文档介绍：Yet Again
Yet Again
Max Beerbohm
1
Yet Again
Till I gave myself the task of making a little selection from what I had
written since last I formed a book of essays, I had no notion that I had put,
as it were, my eggs into so many baskets--The Saturday Review, The New
Quarterly, The New Liberal Review, Vanity Fair, The Daily Mail,
Literature, The Traveller, The Pall Mall Magazine, The May Book, The
Souvenir Book of Charing Cross Hospital Bazaar, The Cornhill Magazine,
Harper's Magazine, and The Anglo-Saxon Review...Ouf! But the sigh of
relief that I heave at the end of the list is panied by a smile of thanks
to the various authorities for letting me use here what they were so good as
to require.
M. B.
2
Yet Again
THE FIRE
If I were `seeing over' a house, and found in every room an iron cage
let into the wall, and were told by the caretaker that these cages were for
me to keep lions in, I think I should open my eyes rather wide. Yet nothing
seems to me more natural than a fire in the grate.
Doubtless, when I began to walk, one of my first excursions was to the
fender, that I might gaze more nearly at the live thing roaring and raging
behind it; and I dare say I dimly wondered by what blessed dispensation
this creature was allowed in a domain so peaceful as my nursery. I do not
think I ever needed to be warned against scaling the fender. I knew by
instinct that the creature within it was dangerous-- fiercer still than the cat
which had once strayed into the room and scratched me for my advances.
As I grew older, I ceased to wonder at the creature's presence and learned
to call it `the fire,' quite lightly. There are so many queer things in the
world that we have no time to go on wondering at the queerness of the
things we see habitually. It is not that these things are in themselves less
queer than they at first seemed to us. It is that our vision of them has been
dimmed. We are lucky when by some chance we see again, for a