Pagan Papers-Kenneth Grahame

0:00Section 1 of Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Recording by Will Cooper. The romance of the road by Kenneth Graham. Among the many places of magic visited by Panta Grool and his company during the progress of their famous voyage, Fuse surpassed that island whose roads did literally go to places Rulishemang Sheminei, Kom Animo and would be travellers having inquired of the road as to its destination and received satisfactory reply. Segwindon as the old book Hathit hoisting themselves upon Oshemang opportune Son Ultraman Soprana Otheti Gei, Settrovoia, Olu Destinei. The best example I know of an approach to this excellent sort of vitality in roads is the ridgeway of the north-barque shut downs. Join it at Streetly, the point where it crosses the Thames.

1:00At once it strikes you out and away from the habitable world in a splendid, purposeful manner, running along the highest ridge of the downs, a broad green ribbon of turf, with but a shade of difference from the neighbouring grass. Yet distinct for all that. No villages nor homesteads tempted aside or modify its course for a yard. Should you lose the track where it is blent with the bordering turf or merged and obliterated by crisscross paths, you have only to walk straight on, taking heed of no alternative to right or left, and in a minute it is with you again, a risen out of the earth as it were. Or, if still not quite assured, lift your eyes, and there it runs over the brow of the fronting hill, where a railway crosses it, it disappears indeed, hiding alphius-like, from the ignominy of rubble and brickwork, but a little way on it takes up the running again, with the same quiet persistence. Bilt on that almost trackless expanse of billowy downs, such a track is in some sort humanly companionable, it really seems to lead you by the hand.

2:03The rudge is of course an exceptional instance, but indeed this pleasant personality in road is not entirely fanciful. It exists as a characteristic of the old country road, evolved out of the primitive prehistoric track, developing according to the needs of the land it passes through and serves, with the language accordingly and a meaning of its own. Its special services are often told clearly enough, but much else too of the quiet story of the countryside, something of the old tale whereof you learned so little from the printed page. Each is instinct, perhaps, with a separate suggestion, some are martial and historic, and by your side the hurrying feet of the dead raise it ghostly dust, the name of Yontown, with its Roman or Saxon suffix to British route hints at much. Many a strong man, wanting his vatis' sake past silently to Hades for that suffix to obtain, the little rise up Yonda on the damns that breaks their straight green line against the sky, showed another sight when the sea of battle surged and beat on its trampled

3:05sides, and the Romans saw beset, may have gazed down this very road for relief, praying for night for the succarring legion. This child that swings on a gate and peeps at you from under her sunbonnet, so may some girl and Cestress of hers have watched, with beating heart the wessex levees hurry along to clash with the heathen and break them on the down where the ash trees grew, and Yonda where the road swings round under gloomy overgrowth of drooping boughs, is that gleam of water or glitter of lurking spears. Some sing new pastoral, fluting low in the hot sun between dusty hedges overlooked by contented cows, past farmsteads where man and beast, living in frank fellowship, learn pleasant and serviceable lessons each of the other, over the full-fed river, lipping the meadow sweet and thence on either side through leagues of hay. Or through bending corn they chant the mystical wonderful song of the reaper when the harvest is white to the sickle, but most of them, avoiding classification, keep each his several

4:09tender significance, as with one I know, not so far from town, which wooves you from the valley by gentle ascent between nut-laden hedges and ever by some touch of keen fragrance in the air, by some mystery of added softness under foot. Ever a promise of something to come, unguessed, delighting, till suddenly you are among the pines, their keen scent strikes you through and through, their needles cup at the ground, and in their swaying tops mowed the unappeasable wind, sad, ceaseless as the cry of warped humanity. Some paces more, and the promises fulfilled, the hints and whisperings becoming fruition, the ground breaks steeply away, and you look over a great inland sea of fields, homesteads, rolling woodland, and bounding all blend with the horizon, a grain-ish, a gleam, the English channel, a road of promises of hinted surprises, following each other with the inevitable sequence in a melody.

5:11But we are now in another and stricter sense, an island of Shaman-ki-shaminō, dominated indeed by them, but these the traveller veritably segwindō, may reach his destination, sans suhpuanō u-sifatike, with large qualifications, the song very much elsewhere of, he would not have known the worse. The gains seem so obvious that you forget to miss all that lay between the springing strides of the early start, and the pleasant weariness of the end approached, when the limbs lag a little as the lights of your destination begin to glimmer through the dusk. All that lay between a day's ride, a life's romance, was the excellent title of an unsuccessful book, and indeed the journey should march with the day, beginning and ending with its sun, to be the complete thing, the golden round required of it. This makes that mind and body fair together, hand in hand, sharing the hope, the action, the fruition, finding equal sweetness in the languor of aching limbs at eve, and in the first godlike intoxication of motion, with braced muscle in the sun, for walk or ride

6:16take mind over greater distances than a throbbing world with stiffening joints and cramped limbs through a dozen counties. Surely you seem to cover vast spaces with lovengro, footing it with gypsies or driving his tinker's cart across lonely commons, then with many a globe trotter or steam yachtsman with diary or log, and even that dividing line, strictly marked and rarely overstepped, between the man who bicycles and the man who walks, is less due to a prudent regard for personal safety of the one part than to an essential difference in minds. There is a certain supernal, a deific state of mind which may indeed be experienced in minor degree by anyone in the siesta part of a Turkish bath, but this particular golden glow of the faculties is only felt at its fullness after severe and prolonged exertion in the open air. A man ought to be seen by the gods, says Marcus Aurelius, neither dissatisfied with anything nor complaining. Though this does not sound at first hearing an excessive demand to make a humanity, yet

7:17the gods, I fancy, look long and often for such a sight in these unbless days of hurry. If ever seen at all, it is when after many a mile in sun and wind, may be rain, you reach at last with the folding star your destined rustic in. There in its homely, comfortable strangeness, after a numbered chops with country ale, the hard facts of life begin to swim in a golden mist. You are ale from accustomed cares and worries, you are set in a peculiar knuck of rest, then old failures seem partial successes, then old loves come back in their fairest form, but this time with never a shadow of regret, then old jokes renew their youth and flavour. You ask nothing of the gods above, nothing of men below, not even their company. Tomorrow you shall begin life again, shall write your book, make your fortune, do anything. Meanwhile you sit and the jolly world swings round and you seem to hear its circle to the music of the spheres. Lord Pipe was ever thus beatafying in effect, you are aching all over and enjoying it and

8:22the scent of limes drifts in through the window, this is undoubtedly the best and greatest country in the world and none but good fellows abide in it. Lord we the gods and let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils from our blessed altars. End of the romance of the road. Section 2 The romance of the rail of pagan papers. This is a Librivox recording, all Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit Librivox.org, read by Will Cooper. The romance of the rail by Kenneth Graham. In these iron days of the dominance of steam, the crowning rung that is wrought us of furnace and piston rod lies in their annihilation of the steadfast mystery of the horizon, so that the imagination no longer begins to work at the point where vision ceases.

9:24In happier times, 300 years ago, the seafarers from Bristol City looked out from the praises of their vessels in the grey of the morning and what not rightly whether the land they saw might be Jerusalem or Madagascar or if it were not north and south America. And there be certain flitting islands, which have been often times seen and when men approach near them they vanished. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down, said Eulaceys, thinking of what Americans call the getting off place. It may be we shall touch the happy Isles and so on and so on, each with his special hope or wild some eyes. There was always a chance of touching the happy Isles and in that first fair world whose men and manners we knew through story books before experience taught us far other, the prince meant his horse one fine morning and rides all day and sleeps in a forest and next morning low a new country and he rides by fields and granges never visited before through faces strange to him to where an unknown king steps down to welcome the mysterious stranger

10:27and he marries the princess and dwells content for many a year. Till one day he thinks I will look upon my father's face again, though the leagues may belong to my own land. And he rides all day and sleeps in a forest and next morning he is made welcome at home where his name has become a dim memory which is all as it should be. For an eye-alike time and space as you may a man's stride remains the true standard of distance and eternal and unalterable scale. The severe horizon too repels the thoughts as you gaze to the infinite considerations that lie about within touch and hail and the night come with when no man can work. To all these natural bounds and limitations it is good to get back now and again from a life assisted and smooth by artificialities where iron has superseded muscle the kindly lifeblood is apt to throb dull as the measured beat of the steam engine but the getting back to them is now a matter of effort of set purpose a stepping aside out of our ordinary course.

11:30They are no longer unsought influences towards the making of character. So perhaps the time of them has gone by here in this second generation of steam, Perion et impotanto, they pass away and are scored against not us but our guilty fathers. For ourselves our peculiar slate is probably filling fast. The romance of the steam engine is yet to be captured and expressed, not fully nor worthily perhaps until it too is a vanished regret though Emerson for one will not have it so and maintains and justifies its right to immediate recognition as poetic material. For as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God that makes things ugly the poet who reattaches things to nature and the whole reattaching even artificial things and violations of nature to nature by a deeper insight disposes very easily of the most disagreeable facts so that he looks upon the factory village and the railway and sees them fall within the great order not less than the beehive or the spider's geometrical

12:32web. The poet however seems hard to convince hereof Emerson will have it that nature loves the gilding train of cars instead of which the poet still goes about the country singing purling brooks. Painters have been more flexible and liberal, turn us all and did his best to seize the spirit of the thing, its kinship with the element and to blend furnace glare and rush of iron with the storm shower, the wind and the thwart flashing sun rays and to make the whole a single expression of the resolvable force and even in a certain work by another and a very different painter though I will willingly acquit Mr. Frith of any deliberate romantic intention. You shall find the element of romance in the vestiges of the old order still lingering in the first transition period, the coat-shaped railway carriages with luggage piled in corded on top, the red coated guard, the little engine tethered well ahead as if between traces. To those bred within sight of the sea steamers will always partake in somewhat of the beauty and mystery of the ships, above all if their happy childhood have lain among the gleaming

13:35locks and ceneous firths of the western highlands where twice a week may be the strange visitant crept by headland and bay, a piece of the busy mysterious outer world. For myself I probably stand alone in owning to a sentimental weakness for the night piercing whistle judiciously remote as some men love the skull of the pipes. In the days where streets were less weirily familiar than now or even the golden cord was quite loose that led back to relinquished fields and wider skies. I have lain awake on stifling summer nights, thinking of luckier friends by more and stream and listening for the whistles from certain railway stations, veritable horns of elfland faintly blowing. Then, a ghostly passenger, I have taken my seat in a phantom train and sped up, up through the map rehearsing the journey bit by bit, through the fernish lit midlands and until the grey glimmer of dawn showed stone walls in place of hedges and masses looming up on either side till the bright sun shone upon brown leaping streams and purple hethers and the clear, sharp

14:39northern air streamed in through the windows. Return indeed was bitter and dimmy and like, my first touch of the earth went night to kill, but it was only to hurry northwards again on the wings of imagination, from dust and heat to the deer mountain air, we are only the children who might have been murmured lambs dream babes to him, and for the sake of those dream journeys, the journeys that might have been, I still hail with a certain affection, the call of the engine in the night, even as I love sometimes to turn the enchanted pages of the railway ABC and pass from one to the other name, reminiscent or suggestive of joy and freedom, Devonian maybe, or savoring of west-ix or bearing me away to some sequestered reach of the quiet Thames. End of the romance of the rail. Section 3 of Pagan Papers This is a Librevox recording.

