PREFACE
THESE fleeting sketches are all re-published by kind permission of the Editor of The Daily News, in which paper they appeared. They amount to no more than a sort of sporadic diary—a diary recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy—the only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep. Even that diary he could only keep by keeping it in public, for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind ora wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realized. He could not write an essay on such a post
