Good Lord, how little the academies became! I remembered the phrases upon one side and upon the other which still live in the stones of the city, carved and deep, but more lasting than are even the letters of their inscription. I remembered the defiant sentence of Mad Dolet on his statue there in the Quarter, the deliberate perversion of Plato, "And when you are dead you shall no more be anything at all." I remembered the "Ave Crux spes Unica"; and St. Just's "The words that we have spoken will never be lost on earth"; and Danton's "Continual Daring," and the scribbled Greek on the walls of the cathedral towers. For not only are the air and the voice, but the very material of this town is filled with words that remain. Certainly the philosophies and the negations dwindled to be so small as at last to disappear, and to leave only the two antagonists. Passion brooded over the silence of the morning; there was great energy in the cool of the spring air, and up above, the forms the clouds were taking were forms of gigantic powers.

I came, as the traveller had come, into the cathedral. It was not yet within half an hour of the feast. There was still room to be found, though with every moment the nave and the aisles grew fuller, until one doubted how at the end so great a throng could be dismissed. They were of all kinds. Some few were strangers holding in their hands books about the building. Some few were devout men on travel, and praying at this great office on the way: men from the islands, men from the places that Spain has redeemed for the future in the new world. I saw an Irishman near me, and two West Indians also, half negro, like the third of the kings that came to worship at the manger where Our Lord was born. For two hours and nearly three I saw and wondered at that immense concourse. The tribunes were full, the whole choir was black, moving with the celebrants, and all the church floor beyond and around me was covered and dark with expectant men.

The Bourdon that had summoned the traveller and driven mad so many despairs, sounded above me upon this day with amplitude and yet with menace. The silence was a solace when it ceased to boom. The Creed, the oldest of our chaunts, filled and completed those walls; it was as though at last a battle had been joined, and in that issue a great relief ran through the crowd.

* * * * *

From such a temple I came out at last. They had thrown the western doors wide open, the doors whose hinges man scarcely could have hammered and to whose miracle legend has lent its aid; the midday, now captured by the sun, came right into the hollow simplicity of the nave, and caught the river of people as they flowed outwards; but even that and the cry of the Benediction from the altar gave no greater peace than an appeal to combat. In the air outside that other power stood waiting to conquer or to fail.

I came out, as from a camp, into the civilian debate, the atmosphere of the spectators. The permanent and toppling influence against which this bulwark of ours, the Faith, was reared (as we say) by God Himself, shouted in half the prints, in half the houses. I sat down to read and compare (as it should be one's custom when one is among real and determining things) the writings of the extreme, that is of the leading men. I chose the two pamphleteers who are of equal weight in this war, but of whom one only is known as yet to us in England, and that the least.

I read their battle-cries. Their style was excellent; their good faith shone even in their style.

Since I had been upon phrases all these hours I separated and remembered the principal words of each. One said: "They will break their teeth against it. The Catholic Church is not to perish, for she has allies from outside Time." The other said: "How long will the death of this crucified god linger? How long will his agony crush men with its despair?"

But I read these two writers for my entertainment only, and in order to be acquainted with men around me; for on the quarrel between them I had long ago made up my mind.



AT THE SIGN OF THE LION

It was late, and the day was already falling when I came, sitting my horse Monster, to a rise of land. We were at a walk, for we had gone very far since early morning, and were now off the turf upon the hard road; moreover, the hill, though gentle, had been prolonged. From its summit I saw before me, as I had seen it a hundred times, the whole of the weald.

But now that landscape was transfigured, because many influences had met to make it, for the moment, an enchanted land. The autumn, coming late, had crowded it with colours; a slight mist drew out the distances, and along the horizon stood out, quite even and grey like mountains, the solemn presence of the Downs. Over all this the sky was full of storm.

