It is Barrie, if memory serves right, who once said that a man could never be a journalist unless he could write a story about a hole ina wall. You know the sort of thing—walking down, for example, a country lane and coming across a lichen-topped wall with a hole in it and writing a story about the fact, telling, perhaps, how there ever came wall there, and passing on to discover how, granted the wall, there happened to be a hole in it. Dilating at large upon the—erection's close Proximity to an old elm which decided to collapse on day in a high wind, as elms will so often do, and wiping out a piece of the wall, making, it may be, a small chink through which "Pyramus and Thisbe dear" whispered the intimacies of a bucolic love. Indeed when we come to think of it, a wall in a country lane brings back thoughts of that rough-cast which kept the immortal lovers apart, recalls the lan thorne which "doth the horn-moon present," makes Bottom the weaver promise anew to roar as it were a sucking dove, or ply his leaden footed fantasies in the Doudoir of the Fairy Queen, A swift turn of thought brings back the leering retort of Toby Bole to the ecataticly: proper Malvolio "An thou be dry, shall there be mo more cakes and ale?" Indeed all these little things founded on airy nonsense, these little Ariels "who whisper faint me congruities in this very workaday world, these trifling nothings Which turn thoughts back through the decades and pick from the tree of memory falls which, had the bree forgetfulness come but a moment sooner, would have lain Ake overripe fruit at the roots ich bring back to life juvenirs of the saplings that nee we were, For some reason or other the idea of a hole in the wall conures up memories of the first Gaddis-worm we saw in the Pellucid depths of the River Kennet as it murmured its graceful way past Preshute church, just down the Bath Road, after one has passed Marlborough College; brings before the eyes the white horse on Granham Hill near where mangeld warzels and pocket knife have provided many a truant lunch, or trans-
Ports us on magic carpets to vernake Forest to lie amid the bracken and breathe deeply of the mysterious perfume of an English summer. Or, perhaps, it will take us down the Avenue in the self-same forest where tall trees unite their foliage above in a stately vaulting through which the rays of the setting sun illumine the fane With rich colour as if filtered through the reverent glass of a tlerestory window, giving to the dim religious light the golden glow of the aura of sanctity. Perhaps, because we look' back on the past through the hole which memory makes in the wall of years, we invest these things vith a quality utterly foreign from the facts. That may Gust as well, for the present is Wways so terribly naked and are? there is too much about it of the nature of imminent reality, depressing vista of sharp cut Rorners, of brutal light and Bhade where only the softening of memory can enable us to get rid of the detail of now, or submerge it in the greater masses of then.
'Walls should have holes them. Indeed a well' favoured wall should have nothing but holes, unless one's stature is suchos enables one to walk along the highways of life with head high enough held to be able to look over the broken glass which always keeps us, where we belong. Or, perhaps, if we are Wise builders we shall leave a brick missing every now and again enabling us to retrace a few steps when we wish to look ick over what we ourselves and time are busily engaged in cutting us off from. A rotten sentence, but in those days when the wall was not quite so high a prepositional ending did not matter; we said what we had to say without worrying about the form in which it was couched. We really shall have to dodge back along this confection of our own building, and slip in a brick lor two if only to keep us from the illiteracies of the past.
But the caddis-worm opened a hole in the wall whence we were led by whole gaps in thei' structure through which we gave a hurried glance were led away from our original contemplation, That little thing lying in the bottom of the stream, for all the world like a short' piece of very rugged twig, to be peeled by pagan hands and impaled on a hook for the betrayal Jof some nobler creation, stirs up. memories of the gudgeon which would not be caught. Probably it was not a gudgeon, but that is what Dick Mundy called it, jand he was the richer by at least, two years more of knowledge and he called it a gudgeon as it lay there on the muddy bottom Jot the stream, wide-mouthed in the risible expression of Cheshire cat, while we dangled the shelled caddis-worm before his very nose in the hope that he would bite, something which he had not the slightest intention of doing, until with a flick of his tail and a parting leer he turned off to woddie up stream like a submarine duck, probably to go home and tell his misses how he fooled another of those two legged creatures gifted with more faith than knowledge of a guilgeon's quaint little ways. May be it was not a gudgeon, jand we shall never be able to find out, for even if we knew where Dick Mundy lives now, it! is probable that he has fitted a brick into that particular section of his wall and forgotten all jabour it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.