The Journal of a Disappointed Man

What a young fool I was to neglect those priceless opportunities of studying and tasting life and character in North ----, at Borough Council meetings, Boards of Guardians, and electioneering campaigns--not to mention inquests, police courts, and country fairs. Instead of appraising all these precious and genuine pieces of experience at their true value, my diary and my mind were occupied only with--Zoology, if you please. I ignored my exquisite chances, I ramped around, fuming and fretting, full of contempt for my circumscribed existence, and impatient as only a youth can be. What I shall never forgive myself is my present inability to recall that life, so that instead of being able now to push my chair back and entertain myself and others with descriptions of some of those antique and incredible happenings, my memory is rigid and formal: I remember only a few names and one or two isolated events. All that time is just as if it had never been. My recollections form only an indefinite smudge--odd Town Clerks, Town Criers (at least five of them in wonderful garb), policemen (I poached with one), ploughing match dinners (platters of roast beef and boiled potatoes and I, bespectacled student of Zoology, sitting uncomfortably among valiant trenchermen after their day's ploughing), election meetings in remote Exmoor villages (and those wonderful Inns where I had to spend the night!)--all are gone--too remote to bear recital--yet just sufficiently clear to harass the mind in my constant endeavours to raise them all again from the dead in my consciousness. I hate to think it is lost; that my youth is buried--a cemetery without even headstones. To an inquest on a drowned sailor--disclosing some thrilling story of the wild seas off the coast--with a pitiful myopia--I preferred Wiedersheim's Comparative Anatomy of Vertebrates. I used to carry Dr. Smith Woodward's Paleontology with me to a Board of Guardians meeting, mingling Pariasaurus and Holoptychians with tenders for repairs and reports from the Master. Now I take Keats or Tschekov to the Museum!