15:40All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librevox.org, read by Judy Derby. Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham. Section 3 Non-Libre said Libre. It will never be clear to the laymind why the book buyer buys books, that it is not to read them as certain the closest inspection always fails to find him thus engaged. He will talk about them all night if he let him, wave his hand to them, shake his fist to them, shed tears over them in the small hours of the morning, but he will not read them. Yet, it would be rash to infer that he buys his books without a remote intention of ever reading them. Most book lovers start with the honest resolution that someday they will shut down on this fatal practice. Then they purpose to themselves to enter into their charmed circle and close the gates

16:44of Paradise behind them. Then will they read out of nothing but first editions. Every day shall be a debauch in large paper and tall copies and crushed maracos shall be familiar to their touch as Buckram. Meanwhile though, books continue to flaunt their vinyl charms, it would be cowardice to shun the fray. In fine, one buys and continues to buy, and the promised Sabbath never comes. The process of the purchase is always much the same, they are in resembling the familiar but inferior passion of love. There is the first side of the object, a company of a catching of the breath, a trembling in the limbs, loss of appetite, ungovernable desire, and a habit of melancholy and secret places. But once possessed, once toyed with amorously for an hour or two, the object, as in the inferior passion of Orsaid, takes its destined place on the shelf where it stays.

17:50And this sayeth the scoffer is all, but even he does not fail to remark with a certain awe that the owner goeth thereafter as one possessing a happy secret and radiating an inner glow. Moreover, he is insufferably conceded, and his conceit waxeth as his coat now condemned to a fresh term of servitude, roeth shabbyer. And shabby though his coat may be, yet will he never stoop to renew its pristine youth and gloss by the price of any book. No man, no human masculine natural man, ever sells a book. Man have been known in moments of thoughtlessness, or compelled by temporary necessity, to rob, to equivocate, to do murder, to commit what they should not, to wince and relant and refrain from what they should. These things, how be it regrettable, are common to humanity, and may happen to any of us.

18:51But amateur bookselling is foul and unnatural, and it is not worthy that our language, so capable of particularity, contains no distinctive name for the crime. Fortunately, it is hardly known to exist, the face of the public being set against it as a flint, and the trade giving such rigid prices. In bookbying you not infrequently condone and extravagance by the reflection that this particular purchase will be a good investment, sortedly considered, that you are not squandering income but sinking capital. But you know all the time that you are lying. Once possessed, books develop a personality. They take on a touch of warm human life that links them in a manner with our kit then kin. Non-angly, said Angeli, was the comment of a missionary, old-style, on the small human duodesimus exposed for sale in the Roman marketplace, and many a buyer, when some fair-haired little

19:54chattel passed into his possession, must have felt that here was something vendable no more. So of these you may well affirm, non-liberry, said delivery. Children now adopted into the circle, and shall be trafficked in never again. There is one exception which is sadly to be made, one class of man of whom I would feign if possible, have avoided mention, who are strangers to any such grouples. These be executors, a word to be strongly accented on the penultimate, for indeed they are the common headsmen of collections, and most of all do whet their bloody edge for harmless books. Hoori, famous old collections, budding young collections, fair virgin collections of a single author. People go down before the executors remorseless acts. He carath not, and he spareth not. The iniquity of Oblivion blindly scattereth her puppy, and it is chiefly by the hand of

20:58the executor that she does love to scatter it. May Oblivion be his portion forever. Of a truth, the foes of the book lover are not few. One of the most insidious, because he cometh at first and friendly, helpful guys, is the book binder, not in the he bindeth books. For the fair binding is the final crown and flower of painful achievement, but because he bindeth not. Because the weary week slaps by and turns to months, and the months to years, and still the binder bindeth not, and the heart grows sick with hope deferred. Each mourn the maiden binds her hair, each spring the honeysuckle binds the cottage porch, autumn the harvester binds his sheaves, each winter the iron frost binds like and stream, and still the book binder he bindeth not. Then a secret voice whispereth, arise, be a man and slay him, take him grossly, full

21:59of bread with all his crimes broad-blown as flushes may, at gaming, swearing, or about some act that hath no relish of salvation in it. But when the deed is done, and the floor is strung with fragments of binder, still the books remain unbound. You have made all that horrid mess for nothing, and the weary path has to be trotten over again. As a general rule, the man in the habit of murdering bookbinders, though he performs a distinct service to society, only waste his own time, and takes no personal advantage. And even supposing that after many days your books return to you in leather and circuits, bravely tricked with gold, you have scarce yet weathered the cape and sailed into Halcyon Seas. For these books, well, you kept them many weeks before binding them. That the ol' adgenous printer zinc might fully dry before the necessary hammering.

22:59You forebore to open the pages that the autocratic binder might refold the sheets if he pleased, and now that all is over, consummate him, yes. Still, you cannot properly enjoy the harvest of a quiet mind. For these purple emperors are not to be read in bed, nor during meals, nor on the grass with a pipe on Sundays, and these brief periods are all the whirling times allow you for solid, serious reading. Still, after all, you have them, you can at least pulverize your friends with the sight, and what have they to show against them? Probably some miserable score or so of half-bindings, such as lead you scornfully to quote the hackneyed couplet concerning the poor Indian whose untudered mind clodes him before, but leaves him bare behind. Let us thank the gods that such things are, that to some of us they give not poverty, nor riches, but a few good books and whole bindings.

23:59Howard with these, and, if it be vouchsafed, a cup of burgundy that is sound, even if it be not old, we can leave to others the filming grape of Eastern France that was vintage in 74, and with it the whole range of shilling shockers. The barmissaddle feast of the purposeful novelist, yay, even the countless series that tell of eminent women as successful men. And of Non-Libri said Libri. Section 4 of Pagan Papers This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Read by Judy Derby. Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham, Section 4. Loafing

25:00When the golden summer has rounded languidly to his clothes, when autumn has been carried forth in russet winding sheet, then all good fellows who look upon holidays as a chief end of life return from more and stream and begin to take stock of gains and losses. And the wisest realizing that the time of action is over while that of reminiscence has begun, realize too that the one is pregnant with greater pleasures than the other. That action indeed is only the means to an end of reflection and appreciation. Wises to Val, the Lofer, stands apart supreme. For he, of one mind with the philosopher as to the end, goes straight to it at once, and his happy summer has accordingly been spent in those subjective pleasures of the mind, where of the others, the man of muscle and peeled faces, are only just beginning to taste.

26:08And yet though he may a little despise or rather pity them, the Lofer does not dislike nor altogether shun them. Far from it, they are very necessary to him. For Suave Mari Magno is the motto of your true Lofer, and it is chiefly by keeping ever in view the struggles and the clamorous jostlings of the unenlightened making holiday that he is able to realize the bliss of his own condition and maintain his self-satisfaction at boiling point. And so is he never very far away from the track beaten by the herring Philistine hooth, but hovers more or less on the edge of it, where the soul fixed star amidst whirling constellations, he may watch the mad world glance and nod and hurry by.

27:08There are many such centers of contemplation along the west coast of Scotland. Few places are better loathing ground than appear, with its tranquil, lucid interval between steamers, the ever recurrent throb of paddle wheel, the Russian foam of beaten water among the piles, splash of ropes and rumble of ganglays, and all the attendant hurry and scurry of the human morice. Here, Tankom in Speculo, the loafer as he lounges may, by attorney as it were, touch gently every stop in the great organ of the emotions of mortality. Rapture of meeting, departing woe, love it for sight, disdain, laughter, indifference. He may experience them all, but attenuated, and as if he saw them in a dream, as if indeed

28:09he were hyna's god in dream on a mountainside. Let the drowsy deity awake, and all these puppets, emanations of his dream, will vanish into the nothing whenst they came. And these emotions may be renewed each morning. If a fair one sail today, be sure that one as fair will land tomorrow. The supply is inexhaustible. But in the south, perhaps the happiest loafering ground, is the gift of father-tems, for there again the contrast of violent action, with its blisters, perspiration and the light, throws into fine relief the bliss of quietism. I know one little village in the upper reaches, where loafering may be pushed to high perfection. Here the early hours of the morning are vexed by the voices of boaters making their way

29:09down the little street to the river. The most of them go staggering under happers, bundles of water proofs, and so forth. Their voices are climate afeats to be accomplished. They will row, they will punt, they will paddle till they weary out the sun. All this the loafer hears through the open door of his cottage, where in his shirt sleeves he is dallying with his bacon, as a gentleman should. He is the only one who has had a comfortable breakfast, and he knows it. Later, he will issue forth and stroll down in their track to the bridge. The last of these arganauts is pulling lustily forth. The river is dotted with evanishing blazers. Upon all these lunatics, a pitiless Phoebus shines triumphant. The loafer sees the last of them off the stage, turns his back on it, and seeks the shady

30:10side of the street. A holy calm possesses the village now, the foreign element has passed away with shouting and waving of banners, and its natural life of somnolency is in evidence at last. And first, as a true loafer should, let him respectfully greet each several village dog. Our Katie's Ambo, loafer's likewise, they lie there in the warm dust. Each outside his own door, ready to return the smallest courtesy. Their own lords and masters are not given to the exchange of compliments, nor to greetings in the marketplace. The dog is generally the better gentleman, and he is aware of it, and he doly appreciates the loafer, who is not too proud to pause a moment. Change the news, and pass the time of day. He will mark his sense of this attention by rising from his dust-devan, and accompanying

31:16his collar some steps on his way. But he will stop short of his neighbor's dust-patch, for the morning is really too hot or as shindi. So, by easy stages, the street is not a long one, six dogs will see it out. The loafer quits the village, and now the world is before him. Shall he sit on a gate and smoke, or lie on the grass and smoke, or smoke aimlessly and sit large along the road? Such a choice of happiness is distracting, but perhaps the last course is the best, as needing the least mental effort of selection. Hardly, however, has he fairly started his first day-dream when the snappaged ting of a belkin recalls him to realities. Why comes the bicyclist? Dusty, sweating, a pittiest thing to look upon.

32:16But the irritation of the strep-a-tent metal has jared the loafer's always exquisite nerves. He is feigned to climb a gate and make his way towards solitude and the breezy downs. Up here, all vestiges of assorted humanity disappear. The loafer is alone with the southwest wind and the blue sky, only a caroling of larks, and a tinkling from distant flocks break the brooding noonday stillness. Above, the wind hover hangs motionless, a black dot on the blue. Prone on his back on the springy turf, gazing up into the sky, his fleshy integument seems to drop away, and the spirit ranges at will among the tranquil clouds. This way, Nirvana, nearest lies. Earth no longer obtrudes herself. Possibly somewhere a thousand miles or so below him.

33:19The thing still spins like a fretful midge. The loafer knows not nor cares. This is now an astral body, and through golden spaces of imagination, his soul is winging her untrammeled flight. And there he really might remain forever, but that his vegrim ferret is called back to earth by a gentle but resisteless, very human summons, a gradual consuming pantacruelian godly thirst. A thirst to thank heaven on. Though with a sigh half of regret, half of anticipation, he bends his solitary steps towards the nearest inn. Tobacco for one is good, to commune with oneself and be still is truest wisdom, but beer is the thing of deity. Beer is divine. Later the loafer may decently make some concession to popular taste, but strolling down to the river

34:20and getting out his boat. With one paddle out he will drift down the stream, just brushing the flowering rush and a meadow sweet and taking in as peculiar gifts the varied suites of even. The loose strife is his and the arrowhead, his the distant moan of the weir, his are the glories, amber and scarlet and silver of the sunset haunted surface. By and by the boaters will pass him homeward bound. All are blistered and sore, his withers are unrung. Most are too tired and hungry to see the sunset glories. No corporeal pangs clog his asthesis, his perceptive faculty. Some have quarreled in the day and are no longer on speaking terms. He is at peace with himself and with the whole world.

