment and Blake-like wonder I stood and gazed at it on my doorstep. For what was I doing there; I, a wanderer, a pilgrim, a nomad of the desert, with no home save where the evening found me--what was my business on that doorstep; at what commonplace had the Moon caught me with a latchkey in my hand? GOOD PRACTICE We met in an omnibus last evening. 'And where are you going now?' she asked, as she looked at me with amusement. 'I am going, if the awful truth must be told, to dine in Grosvenor Square.' 'Lord!' she colloquially replied, 'and what do you do that for?' 'I do it because I am invited. And besides,' I went on, 'let me remind you of what the Persian Mystics say of the Saints--that the Saints are sometimes rich, that God sometimes endows them with an outward show of wealth to hide them from the profane.'