In some manner which language cannot express, and hardly music, the vision was unearthly. All the lesser heights of the plain ministered to one effect, a picture which was to other pictures what the marvellous is to the experience of common things. The distant mills, the edges of heath and the pine trees, were as though they had not before been caught by the eyes of travellers, and would not, after the brief space of their apparition, be seen again. Here was a countryside whose every outline was familiar; and yet it was pervaded by a general quality of the uplifted and the strange. And for that one hour under the sunset the county did not seem to me a thing well known, but rather adored.

The glow of evening, which had seemed to put this horizon into another place and time than ours, warned me of darkness; and I made off the road to the right for an inn I knew of, that stands close to the upper Arun and is very good. Here an old man and his wife live easily, and have so lived for at least thirty years, proving how accessible is content. Their children are in service beyond the boundaries of the county, and are thus provided with sufficiency; and they themselves, the old people, enjoy a small possession which at least does not diminish, for, thank God, their land is free. It is a square of pasture bordered by great elms upon three sides of it, but on the fourth, towards the water, a line of pollard willows; and off a little way before the house runs Arun, sliding as smooth as Mincius, and still so young that he can remember the lake in the forest where he rose.

On such ancestral land these two people await without anxiety what they believe will be a kindly death. Nor is their piety of that violent and tortured kind which is associated with fear and with distress of earlier life; but they remain peasants, drawing from the earth they have always known as much sustenance for the soul as even their religion can afford them, and mixing that religion so intimately with their experience of the soil that, were they not isolated in an evil time, they would have set up some shrine about the place to sanctify it.

The passion and the strain which must accompany (even in the happiest and most secluded) the working years of life, have so far disappeared from them, that now they can no longer recall any circumstances other than those which they enjoy; so that their presence in a room about one, as they set rood before one or meet one at the door, is in itself an influence of peace.

In such a place, and with such hosts to serve him, be wears of the world retire for a little time, from an evening to a morning; and a man can enjoy a great refreshment. In such a place he will eat strongly and drink largely, and sleep well and deeply, and, when he saddles again for his journey, he will take the whole world new; nor are those intervals without their future value, for the memory of a complete repose is a sort of sacrament, and a viaticum for the weary lengths of the way.

The stable of this place is made of oak entirely, and, after more than a hundred years, the woodwork is still sound, save that the roof now falls in waves where the great beams have sagged a little under the pressure of the tiles. And these tiles are of that old hand-made kind which, whenever you find them, you will do well to buy; for they have a slight downward curve to them, and so they fit closer and shed the rain better than if they were flat. Also they do not slip, and thus they put less strain upon the timber. This excellent stable has no flooring but a packed layer of chalk laid on the ground; and the wooden manger is all polished and shining, where it has been rubbed by the noses of ten thousand horses since the great war. That polishing was helped, perhaps, by the nose of Percy's horse, and perhaps by the nose of some wheeler who in his time had dragged the guns back aboard, retreating through the night after Corunna. It is in every way a stable that a small peasant should put up for himself, without seeking money from other men. It is, therefore, a stable which your gaping scientists would condemn; and though as yet they have not got their ugly hands upon the dwellings of beasts as they have upon those of men, yet I often fear for this stable, and am always glad when I come back and find it there. For the men who make our laws are the same as those that sell us our bricks and our land and our metals; and they make the laws so that rebuilding shall go on: and vile rebuilding too.

Anyhow, this stable yet stands; and in none does the horse, Monster, take a greater delight, for he also is open to the influence of holiness. So I led him in, and tied him by the ancient headstall, and I rubbed him down, and I washed his feet and covered him with the rough rug that lay there. And when I had done all that, I got him oats from the neighbouring bin; for the place knew me well, and I could always tend to my own beast when I came there. And as he ate his oats, I said to him: "Monster, my horse, is there any place on earth where a man, even for a little time, can be as happy as the brutes? If there is, it is here at the Sign of The Lion." And Monster answered: "There is a tradition among us that, of all creatures that creep upon the earth, man is the fullest of sorrow."

