careful meditation or long hours of the midnight watch—all these circulate, along with their Victrola records, from room to room, as the chief media of social exchange. And when any remark particularly "good" or particularly "naughty" is devised by any of them it floats through the halls, swift as a whiff of ether, bringing relief and a quickened sense of life to liers-inbed, a little bored by watching the rise and fall of their temperatures and by wondering what progress or regress has been made since the last time they looked, with the aid of the X-ray, into the operations beneath their own breastbones of those swarming micro-organisms, so zealously obeying the Almighty's behest to "increase and multiply."
In a sanatorium "enlightened selfishness" may be described as the official philosophy, and it is deliberately prescribed to patients as the only philosophy fit for them to embrace. The two positive watchwords which Mr. Powys recalls from that period are "good manners" and "expedience." On the negative side: "Insensitiveness is the one cardinal sin." In the depths of consciousness, however, one places as the grand consolation, the foundation stone upon which rise courtesy and gaiety and vivacity and all other amenities—in the bottom of consciousness one rests ultimately upon this grand consolation: "Nothing matters." The maxim is not incompatible with a great deal of eagerness in all the chief concerns of life and punctilious care in the little ones. Often it seems conducive to just the proper degree of internal coolness for the best external functioning of hot little men.
When Mr. Powys emerged from the philosophical school of the sanatorium he found that he did not relish "the smell of the inside of churches," but that the
