Pisa is sleepy, but the railway officials are wide awake. The man who sells me my ticket "forgets" one lira. This answers capitally with innocent old ladies from England or Germany. The old lady counts her change, and if she has carefully ascertained the fare by reading the price marked on her ticket, she finds at once that there is a halfpenny wanting. She never learns that this is the Government tax. "If you please," she begins; or, "_Bitte_," and then she goes off into--not hysterics, but French, and murmurs, "_Seevooplay, je pongse vous devays avoir donnay moi un sou_--er--er--more, _vous comprenny?_" or, "_Il y a encore_--er--er--_fünfzig, vous savay, à moi à payer._" Then the official answers, also in French, "_Ah nong, Madame, ceci est la taxe doo gouvernemang sul biglietto, capisce?_" Whereupon the old lady is so agitated by the thought that she has wrongfully accused him of stealing a soldo, that she never notices that he has withheld a lira. If she counts her money later in the day, she will blame those nasty lira notes, which stick together so, that she must have given two somewhere instead of one. But the railway clerk is also prepared for any more exacting stranger, and holds the extra note ready for him. The clerk at Pisa does so, handing it to me, without a word of objection or explanation, as soon as I ask for it. The system is as perfect as it is simple. Having obtained my change, I start for the Mediterranean. A FIRST IMPRESSIONIST. * * * * * THE TRUISMS OF LIFE. (_By the Right Hon. the Author of "The Platitudes of Life," M.P., F.R.S., D.C.L., LL.D._) CHAPTER I.--_De Omnibus Rebus._ "_Ars longa, vita brevis;_"[1] and indeed "man wants but little here below, nor wants that little long."[2] An oriental writer has told us that "all flesh is grass," to which a Scots poet[3] has replied, that "A man's a man for a' that." There is a Greek aphorism, not sufficiently well known, which says [Greek: gnôthi seauton]. This has been ably rendered by POPE in the words "Know thyself."[4] Proverbially "piety begins at home," but it is wrong to deduce from this that education ends when we leave school; "it goes on through life."[5] Books are an educational force. They "have often been compared to friends,"[6] whom we "never cut."[7] They "are better than all the tarts and toys in the world."[8] It is not generally known that "English literature is the inheritance of the English race,"[9] on whose Empire, by the way, "the sun never sets." We even have "books in the running brooks," as the Bard of Avon[10] tells us; so that not only "he that runs," but he that swims, "may read."