Such were some of a faddist’s diversions; others too we had, of a different kind, for the every-day work that goes on behind the scenes in an office is by no means devoid of entertainment to one who is interested in the eccentricities of human nature, and is prepared to risk some wasted hours in studying them. There was a time when I went to the headquarters of the Humanitarian League in Chancery Lane almost daily for some years, and there had experience of many strange visitors and correspondents of every complexion--voluble cranks and genial impostors; swindlers begging for the cost of a railway-ticket to their distant and long-lamented homes; ex-convicts proposing to write their prison-story at the League’s expense; needy journalists anxious to pick up a paragraph; litigants who wanted gratuitous legal advice; and, worst of all, the confidential Bores who were determined to talk to one for hours together about what Mr. Stead used to call “the progress of the world.” Nor did the post often fail to bring me some queer tidings--a letter perhaps, from some zealot who sent his latest pamphlet about “God’s Dumb Animals” (himself, alas! not one of them), with a request that it should be at once forwarded to the Pope; a voluminous work in manuscript, propounding, as its author assured me, “opinions of an extraordinary and undreamt of kind”; an anthology of Bible-texts in praise of some disputed practice; a suggestion that a notorious murderer should be flogged before being hanged; a grave remonstrance from a friend who feared that public abattoirs “would pave the way for Socialism”; a request from a very troublesome correspondent that the League would award a medal to a man who had saved her from drowning; two twenty-page epistles from an American lady, who, in the first, complimented me on my “markedly intelligent view of the universe,” and in the second told me frankly that I was a fool; a note inviting me to call at a certain address, to fetch a cat whom the writer wished me to destroy; and an urgent inquiry whether sea-sand was a healthy bedding for pigs. Such communications were the daily reward of those who sat in offices to promote humanitarian principles. It was remarkable how few persons volunteered for the work.