A Benedick in Arcady
Author: Sutcliffe, Halliwell
Date: 2016-09-09T05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction
Description: Ebook prepared by crutledge@knology.net
Rights: Public Domain

TABLE of CONTENTS

CHAPTER I—HOME AGAIN IN THE GLAD WEATHER

CHAPTER II—I CONQUER STYLESEY

CHAPTER III—DALLIANCE

CHAPTER IV—SUGGESTED INTRUSION OF A ROGUE

CHAPTER V—A WANDER-DAY

CHAPTER VI—THE ROGUE ARRIVES

CHAPTER VII—REAPPEARANCE OF THE ROGUE

CHAPTER VIII—CONCERNING DOGS

CHAPTER IX—CONCERNING THE LAVENDER LADIES

CHAPTER X—BIRTHDAY PRESENTS, AND A VILLAGE BLACKSMITH

CHAPTER XI—CONTINUATION OF AN ODD ADVENTURE

CHAPTER XII—A GUEST ARRIVES

CHAPTER XIII—A LITTLE TALE

CHAPTER XIV—CONCERNING OLD AGE

CHAPTER XV—HOW TOM LAO FOUND ADVENTURES FOR US

CHAPTER XVI—AND HOW THE GREAT ADVENTURES ENDED

CHAPTER XVII—ON SUPERSTITION

CHAPTER XVIII—IN PRAISE OF OLD TAVERNS

CHAPTER XIX—ON VILLAGE SHOPS, WITH A CURIOUS TALE APPENDED

CHAPTER XX—AN AUTUMN COMEDY

CHAPTER XXI—CONCERNING AN ANCIENT BREED OF DOG

CHAPTER XXII—THE GLEAM AHEAD

CHAPTER I
HOME AGAIN IN THE GLAD WEATHER

We are home in Arcady again, Cathy and I, after a six months’ honeymoon spent in wandering, and the season and the season’s weather seem made for us as we turn down the drive and get our first glimpse of the lawn, the house, the wise, tall guardian-trees. For June is treading on May’s threshold, and lusty summer is kissing spring within the doorway.

There’s no luggage with us, moreover, for the first time since we journeyed out along the unknown paths of wedlock. We left it all to be brought after us in the farm-cart, and walked quietly into those twenty acres of ours, which, if no way great in area, are full to us of great possessions. The absence of luggage alone seems to make for freedom; it is as if one had travelled with an Old Man of the Sea about one’s neck and had shaken him off at last Stylesey, of course, is at the gate to meet us, and Tom Lad, her patient husband; but they are not the first to welcome us. As soon as we turn the bend of the drive the dogs, who are waiting, too, as if they scented strange happenings in the air, espy us and come galloping, tumbling, racing up the road. When they reach us, Cathy and I cannot quite be sure of anything except the dogs themselves; the blue sky is shut out, and the trees and the hedgerows. We are in a storm of flying fur, and scrambling paws that reach to our shoulders, and affectionate red tongues.

They’ve not seen us for six months. How many of our two-legged friends would remember and forgive so speedily?

We reduce them by-and-by to a state of comparative sobriety; but they yelp and whine and bellow all down the drive as if the full cry of a hunting day were abroad in peaceful Arcady. It is a royal welcome, this; better than flags along the route and the efforts of the village band.

Stylesey’s face, when we reach the gate, is a study in fine lights and shades of feeling. In a moment she has appraised Cathy from head to foot—could tell you the details of her wearing-gear and whether she is truly happy—and the good woman does not know whether to be vastly jealous or vastly glad. She glances, too, at me—a transitory glance that says plainly, “Oh, you, sir! Lordie, of course you’d be happy.”

Tom Lad, on the other hand, has a welcome like the dogs’. His weather-moulded face is full of wrinkles, full of smiles that find the furrows out upon his face. He stretches out a hand and takes my own as a playful, ill-trained bear might do.

“Lord help us, ’t has been lonesome-like without ye, sir,” he says.

Stylesey incontinently weeps, and dries her eyes with her apron, and stands off and looks again at Cathy.

“I was crying for Tom’s foolishness," she observes at last “Time ye came home, sir, for he’s getting out of hand.”

Tom Lad glances at me sideways, but says nothing; and, to tell the truth, I am mortally afraid that Stylesey will catch my answering look. For I always had sympathy with Tom Lad in his married life, and my sympathy has been whetted keen by my own six months of absence and of happiness.

“Dinner is all but ready, sir,” says Stylesey suddenly, dropping her apron, “though how I shall fashion to hand plates for two instead of one it passes my wit to answer.”

“Your wit’s keen enough for two, lass,” says Tom Lad drily.

Stylesey is upset this evening. Her natural tartness and her natural, wayward softness seem to have been summoned forth by our arrival after six months’ absence.

“As for ye, Tom,” she observes at large, “ye’re a half-share of what a man was meant to be. Ye never gave me a wholesome training, ye, as to how a man ought rightly to be managed.”

“Likely not,” her goodman answers darkly. “I’ve had a greenhouse o’ my own, lass, and I seldom trouble ye when farm work’s over.”

Stylesey disdains her goodman, as she always does when Tom Lad scores a point in their game of give-and-take.

“Poor lamb!” she says, addressing Cathy, à propos of nothing in this world. “Poor lamb, ye’re cold and all—”

“But I’m not, dear Stylesey,” Cathy protests, with a radiant laugh.

“Ye’re cold and all,” the other repeats, disdaining interruptions. “I’m oldish, and a mother, and I knew your husband as a baby lad, and I know ye’re cold and all.”

I have left the luggage to be brought on; but it seems I cannot rid myself of Stylesey’s references to my past, and even Arcady holds its peculiar sting. Mrs. Styles, good woman, was always so. It is not much, perhaps, to own a house and twenty acres of mixed land; but when you are more or less a man, and have a wife beside you, it is disquieting to meet a family servant who boasts of your childhood and her knowledge of it in the sunshine of a summer’s day.

“Stylesey, we’re hungry,” I put in. “Did you say that dinner was all but ready?”

“You’re not altered, sir,” she observes—a Parthian shot as she retires in the direction of the house. “I remember at four years old you were always ready for your victuals, and the boy was just father to the man, I reckon.”

After dinner we saunter out, Cathy and I, to greet the old, remembered places. On the way we pass a pile of luggage, left by the cart at the side door, and Tom Lad, thumbs in waistcoat, is surveying it, a large, impersonal humour written plainly on his face.

“A penny for your thoughts, Tom,” I hazard.

He turns slowly round towards us, and the smile that always takes so long to come is well worth waiting for.

" Not worth as much, sir! I was just counting up your bags and boxes and what not—four-and-twenty, if I’ve counted right—and I was thinking, like, that it seems queer.”

Cathy is still the Babe, and always will be. She laughs so easily, and she enjoys her laughter so.

“What is it that seems queer? ’’ she prompts.

"Why, that folk need cumber themselves so weightily. Given a change o’ shirt, a pouch o’ baccy and a pipe—what more do poor, simple human bodies need?”

The pile of luggage, interpreted by Tom Lad, seems absurd on the sudden. I had suffered from it, certainly, but had always cherished a faith that my affrays with cabmen, porters, and the like had something in them of the heroic The faith was rudely cut away to-night, and my martyrdom was no longer anyway sublime, but frankly ridiculous. Where is Arcady’s simplicity, if one imports into it four-and-twenty items of baggage like aliens undesired?

A little box standing on the top of the pile catches my eye “Open it, Tom Lad,” I say.

Tom takes out his jack-knife, lifts the light cover deftly, and discloses two briarwood pipes, a bulky packet of tobacco, and, underneath, some rare plants we have brought him for the garden.

“Now, come, there's sense in this here package,"| says Tom, the smile extending to his ears.