35:21Of all that lay them down in the little village that night, his sleep will be the surest and the sweetest. For not even the blacksmith himself will have better claim to have earned a night's repose. End of Loafing Section 5 of Pagum Papers This is a Librivox recording, or Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For more information ought to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Recording by Lintomson. Pagum Papers by Kenneth Graham. Section 5 Cheap knowledge When at times it happens to me that I gain to be a weary of the sun and to find the fair apple of life dust and ashes at the core. Just because perhaps I can't afford Malampus Brown's last volume of poems in large paper,

36:23but must perforce condescend upon the two and six-pinny edition for the million. Then I bring myself to a right temper by recalling to memory a sight which now and again in old days would touch the heart of me to a happier pulsation. In the long dark winter evenings outside some shop window whose gaslight flared brightest into the chilly street, I would see some lad, sometimes even a girl, book in hand, heedless of cold and wet, of aching limbs and straining eyes, careless of jostling passes by, of rattle and turmoil behind them and about, their happy spirit far in an enchanted world. While the ruthless shopman turned out the gas and brought them rudely back to the bitter reality of cramped legs and numbed fingers, my brother, or my sister I would quite inwardly, feeling the link that bound us together, they possessed for the hour the two gifts most precious to the student, light and solitude, the true solitude of the roaring street.

37:30Somehow this vision rarely greets me now, probably the free library have supplanted the flickering shop lights and every lad and lass can enter and call for Miss Braddon and batten thereon in luxury sofa-lap of leather. And of course this boon is appreciated and profited by and we shall see the divine results in a year or two, and yet sometimes like the dear old barren in the red lamp. I wonder. For myself public libraries possess a special horror as have lonely wastes and dragon-haunted fens, the stillness and the heavy air, the feeling of restriction and surveillance, the mute presence of these other readers, all silent and all damned, combined to set up a nervous irritation fatal to quiet setting. Had I to choose I would prefer the windy street, and possibly others have found that the removal of checks and obstacles make the path which leads to the divine mountain

38:31tops less tempting, now that it is less rugged. So full of human nature are we all, still, despite the radical missionaries that labour in the vineyard. Before the national gallery was extended and rearranged, there was a little st. Catherine by Pinturicia that possessed my undivided affections. In those days she hung me the floor, so that those who would worship Ms. Gowall, and I grudged it. Whenever I found myself near Trafalgar Square with five minutes to spare, I used to turn in and sit on the floor before the object of my love, till gently but firmly replaced on my legs by the attendant. She hangs on the line now in the grand new room, but I never go to see her. Somehow she is not my st. Catherine of old. But even when the element of human nature has been fully allowed for, it remains a question

39:44whether the type or mind that a generation or two of three libraries will evolve is, or is not the one that the world most deciderates. And whether the spare reading and consequent fertile thinking necessitated by the old or guess-lamp style is not productive of sound results. The chloid and congested mind resulting from the free run of these grossest shops to omnivorous appetites, and all young readers are omnivorous, bids fair to produce a race of literary resurrection a result from which we may well pray to be spared. Of all forms of lettered effusiveness that rich exploits the original work of others and professes to supply us with right opinions, therean end is the least wanted. And whether he takes a literary expression by pen or only wag the tongue of him, the grossest boy of letters is sure to prove a prodigious ball.

40:45The free library, if it be fulfilling the programme of its advocates, is breeding such as he by scores. But after all there is barming Iliad, a much joy and consolation may be drawn from the sorrowful official reports by which it would appear that the patrons of these libraries are confining their reading, with a charming unanimity, exclusivity to novels. And indeed they cannot do better, there is no more blessed thing on earth than a good novel. Not the least merit of which is that it induces a state of passive, unconscious enjoyment, and never frenzies the reason to go out and put the world right. Next to fairy tales, the original world fiction, our modern novels may be ranked as our most precious possessions, and so it has come to pass that I shall now cheerfully pay my five shillings, or ten shillings, or whatever it may shortly be, in the pound towards the free library. It is at last that the money is not wasted in training exponents of the subjectivity

41:49of this writer, and the objectivity of that, nor in developing fresh imitators of dead discredited styles, but is rightfully devoted to the support of wholesome, honest, unpretending novel reading. And as cheap knowledge. Section 6 of Pagan Papers This is a Libravox Recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Steve Britton Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham Section 6 Through shady throch Morton Street and about the veil of cheap side, the restless mercury is flitting, with furtive eye and voice a little horse from bidding in the market.

42:50Further west, down classic Piccadilly, moves the young Apollo, the lord of the unairing satin bow, and nothing meaner than a frock coat shall in these latter years float round his perfect limbs. But remote, in other haunts, than these the rural pan is hiding, and piping the low, sweet strain that reaches only the ears of a chosen few, and now that the year wearily turns and stretches herself before the perfect waking, the god emboldened begins to blow a clear note. When the waking comes at last, and summer is abroad, these deities will abroad, too, each as his several attributes move him. Who is this that flyeth up the reaches of the Thames and steam launch hired for the day? Mercury is out, some dozen or fifteen strong. The flower-gente banks crumble and slide down under the wash of his rampant screw. His wake is marked by a line of lobster claws, gold-necked bottles, and fragments of

43:56velpye. Resplendent and blazer, he may even be seen to embrace the slim waisted nymph, haunter of green room shades, and in the full gaze of the shocked and scandalized son. Apollo mean time reposeth, passively beautiful, on the lawn of the guards' club at maidenhead. Here, or Apollo, are haunts meet for thee. Adity, subjectively inclined, he is neither objective nor, it must be said for him, at all objectionable, like them of Mercury. Meanwhile, nor launches nor lawns tempt him that pursueth the rural pan. In the hushed recesses of herly backwater, where the canoe may be paddled, almost under the tumbling comb of the weir he is to be looked for. There, the god pipes with freest abandonment. Or under the great shadow of streetly hill, annihilating all that's made to a green thought and a green shade, or better yet, pushing and explorers prow of the remote, untraveled

45:02tem, till dorkchister stately roof broods over the quiet fields. In solitudes such as these, pan sits, and dabbles, and all the air is full of the music of his piping. In the southwards, again, on the pleasant surre downs, there is shouting and jostling, dust that is drowsy, and language that is sultry. Fither comes the young Apollo, calmly confident as ever, and he meets a certain mercuries of the baser sort, who do him a beacons, call him captain and lord, and then proceed to skin him from head to foot as thoroughly as the god himself laid marsias in days of yore, at a certain spring meeting in fridgia, a good instance of times revenges, and yet Apollo returns to town, and swears he has had a grand day, he does so every year. Out of hearing of all the clamor, the rural pan may be found stretched on ran-more common,

46:03loitering under obringer pines, or prone by the secluded stream of the sinuous mole, abounding and friendly greetings for his foster brothers, the dab chick, and water rat. For a holiday, Mercury loveth the poem and express, in a short hour with a society paper, a known brown boots on the pier and the pleasant combination of metropole and monopole. Apollo, for his part, will urge the horses of the sun, and, if he leaveeth the society weekly to Mercury, yet he loveth well the magazine, from which on-follos, or hub of the universe, he will direct his shining team even to the far hasperities of Richmond or Windsor. Both iron road and level highway are shunned by the rural pan, who chooses rather to foot it, along the sheep track, on the limitless downs, or the thought-leading footpath, through cops and spinny, not without pleasant fellowship with feather and fur.

47:06Nor does it follow from all this that the God is on social, albeit shy of the company of his more showy brother deities, he loveth the more unpretentious humankind, especially them that are at scripty, glebe, addicted to the kindly soil and to the working thereof, perfect in no way, only simple, cheery sinners. Where he is only half a god after all, and the red earth and him is strong. When the pelting storm drives the waferers to the sheltering in, among the little group on bench and settle, pan has been known to appear at times, in homely guise of hedger and ditcher, or whether beaten shepherd from the downs. Strange lore and quaint fancy he will then impart, and the musical west-ix, or mercine he has learned to speak so naturally, though it may not be till many a mile away that you begin to suspect that you have unwittingly talked with him who chased the flying shrinks

48:09in argady and turned the tide of fight at marathon. Yes, today the iron horse has searched the country through, east and west, north and south, swinging with it commercialism, whose god is gerry, and whose studs the hills with stucco and garrets the streams with the girder, bringing to, into every nook and corner, fashion and chatter, the tailor-made gown and the eyeglass. Happily, a great part is still spared. How great these others, fortunately, do not know, in which the rural pan and his following may hide their heads for yet a little longer, until the growing tyranny has invaded the last common spinny and sheep down, and driven the kindly god, the well-wisher to man, wither. End of the rural pan and April essay, recording by Steve Britton.

49:15Section 7 of Pagan Papers. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Read by Lisa Reichert. Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham. Section 7, Marginalia. American Hunt, in his suggestive talks about art, demands that the child shall be encouraged or rather permitted for the natural child needs little encouragement, to draw when and where on so ever he can. For, says he, the child scribbling on the margin of his schoolbooks is really worth more to him than all he gets out of them. And indeed, to him the margin is the best part of all books, and he finds in it the soothing influence of a clear sky in a landscape. Doubtless Sir Benjamin Backbite, though his was not an artist's soul, had some dim feeling

50:18of this mighty truth when he spoke of that new quarter of his, in which a neat rivulet of text shall meander through a meadow of margin, boldly granting the margin to be of superior importance to the print. This metaphor is pleasantly expanded in Burton's book hunter, wherein you read of certain folios with their majestic stream of central print overflowing into rivulets of marginal notes, segy, with citations. But the good doctor leaves the mainstream for a backwater of error in inferring that the chief use of margins is to be a parading ground for notes and citations, as if they had not absolute value in themselves nor served a finer end. In truth, Hunt's child was vastly the wiser man. For myself my own early margins chiefly served to note, cite, and illustrate the habits

51:19of crocodiles. Along the lower or tail edge, the sorian splendidly serrated as to his back, arose out of old nail. Up one side negroes swart as sucked-led pencil would limb them, let fall their nervous spears. Up the other, monkeys jibbering with terror, swarmed hastily up palm trees, a plant to the untutored hand of easier outline than, say, your British oak. Meanwhile, all over the unregarded text, Belbus slu-kayus on the most inadequate provocation, or Hannibal pursued his victorious career, while Roman generals delivered ornate set speeches prior to receiving the usual satisfactory licking. Fabius, haste-dribble, all alike were pallid shades with faint, thin voices, powerless to pierce the distance. The margins of co-kites doubtless knew them.

52:20Mine were dedicated to the more attractive flesh and blood of animal life, the varied phases of the tropical forest. Or in more practical mood, I would stoop to render certain facts recorded in the text. To these digressions, I probably owe what little education I possess. For example, there was one sentence in our Roman history, by this single battle of Magnesia, Antiochus the Great lost all his conquests in Asia Minor. This historian's really should not thus forget themselves. It was so easy by a touch of the pen to transform battle into battle. For conquests one could substitute a word for which not even Macaulay's schoolboy were at a loss, and the result, depicted with rude vigor in his margin, fixed the name of at least one ancient fight on the illustrator's memory. But this plotting and material art had small charm for me, to whom the happy margin was

53:22a clear sky, ever through which I could sail away at will to more gracious worlds. I was duly qualified by a painfully acquired ignorance of dead languages, cautiously to approach my own, and was no better. Along Milton's margins, the Griffin must needs pursue the Aramaspian. What a chance that Aramaspian, for the imaginative pencil, and so it has come about that while Milton periods are mostly effaced from memory by the sponge of time, I can still see that vengeful Griffin, cousin German to the gentle beast that danced the lobster quadril by a certain shore. It is by no means insisted upon that the chief end and use of margins is for pictorial illustration, nor yet for fervent games of odds and crosses, nor in the case of hymnbooks, for amorous missives scrawled against the canticle for the day, to be passed over into an adjacent pew, as used alas to happen in days when one was young and godless and went to church.