I left him then, and went towards the house. It was quite dark, and the windows, with their square, large panes and true proportions, shone out and made it home. The room within received me like a friend. The open chimney at its end, round which the house is built, was filled with beech logs burning; and the candles, which were set in brass, mixed their yellow light with that of the fire. The long ceiling was low, as are the ceilings of Heaven. And oak was here everywhere also: in the beams and the shelves and the mighty table. For oak was, and will be again, the chief wood of the weald.

When they put food and ale before me, it was of the kind which has been English ever since England began, and which perhaps good fortune will preserve over the breakdown of our generation, until we have England back again. One could see the hops in the tankard, and one could taste the barley, until, more and more sunk into the plenitude of this good house, one could dare to contemplate, as though from a distant standpoint, the corruption and the imminent danger of the time through which we must lead our lives. And, as I so considered the ruin of the great cities and their slime, I felt as though I were in a fortress of virtue and of health, which could hold out through the pressure of the war. And I thought to myself: "Perhaps even before our children are men, these parts which survive from a better order will be accepted as models, and England will be built again."

This fantasy had not time, tenuous as it was, to disappear, before there came into that room a man whose gesture and bearing promised him to be an excellent companion, but in whose eyes I also perceived some light not ordinary. He was of middle age, fifty or more; his hair was crisp and grey, his face brown, as though he had been much upon the sea. He was tall in stature, and of some strength. He saluted me, and, when he had eaten, asked me if I also were familiar with this inn.

"Very familiar," I said; "and since I can enter it at any hour freely, it is now more familiar to me even than the houses that were once my homes. For nowadays we, who work in the State and are not idle, must be driven from one place to another; and only the very rich have certitude and continuity. But to them it is of no service; for they are too idle to take root in the soil."

"Yet I was of their blood," he said; "and there is in this county a home which should be mine. But nothing to-day is capable of endurance. I have not seen my home (though it is but ten miles from here) since I left it in my thirtieth year; and I too would rather come to this inn, which I know as you know it, than to any house in England; because I am certain of entry, and because I know what I shall find, and because what I find is what any man of this county should find, if the soul of it is not to disappear."

"You, then," I answered (we were now seated side by side before the fire with but one flickering candle behind us, and on the floor between us a port just younger than the host), "you, then, come here for much the same reason as do I?"

"And what is that?" said he.

"Why," said I, "to enjoy the illusion that Change can somewhere be arrested, and that, in some shape, a part at least of the things we love remains. For, since I was a boy and almost since I can remember, everything in this house has been the same; and here I escape from the threats of the society we know."

When I had said this, he was grave and silent for a little while; and then he answered:

"It is impossible, I think, after many years to recover any such illusion. Just as a young man can no longer think himself (as children do) the actor in any drama of his own choosing, so a man growing old (as am I) can no longer expect of any society—and least of all of his own—the gladness that comes from an illusion of permanence."

"For my part," I answered in turn, "I know very well, though I can conjure up this feeling of security, that it is very flimsy stuff; and I take it rather as men take symbols. For though these good people will at last perish, and some brewer—a Colonel of Volunteers as like as not—will buy this little field, and though for the port we are drinking there will be imperial port, and for the beer we have just drunk something as noisome as that port, and though thistles will grow up in the good pasture ground, and though, in a word, this inn will become a hotel and will perish, nevertheless I cannot but believe that England remains, and I do not think it the taking of a drug or a deliberate cheating of oneself to come and steep one's soul in what has already endured so long because it was proper to our country."

"All that you say," he answered, "is but part of the attempt to escape Necessity. Your very frame is of that substance for which permanence means death; and every one of all the emotions that you know is of its nature momentary, and must be so if it is to be alive."

"Yet there is a divine thirst," I said, "for something that will not so perish. If there were no such thirst, why should you and I debate such things, or come here to The Lion either of us, to taste antiquity? And if that thirst is there, it is a proof that there is for us some End and some such satisfaction. For my part, as I know of nothing else, I cannot but seek it in this visible good world. I seek it in Sussex, in the nature of my home, and in the tradition of my blood."