It takes a long time to persuade him that the contents of the box are a gift to him; for Tom, if he dies at ninety, will be unspoiled to the last, and the rare, sweet summer weather blows about all simple gifts you make to him. Moreover, the pipes and the tobacco belong to him alone, but the plants are destined for the garden; he does not care, so long as he has the planting and the tending of them, for my garden space is his also, and the ranged and ordered borders of the flowers blow happily in face of master and of serving-man where Arcady interprets the true democracy.

How true a democracy is ours, indeed, strikes me afresh to-night as we stand chatting with this well-beloved Tom Lad of ours. He and I are rooted deep in the land, and our neighbours call us crusted Tories, survivals of some prehistoric age. Yet we are democrats also, secure each of us in his own rights and limitations, secure in that faith of “man is man” which is so proven and so sweetly reasonable. Politics, as they are seen in the brazen light of the arena, pass over us in Arcady; our tubs are needed for more useful purposes than that of being thumped by fiery demagogues. One such demagogue we have, even here in Arcady—Timothy Brailes, the cobbler—but the weight of Arcadian tradition holds him down; and, moreover, there was a little episode in his career which spoiled his record once and for all among us. I refer to the flower show of last year, when he borrowed broad beans from Tom Lad to help his own tray out, and found himself a victim to Tom’s unerring wit It is all so simple here to-night in Arcady, with the breeze blowing quiet flower-scents all abroad. The outside world, it seems, must be drugged by some potion brewed by the bad fairies. Why should we war upon our neighbours? Why should the rich look down upon the less rich? Here the poor look up to those comfortably well-found in gear, and we in turn look up to the forthright poor, and welcome in them that spade-power which, after all—shy at the issue as we will—is God’s best gift to us.

Perhaps no master ever knows his farm man intimately unless he can mow a swathe beside him, can dig and hoe a furrow with him in perfect comradeship. For myself, I see always in Tom Lad’s eye the knowledge that I can do these things with tolerable credit Cathy will have none of philosophy to-night “Do you use your greenhouse as you used to do, Tom Lad?” she asks, with that happy laugh of hers.

Tom looks at the hilly moors above us—green with bilberry and uncurling bracken-stems—and his smile is something a fine painter ought to set down on canvas.

“More—oh, ay, a lot more,” he vouchsafes at last “I felt lonely-like without the master, and the goodwife seemed i’ the same way, for she nattered, nattered, nattered, till she was fair like a clock a-ticking all the day and all the nighttime through. Oh, ay, the greenhouse thrives. A man must do summat, and make the green shoots thrive, or how’s he going to be evens-up wi’ the goodwife?”

It is later in the evening when, constantly unable to stay within doors now I am home again in Arcady, I go for a last stroll in the garden. The smell of lush, young green-stuff is abroad, and a late thrush up in the big sycamore-tree by the gate is singing mirthfully, and burning, I suspect, a good candle at both ends, for he will be up again at dawn. A casual moth looms ghostlike out of the greyness. A bat goes winging noiselessly across the fragrant dusk. From the far side of the lawn a single star oi light shines out, and I know that Tom Lad is working in the greenhouse, a tallow dip on the shelf beside him.

Six months have passed since I foregathered with Tom Lad in the greenhouse, and a random impulse takes me straight across the lawn.

“I thought ye’d come, sir!" says my henchman, looking up from his row of flowering tomato-plants. “Ye and me, we love a greenhouse ’Tis so simple-like and so chancy-sweet to come by.”

A large silence and much tobacco smoke, interspersed with suave and distant talk, is etiquette in the greenhouses of Arcady. I hand my pouch to Tom Lad, and he fills and lights his pipe; I light my own; we look at each other with a grave air of wisdom and of heedlessness.

“Never met your like for smoking, sir,” says Tom at last, holding his pipe as if he loved it “Terrible fond o’ making a poor man light up more often than he need, just like to keep you company.”

This is so in keeping with Tom’s peculiar greenhouse humour that I feel no need at all to answer him. He always looks aloof at these times on men’s vanities—his own included, for I never knew a heavier smoker—and his air would not disgrace a bishop.

“Green-stuff doing rarely, eh?” he observes, after further meditation. He pats the tomato-plants, the billowing maidenhair, the twenty-and-one rewards that stand here, so many trusty witnesses to his patience and his over-watching.

“A body smokes more here than he’d like to,” he goes on, after a happy silence. “Tis so good for plant life—kills the green-fly off, and other such sly kindred.”

As the slow clouds come before the storm breaks, I know that Tom Lad has something to say to me—something that is beating gradually up the wind. And by-and-by it comes.

“So you’ve joined our club at last, sir,” he says, glancing at me with that bishop’s face and roving eye of his.

I am lost for a moment, and show it, I suppose, for Tom Lad takes pity on me and proceeds with his discourse.

“Club o’ wedlock, I was meaning. There’s Freemasons and Oddfellows, and other sorts o’ burial clubs—I call ’em that for frolic—but there’s only one club that carries a man the world through. Now, look you, sir," he goes on, forgetting his greenhouse manner and tapping his pipe-bowl on the tomato-bench with what stands for enthusiasm with him; “look ye, sir, there’s a lot in wedlock. Given your wife does drive you night by night into your greenhouse, you’re wedded all the same, and you’ve learned a deal of sense and nonsense forbidden to poor single men and women. Lord, if I’d to deal with unmarried folk, I’d truss them up to the cart’s tail and get good wedded men behind them with a whip.”

I laugh. There’s no other answer to be given. But Tom Lad is serious, and frowns on me for levity.

“You wouldn’t call my wife smooth-tongued?” be asks, with an intensity that is all but tragic. “Well, neither should I, by that token; for I’ve suffered. But she’s my wife, for all that, and has taught me a lot, as I told you, sir, a while back. Sense and nonsense both—little o’ one and much o’ t’other—but what little sense there is, is there, for good and all. What, unwedded men? Shoot ’em over the hedge, sir, soon as look at ’em. Airs and graces—full o’ them, your unwedded, prank-some men—would as soon see your own peacocks spreading their tails half over the lawn that takes me a day to clip and cut”

The sense of it all is this—that Tom Lad, whom I reverence and slightly fear—approves of my changed life. And so, to run no risk of spoiling a hard-won approval, I leave him to his plants.

Veiy cool and very warm it is in our North Country to-night The quiet dusk, the quiet scents of my recovered land, are dear to me; the six months' wandering was full of charm, but it is a background only to the home return.

There’s a light in Cathy's window as I go by. The truth of Tom Lad is apparent to me suddenly. His fidelity to life as he sees it—which, roughly, is life as it is—strikes me afresh after these months of absence. I have been elected a member of the worlds club.

Good Tom Lad! You taught me how to shoot and ride, and how to meet a bull when he comes at you in the pastures. You have taught me something, too, to-night in the greenhouse, well worth the knowing—you have taught me the thought embodied in that phrase “The World’s Club.’’

CHAPTER II
I CONQUER STYLESEY

Cathy and I had one grave dispute during our absence with reference to Stylesey. In my newborn zeal to give up something for Cathy, I had thought of many little martyrdoms I might accomplish; but the one I finally wished to choose was not little at alL

“When we return, Stylesey will not continue to be housekeeper in Arcady,” I had said one morning, making a desperate plunge into my venture.

We were sitting, I remember, on a weatherbeaten harbour pier in the West Country, and were looking across the delicate sea-haze at the white village, three miles away, where a ship of the Armada was wrecked once on a day; where still the offspring of those beaten sailors perpetuate the dark comeliness of the Spaniard, his grave and upright charm.

Cathy turned quickly. “Murphy,” she cried, “what nonsense!”

I think I have explained that a weakness for potatoes roasted in their jackets—a weakness of my far-off boyhood—has earned for me the name wife.

“Why?" I demanded. “I am thinking of writing to her to-day. It will be difficult, of course-"

“Difficult? It would be tragedy!”

“Why?" I repeated, my spirits rising imperceptibly. For few men care for martyrdom if they can avoid it honestly, though there are folk here and there who seem no way able to thrive without it.

“Why? It would break her heart.”

“Better than breaking yours, child.”

