spends more hours, making out of pith and coloured paper little models, like stalactite work, of the English Cathedrals. His small holidays go in making trips to Bath, to Exeter, to Durham, and his small savings are spent on architectural drawings and photographs of details. His ambition is to make a model of every cathedral in this country, and, if life holds out, of those at Rouen, Amiens, and Notre Dame de Paris.
This is an ideal: his eyes grow hazy and romantically soft at the thought of finally having in his working shed all these small white objects. But he does not in the least care about architecture. I once met by accident a man of forty, a cashier of a London bus company. He rather disliked the country, but his ambition was to cover, on his bicycle, every road of the United Kingdom. He inked over on his ordnance map each road that he travelled on, and he saw, in imagination, as a glorious finale like a dream, one of the sixpenny papers publishing a half-tone block representing this map with all its coach roads inked and distinct like the filaments of a skeleton leaf.
Collectors and connoisseurs there have been, no doubt, in all the ages since Nero carried off his five hundred bronzes from Delphi. But the recreations of this signalman and this 'bus-cashier are simply mental anodynes: if they were not necessary for self-preservation they would be imbecile. The conditions of modern labour make them almost more than necessary. A man who retires from any routine work at all strenuous, signs nowadays his own death warrant if he have no hobby.
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