But he answered: "No; it is not thus to be attained, the end of which you speak. And that thirst, which surely is divine, is to be quenched in no stream that we can find by journeying, not even in the little rivers that run here under the combes of home."

MYSELF: "Well, then, what is the End?"

HE: "I have sometimes seen it clearly, that when the disappointed quest was over, all this journeying would turn out to be but the beginning of a much greater adventure, and that I should set out towards another place where every sense should be fulfilled, and where the fear of mutation should be set at rest."

MYSELF: "No one denies that such a picture in the mind haunts men their whole lives through, though, after they have once experienced loss and incompletion, and especially when they have caught sight a long way off of the Barrier which ends all our experience, they recognise that picture for a cheat; and surely nothing can save it? That which reasons in us may be absolute and undying; for it is outside Time. It escapes the gropings of the learned, and it has nothing to do with material things. But as for all those functions which we but half fulfil in life, surely elsewhere they cannot be fulfilled at all? Colour is for the eyes and music is for the ears; and all that we love so much comes in by channels that do not remain."

He: "Yet the Desire can only be for things that we have known; and the Desire, as you have said, is a proof of the thing desired, and, but for these things which we know, the words 'joy' and 'contentment' and 'fulfilment' would have no meaning."

MYSELF: "Why yes; but, though desires are the strongest evidence of truth, yet there is also desire for illusions, as there is a waking demand for things attainable, and a demand in dreams for things fantastic and unreal. Every analogy increasingly persuades us, and so does the whole scheme of things as we learn it, that, with our passing, there shall also pass speech and comfortable fires and fields and the voices of our children, and that, when they pass, we lose them for ever."

He: "Yet these things would not be, but for the mind which receives them; and how can we make sure what channels are necessary for the mind? and may not the mind stretch on? And you, since you reject my guess at what may be reserved for us, tell me, what is the End which we shall attain?"

MYSELF: "Salva fide, I cannot tell."

Then he continued and said: "I have too long considered these matters for any opposition between one experience and another to affect my spirit, and I know that a long and careful inquiry into any matter must lead the same man to opposing conclusions; but, for my part, I shall confidently expect throughout that old age, which is not far from me, that, when it ceases, I shall find beyond it things similar to those which I have known. For all I here enjoy is of one nature; and if the life of a man be bereft of them at last, then it is falsehood or metaphor to use the word 'eternal.'"

"You think, then," said I, "that some immortal part in us is concerned not only with our knowledge, but with our every feeling, and that our final satisfaction will include a sensual pleasure: fragrance, and landscape, and a visible home that shall be dearer even than these dear hills?"

"Something of the sort," he said, and slightly shrugged his shoulders. They were broad, as he sat beside me staring at the fire. They conveyed in their attitude that effect of mingled strength and weariness which is common to all who have travelled far and with great purpose, perpetually seeking some worthy thing which they could never find.

The fire had fallen. Flames no longer leapt from the beech logs; but on their under side, where a glow still lingered, embers fell.



THE AUTUMN AND THE FALL OF LEAVES

It is not true that the close of a life which ends in a natural fashion—life which is permitted to put on the pomp of death and to go out in glory—inclines the mind to repose. It is not true of a day ending nor the passing of the year, nor of the fall of leaves. Whatever permanent, uneasy question is native to men, comes forward most insistent and most loud at such times.

There is a house in my own county which is built of stone, whose gardens are fitted to the autumn. It has level alleys standing high and banked with stone. Their ornaments were carved under the influence of that restraint which marked the Stuarts. They stand above old ponds, and are strewn at this moment with the leaves of elms. These walks are like the Mailles of the Flemish cities, the walls of the French towns or the terraces of the Loire. They are enjoyed to-day by whoever has seen all our time go racing by; they are the proper resting-places of the aged, and their spirit is felt especially in the fall of leaves.