“But I was not proposing to have my heart broken, Murphy. I was looking across at our Spanish village, and thinking that some of the Armada people had conquered England after all. Why this sudden wish to make Stylesey quite unhappy?"

“Cathy,” I respond, standing up with a vague sense that physical height carries moral weight with it, “I’ve thought so much about it, and a man—well, a man, you understand, realises things so much better than a woman can."

“Yes, dear.”

Her voice is low and gentle; but I knew Cathy as a girl in short frocks, and I know now that, if I stood sixty feet instead of six, she would still be laughing quietly at my authority, as she is doing now. I try to find that deep, strong note of masculine strength which disdains and intimidates girlish weakness; but my first attempt at opera is not a success. I am conscious that I suggest merely a batsman calling stridently to his partner to chance a short and stolen run.

“It is this way, Babe. I’ve suffered from Stylesey; but then I grew up with the responsibility of the good woman on my shoulders. You did not, and—and, Cathy, you must be mistress in your own house,” I finish lamely.

“You think I would agree to your plan, Murphy?”

Cathy’s eyes remind me of the mist-blue of the bay in front of us. They are at once so tranquil and so earnest “Of course I do. My plan is only to let you have servants of your own choosing."

She is really submissive now, and I begin to think that standing to one’s full height and essaying grand opera has an importance of its own at times.

“You’re a kind boy, Murphy. May I choose them now?” she asks gently.

“Of course, Babe.”

“Honour, Murphy?” she insists, returning to childish days again.

“Honour, Babe!"

“Well, then, I think that I’ll choose just Stylesey and Tom Lad.”

I look at my wife, and then begin to throw pebbles into the sea with desperate and studied calm.

“Murphy, you’ll never, never in this world grow up,” she says at last. It is an old remark of hers.

“I suppose not,” I answer distantly, thinking of my would-be martyrdom, and rather sorrowing that I am not permitted to write that bothersome letter to Stylesey.

There’s a hand on my shoulder, and Cathy is laughing my ill-humour out of court “Now, Murphy, you meant it for the best, and you were eager—oh, so eager, weren’t you—to get rid of Stylesey and Tom Lad at one fell swoop?"

" Not Tom Lad,” I respond unguardedly. The Babe always has that trick of getting underneath one’s guard.

“You think he’d stay and let Stylesey leave you?"

" She would not leave. Babe, I’d pension her, and she could still live with Tom Lad in the cottage and look after him. I’ve planned it alL Stylesey has never yet looked after him, in any real sense. She has her chance.”

“He cares for her, Murphy. He’d never let her be pensioned off and put aside. He cares for her.”

“Oh, yes, in a way. She is a trial, all the same. At any rate, you would find Stylesey a trial; so there’s an end of the matter.”

It is not the least use being firm with Cathy. One might as well be masterful with a humming-bird or a mid-June breeze. She flicks forthrightness from her with a light thumb and forefinger, and looks a saint while she is doing it “I am fond of Stylesey. I want her to stay on and order all the meals for us, Murphy. Besides, you said honour, didn’t you?"

“But, Babe, I was never master in my own house. That didn’t matter; I was used to it But I mean to have you mistress there."

“Well, then, I shall begin by choosing my own servants. You said honour, Murphy; indeed you did.”

I discard my martyr’s cloak with tell-tale willingness.

“Babe,” I observe, “it’s a big relief. Stylesey is rather dear to me—perhaps because she has treated one with faithful and long-suffering contempt. Tom Lad I could not part with.”

“As if I had not known it, Murphy!”

That was the end of my great sacrifice, down yonder in the West Country, where the blue waves danced far out across the bay and tumbled childishly about the shingle—the shingle on which the wrecked Spaniards had once found a refuge and a home. I had meant it honestly, and the relief was great—it is greater still, now that Cathy and I have lived two weeks in Arcady again.

Stylesey may be like a wind from the east, and insufficiently acquainted with the fact that men are the natural rulers of a household, and always will be. Yet she is Stylesey, and cold winds come not amiss at times. Moreover, Tom Lad thrives and ripens in his wit these days, and the land would be barren altogether if he did not come to till it We are Arcadians all, and the glory of our northern fields is ripening to the hay harvest Long winter and short days are gone; we’ve earned our recompense, and late about the evening flowers the roysterer bees go humming.

These northern summer nights are things apart, not understood by southern folk, whose mid-June days are shorter than our own, whose summers are attained more easily and therefore valued less. The long serenity that steals along the pastures, along the meadows, plumed high with fool’s-parsley and buttercup and clover; the peace that rustles downward from the moor, all brave in bracken-green and quieter tints of cotton-grass and bilberry; the low, mysterious hum of insects that have conquered winter and have found at last their holiday; these touch the heart of a man, and no man whose heart is touched stands far from grace.

I have often wondered why our summers here bring back the Scandinavian uplands to me constantly. To-night, as I sit under the lime-tree— its leafage vivid green against the blue and primrose of the sky—I find the clue. It is so always, I fancy, that clues come—come when we seem to be idling, our only occupation to an onlooker that of driving gnats away in clouds of pipe smoke—come when the world is quiet and fairies begin to rub the daytime cobwebs from their eyes.

We are true cousins of the Scandinavians here in Arcady. That is the simple truth which comes to me, and steals marches on me, and will not be denied. Many races have tempered Our rude metal; the heavy Saxon hand has tried to forge us into heavy shape; but we are Scandinavians still, unconquered as the Viking folk who swept up our valleys long ago, and took their toll, and settled here. We till our inland fields to-day; but I suspect that in our dreams o’ nights sometimes the inner door of consciousness is opened, and we see the beaked ships cut the racing foam, the battle-blades go glancing, and hear the windy rattle of the prows against the waves. Moreover, though we are landward bred, the call of the sea— and this I know from men here who have never neared the sea coasts—the call of the sea has a charm and a siren’s music when they read of it, and they love best of all our English tales that simply chronicle of what Howard did, and Raleigh did, and Clifford did, among the Spaniards’ ships.

There’s a quiet footfall behind me, and Cathy —the most absurd of wives—breaks in upon this train of thought, which surely is worth following.

“You are making notes, Murphy."

“No, I was thinking, Babe.”

“But you mean to be making notes.”

I hazard no conjecture.

“Murphy," she says tragically, “you made notes before, and—and, Murphy——’’

“Yes, I know. We idled through a honeymoon, and I was daft, and thought the notes were worth making up into a book. It was only a whim, dear Babe.”

Cathy is, after all, like a quick-glancing butterfly, chased by a boy’s futile cap. “Murphy, you know it was splendid! And it was published, and people said nice things of it”

“You did, Babe,” I put in lazily. “Nobody else cared a rap.”

So the child, to my quiet and cynic joy, grows warm in defence of those scattered notes which a brave publisher had dared to print; and I interject a word here, a comment there, until I tempt her to loftier flights, and find myself planted finally somewhere in the raw and windy climate that haunts the summit of Olympus.

For the first time, so infectious is her defence of my late indiscretion, I begin to think that there was wisdom in my madness. I am soon to be undeceived—abruptly and painfully undeceived— but not this evening. To-night we sit and watch the last streak of sunset-red pale down and die behind the moor—the moor that grows wider, loftier, more big with mystery and portent with each increasing stride of night The bees in the lime-tree over us have gone to bed, but the flower scents and the moths have not, and the night is scarcely night at all, for it means to keep one half-closed eye awake until the dawn.

Long after Cathy leaves me I sit on and “listen to the dark,” as some one happily has phrased that quiet hearkening to the stillness and the furtive uproar of the night—that quiet hearkening to what is summer’s heart in our northern Arcady.

An owl is calling to me from over the far pasture-field. The bats are busy with their murmur of spreading wings—the murmur that in itself is silence, inaudible save to the ear of fancy. An incense is abroad, sent up into the blue-grey sky from lilac-bloom and peonies, from meadow clover and the watered grasses. Far off a fox is yapping as he comes from the pine-wood on the hill and seeks the nearest henroost—not mine, I judge, or I should hastily leave speculation.

