activity. Yet betimes we are favoured with
a passport for this kingdom in the broad-day
season—in the fierce summer heat, when we
retire to cool rooms, there to pay the tribute
of forty winks to the Monarch of the
Impossible: when, as we travel, we can half
discern the green summer leaves waving
through our translucent eyelids, can hear the
murmuring of fountains and the singing of
birds in the kingdom we have come from.
Very pleasant are these day voyages,
especially when we can drowsily hear the laughter
of children playing on a lawn outside.

The Kingdom of Reconciled Impossibilities
is a land of unfulfilled promises, of broken
engagements, of trees for ever blossoming
but never bearing fruit, of jumbles of
commencements with never a termination among
them, of prefaces without finises, of dramas
never played out. The unities are not
observed in this kingdom. There are a great
many prologues, but no epilogues. It is
all as it  should not and cannot be. It
snows in July, and the dog-days are in
January. Men sneeze with their feet and
see with their thumbs, like Gargantua. The
literature of the country consists of tales told
by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying
nothing. The houses are all built without
foundations; they are baseless fabrics, which,
vanishing, leave not a wreck behind. Everything
in the kingdom is impossible.

Impossible, yet reconciled. In no other
land, certainly, are we so convinced of the
truth of the axiom that, " whatever is, is
right." Against our knowledge, feelings,
experience, and convictions, against all evidence,
oral or ocular, against truth, justice, reason,
or possibility, we smilingly confess that black
is white, that clouds are whales, that the
moon is cheese. We know our brother to
be our brother, yet without difficulty or
reluctance we admit him to be Captain Cook.
With a full knowledge that what we are
doing can't be, we are pleasantly convinced that
it can be, and that it is, and is right. So we
violate all laws of morality, decorum,
international justice, honesty, and courtesy, with
a comfortable self-consciousness that it is " all
right," and that we are wronging no one.
Quakers have been known in the Kingdom of
Impossibilities to lie in wait for men and
murder them; nay, to have hidden the bodies
afterwards in corn-bins, or chemists' bottles.
Moral men have eloped with ballet dancers.
Bishops have found themselves at the Cider
Cellars. Judges of the Ecclesiastical Court
have created disturbances at the Casino, and
have wrenched off knockers in company with
jovial proctors and fast old surrogates about
town. There was a cathedral verger once, in
the Kingdom of Impossibilities, who refused
a fee; there was an Irish Member without a
grievance; there was a Chanceiy suit decided
to the satisfaction of all parties.

Good men not only become rascals; but
rascals turn honest men in this astonishing
country. Captain Mac Swindle paid me,
only last night, the five pounds he has
owed me for fifteen years. I saw the unjust
steward render up a faultless account. All
is not vexatious and disappointing in the
Impossible Kingdom. If it be a kingdom
of unfulfilled promises, it is one of
accomplished wishes. Sorely pressed for cash in
this sublunar kingdom, no sooner are we
in the other than the exact sum we wished
for, chinks in golden sovereigns, rustles in.
crisp notes, mellifluously whispers in soft-
papered cheques before our eyes, within our
gladsome pockets, or our rejoicing fingers.
We shall be able to meet the little bill; streets
are no longer stopped up; the tailor shall
cringe again; Caroline shall have the velvet
mantle trimmed with sable. Hurrah! But
alas! the money of the kingdom that never
can be, and yet always is and will be, is a3
treacherous and deceitful as a will-of-the-wisp,
or an Eastern mirage; no sooner do we
possess it than we have it not. We wake,
and the shining sovereigns and the rustling
notes have turned into dry leaves, like the
money paid by the magician in the Arabian
Nights.

If the kingdom (to expatiate further on its
advantageous features) be one of tribulations
and disappointments, it is also one of great and
extended privilege. We are privileged to
walk about unwashed, unshaven, and
undressed, to clap kings upon the back, to salute
princesses if we list, to ride blood horses, to fly
higher than the skylark, to visit foreign lands
without a Foreign Office passport, the reference
of a banking firm, or the necessity of being
personally known to the Foreign Secretary.
We have the privilege of being a great many
people and in a great many places at one and
the same time. We have the privilege of
living our lives over again, of undoing the
wrongs we have done, of re-establishing our
old companionship with the dead, and knowing
their worth much better than we did
before we lost them.

Yes, pre-eminent and radiant stands one
privilege, to the enjoyment of which every
traveller in the land of Reconciled
Impossibilities is entitled. He is privileged to behold
the Dead Alive. The King of Terrors has no
power in the domains of the Impossible. The
dead move and speak and laugh, as they
were wont to speak and move and laugh, in the
old days when they were alive, and when we
loved them. They have been dead—of course
—we know it and they say so—but they are
alive now; and, thanks to the irresistible logic
of the Impossible kingdom, we slightly question
how. These visitors have no grim tales to tell,
no secrets of their prison-house to reveal.
Here, joyful and mirthful as ever, are the
old familiar faces; the life- blood courses
warmly through the old friendly hands; dead
babies crow and battle valorously in nurses'
arms; dead sweethearts smile and blush;
dead aunts scold; dead schoolmasters awe;