One of the loveliest women I have ever known--the late Alison Cunningham--told me a little anecdote of the author of _The Lantern-Bearers_ which, so far as I know, has never yet been published. When little Louis was about five years old, he did something naughty, and Cummy stood him up in a corner and told him he would have to stay there for ten minutes. Then she left the room. At the end of the allotted period, she returned and said, "Time's up, Master Lou: you may come out now." But the little boy stood motionless in his penitential corner. "That's enough: time's up," repeated Cummy. And then the child mystically raised his hand, and with a strange light in his eyes, "Hush...," he said, "I'm telling myself a story...." And, in the _Christian Morals_ of Sir Thomas Browne, we may read the following passage:--"He who must needs have company, must needs have sometimes bad company. Be able to be alone. Lose not the advantage of solitude, and the society of thyself; nor be only content, but delight to be alone and single with Omnipresency. He who is thus prepared, the day is not uneasy nor the night black unto him. Darkness may bound his eyes, not his imagination. In his bed he may lie, like Pompey and his sons, in all quarters of the earth; may speculate the universe, and enjoy the whole world in the hermitage of himself." Wordsworth sitting quiescent and receptive in a lakeside landscape, little Louis standing in a corner, Sir Thomas Browne enjoying the whole world in the hermitage of himself:--what a rebuke is offered by these images to those who fret and fume away the leisure that is granted them at all the waiting places of their lives!... These disgruntled travelers _nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita_ miss their privilege and duty of enjoying life merely because they miss the point that life is, in itself, enjoyable. They are so busy reading guide-books to the vague beyond that they shut their minds to all that may be going on about them, or within them, at way-stations. They close their eyes and ears to the immediate. They veto all perception of the here and now. But life itself is always here and now; and, truly to enjoy it, we must learn to look forever with unfaltering eyes into the bright face of immediacy. * * * * *