I go back to the tempting puzzle of the north-bred folk. All is peace here, yet I can think of little save that forward journey of the Scandinavians, when they sat, with axes ready, in their high ships, and knew their manhood ripe, and raided, killed, and settled here by God’s grace in the Vale of Arcady. They were men of the sea, ready to mend a riven plank or to look disaster quietly in the face, ready at all times to meet the needs of life’s handicraft and heart-craft They left their sons and their sons' sons after them to till an inland soil; they left, moreover, a happy legacy which no shifting changes of the times have dwarfed, here in the forthright north. The legacy, I think, was cheeriness of heart, when the wind was bitter and the snows came down; was readiness to put a strong hand to any task, whether meadow grass leaned down toward the scything time or sheep were over-driven on the winter moor; was grace, in short, to look life in the face without flinching, and to live or die, as it might happen, with the God-cry on their lips, “I, even I, have done my best! ’’

There’s Tom Lad here in Arcady. He is first—easily first, maybe—of our good men. Tom Lad would have been spoiled by titles, decorations, plaudits of the crowd, had he been born under a loftier and less lucky star. As it is—and the press of life allows a few good folk to be and to remain unspoiled—he is simply Tom Lad, bearing Stylesey’s whimsies as best he may, putting his hand to any labour, looking up to the sky with a faith that is strong and patient I cannot remember that he ever spoke of faith or boasted of it, as so many well-intentioned people do; he simply implies it—implies it in the shrewd grey eyes that are ready with a smile on the least pretext, in the clean, hard face where charity nestles slyly in among the wrinkles, in his comments on the casual wear-and-tear of life. If it is raining hard, not meaning to stop for a week or so, Tom is always sure that the land needs it— even though this same land is fetlock-deep already in running water. If there is drought, and all the fields are panting, Tom judges that “we get too much rain just time and time, and we’ll not grumble—eh, sir?—now the summer’s fair a-blazing down upon us.” When any living thing is sick—the patient may possess two legs or four —my Tom Lad is a nurse indeed, and spreads about the sufferer such an aura of tenderness and strength and absolute good hope that he or she, for decency’s sake, is compelled to get better with much or little speed. Tom, in brief, is a man to whistle for when your back is to the wall and the heavy odds are meeting you in front; and, when his time comes, I think we shall grave simply Tom Lad on his headstone, trusting that all the Vale of Arcady will understand how we have praised him after death.

It is hard, here under the lime-tree, with the half-light of the darkness lying over the flower scents and the reek of summer, hard to make clear headway with what one has in mind. The serious writers, I am told, seldom work out of doors, fearing those happy distractions that are shut out by four stone walls. I am sorry for them; for surely they must sometimes overshoot their mark by too much striving after a good aim.

For myself, I have no aim at all to-night, save lazily to re-people the world with good fairies— with such inhabitants as grow hero in our Arcady, acknowledging Tom Lad as their democratic king. I want—still lazily—to get back to those Scandinavian rovers who came raiding lands and cattle and good household-gear a few centuries ago, and left descendants here to boast that they were Norsemen.

What I am thinking is true and understandable, once I could arrive at speech. I am thinking of the man of his hands—the man who can turn to any job and do it well—the man who has his own trade and pursues it, and in leisure hours walks out to help his neighbour with some other task.

They are a dying race to-day. The dust and follies of the towns have hidden their eyes from Arcady’s true meaning. We have few men of their hands, and England—whose heart is Arcady, and has been always—is growing every day less like the merry land ol meadows and of pastures that once it was.

It is not the hour or season for recrimination; but, looking quietly down the lane of history tonight, one sees great guiltiness lying at the door of that far-off, fanatic movement which levelled our maypoles, whitewashed our church walls, suppressed our village games—the movement which dwarfed every healthy country instinct, which bade us, here in the north, where winter’s long and summer is hard-come-by—bade us take no heed to the call of nature in her brief moods of jollity.

That was the first serious blow to village life, I think; the first of many that have followed since. My ideal villager—whom I name the “man of his hands”—is essentially a pleasure lover as well as a work lover. He works hard and plays hard, and to the making of him go many wholesome forces. His glass of ale at the inn; his many pipes when work is done for the day and cronies gather round him; his laddish joy at fair-times, when booths fringe all the village green, leaving only an island of greensward in the middle where boisterous couples dance; these things make for good work, because they are good play. Tom Lad, and others like him here in Arcady, keep level the balance between play and work, and no man until he has acquired that habit has begun to live at all.

It is odd that this same fanatic movement—and I trust that none will bear me a grudge for giving what seems to me a true name for a well-inten tioned effort—it is odd that this movement spread so rapidly in Yorkshire just when Charles the First needed our north-country lads the most. In the last result, our willingness to rebel against the Crown—I speak of such rebellion with a sense of personal shame, though it was all done so long ago—made altogether against our interests. Our habit here in the north is to learn too much from winter, too little from June’s flood-tide; we are rather too willing to work at all times, whether or no we have worked too much already, and to interpret life according to the gospel of a north wind blowing from the moors. Our village games of old were a needful antidote against a fixed habit and fixed point of view; we play these same games nowadays with a curious air of theft and a sideways glance to see if the ghost of sour Protector Cromwell is looking at us with upbraiding.

It was good for the tranquil midlands and the tranquil south, no doubt, to have this stir of desperate endeavour, this protest against the easiness of life; but it was bad for us here, where the winter’s hard and we are by nature apt always to look askance at gaiety. Our goodmen of their hands are dying out as a race, and the towns go humming with their ceaseless stir and bustle of restless people, treading useless pavements; and England, fair, good mother of us all, is sighing for that other life she knew, when folk were workers and were pleasure lovers both, smelling the meadow-sweets or the winter’s wholesome winds about them.

One distrusts pathos, and for that reason I get up from my friendly lime-tree, lest I sorrow foolishly over what has gone, or nearly gone, from all North Country villages save favoured Arcady. We are dying, up here in the cleanly villages. There’s not a doubt of it, unless some clever doctor comes to save us in the nick of time We are dying. The cool, grey hills will lie about our Arcady; the winds will blow as they list; but the sullen march of the townsman comes down the road, and the soul-destroying wretchedness of his streets, all modelled after one hopeless pattern, is coming near to us. Yet my faith is bigger than I thought it to-night, as I cross the lawn. I am listening for the hoof-beats of the doctor’s pony, I find—that rude and forthright doctor who will put a knife into the sore and let the evil out, and wash clean the wound again. It is all fancy, of course—or faith, whichever term you happen to prefer—for I have met no doctor yet who understands, or can cope with, that increasing malady which we in Arcady call “town fever." The city folk peep into Arcady—when the weather happens to be good—to smile at our simplicity, our candid way of meeting life, of expecting candour in return. They do not guess the quiet laughter we enjoy at their expense; if once they did—if they saw their town ideals in the wholesome light that Arcady throws on them—they would, I think, be humbled and ashamed.

We see them dancing down their streets, dusty and footsore, following any tune the Pied Piper cares to play. Some cannot get away, but others can; and it is those who are free to escape who follow the Piper most persistently. They might be treading daisied fields, might be listening while the throstle and the cuckoo challenged the south wind to a tournament of song; they might be climbing up the moor’s rough face; they prefer to follow the Mad Piper up and down the sick immensity of streets—line after line of meaningless, dark houses, fronting the perpetual uproar of the roads.

For those who are condemned, willy-nilly, to live in the city’s prison-house we in Arcady have nothing but great pity; for those who live there of their own free-will we have a pity tempered by amusement.

Indeed, as I saunter across the lawn—ripe and sweet with the scent of the grass which Tom Lad cut this morning—I feel that there’s a message, an important message, one could send abroad to the folk who live helpless under the delirium of “town fever.” It happens, though, that I cross to the back of the house, remembering some order I have to give Tom Lad for the morrow; and at her door stands Stylesey.

