He is now living, broken and prematurely aged, in a brick house which he has built for himself in a charming part of the County of Surrey. He has recently discovered that the title to his freehold is insecure: an action is pending. Meanwhile, a spring of water has broken out under the foundations of the building, and some quarter of a mile before its windows, obscuring the view of the Weald in which he particularly delighted, a very large factory with four tall chimneys is in process of erection. These things have depressed him almost to the verge of despair, and he can only forget his miseries in motoring. He is continually fined for excessive speed, though by nature the most cautious of men, and terrified by high speeds, and I learn only to-day that as he was getting ready to go into Guildford to dispute a further fine before the Bench a backfire has put his wrist out of joint, and he suffers intolerable pain. _Militia est Vita Hominis!_ The Contented Man Lucifer, for some time a bishop in Southern Italy (you did not know that, but it is true nevertheless, and you will find his name in the writings of Duchesne, and he took part in councils; nay, there was a time when I knew the very See of which he was bishop, but the passage of years effaces all these things)--Lucifer, I say, laid it down in his System of Morals that contentment was a virtue, and said that it could be aimed at and acquired positively, just as any other virtue can. Then there are others who have said that it was but a frame of mind and the result of several virtues; but these are the thinkers. The great mass of people are willing to say that contentment is strictly in proportion to the amount of money one may have, and they are wrong. I remember now there was a Sultan, or some such dignitary, in Spain, who counted the days of his life which had been filled with content, and found that they were seventeen. He was lucky; there are not many of us who can say the same. Then once a man told me this story about contentment, which seemed to me full of a profound meaning. It seems there was once an old gentleman who was possessed of something over half a million pounds, a banker, and this old gentleman every night of his life would go through certain little private books of his, compare them with the current list of prices, and estimate to a penny what he was worth before he slept. It was always a great pleasure to him to note the figures growing larger, and a great pain to him to note the rare occasions when they had shrunk a little in twenty-four hours. It so happened that this old gentleman lost a considerable sum of money which he had imprudently lent to a distant and foreign country too much praised in the newspapers, and he worried so much over the loss that he became ill and could not go to his office. His sons kept on the business for him, and every succeeding week they lost more and more of the money. But such was their filial piety that every night they