his wife and his neighbours--every blessed neighbour--and with

indescribable bitterness he hated himself.

"Why did I ever get in this silly Hole?" he said. "Why did I ever?"

He sat on the stile, and looked with eyes that seemed blurred with

impalpable flaws at a world in which even the spring buds were wilted,

the sunlight metallic and the shadows mixed with blue-black ink.

To the moralist I know he might have served as a figure of sinful

discontent, but that is because it is the habit of moralists to ignore

material circumstances,--if indeed one may speak of a recent meal as a

circumstance,--with Mr. Polly circum. Drink, indeed, our teachers

will criticise nowadays both as regards quantity and quality, but

neither church nor state nor school will raise a warning finger

between a man and his hunger and his wife's catering. So on nearly

every day in his life Mr. Polly fell into a violent rage and hatred

against the outer world in the afternoon, and never suspected that it

was this inner world to which I am with such masterly delicacy

alluding, that was thus reflecting its sinister disorder upon the

things without. It is a pity that some human beings are not more

transparent. If Mr. Polly, for example, had been transparent or even

passably translucent, then perhaps he might have realised from the

Laocoon struggle he would have glimpsed, that indeed he was not so

much a human being as a civil war.

The History of Mr Polly