Stylesey has always had a trick of dispersing my big thoughts. Greatly as I need and love her, she affects me as she does Tom Lad, and makes me think of greenhouses.

To-night—she stands clearly in the lamplight coming through the open door—I can see her lift a corner of her apron as I approach,

“We never had better weather, Stylesey?” I hazard, striving helplessly to avert the coming battle. There is always a battle when Stylesey lifts a corner of her apron.

“True, sir; but I distrust good weather, for my part, and I always did. There’s always a canker-worm in the rosebud, like—seems as if Heaven meant it so to be.”

Tom’s wife is like the folk I talked of awhile since. She does not understand that Heaven is not nearly so hard on us as we are upon ourselves.

“What is the new trouble, Stylesey?” I ask, preferring to hit first, since battle is toward. “ You have three a day, so far as I remember— five in a good season.”

Stylesey drops her apron and looks at me. “Marriage seems to have fettled your tongue up, sir, if ye’ll excuse plain speech,” she says, with grudging admiration.

“I am not afraid of you, Stylesey,” I answer, trusting to be forgiven for obvious departure from the truth.

She tucks one corner of her apron into her mouth, and a tear trickles snugly down her nose. “I was thinking of your poor mother, sir. I knew her long before you were thought of, and I wonder often how she’d like to see another mistress here. Mistress of her house, your mother was, and all the great lady, and she little thought to see another in her place. It brings the tears to my eyes—and I hope you'll pardon them, sir, meaning the tears—for I cannot help myself,"

This is the true Stylesey. There is none like her—none Her methods are calculated always to defy and puzzle ordinary men, such as Tom Lad and myself; but the most puzzling of all to me is her trick of referring to my mother, as if her memory should be a constant reproach to me, instead of a most fragrant, quiet, and tempered memory.

The good woman is jealous. So much is obvious. She has yielded to her besetting sin, and will not see that it is idle to quarrel with such sunshine and laughter as Cathy has brought into Arcady. This is the situation that I foresaw so clearly when Cathy and I sat looking out across the western sea.

“I have often wondered if you would care to go on living here,” I observe, drawing a rook’s feather from my pocket with sudden recollection that my pipe needs cleaning.

“Go on living here?” she echoes, dropping her apron suddenly.

“Yes, Stylesey. It must be very difficult for you, and I felt sure, as I was thinking over it to-night, that you would wish to leave us. We are both sorry—very sorry, Stylesey—but it cannot be helped, I suppose.”

She leans against the doorway and fans her face with one plump hand. “I’m not so young as I was, sir, and ’tis shame to take an old woman’s breath away.” Again she is appealing to my sense of chivalry; but I am fighting in a good cause, and know it.

“You have been mistress of the house so long,” I continue, proud—I confess it—of my courage and diplomacy, “and, of course, you feel the change. I am sure you are right—the best thing for your happiness is to leave——”

Stylesey forgets her pathos and the respect due to me. “Ay, sir,” she says, with a breezy flick of her apron, “ Tom Lad talks of my happiness just time and time. Masters and men are alike—they think they can learn the way of a woman’s heart by mooning in a greenhouse. Flick the green-flies off, they, and tap a flower-pot here and a flowerpot there, to see if the plants are thirsty-like, and water them, and then come home knowing all about a woman’s feelings. ’Tis water for the flowers; but what o’ the tears that us poor women shed, and no man caring? Your mother, sir, cried just so when you were young, I call to mind.”

Stylesey halts for breath, and I wait placidly, for I can always get the better of my good friend and tyrant when she descends to oratory.

“You want to be rid of me, sir, I can see. Tis not enough to have worked for you, and shed tears for you, and moiled and toiled till sometimes I fancied I must drop where I stood,” she resumes, a little disconcerted by my silence. “I’m getting old, and you want to be rid of me.”

She weeps tumultuously, spoiling a clean apron in useless efforts to stem the flood. I wait till there is a lull in the storm, and then I speak, in that quiet, assured voice which all true diplomats employ—on the stage, at any rate—when they have waited for their moment “It is you who want to be rid of yourself, Stylesey."

“Yes, sir—and how, if a plain body might ask?” There’s a bright light of humour in the eyes she lifts to mine, in spite of the tear-lines mapped across her rosy face.

“My wife happens to be mistress here, Stylesey, and I mean her to be mistress. I told her that you would never agree to it.”

“Indeed, sir?” puts in my adversary tartly.

“I wanted to write and break the news to you, Stylesey, but your mistress would not hear of it She said you must stay on here.”

Stylesey retreats into her kitchen—which seems always to give her the kind of inspiration that Tom Lad derives from his greenhouse—and puts a few things to rights. Then she returns, and I can see that she is awed by the easy fashion in which I have confessed my willingness to dismiss her.

“Your poor mother, sir!” she observes, but feebly and without conviction. “The last words she said to me were, “You’ll be a mother to my boy, Stylesey.’ And I’ve tried to be—’

“You have,” I murmur, with something of tragedy in my voice.

“I’ve tried to be, and all goes for naught. I love the old place, sir—love you, if it comes to that, and if you’ll pardon the freedom—and, as for the dear lamb you’ve brought home, I seem to be following her all day with my eyes instead of looking after my own household work.” Stylesey and I know each other. We waste no ammunition, once we know that a battle is lost and won.

“So you will stay? " I ask.

“Yes—yes, if you please, sir,” she answers meekly.

It may seem a light matter, to those who do not know Stylesey, that I have met and conquered her in open fray; but we in Arcady here have understanding of such Homeric combat, and selfglory may well be excused to me to-night

CHAPTER III
DALLIANCE

I had meant to go indoors, but turn across the lawn instead, and walk down to the river’s bank. Forget-me-nots are nestling in the banks, half shy, half wanting to be seen, like girls whose springtime comes to them. From the meadows comes the harsh, romantic Wailing of the corncrake, a sound dear from boyhood to us all.

. The gnats move sleepily, and now and then raise blisters on my hands; and from a farm high up towards the moors a dog gives tongue A tranquil scene Ay, ay, my masters, but I have lately come from battle. Absurd as Stylesey is, absurd as our late argument may seem, the Babe’s happiness depended on my victory to-night. Cathy had said nothing to me since we returned to Arcady, but underneath her gaiety I have seen traces of that feeling, well-learned by me aforetime, which resists, and is troubled by, the masterful whims of Mrs. Styles. For myself, I used to undergo the penance constantly, from a mean wish to save present uproar and confusion; but now the world is different—as a Benedick is changed, with free wings blowing to the breezy sunlight, from the helpless bachelor-chrysalis that once he was. I have been a fighting man to-night, for Cathy’s sake, and the laurels lie cool upon my brow, if—as Stylesey would say—“I may be pardoned-like” for applauding my own victory.

There were so many troubles which Stylesey might have conjured up—from the recesses of her apron, as her wont is—for my wife. No man is half-mothered by his housekeeper throughout the years for nothing; he learns the perils of the highway, and Cathy, listening to me yonder on the western coasts, did not understand the byroads of that Stylesey temper which bade me ask to rid myself of her at any cost.

That is over and done with, however. Stylesey has her faults, but she’s dependable, and I know that Cathy will be mistress of her house at last There’s relief in the victory, I own, for Stylesey—plump, and bellicose, and vastly tender —is like the winter’s wind that comes to clean the summer’s heat away; she is a tonic I could ill afford to lose.

There’s beguilement on this river-path to-night. The warm air, the cool prattle of the water, the wonderful, deep shadows and lights of liquid green that lie upon the pools, all make for fairy-craft A big trout, as I pass that round sweep of the river known as Dingle Pool, has all his bead and shoulders in a patch of up-stream light, while the rest of him is hidden in the blackness thrown across by overhanging leafage. He’ll be worth attention by-and-by.

The whim takes me to go as far as the Bridge of Amity—the arched and fragile bridge of stone, with its grey parapets, which links my twenty acres to the Squire’s estate. The Squire is big and hearty, as I have said elsewhere, and happens to be Cathy’s father; and his delight in having us again for neighbours has been palpable, and rather overwhelming, during the last month.

