The Day Before Yesterday

THERE were two kinds of gardening to employ our sunny hours—the one concerned with the vast tracts of the Olympians, the other with the cultivation of those intimate patches of...

It was my fate to drift, fatally and immutably Cambridge, into a school that had a crushing Oxford majority. In these circumstances, the light-blue ribbon became, for the small...

We had no difficulty in getting out of the house when the time came, simply because this was not the sort of thing that the grown-up people expected us to do, but we found the w...

When we were boys there was no part of the Christmas festivities to which we looked forward more eagerly than the singing of carols from house to house on Christmas Eve. If the...

There were rare nights—nights of great winds—when we would suddenly realise that fear had entered into the room, and that, after all, we were children in a world of men. Our eff...

IN the well-ordered garden of every well-ordered house—that is, every house that numbers children in its treasury—there lies, screened perhaps by some inconvenient shrubbery but...

PAGE AN ENCHANTED PLACE 1 A RAILWAY JOURNEY 8 THE MAGIC POOL 16 THE STORY-TELLER 25 ADMIRALS ALL 33 A REPERTORY THEATRE 41 CHILDREN AND THE SPRING 49 ON NURSERY CUPBOARDS 56 THE...

From the days of our youth we have always had a kindness for Drury Lane Theatre, and, above all, for Drury Lane pantomime. The theatre has an individual atmosphere, the pantomim...

The years passed, and in due course the imaginative graces of my childhood were destroyed by the boys of my own age at school. They compelled me to exchange a hundred star-roofe...

It will be understood that by that time we had come to rely on the grown-up people for assistance in producing plays, and we had substituted their perverted adult taste for our...

In Utopia, the average human being would not know how to read or write, would have no knowledge of the past, and would know no more about life and the world in general, than he...