At this season a sky which is of so delicate and faint a blue as to contain something of gentle mockery, and certainly more of tenderness, presides at the fall of leaves. There is no air, no breath at all. The leaves are so light that they sidle on their going downward, hesitating in that which is not void to them, and touching at last so imperceptibly the earth with which they are to mingle, that the gesture is much gentler than a salutation, and even more discreet than a discreet caress.

They make a little sound, less than the least of sounds. No bird at night in the marshes rustles so slightly; no man, though men are the subtlest of living beings, put so evanescent a stress upon their sacred whispers or their prayers. The leaves are hardly heard, but they are heard just so much that men also, who are destined at the end to grow glorious and to die, look up and hear them falling.

* * * * *

With what a pageantry of every sort is not that troubling symbol surrounded! The scent of life is never fuller in the woods than now, for the ground is yielding up its memories. The spring when it comes will not restore this fullness, nor these deep and ample recollections of the earth. For the earth seems now to remember the drive of the ploughshare and its harrying; the seed, and the full bursting of it, the swelling and the completion of the harvest. Up to the edge of the woods throughout the weald the earth has borne fruit; the barns are full, and the wheat is standing stacked in the fields, and there are orchards all around. It is upon such a mood of parentage and of fruition that the dead leaves fall.

The colour is not a mere splendour: it is intricate. The same unbounded power, never at fault and never in calculation, which comprehends all the landscape, and which has made the woods, has worked in each one separate leaf as well; they are inconceivably varied. Take up one leaf and see. How many kinds of boundary are there here between the stain which ends in a sharp edge against the gold, and the sweep in which the purple and red mingle more evenly than they do in shot-silk or in flames? Nor are the boundaries to be measured only by degrees of definition. They have also their characters of line. Here in this leaf are boundaries intermittent, boundaries rugged, boundaries curved, and boundaries broken. Nor do shape and definition ever begin to exhaust the list. For there are softness and hardness too: the agreement and disagreement with the scheme of veins; the grotesque and the simple in line; the sharp and the broad, the smooth, and raised in boundaries. So in this one matter of boundaries might you discover for ever new things; there is no end to them. Their qualities are infinite. And beside boundaries you have hues and tints, shades also, varying thicknesses of stuff, and endless choice of surface; that list also is infinite, and the divisions of each item in it are infinite; nor is it of any use to analyse the thing, for everywhere the depth and the meaning of so much creation are beyond our powers. And all this is true of but one dead leaf; and yet every dead leaf will differ from its fellow.

That which has delighted to excel in boundlessness within the bounds of this one leaf, has also transformed the whole forest. There is no number to the particular colour of the one leaf. The forest is like a thing so changeful of its nature that change clings to it as a quality, apparent even during the glance of a moment. This forest makes a picture which is designed, but not seizable. It is a scheme, but a scheme you cannot set down. It is of those things which can best be retained by mere copying with a pencil or a brush. It is of those things which a man cannot fully receive, and which he cannot fully re-express to other men.

It is no wonder, then, that at this peculiar time, this week (or moment) of the year, the desires which if they do not prove at least demand—perhaps remember—our destiny, come strongest. They are proper to the time of autumn, and all men feel them. The air is at once new and old; the morning (if one rises early enough to welcome its leisurely advance) contains something in it of profound reminiscence. The evenings hardly yet suggest (as they soon will) friends and security, and the fires of home. The thoughts awakened in us by their bands of light fading along the downs are thoughts which go with loneliness and prepare me for the isolation of the soul.

It is on this account that tradition has set, at the entering of autumn, for a watch at the gate of the season, the Archangel; and at its close the day and the night of All-Hallows on which the dead return.



THE GOOD WOMAN

Upon a hill that overlooks a western plain and is conspicuous at the approach of evening, there still stands a house of faded brick faced with cornerings of stone. It is quite empty, but yet not deserted. In each room some little furniture remains; all the pictures are upon the walls; the deep red damask of the panels is not faded, or if faded, shows no contrast of brighter patches, for nothing has been removed from the walls. Here it is possible to linger for many hours alone, and to watch the slope of the hill under the level light as the sun descends. Here passes a woman of such nobility that, though she is dead, the landscape and the vines are hers.