Remembering that this is Arcady—Arcady in the full flush and strength of summertide—it is easy to understand that one rides sentiment on a loose rein. It pleases me to recall that legend of the feud between the Squire’s house and mine, long since, when my folk had more lands and his had fewer; of how a man of his race married a daughter of ours, of how the feud was healed, of how the Bridge of Amity was built across the intervening stream. The legend, to me, at any rate, has all the softness and the glamour of a ballad sung to the music of an old-time spinet, and heard by a wayfarer passing some cool parlour’s open windows.

I am not alone, it seems, in my wish to seek the bridge to-night. A slim, cool figure is leaning over the parapet, and Cathy, whom I had thought upstairs in the old, grey house below, looks quietly down upon me.

“Babe, is it your ghost?” I ask, coming quietly to her side.

“No, Murphy.” Her demureness is accentuated, and so I know that she is bent on mischief.

" But you're in two places at once."

“I think not, dear; but of course you are the wiser, and should know.”

“You were upstairs, I thought.”

“So I was, wise Murphy. And the windows were all open, and the joy of things came drifting in, and I couldn’t stay indoors.”

“What brought you to the bridge?” I ask, after a silence.

Cathy looks once at me, a glance fleeting as our northern summer, but full of that elemental strength which makes for deep gladness or deep sorrow.

“I came—Murphy, you have no right to ask, but you will make me tell you—I came, Murphy, to—to think of that night, a year ago, when the fairies brushed my eyelids——”

She halts. Silence and quiet uproar of the birds alike to-night are exquisite. The scent of wild roses meets one like a warm and playful breeze; the heavy honeysuckle scents are cooled and chastened by the stream; the first of the hay-fields to be cut contributes largesse to this free, heart-whole beneficence of latter June.

" Were they good fairies, Babe? I had asked you to marry me, and the fairies brushed your eyelids—”

" They have brushed them ever since, Murphy," she answered quietly, "and I think they were good fairies.”

Let no man boast that he is happy until he is dead. So the Greeks said, I believe, and that is our peculiar faith here in the north, where we accept long winters and are prone to distrust our summer-times—as a hard-working farmer distrusts the folk who come in fine array and commit trespass on his lands. Yet I, sharing to the full that distrust of softer things—a birthright I have longed sometimes to give away—can give no hostages to fear just now. Out of the heart of Arcady my wife’s answer comes to me, and there is nothing further to be said.

Have the fairies brushed my eyelids too, that I cannot think any land so fair as this, our tranquil Arcady? The quiet river, brown with peat, the wide, rich trees that find their shelter here and pay their house-rent handsomely, the constant moors that seldom fail to peep between the leafage, with assurance that the strength of the hills is with us amid this dalliance of June—I have seen other lands, but always I come back to Arcady, and find it fairer than the big-little world without which shuts it in. The round, raking slopes of limestone hills appeal to me; the breeze is a boon comrade, when it comes to drive the vapours off from summer’s heat; our summer, surely, is like a hard-won hay crop, sweet to smell and crisp to handle.

" Suppose we had never come together, Babe?” I say at last Cathy does not look at me, but glances at the brown and pebbly stream below; then turns to see the upper reaches of the river come down with petulant and foaming quiet.

“That could never have been, Murphy," she says at last We are surprised by a sudden uproar. The Squire’s voice is big at all times, but louder than its wont to-night as he nears the bridge from his own side of the water.

“I’m intruding—not a doubt of it,” he bellows. Respect for truth compels me to admit that the Squire echoes one of his own prize-bulls at times.

I disdain any such feeling on our part, and he stands looking at us. A grim smile is playing about his mouth and in the fine grey eyes, and his whole attitude suggests that he is watching the gambols of a couple of irresponsible kittens.

“Not a doubt of it,” he repeats. “I suppose, because I gave you my daughter, you thought I should give up the bridge, too, for your private and exclusive use? Eh, sir? Well, I don’t propose to do; I am far too fond of it. Bless me, young people when they marry seem at once to think that every good nook and corner of the world should be preserved for them. I’m too old, boy, to understand such nonsense.”

We idle on the bridge awhile, contented and at ease; for Cathy, the Squire, and I, have long since learned to be at home with one another, and three, in our case, is company of the best “ Gad, it’s magnificent I” the Squire observes at last, pointing up the river, then down the river, and then at the climbing woods through which the hill-top peeps. “I want to sing, Cathy—want to sing,‘ Here’s to the man who’s content with his lot’ It is good to feel twenty, and to believe it, even if the gout will remind you now and then that it’s all make-believe.”

That is the Squire’s secret; the gods have loved him well, and he will assuredly die young.

When we have said good-night he calls us back.

“Dine with the old man to-morrow, you selfish couple. I'm lonely up there at the house.”

Since we returned I cannot remember once meeting the Squire without this parting appeal to our humanity. He loses his cheeriness at the moment of farewell, and instantly assumes an air of pathos—suggestive of a white-haired hermit sitting before a fireless grate and mourning for his thankless offspring—an air that would be convincing but for the suddenness with which it is assumed.

“Poor old daddies!” says Cathy, as we wander quietly home. “He must be rather lonely, and I’m so glad we’re near him.”

That the Babe should give the absurd name of “Daddies’’ to a Deputy Lieutenant and Justice of the Peace is, of course, deplorable; but, then, she has a talent for absurdity, and I myself gain nothing by protesting against my name of Murphy.

The Squire was right, I think, in choosing that finest of our English songs for his theme just now.

Here’s to the man who’s content with his lot,

And never goes sighing for what he has not.

That is Arcady’s hymn; but there is no credit to myself for singing it. I have a good deal, as it happens—including Cathy.

CHAPTER IV
SUGGESTED INTRUSION OF A ROGUE

When I came down to breakfast, on the day after our meeting at the Bridge of Amity, I found one letter that attracted me simply by the handwriting of the address. It was vigorous handwriting, bold and self-confident, and I wondered who my unknown correspondent was.

After breakfast—Cathy had gone to the fields on some business connected with her poultry— I took my correspondence out to the seat under the lime-tree, and opened first this letter with the dashing superscription. The notepaper was headed with the address of an infirmary in our nearest town, and the letter itself was straightforward, manly, and vastly pitiful My correspondent was writing solely on the strength of the freemasonry which exists between old ’Varsity men—between gentlemen, though his was a case of past, not present gentility, he feared—between brother scribes. The infirmary doctor, it seems, had lent him a copy of that book which I had been rash enough to publish while shaken slightly from my balance by the fever of a honeymoon with Cathy. He fancied I was a man with a heart, but was quite prepared—“the world had knocked him about a bit"—to get no answer at all, or a curt intimation that letters from a work-house infirmary were not needed by myself.

I ought to have paused at the suggestion that I had a heart About once a month I had been swindled in the past by plausible decayed gentlemen who had appealed to me through that specific organ. I ought to have paused, but did not. I let my other letters wait, and re-read this one, and put it down; and I thought the matter over, and was sorry for the poor beggar. I have the letter still—it is one of my cherished trophies, now that the bitterness of feeling duped is overpast—and sometimes I take it out and glance through it; and I feel still that any unbiassed critic would say that it was so shrewd a counterfeit of manly feeling, of manly patience under ignominy and suffering, as to deceive all save the specialists in roguery. Though, to be sure, experience should have made me a specialist myself by this time.

What happened was that I chanced to see Stylesey crossing the lawn, and asked her to bring pen and ink and notepaper; and when these arrived I wrote off at once a friendly response to my sick friend—gentleman, ’Varsity man, and brother scribe—who was lying far away from the sweets of Arcady. The whole thing is frankly humorous to me now; but at the time I was in earnest, and I wrote sincerely, trying to let him know that friends are made by suffering, trying-woe is me, what foolish help did I try to give in that letter written under the lime-tree!