54:30Nor again are the margins of certain poets entrusted to man for the composing thereon of infinitely superior rhymes on the subjects themselves have maltreated, a depraved habit akin to scalping. What has never been properly recognized is the absolute value of the margin itself, a value frequently superior to its enclosure. In poetry the popular taste demands its margin, and takes care to get it in, the little verses what they put inside the crackers. The special popularity, indeed of lyrics as opposed to epic verse, is due to this habit of feeling. A good example may be found in the work of Mr. Swinburn. The latter is the better poetry, the earlier remains the more popular, because of its eloquence of margin. Mr. Tupper might long ago have sat with laureate brow, but for his neglect of this first principle, the song of Sigurd, our one epic of the century, is pitifully unmargined, and

55:35so has never won the full need of glory it deserves, while the ingenious gentleman who wrote Beowulf, our other English epic, grasped the great fact from the first, so that his work is much the more popular of the two, the moral is evident. An authority on practical bookmaking has stated that, margin is a matter to be studied. It is also that, to place the print in the center of the paper is wrong in principle, and to be deprecated. Now if it be wrong in principle, let us push that principle to its legitimate conclusion, and deprecate, the placing of print on any part of the paper at all. Without actually suggesting this course to any of our living-bars, when I may ask, then shall that true poet arise, who, disdaining the trivialities of text, shall give the world a book of verse consisting entirely of margin. How we shall shove and jostle for large paper copies.

56:41End of Marginalia Section 8 of Pagan Papers This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Steve Britton Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham Section 8 There was once an old cashier in some ancient city establishment whose practice was to spend his yearly holiday in relieving some turnpike man at his post, and performing all the duties I pertaining thereon to. This was vulgarly taken to be an instance of mere mill-horse enslavement to his groove, the reception of payments, and it was spoken of both in mockery of all mill-horses and for the due admonishment of others.

57:41And yet that clerk had discovered for himself an unique method of seeing life at its best, the flowing, hurrying, traveling, marketing life of the highway, the life of bagman and cart, of tinker and pig dealer and all cheery creatures that drink and chaffer together in the sun. He belonged, above all, to the scanty class of clear-seeing persons who know both what they are good for and what they really want. To know what you would like to do is one thing, to go boldly and do it is another, and the rarer, and the sterile fields about hellgate are strewn with the corpses of those who would, and if they could. To be sure, being bent on the real taxation most congenial to one's soul, it is possible to push one's disregard for convention too far as it is seen in the case of another, though of an earlier generation in the same establishment.

58:43In his office there was the customary attendance book wherein the clerks were expected to sign each day. Here his name one morning ceases abruptly from appearing. He signs, indeed, no more. Out of signature you find, a little later, writ in careful commercial hand this entry. Mr. Wilson did not attend at his office today, having been hanged at eight o'clock in the morning for horse-stealing. Through the faded ink of this record do you not seem to catch across the gulf of years, some waft of the jolly humanity which breathed in this prince among clerks? A formal precision doubtless during business hours, but with just this honest love of horse-flash lurking deep down there in him, unsuspected, sweetening the whole lump. Can you not behold him, freed from his desk, turning to pursue his natural bent, as a city-bred dog still striveth to bury his bone deep in the hearth-rug?

59:47For no filthy lucre you may be sure, but from sheer love of the pursuit itself. All the same, he aired. Eared, if not entased, at least in judgment, for we cannot entirely acquit him of blame for letting himself be caught. In these tame and tedious days of the policeman rampant, our melancholy cells are debarred from many a sport, joyous and debonair, whereof our happier fathers were free. And book-stealing to be sure remains to us, but everyone is not a collector, and besides, to the diversion you can follow with equal success all the year round. Still, the instance may happily be pregnant with suggestion to many who wearily ask each year, what new place or pursuit exhausted earth still keeps for the holiday-maker. It is a sad but sober fact that the most of men lead flat and virtuous lives departing annually with their family to some flat and virtuous place, there to disport themselves

1:00:52in a manner that is decent, orderly, wholly uninteresting, vacant of every buchsem stimulus. To such as these, a suggestion, in all friendliness, why not try crime? We shall not attempt to specify the particular branch for everyone must himself seek out and find the path his nature best fits him to follow, but the general charm of the prospect must be evident to all. The freshness and novelty of secrecy, the artistic satisfaction in doing the act of self-expression as well as it can possibly be done, the experience of being not the hunter, but the hunted, not the sportsman, but the game. The delight of comparing and discussing crimes with your mates over a quiet pipe on your return to town, these new pleasures, these and their like, would furnace just that gentle stimulant, that peaceful sense of change so necessary to the tired worker, and then the

1:01:54fact that you would naturally have to select and plan out your particular line of diversion without advice or assistance as its own advantage. For the moment the man takes to dinting in your ears that you ought, you really ought to go to Norway, you would once begin to hate Norway with the hate that ever will be, and to have Newland, Chromor, or Dallish, Corinthia, or the Austrian Tyrell jammed down your throat is enough to initiate the discovery that your own individual weakness is a joyous and persistent liking for manslaughter. Some few seem to be born without much innate tendency to crime. After all, it is mostly a matter of heredity. These unfortunate are less culpable than their neglectful ancestors, and it is a fault that none need really blush for in the present. For such as they, there still remains the example of the term pike loving Clark, with all its golden possibilities.

1:02:55Try the great delight of driving locomotive, or a fire engine, world along in a glorious nembus of smoke-pant, spark-shower, and horse-warning roar, and what bliss to be the pale-faced quill driver to command a penny-steemboat between London bridge and Chelsea, to drive a four-horse jersey-car to cue at six pence ahead. Though termpikes be things of the past, there are still tolls to be taken on many a pleasant breach of tams. What happiness, in quiet moments, to tend the lock-keeper's flora-beds, perhaps make love to his daughter, a non-advisier times to let the old gates swing, work the groaning winches, and hear the water lap and suck and gurgle as it slowly sinks, or rises with its swaying freight. To dangle legs over the side and greet old acquaintances here and there, among the party-colored waifers passing up or down, while tobacco palath-knot on the longest day in beer is ever

1:03:57within easy reach. The iron tether that skerfs the face of our island has killed out the pleasant life of the road, but many of its best conditions still linger around these old toll gates free from dust and clatter on the silent liquid highway to the west. These were the weaker brethren, but for him who was conscious of the gift, the path is plain, end of the eternal wither, recording by Steve Britton. Section 9 of Pagan Papers This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Brian Darby, March 2016, San Jose, California. Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham Section 9, Deus Terminus

1:05:05The practical Roman, stern constructor of roads and codes, when he needs must worship, loved a deity practical as himself, and in his parceling of the known world into plots, saying unto this man by'd here, and to that sit you down there, he could scarce fail to evolve the god Terminus. Visible witness of possession and dominion, type of solid facts not to be quibbled away. We Romans of this latter day, so hailed by others or complacently christened by ourselves, a Roman and nothing more than in this, and as much in the less tangible realms of thought as in our solid acres, we are fain to set up the statue, which shall proclaim that so much country is explored, marked out, allotted, and done with, and that such and such ramblings and excursions are practicable and permissible, and all else is exploded illegal or absurd.

1:06:06And in this way we are left with not but a vague lingering tradition of the happier days before the advent of the ruthless deity. The silver glories of yonder stretch of woodland renew themselves each autumn regal as ever. It is only the old enchantment that is gone, banished by the matter of fact deity, who has stalledly settled exactly where Lord A's shooting ends and squire bees begins. Once no such petty limitations fettered the mind. A step into the woodland was a step over the border, the margin of the material, and then goodbye to the modern world of the land agent and the field advertisement, a chiming of little bells over your head and low, the Paragrin, with eyes like jewels, fluttered through the trees, her jessas catching in the bows. To us the favorite of the princess, the windows of whose father's castle already gleamed through the trees where honors and favors awaited the adventurus.

1:07:07The white doge sprang away through the thicket, her snowy flanks stained with blood she made for the enchanted caught, and for entrance you too had the password. Did you fail on her traces, nor Fox nor Mole was too busy to spare a moment for friendly advice or information. Little hands were stretched to trip you. Mary Jybe and Mockery pelted you from every rabbit hole, and oh what dry adds you have kissed among the leaves in that brief blissful moment air they hardened into tree. It is pity, indeed, that this sort of thing should have been made to share the suspicion attaching to the poacher, that the stony stare of the boundary god should confront you at the end of every green ride and rabbit run. While the very rabbits themselves are too disgusted with the altered circumstances to tarry a moment for so much as to exchange the time of day. Truly this age is born like fall staff with a white head and something around belly, and

1:08:08will none of your jigs and fantasies. The golden era of princesses is passed, for your really virtuous princesses there still remain a merchant's daughter or two and a bottle of port of Sundays on the clap of mahogany. For the rest of us, one or two decent clubs and plenty of nice, roomy lunatic assilums go spin you jade go spin is the one greeting for imagination. And yet what a lip the slut has, what an ankle. Go too, there's nobody looking let us lock the door, pull down the blinds and write us a merry ballad. As ungracious perhaps to regret what has gone forever when so much is given in return. A humor we have that is entirely new and a lot months that shall win back Australia. Our labor program stands for evidence that the board school at least has done enduring work and the useless race of poets is fast dying out.

1:09:12Though we no longer conjecture what song the sirens sang or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, yet many a prize of Gini's galore awaits the competitor who will stoop week by week to more practical research. Le Monde Marche as Rennon-Hathet verse un sort de mercanisme potatre la vulgarité général sera tell un jour la condition de Bernard des élieux. Nonnevon pa la douata trough forty if you see you. We will be very facile then since needs must. Remembering the good old proverb that scornful dogs eat dirty puddings. But air we show terminus the door, at least let us fling one stone at the shrieking sulfurious houses of damnation erected as temples in his honor and dignified with his name. Their mid-clanger dirt and pestilence of crowding humanity, the very spirit of worry and unrest sits embodied.

1:10:14The old Roman was not such a bad fellow. His deity of demarcation at least breathed open air and knew the kindly touch of sun and wind. His simple rights were performed amid flowers and under blue sky by sunny roads or tranquil waters. And on this particular altar the sacrifice was ordained to be free from any stain of gore. For our sacrifice alas is not yet come. When it does, a out procule absente, let the offering be no bloodless one but let for choice a fat and succulent station master's smoke and crackle on the altar of expiation. End of day's terminus, recording by Brian Derby. In 10 of pagan papers, this is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain.

