I had a glimpse of Eden last night. It came, as visions should come, out of the of things. In all these years no night spent in a newspaper office had been more depressing than this, with its sense of , its communiqué, Wytschaate lost, won, lost again; the eager study of the map with its ever retreating British line; the struggle to write cheerfully in spite of a sick and foreboding heart—and then out into the night with the burden of it all hanging like a upon the soul. And as I stood in the dark and the slush and the snow by the Law Courts I saw careering towards me a motor-bus with great head-lights that shone like blast furnaces on a dark hillside. It seemed to me like a magic bus pounding through the gloom with good tidings, jolly tidings, and the darkness with its lamps. Heavens, thought I, what strangers we are to good tidings; but here surely they come, breathless and radiant, for such a glow never sat on the brow of fear. The bus stopped and I got inside, and inside it was radiant too—so brilliant that you could not only see that your fellow-passengers were real people of flesh and blood and not in the darkness, but that you could read the paper with ease.  
But I did not read the paper. I didn't want to read the paper. I only wanted just to sit back and enjoy the forgotten sensation of a well-lit bus. It was as though at one stride I had passed out of the long and bitter night of the black years into the careless past, or forward into the future when all the agony would be a tale that was told. One day, I said to myself, we shall think nothing of a bus like this. All the buses will be like this, and we shall go galumphing home at midnight through streets as bright as day. The gloom will have vanished from Trafalgar Square and the fairyland of Piccadilly Circus will glitter once more with ten thousand lights singing the praises of Oxo and Bovril and Somebody's cigarettes and Somebody else's pills. We shall look up at the stars and not fear them and at the moon and not be afraid. The newspaper will no longer be a chronicle of hell, nor the tyrannical occupation of our thoughts.
 
And as I sat in the magic bus and myself with this vision of the Eden that will come when the madness is past, I wondered what I should do on entering that blessed realm that was lost and that we to . Yes, I think I should fall on my knees. I think we shall all want to fall on our knees. What other attitude will there be for us? Even my barber will fall on his knees. "If I thought peace was coming to-morrow," he said firmly the other day, "I'd fall on my knees this very night." He as though nothing but peace would induce him to do such a desperate, unheard-of thing. I tried to puzzle out his scheme of faith, but found it beyond me. It rather resembled the naked commercialism of King Theebaw, who when his favourite wife lay ill promised his gods most splendid gifts if she recovered, and when she died brought up a park of and blew their temple down. But my barber, nevertheless, had the root of the matter in him, and I would certainly follow his example.
 
But then—what then? Well I should want to get on to some high and

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