He had not asked for anything but sympathy; and that, too, showed genius. He was dying fast of phthisis, so I gathered from his letter, and solid help in the way of this world’s gear was of no service to him; a friendly hand was all he needed. So later in the morning I sent off my letter. I enclosed, as a matter of course, a money-order; he might be longing for tobacco, I thought, or for some lesser creature comfort, and it cost me so small an effort to send him something.

Now, I am well aware that the prudent man would have written to the infirmary doctor, and would then have studied some work of political economy, before replying hastily; but I am not prudent, nor shall I ever be, I trust, in that direction; to give at once—sympathy, money, a word in season, whatever it may be—is to give twice, and it is useless, so it seems to us in Arcady, to spend so long a time in making sure of one’s ground that the man at the other end is either dead or desperate before one’s bounty reaches him.

At any rate, I sent off at once the letter and the money-order—walked up to the village post-office myself to dispatch the missive—and returned with a pleasant sense that I had helped somebody for once. I told Cathy nothing: for I find a curious instinct among Arcadians to conceal these matters as if they were so many crimes.

Cathy had returned from her hen-farm when I got back, and met me at the gate. She would talk of nothing but the turkey chicks which she was rearing with tribulation and solicitude. I often wonder why folk, presumably for gain, rear turkeys for the market They are tricky fowls in their first youth, though strong in later days; an unexpected shower of rain will kill the chicks oft by their sixes, unless you keep a watchman near the run; they consume the hard-boiled eggs of honest hens in profligate and wasteful fashion. Yet still men rear them, and still the buyer thinks their price too high when winter draws nearer to old December’s threshold and he has to buy them.

“They are all dead, I suppose?" I venture, when Cathy meets me with some breathless history of the morning’s work.

“Murphy, they are darlings," she answers reproachfully. “There’s been no rain, you see, and they are ‘ thriving,’ as Stylesey would say, and they ate up all the food I gave them.”

It is not wise, I have found, to tease the Babe on the subject of hens and turkeys; she is sensitive on the point, and, after all, it is a more harmless pastime than writing verse. Cathy happens to be a poem herself, and I have often dreaded that she would tiy to paint other lilies in lines and syllables.

“What are you going to buy from the proceeds, Babe?” I suggest, with due gravity.

“Some present for the man who has learned fairy magic.”

“That is handsome of you, Babe.”

She retreats with the manner of a fairy—at least, those who have seen the Green Folk tell me they are so be-mannered—and her serious, blue eyes rest on me for a moment “I have not found him yet; so, of course, the present must be kept awhile.”

She returns, however, like Lot’s and all men’s wives. “What have you been doing, Murphy?” she demands.

“Nothing at all, except post a letter, for want of something better to do," I answer disingenuously.

“Murphy, you had a secretive air as you came in at the gate. You have been in mischief.”

Why does one feel so guilty in doing good by stealth? I stand like a schoolboy listening to the tally of the pears and apples he has stolen.

“When I was the height of your elbow, and we took a fearful joy in tickling trout,” she goes on remorselessly, “you had always that look, Murphy.”

Perhaps if I had told my wife what I had done, she would have put a saner interpretation on that letter which had appealed to me so poignantly. But I did not, and in consequence a big-little trouble was to invade the even life of Arcady.

Oddly enough, when we dined with her father that night, he also gave me pause for thought and an uncomfortable sense that my letter to the all-but-dying man in hospital might have been hasty and ill-considered.

“When do you propose to do your duty to the county, sir?” he asks suddenly.

“I have always tried to do it,” I answer guardedly.

“Tried? Then why don’t you take your proper seat on the Bench more often than you do ? Oh,

I know—pass the decanter, boy, for I’m free of gout just now—I know your whims and fancies about tramps. You’d keep an inn for that kind of gentry, if you had your way. Now I have a cool head for judging a rogue.”

The Squire is impetuous to a fault, as it chances, and hates or likes a man quite irrespective of his record; but I do not tell him so to-night. One does not tell these things to a father-in-law.

“We had a case to-day,” he goes on. “Rank poacher—worst in the district—a man you’d shoot at sight He was up for snaring rabbits in the next property to mine. Lucky you were not on the Bench, boy, or you’d have given him a pension for life.”

“And the Bench, sir?” I ask.

“Well, the man had a good sort of face to look at, and I always thought rabbits a mean sort of vermin—and—pass the decanter, boy—we let him off with a caution, because he had a wife and family! Poachers always have a wife, and ten or fourteen to the litter.”

“It comes of the open-air life,” I suggest “Comes of vagabondage.—But we let him off,” he adds, with lame good temper. “He had a good face, you see, and made us think of his wife and children."

The memory comes to me of a most plausible scoundrel who once had appealed to me through the medium of an imaginary wife and non-existent children. He had taken a home-bee line for the village inn, I recall, after bidding me a touching farewell, and at the inn he had gathered round him a great jug of ale and many smaller jugs, which were filled from my own pocket, and which he humorously named his wife and little ones. The drift of the Squire’s talk, and the recollection of my witty vagabond, affect me with a strange disquiet Suppose my friend in hospital is also of the Rogues’ Club, as Tom Lad would say?

My doubts are scattered, however, when the next day’s evening post comes in. It seems that my friend believes, like myself, in the maxim that he gives twice who gives quickly, for he has answered by the earliest post A manly letter again. He accepts my pleasant fiction that the money is a loan, and with serene and devilish ingenuity he persuades me that he has bravely struggled with disease and the near approach of death, has written two short stories while in hospital, and means to repay me from the proceeds.

I am quite aware that I might have given this incident an entirely different setting. The progress of this special rogue could be rendered plausible enough, if the purpose of my notes in Arcady were to deceive the casual vagrant who picks up the scribbled sheets; but, if one sets about to write down one’s self an ass, like Dogberry the constable, it is as well to do it thoroughly. It is said that an Englishman fears more than the gallows any suspicion that he is guilty of foolishness. The North Country folk have this feeling developed most acutely; but, on the other hand, we have, I think, a saving gift of humour and a marvellously simple habit of making others laugh with us at our follies as soon as we have recovered from the first blow to our pride.

At the time, however, I thought a great deal of my unknown consumptive, and wondered how best to give him that little which would not be missed from the wealth of Arcady. And now I reach the prime motive of my folly. There is a tenderness of heart that comes from bitter hopelessness and trouble; there is, too, an abiding tenderness that springs from prosperity and the sense that we have more than we deserve; and we, who live in Arcady here, are apt to be the prey of any clever member of the Rogues’ Club who tracks us down. We learn nothing from experience, moreover; for a new dawn rises on the shattered faith of yesternight, and we call gaily to the hills again that we believe. I like that breed of folk myself; they add more to the world’s happiness in the long run than do the grim-faced citizens who study diligently the academic problem of how to be charitable and wise at one and the same time. It seems to me— dawdling here beneath the lime-trees—that the old truth is the new truth, too, as fresh as on the day when it was uttered first. The left hand must know nothing of the right hand’s doings; like well-matched wife and goodman, they must ask no details of each other, but know that sense of forward hopefulness and faith which, at the end and summing-up of life, directs the verdict of the world’s jury—the verdict passed upon our uselessness or on our competency.

I would be taken in again to-morrow rather than leave unwritten just such another letter, asked for by a friend in need. The answering of such letters opens out an unknown, dangerous future for the writer; but that is his own personal risk, and the peril of refusing a reply is greater— greater, as peril is measured after we are dead. We are apt to-day, I think, to make of charity— the charity of old, fragrant, eager, a winsome maid—apt to make her a beldame, sour of face and curious as to the antecedents and the record of her suppliants. Soon we shall have a law, I fear, forbidding us to give pennies to children in the village street; and judges, passing sentence on us, will declare it a high crime against the State to pauperise the young.

The folly of the age—a folly built upon the insecure foundation of so-called common sense— has not gone yet so far, but it is nearing it Meanwhile, we in Arcady give liberal alms, and down our village street there passes a good fairy, who shines like sunlight on the house-fronts and whose name is Charity.