1:11:15For more information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham. Section 10 of Smoking. Concerning cigarette smoking. It has been well observed by a certain philosopher that this is a practice commendable in enough and pleasant to indulge in when you're not smoking. We're in the whole criticism of the cigarette is found in a little room. Of the same manner of thinking was one that I knew who kept by him an ample case bulging with cigarettes to smoke while he was filling his pipe. Toys they be verily, new guy and shadows of their substance. Not all nevertheless, as shadows sometimes be when the substance is temporarily unattainable as between the acts of a play in the park or while dressing for dinner, that such moments

1:12:15may not be entirely wasted. That cigarette however, which is so prompt to appear after dinner, I would reprehend and ban and totally abolish, as enemy to that diviner thing before which it should pale its ineffectual fires in shame. To wit, good drink, la dive bottelieu, except indeed when the liquor be bad, as is sometimes known to happen. Then it may serve in some sort as a sorry consolation, but to leave these areas substitutes and come to smoking. It has been oftentimes debated whether the morning pipe be the sweeter or that first pipe in the evening which has spurious, who bringeth all good things, brings to the weary with home and rest. The first is smoked on a clearer palette and comes to unjaded senses like the kiss of one's first love, but lacks that feeling of perfect fruition, of merit recompensed,

1:13:16and the goal and the garland won, which clings to the vespere bowl. Once it comes at the majority give the palm to the latter. To which I intend no slight when I find the incense that arises at mata, sweeter even than that of even song. For although with most of us who are laborers in the vineyard, toilers and swinkers, the morning pipe is smoked in hurry and fear and a sense of alarms and excursions and fleeting trains, yet with all this there are certain howlsy and periods short to arrive, Sundays, holidays and the like. The whole joy and peace of which are summed up in that one beatific pipe after breakfast, packed in a careless majesty like that of the gods when they lie beside their nectar and the clouds are lightly curled. Then only can we be said really to smoke. And so this particular pipe of the day always carries with it festival reminiscences, memories

1:14:19of holidays past, hopes for holidays to come. A suggestion of sunny lawns and flannels and the unguard loin, as sense with all of something free and stately as of faint march music in the air, or the old Roman cry of liberty, freedom and enfranchisement. If there be any fly in the pipe smokers' ointment, it may be said to lurk in the matter of rings. Only the exceptionally gifted smoker can recline in his chair and emit at will the perfect smoke ring, in consummate edding succession. He of the meaner sort must be content with, at rare heaven-scent intervals, while thinking perhaps of nothing less, their escape from his slips the unpremeditated flawless circle. Then Dale's fio he is moved to cry, at that breathless moment when his creation hangs solid and complete, ear the particles break away and blend with the baser atmosphere.

1:15:23May some will deny to any of us terine smokers the gift of fullest achievement, for what sayeth the power of the century? On the earth the broken arcs, in the heaven the perfect round. It was well observed by a certain character in one of Wilkie Collins's novels, if an imperfect memory serveth me rightly, that women will take pleasure in sense derived from animal emanations, clarified fats and the like, yet do illogically abhor the clean, dry, vegetable smell of tobacco. Herein the true base of the feminine objection is reached, being as usual inherent want of logic rather than any distaste, in the absolute for the thing in question. Thinking that they ought to dislike, they do painfully cast about for reasons to justify their dislike, when none really exists. As a specimen of their so-called arguments, I remember how a certain fair one triumphantly

1:16:25pointed out to me that my dog, though loving me well, could yet never be brought to like the smell of tobacco. To whom I, who respected my dog, as Ben's Seth of Master Shakespeare, on this side idolatry as much as anything, was yet feigned to point out, more in sorrow than in anger, that a dog being an animal who delights to pass his whole day from early mourn to duey eve, in shoving his nose into every carry and beastliness that he can come across, could hardly be considered arbiter elegant tiaram in the matter of smells. But indeed I did wrong to take such foolish quibbling seriously, nor would I have done so if she hadn't dragged my poor innocent dog into the discussion. Of smoking in bed. There be who consider this a depravity, an instance of that excess in the practice of a virtue which passes into vice, and couple it with dram drinking, who yet fail to justify themselves

1:17:27by argument. For if bed be by common consent the greatest bliss, the divinist spot on earth, ille terarum quibrite aramnes angolus ridet, and if tobacco be the true herb of grace and a joy and healing balm and respite and napency, if all this be admitted. Why are two things super excellent separately, noxious in conjunction? And is not the bed smoker rather an epicure in pleasure, self-indulgent perhaps, but still the triumphant creator of a new blend, reminding one of a certain traveller's account of an intoxicant patronised in the south sea islands, which combines the blissful effect of getting drunk and remaining sober to enjoy it. Yet I shall not insist too much on this point, but would only ask so long as a smoker be unwedded, for some tolerance in the matter and a little logic in the discussion thereof.

1:18:27Concerning cigars. That there be large sums given for these as within common knowledge. One penny, two pennies, nay even four pennies is not too great a price. If a man will have of the finest leaf, reckless of expense. In this sort of smoking however, I find more vain glory and ostentation than solid satisfaction, and its votaries would seem to display less a calm, healthy affection for tobacco than a certy brown-half-it, a passionate prodigality. And besides grievous wasting of the pocket, atmospheric changes, varying in the crops and the like, cause uncertainty to cling about each individual weed, so that man is always more or less at the mercy of nature and the elements, an unsatisfactory and undignified position in these latter days of the triumphant democracy. But worst and fatalist of all, to every cigars smoker, it is certain to happen that once

1:19:31in his life, by some happy combination of time, place, temperament and nature, by some starry influence may be or freak of the gods in mocking sport, once and once only, he will taste the aroma of the perfect leaf at just the perfect point, the ideal cigar. Henceforth his life is saddened, as one kissed by a goddess in a dream, he goes thereafter as one might say in a sort of love sickness. Having his scarce nose what, his existence becomes a dissatisfied yearning, the world is spoiled for him, its joys are tasteless, so he wonders, vision haunted, down dreary days to some miserable end. Yet, if one will walk this path and take the risks, the thing may be done at comparatively small expense. To such I would command the Roman motto slightly altered, alieini apentes sui avaros.

1:20:34There be always good fellows with good cigars for their friends, nay to the boxes of these lie open, and the good cigar belongs rather to him that can appreciate it a right, then to the capitalist who, owing to a false social system, happens to be its temporary guardian and trustee. Again there is a saying, bread first I think among the schoolmen at Oxford, that it is the duty of a son to live up to his father's income. Should any young man have found this task too hard for him, after the most strenuous and single-minded efforts, at least he can restiledly smoke his father's cigars. In the path of duty complete success is not always to be looked for, but in improving conscience, the sure reward of honest endeavor is within reach of all. End of Smoking

1:21:37Section 11 of Pagan Papers This is a Libra Box recording. All Libra Box recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit librabox.org. Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham An autumn encounter For yet another mile or two, the hot dusty road runs through level fields till it reaches yonder shoulder of the downs, already golden three parts up with ripening corn. Under the wards lies my inevitable way, and now that home is almost inside, it seems hard that the last part of the long day's sweltering and delightful tramp must needs be haunted by that hateful speck, black on the effulgence of the slope.

1:22:38Did I not know he was only a scarecrow? The thing might be in a way companionable. A pleasant suggestive surmise, peaking curiosity, gilding this last weary stage with some magic of expectancy. But I passed close by him on my way out. Early as I was, he was already up and doing, eager to introduce himself. He leared after me as I swung down the road, mimicked my gate, as it seemed, in a most uncalled for way, and when I looked back he was blowing derivesive kisses of farewell with his empty sleeve. I had succeeded, however, in shaking off the recollection between the morning starts and now, so it was annoying that he should force himself on me, just when there was no

1:23:42getting rid of him. At this distance, however, he might be anything. An indeterminate blot, it seems to waver, to falter, to come and vanish again in the quivering heated air. And so, in the old time, leaning on that familiar gate, are the telltale in woven initials still desolifable, are used to watch her pacing demurly towards me through the corn. It was ridiculous, it was vatuous, under all the circumstances it was monstrous, and yet. We were both under twenty, so she was she, and I was I, and there were only we three, the wide world over, she and I, and the unbetraying gate, porter eburnia.

1:24:45False visions alone sped through you, though cupid was want to light on your top most bar, and pre in his glowing plumes. And to think that I should see her once more, coming down the path, as if not a day had passed, hesitating as a bold, and then, but surely her ankle seam, can found that scarecrow. His sex is by this time paintfully evident, also his condition in life, which is as of one looking back on better days. And now he is upon a new tack. Though here on the level it is still sultry and airless, an evening breeze is playing briskly along the slope where he stands, and one sleeve soars the air violently. The other is pointed stiffly

1:25:46heavenwards. It is all plain enough, my poor friend. The sins of the world are a heavy burden, and a grievous unto you. You have a mission, you must testify. It will forth in season and out of season. For man he wakes and sleeps and sins be times, but crows sin steadily, without any cessation. And this unhappy state of things is your own particular business. Even at this distance I seem to hear you rasping it. Salvation. Damnation. Damnation. Salvation. And the jolly earth smiles in the perfect even glow, and the corn ripples and laughs all round you. And one young rook only fledged this year too, after

1:26:47an excellent simulation of prostrate, heartbroken penitents, saws joyously away to make love to his neighbour's wife. Salvation. Damnation. Damn. A shifty riggle of the road, and he is transformed once more. Flung back in an ecstasy of laughter, holding his lean sides, his whole form rides with the chuckle and gurgle of merriment. Oh, ho, what a joke it was, how I took you all in, even the rooks, what a joke is everything to be sure. Truly I shall be glad to get quit of this heartless mama. Fortunately I shall soon be past him. And now behold the old dog waxes amorous, mincing, mowing, empty sleeve on hollow breast. He would vain pose as the

1:27:51most irresistible world hypocrite that ever paced a metropolitan curb. Love, you young dogs, he seems to croak. Love is the one thing worth living for. Enjoy your present, rooks and all, as I do. Why, indeed, should he alone be insensible to the golden influence of the hour? More than one supple waste, a last or universal masculine frailty, has been circled by that tattered sleeve in days gone by, a throbbing heart once beat where sodden straw now fails to give a manly curve to the chest. Why should the coat survive, and not a particle of the passion that inspired it long ago? At last I confront him, face to face, and the villain grins recognition

1:28:53completely unabashed. Nay, he cocks his eye with a significant glance under the slouch of his shapeless hat, and his arm points persistently and with intelligence up the road. My good fellow, I know the way to the dog and duck as well as you do. I was going there anyhow, without your officious interference, and the bear, as you justly remark, is unimpeachable. But was this really all you've been trying to say to me this last half hour? Well, well. End of an autumn encounter. Section 12 of Pagan Papers This is a Libravox recording, or Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org, recording by

1:29:58Lindhompson. Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham. Section 12. The White Poppy A riot of scarlet on gold, the red poppy of our native fields tosses heavy tresses with gypsy abandon, a sister of the sea-shore is golden, a yellow blossom that loves the keen salt savor of the spray. Of another hue is the poppy of history, of romance, of the muse, white as a stark death shroud, pallid as the cheeks of that queen of a silent land whose temple she langurously crowns, ghost-like beside her fuller-blooded kin. She droops, dream-laden, paparversomni-ferum, the poppy of the magic juice of oblivion. In the royal plenitude of summer the scarlet blooms will sometimes seem but a red cry from earth in memory of the many Jews of battle that have drenched these acres in years gone by, for little end but these came bubbles of blood might glow today.

1:31:01The yellow flower does but hint of the gold that has dashed a thousand wrecks at her feet around these shores. For happier suggestion we must turn to her of the pallid petals, our white lady of consolation. Fitting hue to typify the crowning blessing of forgetfulness. Too often the sable robes of night disemble sleeplessness, remorse, regret, subquestioning. Let black thin rather stand for hideous memory, white for blessed blanket oblivion, happiest gift of the gods. For who, indeed, can say that the record of his life is not crowded with failure and mistake, stained with its petty cruelties of youth, its meannesses and follies of later years, all of which storm and clamour incessantly at the gates of memory, refusing to be shut out. Lever salone, O gods, to remember our felicities, our successes, only aid us ye who recall no gifts aptly and is squeaky to forget. Discreetly we say for it is a tactful forgetfulness

1:32:07that makes for happiness. In the minor matter for instance of small money obligations, that shortness of memory which the school of professors pernerge and falls off rashly praises, may often betray into some unfortunate illusion or reference to the subject which I'll pay in the delicate feelings of the obliger, or if he be of course a clone, shall lead him in his anger to express himself with unseen inus and thereby to do violence to his mental tranquility, in which alone as Marcus Aureus teaches, lie the perfection of moral character. This is to be a stumbling block and an offence against the brethren. It is better to keep just memory enough to avoid such hidden rocks and shoals, in which thing Mr. Swivler is our great exemplar, whose mental map of London was a chart wherein every creditor was carefully void. The wise man prays we are told for good digestion. Let us add to the prayer and a verb memory.

