How grateful one is on such occasions to the authors who have written books of that kind! Somebody once said that there were books which it is a positive pleasure to read. To my mind the most precious of all books are those which seem to do the work for you. You don’t have to bother; you are not aware that you are reading. Nobody could say this of the works of George Meredith or of Henry James. You may be interested, delighted, and moved, but you know you are reading. Anthony Trollope and William de Morgan do the work for me, personally; so do Victor Hugo, George Sand, Count Tolstoy, and Rudyard Kipling. Then there are books which one can’t stop reading. To this class belong, in my case, the works of Dumas: “Monte Cristo,” “La Reine Margot,” and the many volumes which tell of the Musketeers. “Monte Cristo” is the only book which for me has ever annihilated time, space, and place, and everything else. I read it at school at Eton, on a whole school-day. At three you had to go into school, which lasted till four. I began reading, or rather flew back to my book, as soon as luncheon was over, about half past two. I had just got to the part where Dantès is escaping from the Château d’If. I sat reading in a small room in my tutor’s house. A quarter to three struck; three struck; Dumas silenced those bells, whose sound your whole unconscious self, as a rule, automatically obeyed. You couldn’t forget that sound if you wanted to, any more than a soldier forgets the bugle-calls that mark the routine of the day, or the sailor forgets the boatswain’s whistle. The sound is in his flesh and bones as well as in his ears. Nature responds to it automatically, unconsciously.