the first signs of budding leaves, heralds of spring and sunshine, and the long June days. “Cricket is coming,” I shall tell myself. The last Test Match in South Africa is over; only another month of football. It is high time that I was thinking of putting some oil on those old bats of mine. And now that my book is finished, my season’s cricket, I shall remind myself, will be unharassed by financial worries. I shall play three times a week, and on the fourth sit at Lord’s in the top gallery of the pavilion and watch Hearne and Hendren pile another double century on to their list of third-wicket partnerships. And when summer is over and once again in mid-September I take down from its shelf my red-and-white jersey and my studded boots; when these pages are with the booksellers and the critics, I shall be hard at work on another and, it is to be hoped, less unworthy book. To-day will be as dead then as yesterday is now. I shall be disappointed, naturally, if people do not like my book; but I shall not be broken-hearted. There is time in plenty. But I also know that forty years from now, when the corner has been reached, when I have definitely turned my back upon the future,--the dull, uninteresting, unromantic future; the future that can bring me no new thing--when I have set out upon my second journey into the unknown, my journey “_à la recherche du temps perdu_”; when I shall try to recreate the past through an endless series of associations; the smell of wet stone that will recall to me the cloisters and high garden walls of Sherborne; the taste of cocoa that will recapture for me the depression of Sunday nights in the autumn of 1915 and the spring of 1916, when after an early dinner and a cup of cocoa I set out with my father to catch the last train from Euston back to camp; the sound of dance music, of “The Sheik” and “Honolulu Eyes”; the chance glimpses through a carriage window of a square-towered church, of the sudden aspect of sunlight on old stone; when, through the associated memory of taste and sight and smell and sense, I shall recompose that picture of all that my life has been and is not; then I know that I shall take down again from the shelf the books that I have written in the early twenties, and that they will possess for me a significance that they have never had for me before, and they can have for no one else. They will be the spade with which I shall unearth the past.