1:33:13Truly we are sometimes tempted to think that we are the only ones cursed with this corroding canker. Our friends we can swear have all, without exception, atrocious memories. Why is ours alone so hideously vital? Yet this isolation must be imaginary. For even as we engage in a selfish moan for help, in our own petty case, we are moved to add a word for certain others who, meaning no ill, I'm thinking we go about to add to humanity's already heavy load of suffering. How much needless misery is caused in this world by the reckless recollections of dramatic and other celebrities. You gods in lending ear to our prayer remember two above all other sorts and conditions of men, these are poor, earing brothers and sisters and sometimes somitays of mummardoon. Moments there are, it is true, when this trait of spirit tricks you, when some subtle sense, some broken notes of an old song, nay, even some touch of a fresh air

1:34:19on your cheeks at night, a breath of Levant-Kivia a trabeur's lamenting, have power to ravish, to catch you back to the blissful days when you trod the one authentic paradise, moments only, alas, then the evil crowd rushes in again, howls in the sacred groves, tramples down and defiles the happy garden. And once more you cry to our loady of sleep, crowned of the white poppy. And you, however, your dog, who, for full discharge of a present benefaction having wab to a hearty, expressive tale, will then pursue it gently round the half-throg, till, in restful coil, he reaches it at last and oblivion with it. Every one of his half doesn't die on all sleeps being in truth or royal amnesty. But who's the hand that shall reach as the herb of healing? Perded to bless his every guest at the shearing with a hand full of blossom, but this gift is not to be asked of her whose best wish to her friends is grace and remembrance.

1:35:25The fair of failure, rather, nay, for as a nirseling she hugs her grief, and for her the memory of the past is a sorrow's crown of sorrow. What flowers are these her pale hand offers? There's panses that's for thoughts. For me, rather, O dear aphelia, the white poppy of forgetfulness. End of the white poppy. Section 13 of Pagan Papers This is a Libravox Recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Steve Britton Section 13 of Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham A Bohemian in exile, a reminiscence.

1:36:27When, many years ago now, the once potent and extensive kingdom of Bohemia gradually dissolved and passed away, not a few historians were found to chronicle its past glories, and some have gone on to tell the fate of this or that once powerful chief-ten who either dawned the swallow-tail and conformed, or proudly self-exiled, sought some quiet retreat and died, as he had lived, a Bohemian. But these were of the princes of the land. To the people, the Vien, the common rank and file does no interest attach. Did they waste and pine, anemic, and thin, strange, unwanted air, or sit at the table of the scornful and learn with Dante how salt was alien-bred? It is of one of those faithful commons, I would speak, narrating only the short and simple annals of the poor. It is to be noted that the kingdom of foresaid

1:37:31was not so much a kingdom as a United States, a collection of self-ruined guilds, municipalities, or republics, bound together by a common method of viewing life. There once was a king of Bohemia, but that was a long time ago and even corporal trim was not certain in whose reign it was. These small free states then broke up gradually from various causes and with varying speed, and I think ours was one of the last to go. With us, as with many others, it was a case of lost leaders, just for a handful of silvery left us. Though it was not exactly that, but rather that, having got the handful of silver, they wanted a wider horizon to fling it about under than Bloomsbury afforded. So they left us for their pleasure, and in due time, one by one. But I will not be morose about them, they had honestly earned their success, and we all honestly

1:38:33rejoiced at it, and do so still. When Old Pan was dead, and Apollo's bow broken, there were many faithful pagans who would worship at no new shrines, but went out to the hills and caves, truer to the old gods in their discrowned desolation than in their pomp and power. Even so, where we left behind a remnant of the faithful. We had never expected to become great in art or song. It was the life itself that we loved. That was our end, not as with them, the means to an end. We aimed at no glory, no lovers of glory, we give us the glory of going on and still to be. Unfortunately, going on was no longer possible. The old order had changed, and we could only patch up our broken lives, as best might be. Father Gill said that he, for one, would have no more of it.

1:39:36The past was dead, and he wasn't going to try and revive it. Henceforth, he, too, would be dead to Blomsbury. Our forefathers, speaking of a man's death, said he changed his life. This is how Father Gill changed his life and died to Blomsbury. One morning, he made his way to the White Chapel Road, and there he bought a barrow. The White Chapel Barrows are of all sizes from the barrow wheeled about by a boy with half a dozen heads of cabbages, to barrows drawn by a tall pony, such as on Sundays, take the members of a club to Epping Forest. They are all precisely the same in plan and construction, only in the larger sizes the handles develop or evolve into shafts, and they are equally suitable, according to size, for the vending of welks, for a hot potato can, a piano organ, or for the conveyance of a cheery and numerous party to the Derby.

1:40:38Father Gill bought a medium-sized, developed one, and also a donkey to fit. He had it painted white, picked out with green, the barrow, not the donkey, and when his arrangements were complete, stable the hole for the night in Blomsbury. The following morning, before the early red had quite faded from the sky, the Exodus took place. Those of us who were left being assembled to drink a parting whiskey and milk in sad and solemn silence. Father Gill turned down Oxford Street, sitting on the shaft with a short clay in his mouth, and disappeared from our sight, heading west at a leisurely pace. So he passed out of our lives by way of the Bay's water road. They must have wandered far and seen many things, he and his donkey, from the fitful fragments of news that now and again reached us. It seems that eventually, his style of living being economical, he was enabled to put down his donkey and barrow and set up a cart and a mare. No fashionable

1:41:43gypsy cart, a sort of houseboat on wheels, but a light and serviceable cart with a movable tilt constructed on his own designs. This allowed him to take along with him a few canvases and other artist materials. Soda water, whiskey, and such like necessaries, and even to ask a friend from town for a day or two, if he wanted to. He was in this state of comparative luxury when at last, by the nearest accident, I foregathered with him once more. I had pulled up to streetly one afternoon, and leaving my boat had gone for a long ramble on the glorious north Berkshire Downs to stretch my legs before dinner. Somewhere over on Cucam'sly Hill, by the side of the Ridgeway, remote from the habitable world, I found him, smoking his vest per pipe on the shaft of his cart, the mare cropping the short grass beside him. He greeted me without surprise or refusion, as if we had only parted yesterday and without a hint of an allusion to past times, but drifted quietly into rambling talk

1:42:50of his last three years, and without ever telling his story right out, left a strange picture-esque impression of a nomadic life which struck one as separated by fifty years from modern conventional existence. The old road life still lingered on in places it seemed once one got well away from the railway. There were two England's existing together, the one fringing the great iron highways wherever they might go, the England under the eyes of most of us. The other, unguessed at by many, in whatever places were still vacant of shriek and rattle, drowsed on as of old. The England of Heath and Common and Windy Sheep Down of Bylands and Village Greens, the England of Parsons Adams and Lavengro. The spell of the free, untrammed life came over me as I listened till I was feigned to accept of his hospitality and a horse blanket for the night, oblivious of

1:43:51civilized comforts down at the bull. On the downs where Alfred fought, we lay and smoked, gazing up at the quiet stars that had shown on many a dain, lying stark, and still a thousand years ago, and in the silence of the lone tract that infolded us, we seemed nearer to those old times than to these I had left that afternoon in the now hushed and sleeping valley of the Thames. When the news reached me, sometime later, that Father Gail's aunt had died and left him her house near town, and the little all she had possessed, I heard it with misgivings, not to say for boatings. For the house had been his grandfather's, and he had spent much of his boyhood there, it had been a dream of his early days to possess it in some happy future, and I knew he could never bear to sell it, or let it. On the other hand, can you stall the wild ass of the desert,

1:44:52and will not decaged eagle-mope and pine? However, possession was entered into, and all seemed to go well for the time. The cart was honorably installed in the coach-house, the mayor turned out to grass. Father Gail lived idly and happily, to all seeming, with the book of verses underneath the bow, and a bottle of old claret for the friend who might chance to drop in. But as the year wore on, small signs began to appear that he, who had always rather hear the lark sing, than the mouse squeak, was beginning to feel himself caged, though his bars were gilded. I was talking one day to his coach-man. He now kept three men servants, and he told me that of a Sunday morning when the household had gone to church, and everything was quiet, Mr. Father Gail would go into the coach-house and light his pipe, and sit on the step of the brome he had a brome now, and gaze at the old cart, and smoke, and say nothing, and smoke, and say nothing again.

1:45:58He didn't like it, the coach-man confessed, and to me it seemed ominous. One morning late in March, at the end of a long hard winter, I was wakened by a flood of sunshine. The early air came warm and soft through the open window. The first magic suggestion of spring was abroad, with its whispered hints of daffodils and budding hotorns, and once blood danced to imagined pipings of pan from happy fields far distant. At once I thought of Father Gail, and, with a certain foreboding of ill, made my way down to holly lodge as soon as possible. It was with no surprise at all that I heard that the master was missing. In the very first of the morning it seemed, or ever the earliest, under-house-made had begun to set man-traps on the stairs and along the passages he must have quietly left the house. The servants were cheerful enough, nevertheless, and thought the master must only have gone for a

1:46:58nice long walk, and so on, after the manner of their kind. Without a word, I turned my steps to the coach-house. Sure enough, the old cart was missing. The mare was gone from the paddock. It was no good, my saying anything. Pursuit of this wild haunter of tracks and bipaths would have been futile, indeed, so I kept my own counsel. Father Gail never returned to holly lodge, and has been more secret and evasive since his last flight, rarely venturing on old camping grounds near home, like to a bird scared by the filer's gun. Once, indeed, since then, while engaged in pursuit of the shy quarry known as the early-purp, late-deck, e-ang, and the like, specimens of which I was tracking down in the west, I hid upon him by accident, hearing in an old village rumours concerning a strange man in a cart who neither carried samples nor pushed the brewing interest by other means than average personal consumption, tales already beginning to be distorted into material for the myth

1:48:03of the future. I found him, friendly as ever, equally ready to spin his yarns. As the evening war on, adventured upon an illusion to past times and holly lodge, but his air of puzzled politeness convinced me that the whole thing had passed out of his mind as a slight but disagreeable incident in the even tenor of his nomadic existence. After all, his gains may have outbalanced his losses. Had he cared, he might, with his conversational gifts, have been a social success. Certainly, I think, an artistic one. He had great powers had any impulse been present to urge him to execution and achievement, but he was, for none of these things. Contemplative, receptive, with a keen sense of certain subtones and side aspects of life unseen by most, he doubtless chose wisely to enjoy life his own way, and to gather from the fleeting days what bliss they had to give, nor spend them

1:49:09in toiling for a harvest to be reaped when he was dust. Some for the glories of this life, and some sigh for the prophets' paradise to come, take the cash and let the credit go, nor heed the rumble of a distant drum. End of a Bohemian in exile, a reminiscence, recording by Steve Britton. This is a remedial age, an age of keys for all manner of locks, so he cannot be said to ask too

1:50:11much who seeks for exact information as to how a young man ought injustice to himself and to society to deal with his relations. During his minority, he has lain entirely at their mercy, has been their butt, their martyr, their drudge, their corpus billet, possessing all the sinuses of war, this stiff-necked tribe has consistently refused to part. Even for the provision of those luxuries, so much more necessary than necessities, its members have crammed their victim full of precepts, rules of conduct, moral maxims, and most miscellaneous counsel, all which he intuitively suspected at the time, and has ascertained by subsequent experience to be utterly worthless. Now, when the hour has come, when the toss-in has sounded at last, and the gall is at the gate, they still appear to think that the old condition of things is to go on, unconscious, apparently, of atonement to do, of retribution to be exacted, of wrongs to be avenged, and of insults to be wiped away.