It was in September, during a silence of the air, that I first saw her as she moved among her possessions; she was smiling to herself as though at a memory, but her smile was so slight and so dignified, so genial, and yet so restrained, that you would have thought it part of everything around and married (as she was) to the land which was now her own. She wandered down the garden paths ruling the flowers upon either side, and receiving as she went autumn and the fruition of her fields; plenitude and completion surrounded her; the benediction of Almighty God must have been upon her, for she was the fulfilment of her world.

Three fountains played in that garden—two, next to the northern and the southern walls, were small and low; they rather flowed than rose. Two cones of marble received their fall, and over these they spread in an even sheet with little noise, making (as it were) a sheath of water which covered all the stone; but the third sprang into the air with delicate triumph, fine and high, satisfied, tenuous and exultant. This one tossed its summit into the light, and, alone of the things in the garden, the plash of its waters recalled and suggested activity—though that in so discreet a way that it was to be heard rather than regarded. The birds flew off in circles over the roofs of the town below us. Very soon they went to their rest.

The slow transfiguration of the light by which the air became full of colours and every outline merged into the evening, made of all I saw, as I came up towards her, a soft and united vision wherein her advancing figure stood up central and gave a meaning to the whole. I will not swear that she did not as she came bestow as well as receive an influence of the sunset. It was said by the ancients that virtue is active, an agent, and has power to control created things; for, they said, it is in a direct relation with whatever orders and has ordained the general scheme. Such power, perhaps, resided in her hands. It would have awed me but hardly astonished if, as the twilight deepened, the inclination of the stems had obeyed her gesture and she had put the place to sleep.

As I came near I saw her plainly. Her face was young although she was so wise, but its youth had the aspect of a divine survival. Time adorned it.

Music survives. Whatever is eternal in the grace of simple airs or in the Christian innocence of Mozart was apparent, nay, had increased, in her features as the days in passing had added to them not only experience but also revelation and security. She was serene. The posture of her head was high, and her body, which was visibly informed by an immortal spirit, had in its carriage a large, a regal, an uplifted bearing which even now as I write of it, after so many years, turns common every other sight that has encountered me. This was the way in which I first saw her upon her own hillside at evening.

With every season I returned. And with every season she greeted my coming with a more generous and a more vivacious air. I think the years slipped off and did not add themselves upon her mind: the common doom of mortality escaped her until, perhaps, its sign was imposed upon her hair—for this at last was touched all through with that appearance or gleam which might be morning or which might be snow.

She was able to conjure all evil. Those desperate enemies of mankind which lie in siege of us all around grew feeble and were silent when she came. Nor has any other force than hers dared to enter the rooms where she had lived: it is her influence alone which inhabits them to-day. There is a vessel of copper, enamelled in green and gilded, which she gave with her own hands to a friend overseas. I have twice touched it in an evil hour.

Strength, sustenance, and a sacramental justice are permanent in such lives, and such lives also attain before their close to so general a survey of the world that their appreciations are at once accurate and universal.

On this account she did not fail in any human conversation, nor was she ever for a moment less than herself; but always and throughout her moods her laughter was unexpected and full, her fear natural, her indignation glorious.

Above all, her charity extended like a breeze: it enveloped everything she knew. The sense of destiny faded from me as the warmth of that charity fell upon my soul; the foreknowledge of death retreated, as did every other unworthy panic.

She drew the objects of her friendship into something new; they breathed an air from another country, so that those whom she deigned to regard were, compared with other men, like the living compared with the dead; or, better still, they were like men awake while the rest were tortured by dreams and haunted of the unreal. Indeed, she had a word given to her which saved all the souls of her acquaintance.

It is not true that influence of this sort decays or passes into vaguer and vaguer depths of memory. It does not dissipate. It is not dissolved. It does not only spread and broaden: it also increases with the passage of time. The musicians bequeath their spirit, notably those who have loved delightful themes and easy melodies. The poets are read for ever; but those who resemble her do more, for they grow out upon the centuries—they themselves and not their arts continue. There is stuff in their legend. They are a tangible inheritance for the hurrying generations of men.

