Now that I am myself grown-up, though children occasionally flatter me by treating me as an equal, I revert sometimes to our earliest thoughts and wonder what the wool-gatherer did with all his wool. Perhaps he wove it into blankets for the poor dreamless ones of the world. They are many, for it is not so easy to be absent-minded as people think; in the first place, it is necessary to have a mind. It is wrong also to believe that wool-gatherers fill no useful place in life. I have shown how Mr. X., lost in his world of dreams, was yet of real service to us as children, and in the same way I think that we who live the hurried life derive genuine satisfaction from the spectacle of the dreamers sauntering by. If they serve no other purpose, they are at least milestones by aid of which we can estimate our own speed, and if no one were idle we would win no credit from our marvellous energy. Also they are happy, and the philosopher will always hesitate to condemn the way of life of a man who succeeds in that task. Perhaps we should all be better off gathering wool! THE PERIL OF THE FAIRIES IT is something to have heard once in a lifetime the ecstatic thrill that glorifies Essex Hall while that intellectual pirate Mr. Bernard Shaw sails out and scuttles a number of little merchant ships of thought that have never hurt anybody. The applause and admiring laughter that punctuate his periods really suggest that Fabianism makes people happy, while the continued prosperity of the group gives the lie to the cynic who reminded me how popular ping-pong was while the craze lasted, and how utterly forgotten it is to-day. But I had to rub my eyes while I stood in the overcrowded room, listening to Puck in Jaeger, more witty, perhaps, than the old Puck, but no less boyishly malicious, and ask myself whether, after all, this was only the old magic in a new form. True, civilisation had perforce made him larger in order that human beings might appreciate his eloquence, and I saw no traces of wings or magic flowers. But beyond that I recognised the same pitying contempt for mortals, the same arrogant confession of his own faults, the same naïve cunning. And then (perhaps a turn of the voice did it, or some slight slurring of the words) the enchantment passed, the ears of his audience resumed their ordinary dimensions, and I offered mentally two teaspoonfuls of honey to the real Puck, for I saw that he had tricked me into recognising his qualities in the most serious man the twentieth century knows.