As for the flute-player, if I see him no more with wakeful eyes, I know that he is never very far away. Likely enough one of these wintry evenings, in the hour before bedtime, when the fire burns brighter and brighter in the hearth, I shall look up and see him sitting astride of the fireguard and puffing out his cheeks over his shining flute. Not many nights ago I heard some one playing the flute out in the street, and I went down and found a poor fellow blowing his heart out for rare _sous_. There was not much enchantment about him—he had been dismissed from a music-hall orchestra for drinking red wine to excess—but he was a real flute-player, and I could well imagine that such a man might be driven to intemperance by the failure to achieve those “unheard melodies” not to be detected by the sensual ear. To be a bad flute-player must be rather like being a bad poet, a joyous but sadly finite life. He was a sad dog, this earthly musician, and he frankly conceived the ideal state as a kind of communal Bodega where thirsty souls could find peace in satiety. I gave him fivepence to help him on his way, and left him to make doleful music in the night till he had enough money to supply his crimson dreams. But he ought not to have said that my flute-player was only an amateur. THE WOOL-GATHERER WHEN he walked down the streets with his head drooping towards the pavement and his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat the grown-ups would say, “There goes poor Mr. X. wool-gathering as usual”; and we children used to wonder what he did with all the wool and where he found it to gather. Perhaps he collected it from the thorn-bushes whereon the sheep had scratched themselves, or perhaps, being a magician, he had found a way to shear the flocks that we often saw in the sky on fine and windy days. At all events, for a while his strange calling made us regard him with interest as a man capable of doing dark and mysterious things. Then the grown-ups tried to dispel our illusions by explaining that they only meant that he was absent-minded, a dreamer, an awful warning to young folk who had their way to make in the world. This admirable moral lesson, like most of their moral lessons, failed because they did not appreciate the subtlety of our minds. We saw that the wool-gatherer did no recognisable work, wore comfortably untidy clothes, walked in the mud as much as he wanted to, and, in fine, lived a life of enviable freedom; and we thought that on the whole when we grew up we should like to be wool-gatherers too. Even the phrase “absent-minded” excited our admiration; for we knew that it would be a fine thing if our thoughts could travel in foreign countries, where there are parrots and monkeys loose in the woods, while our bodies were imprisoned in the schoolroom under the unsympathetic supervision of the governess of the moment. Although we no longer credited him with being a magician, the