The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood
in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and
intricate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the keeping
off of the profane, we disguise by the exoteric name of Nothing.
At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at
a tree, practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of
knife-throwing by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances.
Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something
about their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that
reminded me, I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy.
They asked what the knife was, who I was, why I was throwing it,
what my address was, trade, religion, opinions on the Ja
