ill. My dear mother made me promise to steal apples no more; and she

said to me: “Though I cannot always see you, God can, for He is always walking about everywhere.”

“What is He like?” I asked, and then she described Him.

Not long after that I was going up a lonely lane near our house when I suddenly spied some green gooseberries in a long front garden. Being a born vagabond, I opened the gate and crept in, and kneeling down by the bushes I stole a pocketful of the unripe gooseberries. Just as I was bolting off an old gentleman with a long white beard, who held a walking-stick to help him along, quietly opened the gate, walked in and looked at me with solemn eyes. I stood before him trembling like a leaf, quite certain that God stood before me! I hung my head with shame and said: “Oh, God, I am so sorry, please forgive me”; and then I saw a kind look in God’s eyes. I promised never to steal again. He let me out of the gate; and I rushed off home, thrilled with excitement. I almost burst the door open and, rushing up to my mother, shouted: “I’ve seen God! He’s such a kind old man. He’s given me a penny!” Sometimes now I think that God is dead, that He has died of sheer loneliness and grief over the sad lot of His lost children.

I have often wondered what I have lost through embracing scallawagism with its visionary splendours. Probably, were it not for that, I should be the proud possessor of a brick house in a decorous suburb, and oh! vast ambition, wear a white collar and cuffs. And, who knows, be pushing my lawn-mower, hiding my sarcastic grin over its ostentatious hum—as I watch my envious neighbour cut his grass with shears!

Even so, I think the greater prize is in being able to sit over the hearth fire or the camp fire with one’s comrades, revelling in the realism of the “Not Permissible,” turning the Universe the other way and singing the reminiscent vagabond’s Excelsior—Onward to the Past! Ever back to some happy past, back to the miser hoards from the glorious Past to the loaded wine cellars of dreamland’s infinity. To uncork the bottled dead sunsets, foaming champagnes of forgotten forest moonlights and blazing camp fires, bubbling laughter and friendly eyes. Drink deeply to her lips of other days, renew the old vows, clasp her tightly, gaze in her eyes ere the desert wind blow her from your arms—as scattered dust! And, if she be old, if her face, her loveliness, be changed to the wrinkled map, the sad parchment whereon Time’s hand ever toils to write creation’s grief, kiss her passionately, dip her in the bath of old cleansing imagination, rewhiten her limbs and make her beautiful! Watch her happiness! Make the only future man ever knew, or ever will know; gladden and become rich with life’s old wine of the beautifully unreal! Friend, shut your eyes and look at the past; see sunsets and sunrises, the mirrored blue days of silent skies, soaring birds, ancient cities, nations and their histories, empires of splendid chaotic violence, laughter, love and intense tragical drama. Now shut your eyes and look at the future—can you see one moment of its reality? No, you cannot. So make your spiritual creed some dim, long-ago remembrance of your own happiness, and cherish and make the old the new! Make yesterday, and to-day, and to-morrow shining planets that came, and are coming from the illimitable past to swim into the happy skies of your ken. And let the lawn-mower’s triumphant, respectable humming go by!

Probably we vagabonds are mad, and the great majority who laugh at sentiment are the really sane ones. How strange indeed if, after all, the poets are wrong, and the great and glorious aim and end of the Universe is—affluence, with flabbiness, grand pianofortes, Brussels carpets, retinues of wooden servants and gold! Gold! Indeed, for all those things we vagabonds must hold the candle to the devil. For alas! the body cannot live on sunsets and the memory of sad derelicts, dead sailors and forgotten heroes. But mentally we are wealthy. We have explored the gold-fields of the universe and struck a rich vein. It is rough gold, truly, but perhaps our Creator never meant it to be reforged and rehallmarked after He scattered it among the stars. Certainly it has always appealed to me in the rough state, more so than in the polish of strange, unmusical voices, high collars and a great lack of appreciation for shabby men. We vagabonds are not conscientious judges of worldly greatness. We are strangely biassed in favour of those lost outcasts who drift on the waters of infinity, singing chanteys to the wandering stars, and not caring so long as “God’s in His heaven—all’s right with the world!” What matters if men are happy? Yes, even though “they fall by the roadside and die,” with no obituary notice and the “cause of little crape,” as one of my critics said. He and I, I think, would tramp the world together if we had a chance to live our life over again. We may live again; I sometimes think I have lived before. And what greater truth is there in the hearts of men than their own belief in all that they believe?