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Week-end Wizardry.

But Saturday always remains—just Saturday.

When we were young the early air was different on Saturday. The gooseberry bushes, the cat, the back fence and the wood-pile somehow looked different. It seemed that, although our eyes were unchanged, the mind behind had been burnished bright overnight. Perhaps that sixth sense of Freedom produced a clearness of vision unblurred by chalk, chanting and chewing-gum. For on Saturday there was no clanging summons to the altar of Erudition; no cheerless champing over the Kings of England, no Battle of Hastings—ten-sixty-six, no recitations to mumble, no dates to jumble, no vulgar fractions and frictions, no stink of ink, no mental mumbo-jumbo to justify the idiot actions of hypothetical merchants who bought and sold in a frenzy of fallacious finance.

Instead, there loomed ahead a fine unfettered fillet of freedom, from daylight to dark, to be lived and loved and squeezed dry of the juice of joy; an unalloyed, untramelled, unchallenged slice of Time's terrain.

Our bare toes fondled the warm asphalt, or the wet grass caressed our ankles; the wind whipped us, the sun blistered us, and even the rain failed to quench the light that burned within us, on Saturday. Flying footballs, supplementary sodfights, action, reaction, but never inaction—such was Saturday. Grime and glow and, above all, release from the dour dictates of “hire civilisation.” That was Saturday. Saturday is the only day with a soul. Other days have characteristics.