1:51:18Over the northwest frontier, where the writ of the English Raj runs not, the artless Afghan is happy in a code that fully provides for relatives who neglect or misunderstand their obligations. An Afghan it was, who found himself compelled to approve an uncle with an unfortunate habit of squandering the family estate. An excellent relative this uncle and all other respects. As a liar, he had few equals. He robbed with taste and discretion, and his murders were all imbued with true artistic feeling. He might have lived to a green old age of spotless respectability, but for his one little failing. As it was, just his head to be done, Ruat-Kaelon. And so it came about that one day the nephew issued forth to correct him with a matchlock. The innocent old man was cultivating his paternal acres, so the nephew was able, unperceived, to get a steady sight on him. His finger was on the trigger, one suddenly there slipped into his mind,

1:52:18the divine precept. Aula is merciful. He lowered his peace and remained for a little plunge in thought. Meanwhile, the unconscious uncle owed his patty. Then with a happy smile he took aim once more, for there also occurred to him the precept equally divine, but Aula is also just. With an easy conscience he led fly and behold there was an uncle the more imperidized. It was probably some little affair of a similar quality that constrained a recruit in a regiment stationed at Pashaure to apply for a leave of absence in order to attend to family matters of importance. The colonel knew it was small use refusing to leave, as in that case his recruit would promptly desert, so he could only ask how long was the transaction likely to take. It was told him after consideration that allowing for all possible difficulties and delays a month would meet the necessities of the case, and on that understanding he allowed his man to depart.

1:53:21At the end of the month he reappeared on duty, a subdued but mellow cheer shining through his wanted impassiveness. His colonel ventured to inquire of him in a general way if the business in question were satisfactorily concluded, and he replied, I got him from behind a rock. There are practical difficulties in the way of the adoption of such methods at home, we must be content to envy without imitating these free and happy sons of the hills. And yet a few of the old school are left as still, a verse from change mistrustful of progress, sticking steadily to the good old fashioned dagger and ball. I had a friend who disposed the revelative every spring. Uncle's were his special line. He had suffered much from their tribe, having been early left and orphan. Though he had dabbled in aunts and in his hot youth when he was getting his hand in, he had even dallied with a grandparent or two. But it was in uncle's he excelled. He possessed, at the beginning of his career, a large number of these connections,

1:54:25and pursued them from the mere sorted point of view of pounds and pens proved lucrative. But he always protested and, I believe him, that gain with him was a secondary consideration. It would hardly be in the public interest to disclose his modus operandi. I shall only remark that he was one of the first to realise the security and immunity afforded the artist by the conditions of modern London. Hence it happened that he usually practised in town, but spent his vacations at the country-houses of such relations as were still spared him, where he was always the life and soul of the place. Unfortunately, he is no longer with us to assist in the revision of this article, nor was it permitted me to soothe his last moments. The presiding sheriff was one of those new fengled officials who insist on the exclusion of the public, and he declined to admit me, either in the capacity of a personal connection, or, though I tried my hardest as a representative of the national observer.

1:55:26It only remains to be said of my much-tried and still-lamented friend, that he left few relatives to mourn his untimely end. But our reluctant feet must needs keep step with the imperious march of time, and my poor friend's art, as himself in later years would sorrowfully admit, is now almost as extinct as the glass-staining of old, or Robbie's craft so apt and strange. While our thin-blooded youth, too nice for the joyous old methods, are content to find sweetest revenge in severely dropping their relations. This is, indeed, a most effective position. It exasperates while it is unassailable. And yet there remains a higher course, a nobler task, not mere forgiveness. It is simple duty to forgive, even one's guardians. No young man of earnest aspirations will be content to stop here. Nay, lead them on, these lost ones by the hand, conduct them generously and gently,

1:56:30and with linking of the arm, educate them, eradicate their false ideals, dispel their foolish prejudices, be to their faults a little blind, and to their virtues very kind. In fine, realise that you have a mission, that these wretched are not here for nothing. The task will seem hard at first, but only those who have tried can know how much may be done by a Sidious and kindly effort toward the chasening, I, the final redemption even, of the most hopeless and pig-headed of uncles. End of justifiable homicide. Section 15 of pagan papers. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit leabravox.org. Recording by Joseph Tabler.

1:57:32Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham. Section 15. The Fairy Wicked. From digging in the sandy, over-treatrated soil of times historical, all dotted with date and number and sign, how exquisite the relief in turning to the dear days outside history. Yet not so very far, neither for us, nurslings of the northern sun, when kindly beasts, would loiter to give counsel by the wayside, and a fortunate encounter with one of the good people, was a sure path to fortune and the bride, then the best-worn stool that ever proved step-latter to aspiring youth. For then, the Fairy Wicked stood everywhere a jar, everywhere and to each and all. Open, open Green Hill! You needed no more, recondite, accessory than that. And whoever you were, you might have a

1:58:36glimpse of the Elfin dancers in the hall that is lit in, within, by neither in sun nor moon, or catch at the White Horse's bridle, as the Fairy Prince rode through. It has been closed now, this many a year, the fairies always strong in the field, are excellent Wicked Keepers, and if it opened at all, Tisbut for a moment's mockery of the material generation that so deliberately turned its back on the gap into Elfland, that first stage to the beyond. It was a wanton trick, though, that these folk of malice used to play on a small schoolboy, new kicked out of his nest into the drafty, uncomfortable outer world, his unfledged skin still craving the feathers, wherein to he was wantonessel, the barrack-like school, the arid, cheerless classrooms, drove him to nature for redress, and under an alien sky he would go forth

1:59:39and wander along the iron road by impassive fields, so like, yet so unlike, those hitherto a part of him, and responding to his every mood. And to him, thus loitering with overlaid in heart, there would come suddenly a touch of warmth, of strange surprise. The turn of the road, just to head, that sure is not all unfamiliar. That row of elms, it cannot entirely be accident that they range just so, and if not accident, then round the bend, will come the old duck pond, the shoulder of the barn will top it, a few yards on will be the gate. It swings too with its familiar click, the dogs race down the avenue, and then, and then. It is all wildly fanciful, and yet, though knowing not to tellian, a credo cuia impulsabile is on his tongue as he quickens his pace, for what else can he do? A step in the spell is shattered, all is cruel, an alien once more,

2:00:43while every cops and hedgerow seems a tingle with faint elvish laughter. The fairies have had their joke, they have opened the wicket one of their own hands, breaths, and shut it in their victim's face. When next that victim catches a ferry, he purposes to tie up the brat in sight of his own green hill, and set him to draw up a practical scheme for village councils. One of the many women I ever really loved, fair in the fearless old fashion, was used to sing in the blithe, unthettered accent of the people. I'd like to be a fairy, and then sip on my toes. I'd like to be a fairy, and wear short glows. And in later life it is to her sex that the wee but very wise folk sometimes delegate their power of torment. Such understudies are found to play the part exceedingly well, and many a time the infatuated youth believes he sees in the

2:01:43depth of one soul pair of eyes, blue-brown or green, the fairy-color, the authentic fairy-wicket standing at jar. Many a time he must hear the quaint old formula, I'm sure if I've ever done anything to lead you to think, etc. runs it not so. Air he shall realize that here is the gate upon no magic pleasant, but on a cheap suburban villa banging behind the wrathful rate collector or hurled open to speed the palad householder to the registrar's office. In still-groser habitations, too, they lurk, do the people of mischief, ready to frolic out on the unsuspecting one, as in the case which still haunts my memory of a certain bottle of an historic, chateau-icam. Hude, like Venetian glass, odorous as a garden in June, forth from out the faint perfume of this haunt to drink their dance, a bevy from old France clad in the fashion of Louis-Kinsey, peach-colored knots of ribbon-bedizing apple-green velvets, as they moved in stately-wise,

2:02:49among the roses of the old garden to the quaint music. Ramo, was it, of a fairy corn amuse? While fairy-wattos, fraganards, lancrats sat and painted them, a last to shallow the bottle, to brief the brawls not to be recalled by any quantity of green-shar truce. End of the Fairy Wicked. Section 16 of pagan papers. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recorded by Lisa Reichert. Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham. Section 16. A Board the Galley. He was cruising in the southern seas, was the Ulysses who told me this tale,

2:03:50when their board down upon him a marvelous strange fleet, whose like he had not before seen. For each little craft was a corpse, stiffly marland, or bound about with tarred rope, as mariners do use to treat plugged tobacco. Also, ballasted and with a fair mast and sale, stepped through his midriff. These self-sufficing ships knew no divided authority. No pilot ever took the helm from the captain's hands. No mutines lay in billboes. No passengers complained of the provisions. In a certain island to winward, the native pilot explained, it was the practice when a man died, to bury him for the time being in dry, desiccating sand, till a chief should pass from his people. When the waiting bodies were brought out, caulked and rigged secundum artum, were launched with the first fair breeze, the admiral at their head, on their voyage to the blessed islands. And if a chief should die, and the sand should hold no store of corpses for

2:04:57his escort, this simple practical folk would solve the little difficulty by knocking some dozen or twenty stout fellows on the head, that the notable might have voyage like a gentleman. Once this gallant little company, running before the breeze, stark, happy and extinct, all bound for the ills of light, it was a sight to shame us sitters at home, who believe in those islands most of us even as they yet are content to trundle city-wards or to margate, so long as the sorry breath is in us, and breathless at last to bow or cancel green, without one effort dead or alive to reach the far-shining disparities. Da la galère capitane, nous étions, qu'à travers rameur, sang the ores men in the ballad, and they, though indeed they toiled on the galley bench, were free and happy pirates, members of an honored and liberal profession. But all we, pirates, parsons, stockbrokers, whatever are calling, are but galley slaves of the

2:06:04bassist sort, fettered to the ore each for his little spell. A common misery links us all, like the chain that runs the length of the thorts. Can nothing make it worth our while not to quarrel with our fellows? The menace of the storms is for each one and for all. The master's whip has a fine impartiality, crack. The lash that scored my comrades back has flicked my withers too, yet neither of us was shirking, it was that grinning ruffian in front. Well, tomorrow, God willing, the invasion shall be ours, while he rives howling. But why do we never once combine, seize on the ship, fling our masters into the sea, and steer for some pleasant-tile far down under the line, beyond the still-vexed bermouths? When whole for feasting, hey, for tobacco and free-quarters! But no, the days pass and are

2:07:05reckoned up and done with, and evermore pressing cares engage. Those fellows on the leeward benches are having an easier time than we poor dogs on the weatherside. Then let us abuse, pelt, vilify then. Let us steal their grub and have at them generally for a set of shirking, malingering broods. What matter that tomorrow they may be windward, we to lee. We never can look ahead, and they know this well, the gods are masters, pliers of the whip, and may have, we like them, none the worse for it. Indeed, there is a traitor sort among ourselves, that spins fast-style phrases in the honor of these whip masters of ours, as omnise yudim kajamur, and the rest, which is all very pretty and mighty consoling. The fact is, the poets are the only people who score by the present arrangement, which it is therefore their interest to maintain. While we are doing all the work, these incorrigible skulkers lounge about and make ribled remarks, they write Greek tragedies on fate,

2:08:12on the sublimity of suffering, on the petty span and so on, and act in a generally offensive way. And we are even weak enough to buy their books, offer them drinks, purages and things, and say, what superlative fellows they are. And when the long looked for combination comes, and we poor devils have risen and abolished fate, destiny, the Olympian council, early baldness and the like, these poets will really have to go. And when every rimester has walked the plank, shall we still put up with our relations, true members of the stupid party, who never believe in us, who know and never forget the follies of our adolescence, who are always wanting us not to do things, who are lavish of advice yet angered by the faintest suggestion of a small advance in cash. Shall the idle singers perish and these endure? No, as soon as the last poet has splashed over the side, to the sharks with our relations. The old Barkey is lightening famously, who shall be

2:09:19next to go. The sportsman of intolerable yarns, who slays twice over, first his game, and then the miserable being he buttenholes for the tedious recital, shall we suffer him longer? Who else? Who is that cowering under the bullworks, yonder? The man who thinks he can imitate the Scottish accent, splash, and the next one, what a crowd is here. How they block the hatchways, lumber the deck, and get between you and the percise room? These fad mongers, tea-toddlers, missionaries of diverse isms, overboard with them, and hay for the fortunate Isles. Then for tobacco, in a hammock twix the palms, then for wine, cooled in a brooklet, losing itself in silver sands. Then for, but oh, these billboes on our ankles, how mercilessly they grip, the vertical sun blisters the bear back, faint echoes of Olympian laughter seem to flicker like northern lights across the stark and pitiless

2:10:23sky. One earnest effort would do it, my brothers, a little modesty, a short sinking of private differences, and then we should all be free and equal gentleman of fortune, and I would be your captain. Who, you, you would make a pretty captain? Better than you, you scurvy, skulking little galley slave, galley slave yourself and be, pull together boys and lie low, here's the master coming with his whip. End of aboard the galley, recorded by Lisa Reichert. Section 17 of pagan papers. This is a Libravox recording. All Libravox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit Libravox.org. Recording by Diana Schmidt. Pagan papers by Kenneth Graham, the lost sentar.