She was of this kind. She was certainly of this kind. She died upon this day[1] in the year 1892. In these lines I perpetuate her memory.

[Footnote 1: The 22nd of December.]



THE HARBOUR IN THE NORTH

Upon that shore of Europe which looks out towards no further shore, I came once by accident upon a certain man.

The day had been warm and almost calm, but a little breeze from the south-east had all day long given life to the sea. The seas had run very small and brilliant, yet without violence, before the wind, and had broken upon the granite cliffs to leeward, not in spouts of foam, but in a white even line that was thin, and from which one heard no sound of surge. Moreover, as I was running dead north along the coast, the noise about the bows was very slight and pleasant. The regular and gentle wind came upon the quarter without change, and the heel of the boat was steady. No calm came with the late sunset; the breeze still held, and so till nearly midnight I could hold a course and hardly feel the pulling of the helm. Meanwhile the arch of the sunset endured, for I was far to the northward, and all those colours which belong to June above the Arctic Sea shone and changed in the slow progress of that arch as it advanced before me and mingled at last with the dawn. Throughout the hours of that journey I could see clearly the seams of the deck forward, the texture of the canvas and the natural hues of the woodwork and the rigging, the glint of the brasswork, and even the letters painted round the little capstain-head, so continually did the light endure. The silence which properly belongs to darkness, and which accompanies the sleep of birds upon the sea, appeared to be the more intense because of such a continuance of the light, and what with a long vigil and new water, it was as though I had passed the edge of all known maps and had crossed the boundary of new land.

In such a mood I saw before me the dark band of a stone jetty running some miles off from the shore into the sea, and at the end of it a fixed beacon whose gleam showed against the translucent sky (and its broken reflection in the pale sea) as a candle shows when one pulls the curtains of one's room and lets in the beginnings of the day.

For this point I ran, and as I turned it I discovered a little harbour quite silent under the growing light; there was not a man upon its wharves, and there was no smoke rising from its slate roofs. It was absolutely still. The boat swung easily round in the calm water, the pier-head slipped by, the screen of the pier-head beacon suddenly cut off its glare, and she went slowly with no air in her canvas towards the patch of darkness under the quay. There, as I did not know the place, I would not pick up moorings which another man might own and need, but as my boat still crept along with what was left of her way I let go the little anchor, for it was within an hour of low tide, and I was sure of water.

When I had done this she soon tugged at the chain and I slackened all the halyards. I put the cover on the mainsail, and as I did so, looking aft, I noted the high mountain-side behind the town standing clear in the dawn. I turned eastward to receive it. The light still lifted, and though I had not slept I could not but stay up and watch the glory growing over heaven. It was just then, when I had stowed everything away, that I heard to the right of me the crooning of a man.

A few moments before I should not have seen him under the darkness of the sea-wall, but the light was so largely advanced (it was nearly two o'clock) that I now clearly made out both his craft and him.

She was sturdy and high, and I should think of slight draught. She was of great beam. She carried but one sail, and that was brown. He had it loose, with the peak dipped ready for hoisting, and he himself was busy at some work upon the floor, stowing and fitting his bundles, and as he worked he crooned gently to himself. It was then that I hailed him, but in a low voice, so much did the silence of that place impress itself upon all living beings who were strange to it. He looked up and told me that he had not seen me come in nor heard the rattling of the chain. I asked him what he would do so early, whether he was off fishing at that hour or whether he was taking parcels down the coast for hire or goods to sell at some other port. He answered me that he was doing none of those things.

"What cruise, then, are you about to take?" I said.

"I am off," he answered in a low and happy voice, "to find what is beyond the sea."

"And to what shore," said I, "do you mean to sail?"

He answered: "I am out upon this sea northward to where they say there is no further shore."

