To the enviable reader, when, after much water-spilling and cracking of crowns, Jack has got his Jill, and the wedding-bells are lin-lan-loning behind the dropt curtain, there is the satisfaction of certainty that so much love, and one pair of hearts at least, are safe from further chance and change in the whirligig of life. But to the teller of the tale, there is no such assurance. Just as his dream-children came out of an immortality he did not devise, so will they persist through an eternity not of his controlling; and for ever they will be subject to the same odds of bliss or disaster as any stranger that may pass his door. Yet, being only human, he will nevertheless go on with his tales in the secret hope that Jove may be caught napping, and a little heaven be brought down to earth before its allotted time. For living in a world of law and order—where even Omnipotence may not deny to every cause its outcome—is too realistically like camping under fire. The old fatalists had peace of mind because they believed it availed nothing to crouch when the bullets screamed overhead, nor even to dodge a spent shot. But to take one’s stand in the face of the myriad cross-purposes and side-issues of an orderly universe, needs a vastly different temper. Perhaps it is just the secret longing in all hearts to have at least a little make-believe of certitude—if nowhere else but in the pages of a story—by which the art of fiction so hugely thrives. I have put out the candles, each shining under its little red umbrella of paper, the better to see the joyous colour of the fire. When drab thoughts come—those night-birds of sombre feather—the pure untinctured glow from well-kindled logs has a wonderful way of setting them to flight. Let unassailable optimism make his fire of coals: for him of questioning, craving, often craven heart, there is no warmth like that from seasoned timber. Coals, with their dynamic energy, their superfluity of smoke, their sudden incongruous jets of flame, seem to be for ever insisting on facts you would fain forget a while, much as you may admire them and depend on them—the progress and competition of outer life. But wood fires serve to draw the mind away from modernism in all its phases. So that you burn the right kind of wood, and this is important, your fireside thoughts need never leave the realm of cheery retrospect. Good, seasoned logs of beech or ash are the best. Oak has no half moods; it must make either a furnace unapproachable, or smoulder away in dead, dull embers. Elm gives poor comfort, and the slightest damp appals it. Poplar is charity-fuel; burn it will, indeed, to good purpose, but too explosively. There is no rest by a fire of poplar: one must be for ever treading out or parrying the vagrant sparks.