2:11:26It is somewhere set down, or does the legend only exist in the great volume of ought to be that the young Achilles nurtured from babyhood by the wise and kindly cairen, accustomed to reverence and ideal of human skill and wisdom, blunt with all that was best and noblest of animal instinct, strength and swiftness, found poor humanity sadly to miss. When at last he was sent forth among his pottering little two-legged peers. Himself alone he had hitherto fancied to be the main one, the incomplete. He looked to find the lords of earth even such as these sentars. Wise and magnanimous atop, below, shod with the lightning, winged with the wind, terrible in the potentiality of the armed heel, instead of which how fallen was his first fair hope of the

2:12:29world, and even when reconciled at last to the dynasty of the forked radish, after he had seen its quality tested round the clangerous walls of Troy, some touch of an imperial disdain ever lingered in his mind for these feeble folk who could contentedly hail him, him who had known Cairen as hero and lord. Achilles has passed with the sentars and Troy, but the feeling lingers, of strange and diverse strands, is twisted the mysterious cord that reaching back through spaces out of space and timeless time somewhere joins us to the brute. A twine of mingle de yarn, not utterly base. As we grow from our animal infancy and the threads snap one by one at each gallant wing stroke of a soul poising for flight into Imperion. We are yet conscious of a loss for every gain,

2:13:31we have some forlorn sense of a vanished heritage. Willing enough are we to let the ape and tiger die, but the pleasant cousins dissembled in hide and fur and feather are not all tigers and apes, which last vile folk, indeed, exist for us only in picture books, and chiefly offend by always carrying the Sunday school ensign of a moral at their tails. Others happily of less didactic dispositions, there be, and it is to these unaffected, careless companions, that the sensible child is want to devote himself, leaving severely alone the stiff, tame creatures claiming to be of closer kin. And yet these playmates, while cheerfully admitting him of their fellowship, make him feel his inferiority at every point. Vanley, his snobb knows projected earthwards, he essays to sniff it with the terrier who, as becomes the nobler animal,

2:14:36is leading in the chase, and he is ready to weep as he realizes his loss. And the rest of the free company, the pony, the cows, the great cart horses, are ever shaming him by their unbostful exercise of some enviable and unattainable attribute. Even the friendly pig, who did but parents permit, should eat of his bread and drink of his cup, and be unto him as a brother, which among all these unhappy bifurcations, so cheery, so unambitious, so purely contented, so apt to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of boyhood as he? What wonder that at times, when the neophyte in life begins to realize that all these desirable accomplishments have had to be surrendered one by one in the process of developing a mind, the course of fitting out a lord of creation he is want, not knowing the extent of the kingdom to which he is air,

2:15:41to feel a little discontented? Air now this ill-humour, taking root in a nature wherein the animal is already ascendant, has led by downward paths to the goat foot, in whom the submerged human system peeps out but fitfully, at exalted moments. He, the pee-fish and arassable shy of trotten ways and pretty domesticities, is linked to us by little but his love of melody, but for which saving grace the hair would soon creep up from thigh to horn of him. At times, he will still do us a friendly turn, will lend a helping hand to poor little psyche, willfully seeking her own salvation, will stand shoulder to shoulder with us on marathon plane. But in the main his sympathies are first for the beast to which his horns are never horrific, but with his hairy pelt ever natural and familiar, and his voice with its talk of help in healing,

2:16:45not harsh nor dissonant, but voice of every brother as well as every god. And this declension for declension it is, though we achieve all the competences of Olympus, and even master with him the pleasant argo of the woods, may still be ours if we suffer what lives in us of our primal cousins to draw us down. On the other hand, let soul inform an irradiate body as it may. The threads are utterly shorn asunder never, nor is man the complete the self contained permitted to cut himself holy adrift from these his poor relations. The mute and stunted human embryo that gazes appealingly from out the depths of their eyes must ever remind him of a kinship once possibly closer. Nay at times it must even seem to well him in reproach. As thus, was it really necessary

2:17:48after all that we too should part company so early, may you not have taken a wrong turn somewhere in your long race after your so-called progress after the perfection of this belotted species of yours? Atturning whose due avoidance might perhaps have resulted in no such lamentable cleavage as is here, but in some perfect embodiment of the dual nature as who should say of being with the nobilities of both of us, the baseness of neither so might you more fortunately guided have been led at last up the green sides of pylian to the ancestral the primeval centaur still waiting majestic on the summit. It is even so. Perhaps this might once have been o-causen outcast and estranged, but the opportunity was long since lost henceforth two ways for us forever. End of the lost centaur.

2:18:55Section 18 of pagan papers. This is a Librevox recording. All Librevox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit Librevox.org. Read by Judy Derby. Pagan Papers by Kenneth Graham Orion The moonless night has a touch of frost and is steely clear. High and dominant amidst the populations of the sky. The restless and the steadfast alike hangs the great plow lit with a hard radiance as of the polished and shining share. And yonder, low on the horizon but half a resurgent as yet, crouches the magnificent hunter, watchful seemingly and expectant, with some hint of menace in his port. Yet should his game be up you would think by now.

2:19:57Many a century has passed since the plow first sped a conqueror east and west, clearing forest and draining fenn, policing the valleys with barbed wires and sandy schools, with the chains that are forged of peace, the urking fetters of plenty. Driving also the whole lot of us. These to sweat at its tail, those to plod with a patient team, but all to march in a great chain gang, the convicts of peace and order and law while the happy nomad, with his woodlands, his wild cattle, his pleasing nubsalaties, as long since disappeared, dropping only in his flight some store of flinteds, a legacy of confusion. Truly, we children of the plow, but for yonder, tremendous monitor in the sky, were in right case to forget that the hunter is still a quantity to reckon with all.

2:21:01Where then does he hide, the shaker of the spear? Why, hear my brother and hear, deep in the breasts of each and all of us, and for this drop of primal quick silver in the blood, what poppy or mandragora shall purge it hence away. Of pulpateers and parents, it is called original sin, a term wherewith they brand whatever frisks and butts with rude gaudish horns against accepted maxims and trim theories of education. In the abstract, of course, this fitful stirring of the old yeast is no more sin than a natural craving for a seat on a high stool. For the inscription, now horizontal and now vertical, a figure is sin, but the deskman command a temporary majority. For the short while they shall

2:22:03hold the cards, they have the right to call the game. And so, since we must bow to the storm, let the one thing be labeled sin and the other salvation, for a season, ourselves forgetting never is the matter of no manquature. What we have now first to note is that this original waft from the garden asserts itself most vigorously in the child. This is that thrust the small boy out under the naked heavens to enact a sorry and shivering cruso on an islet in the duck pond. This is that sends the little girl footing it after the gypsy's van, oblivious of lessons, puddings, the embrace maternal, the paternal smack, hearing not save the faint, far bugle summons, to the prehistoric little savage that thrills and answers in the tingling blood of her.

2:23:04Seeing only a troop of dusky, dull-eyed guides along that shining highway to the dim land east to the sun and west to the moon, where freedom is and you can wander and breathe, and at night time street lamps there are none, only the hunters' fires, and the eyes of lions and the mysterious stars. In later years it is stifled and gagged, buried deep, a green turf at the head of it, and on its heart a stone, but it lives, it breathes, it lurks, it will up and out when it has looked for at least. That stockbroker, some brief summons gone, who was missed from his wanted place one settling day. A goodly, portly man, if ate, and had a villa and a steam-launch at Serbaton, and was versed in the esoteric humors of the house. Who could have thought that the hunter lay

2:24:11hid in him? Yet, after many weeks, they found him in a wild nukov hampshire. Ragged, sun-burt, the nocturnal haystack calling aloud from his frayed and weather-stained duds. His trousers tucked, he was tickling trout with godless, stator-virtians, and when they would have won him to himself, with honeyed whispers of American rails, he answered but with babble of green fields. He is back in his wanted corner now, quite cured, apparently, and tractable. And yet, let the sun shine too wantently in throg-morton street, let an errant zephyr quick with the warm south, famed but his cheek too wooingly on his way to the station, and will he not once more snap his chain and away? I, truly, and next time he will not be caught. Deans have danced to the same wild piping,

2:25:16though their chapters have hushed the matter up, even duchesses, they say, have come tripping dune the stair, wrapped by the climbing passion from their strawberry-leaved surroundings into starlit spaces. Nay ourselves too, the doose, respectable mediocrities that we are, which of us, but might recall some fearful outbreak, whose details are mercifully unknown to the household that calls us breadwinner and chief. What marvel that upyonder the hunter smiles, when he knows that everyone in his can, the tinker with the statesman, has caught his bugle blast and gone forth on its irresistible appeal. Not that they are so easily followed as of your, those flying echoes of the horn? Joints are stiffer, maybe. Certainly the desolate suburbs creep ever farther into the retreating fields, and when you reach the windy morland, low, it is all

2:26:20staked out into building lots. Mud is mudier now than here to for, and ruts are rudder. And what friendless old beast comes limping down the dreary lane. He seems sorely shrunk and shoulder-shotten, but by the something of divinity in his look, still more than by the wings despondent along his mighty sides, toes ever the old Pegasus, not yet the knackersome. Hard times have been having, he murmurs, as your rub is nose. These fellows have really no seat except for a park hack. As for this laurel, we were wont to await it trembling, and in taking it we were afraid. Your English way of hunting it down with yelpings and haloings. Well, I may be out of date, but we wouldn't have stood that sort of thing on hella-con. So he hobbles down the road,

2:27:21good night old fellow, out of date? Well, it may be so, and alas, the blame is ours. But for the hunter, there he rises, couchant no more. Nay, plung full stretch on the blue, he blazes, he dominates, he appalls. Will his turn then really come at last? After some Armageddon of cataclysmal ruin, all leveling, well-meaning the county counsellor with the musical artist, obliterating the very furrows of the plow. Shall the skin-clad nomad string his bow once more, and once more loose the whistling shaft, wildly incredible it seems, and yet look up. Look up and behold him confident, erect majestic, there on the threshold of the sky. End of Orion.

2:28:21End of pagan papers by Kenneth Graham.