Yet apart from this, there isn't a doubt, I think, that these super-days stand out in memory, and gain their constructive force less by reason of their muscular exaltation than by virtue of their spiritual vision. For even in the days of the doughnut and the hot bath this last wasn't altogether absent. The doughnut marked the closing of an epoch and the dawn of its successor. It meant the passage--and to a certain extent the conscious passage, too--of an irresponsible childhood into a region of honourable reputation. It was a doughnut that had been bestowed by the hands of a captain. While the hot bath, careless of defeat, merely whispered how great had been the game. And in their successors of later years this spiritual factor has tended to emphasise itself in an ever-growing proportion. Wordsworth might almost have selected the theme, I think, for an Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in Middle Age. I can remember one such day on Butser Hill, during a snatched week-end in Hampshire, and another that is summed up for me in a bend of heather-bordered road, turning, at a hot day's end, towards Stronachlacher and a green lawn above Loch Katrine. And now, with an equal unexpectedness, there has come the latest of them all. You know how it goes on a holiday--the holiday, that is, of a man to whom holidays are rare and very blessed. For the first day your mind has not yet freed itself from town and toil and the hundred other interests for which they stand. Nor has your body quite overcome the lassitude inspired by pavements, and encouraged by taxi-cabs and broughams. Your host, too, wants to learn the latest tidings from the great metropolis; what So-and-so thinks of the political situation; the prevailing opinion on stocks and shares; the last pronouncements on art and music; the newest good thing in plays. And perhaps even, if you chance to be of the same profession, you fall to talking shop. Not even the magic of plunging streams and deep, rock-shaded pools is quite sufficient, for the moment, to dispel the urban atmosphere that still clings about you. Your unused muscles remind you of the reason for their flabbiness. Your eye, too long engaged upon other sights, is not yet quick enough to mark the swift rise among those ripples at the tail of the pool. And you return from your first day's fishing a little annoyed with yourself, aching as regards the wrist and thigh, and more often than not with a light or empty bag. Yet even so, mark the change in your after-dinner talk! Smoking there round the hall fire, surrounded by rods and guns and cases of fish and game, you no longer deliver yourself of opinions on the rubber market or the precise value of the latest vaccine. You discuss instead the reason why you missed that pounder under Applebrook Bridge. And you sit for long minutes staring through a blue tobacco haze into the wood-fire's heart, presumably thinking, but in reality doing nothing of the kind.