As he spoke he looked towards that horizon which now stood quite clean and clear between the pier-heads: his eyes were full of the broad daylight, and he breathed the rising wind as though it were a promise of new life and of unexpected things. I asked him then what his security was and had he formed a plan, and why he was setting out from this small place, unless, perhaps, it was his home, of which he might be tired.

"No," he answered, and smiled; "this is not my home; and I have come to it as you may have come to it, for the first time; and, like you, I came in after the whole place slept; but as I neared I noticed certain shore marks and signs which had been given me, and then I knew that I had come to the starting-place of a long voyage."

"Of what voyage?" I asked.

He answered:

"This is that harbour in the North of which a Breton priest once told me that I should reach it, and when I had moored in it and laid my stores on board in order, I should set sail before morning and reach at last a complete repose." Then he went on with eagerness, though still talking low: "The voyage which I was born to make in the end, and to which my desire has driven me, is towards a place in which everything we have known is forgotten, except those things which, as we knew them, reminded us of an original joy. In that place I shall discover again such full moments of content as I have known, and I shall preserve them without failing. It is in some country beyond this sea, and it has a harbour like this harbour, only set towards the South, as this is towards the North; but like this harbour it looks out over an unknown sea, and like this harbour it enjoys a perpetual light. Of what the happy people in this country are, or of how they speak, no one has told me, but they will receive me well, for I am of one kind with themselves. But as to how I shall know this harbour, I can tell you: there is a range of hills, broken by a valley through which one sees a further and a higher range, and steering for this hollow in the hills one sees a tower out to sea upon a rock, and high up inland a white quarry on a hill-top; and these two in line are the leading marks by which one gets clear into the mouth of the river, and so to the wharves of the town. And there," he ended, "I shall come off the sea for ever, and every one will call me by my name."

The sun was now near the horizon, but not yet risen, and for a little time he said nothing to me nor I to him, for he was at work sweating up the halyard and setting the peak. He let go the mooring knot also, but he held the end of the rope in his hand and paid it out, standing and looking upward, as the sail slowly filled and his craft drifted towards me. He pressed the tiller with his knee to keep her full.

I now knew by his eyes and voice that he was from the West, and I could not see him leave me without asking him from what place he came that he should set out for such another place. So I asked him: "Are you from Ireland, or from Brittany, or from the Islands?" He answered me: "I am from none of these, but from Cornwall." And as he answered me thus shortly he still watched the sail and still pressed the tiller with his knee, and still paid out the mooring rope without turning round.

"You cannot make the harbour," I said to him. "It is not of this world."

Just at that moment the breeze caught the peak of his jolly brown sail; he dropped the tail of the rope: it slipped and splashed into the harbour slime. His large boat heeled, shot up, just missed my cable; and then he let her go free, and she ran clear away. As she ran he looked over his shoulder and laughed most cheerily; he greeted me with his eyes, and he waved his hand to me in the morning light.

He held her well. A clean wake ran behind her. He put her straight for the harbour-mouth and passed the pier-heads and took the sea outside.

Whether in honest truth he was a fisherman out for fishes who chose to fence with me, or whether in that cruise of his he landed up in a Norwegian bay, or thought better of it in Orkney, or went through the sea and through death to the place he desired, I have never known.

I watched him holding on, and certainly he kept a course. The sun rose, the town awoke, but I would not cease from watching him. His sail still showed a smaller and a smaller point upon the sea; he did not waver. For an hour I caught it and lost it, and caught it again, as it dwindled; for half another hour I could not swear to it in the blaze. Before I had wearied it was gone.

* * * * *

Oh! my companions, both you to whom I dedicate this book and you who have accompanied me over other hills and across other waters or before the guns in Burgundy, or you others who were with me when I seemed alone—that ulterior shore was the place we were seeking in every cruise and march and the place we thought at last to see. We, too, had in mind that Town of which this man spoke to me in the Scottish harbour before he sailed out northward to find what he could find. But I did not follow him, for even if I had followed him I should not have found the Town.

THE END