It is good, I think, to hold the faith most strongly when reason is most inclined to flout one’s faith as so much sentiment. My dying consumptive—gentleman and brother scribe— recurs to me o’nights and makes my folly patent; but he cannot conquer my belief in Charity. Sometimes I wonder that, in a land where many saints have many monuments, there is no statue, simple and virginal, reared to the prime saint of the world.

All this is looking forward, though. There’s a week of sunshine and fresh air of Arcady before me until the rogue arrives, and I make the most of it Our northern summer is home again in his old quarters; the elder-bushes—white masses ranging after white masses all up the hedges— are in pride of bloom. Arcady is full of mingled perfumes, as it will never be again until next summer races into flood.

On one of these evenings the Wanderer appears at the open window of the dining-room as Cathy and I are finishing dessert. The Wanderer rarely approaches one’s house by the usual entry; such a method would disturb his outlook upon life— would, indeed, prove something of a shock to us who know him. The Wanderer was a boon comrade of my father’s, so that I can give him a liberal handicap on the score of years; yet he constantly attempts—and nears success at times— to walk me olf my feet. He knows many things about the hedgerows and the uplands, about birds and fish and insects; he delights in good stories, and seems always to roll them delicately round his tongue before relating them; he has a pretty taste for wine and snuff, and is one of those rare folk who seem to bring good cheer and betterment into a room whenever he enters it “Intruding, ami?" he asks, swinging his goldheaded cane with an air as if, forsooth, we were living in an older and a happier generation.

“I never found you guilty of intrusion yet, sir. Come in.”

The shape of his beaver hat, the very way he holds it in his hand—holds it eloquently, protesting deference to Cathy—has nothing of to-day in it. He stands apart, a brave soul disdaining to the last all recognition of newer times.

The Wanderer, I think, would not admit the grave importance of manners; for he professes to despise them, and chooses frequently the company of gipsies, stone-breakers, and all who seek the open air by instinct. Yet in himself he is an upholder of that grand manner which is dying in the odour of sanctity. It is good to watch him do the simplest things, such as sitting down to wine. In all things modest, yet secure; in all things quiet, with laughter hiding in the wrinkles round his eyes; in all things suggesting, without emphasis, that he would fight bravely to the death, if need arose, for any old-world cause. That is our Wanderer, and Cathy and I feel that there is something amiss if we do not see him every day or so.

He has a tale or two for us to-night, of course, and some few glances—sly, cynical, and kindly— which plainly ask us if we are still content to live on honeycomb.

“Odd, odd,” he murmurs, after one of these glances.

And when I question him in turn as to his meaning, he lifts his glass to the light and pauses before answering.

“Why, I knew you two as boy and girl—a remarkably lanky boy, if I remember, and always just getting into mischief or just struggling out of it Yet here you are at your own dinner-table, the pair of you, as if you were old to the game.

Still happy, too, unless it is all make-believe. Odd, very odd!—But that is not strictly what I came to talk about,” he adds.

His object, as it proves, is to tempt me to share a quiet stroll with him to-morrow. Just a stroll, he explains, because the weather is too hot for real walking. I know my Wanderer, however; while I was still in my early ’teens, he taught me what was understood by a “quiet stroll,” and, by the hard discipline of blistered feet and limbs that ached and sorrowed on the morrow, I then began to learn the niceties of a simple phrase.

To begin with, his suggestion that we should start at seven—to get the cool of the morning— did not fit in with my own conception of a quiet stroll. I knew roughly, in fact, what this guileless Wanderer had in store for me; but it was a point of honour, as between us, that there should be no refusal of these adventures, whether the sun shone hot or the wind blew icy cold.

CHAPTER V
A WANDER-DAY

I warned Cathy, when I set off on the next morning to meet my Wanderer, that I should be late in coming back; and we said farewell, she and I, with that quiet mingling of tragedy and hope which attends a day’s parting from one’s mate in Arcady, and I joined my comrade at his garden gate. He was taking a pinch of snuff.

“In time?” he says, with an affectation of surprise which I know by heart “Oddi The youngsters lag so nowadays. Well, we had better start, though I doubt the best of the morning has gone by us.”

“We should have started last night, sir, just after dinner. That was our only chance."

“Gad, why didn’t you suggest it? However, there’s no use in crying over the broken pitcher. Let us make the best of what, under Providence, is left to us.”

The best of what is left us proves to be good indeed. Half the hay of the countryside is mown, and the sweet of the morning’s dew brings out a fragrance unbelievable. There’s not a bird in hedgerow or mid-air that is not singing matins.

The sky looks down on us, and laughs its “Well met, brothers.”

“Ripe summer, boy,” says the Wanderer, with the air of an expert I do not propose to chronicle our day—am far too lazy, indeed—but I am anxious, by the shortest cut that I can find, to come to one of those little adventures that meet one by the way on such excursions—adventures little in themselves, but showing bigger issues in the retrospect.

It should be explained that the Wanderer and myself, when we go abroad, are apostolic in our treatment of physical needs, if in no other way. We seldom take meat or drink with us, but cany a staff apiece and sally forth into the unknown; we take no maps, lest, by trusting reason, we are deserted by the better helpmate, instinct; we trust no highroads, for these are apt to lead to foolish places where men congregate too thickly.

There was a time, long ago, when I would suggest a route to the Wanderer before we set out; but I have come to realise that his own plan is the better—to climb, or open, the first gate that chances to be near, and to go forward, choosing constantly to trespass whenever possible. This business of trespassing is little understood, and deserves a random treatise devoted solely to a description of its joys, its griefs, its difficulties.

To the uninitiated, trespass is a fearsome matter, involving—in the event of detection—prosecution, an appearance before the ogres of the law, and afterwards a long vista, beginning with fines and penalties, and ending with the modern equivalent of Botany Bay. To experts, though, it is a simple game and a delightful one.

Like all games, it has its strict rules and also its more delicately shaded laws of etiquette. The Complete Trespasser, for instance, must never leave a gate open which he found closed; must not take a bee-line across growing wheat or through ripening meadow-grass; must repair a dry-built wall if he chances to bring it down with him—no rare happening in a limestone country— while climbing it. The righteous trespasser, moreover, should on no occasion be discovered uprooting lilies of the valley, oak-fern, or wild orchids, nor should he move forward with a high head when summoned to stand his ground. When crossing a moor at breeding-time, it is not strictly courteous—according to trespassers’ etiquette—to put one’s boot into the nests of breeding grouse; nor should one, in passing through a wood, throw one’s stick at pheasants rising close at hand. It is well, too, if you see a big trout idling in a shady pool, to avoid the temptation to lie down—a boy again—and gently tickle him until you land him on the bank.

These would seem obvious axioms; but I have seen such total ignorance of them displayed so frequently that it may be well to set them down. The niceties of the game—those impalpable lights and shades which only the practised hand can grasp—I cannot enter into here, for the Wanderer and I are busy climbing hills and scrambling down the further steeps.

He has so much to show me, so much to bring out from nature’s store-house, a private key to which, apparently, he keeps snugly in his waistcoat pocket We turn aside here into a little dell, all watered by a brown and tinkling stream, where a rare potentilla grows in quiet profusion; while there we scale a limestone scarp half up its breathless rise, to view a shallow cave, where once he discovered relics of a bygone people; and now again we are raking westward across a slippery slope of limestone towards three round and trifling hills which once were coral islands.

There’s none like my Wanderer, none, if one is bent on walking. He is nature’s Admirable Crichton, knowing her emergencies, her wiles, her tenderness. When most out of breath—say, after slipping on a limestone scree and rattling to the bottom in a cloud of stones and pebbles—he remains his buoyant self, and will launch some happy shaft of wit at you as he arises. When we miss our way, and the going is hot and difficult, and true men’s tempers show signs of breaking up, he remembers some odd story, and tells it, and doses you with life’s finest physic, laughter, till you twain are schoolboy comrades once again, and taste life at its dawn.

Perhaps knowledge of a game is never shown so clearly as in the knowledgeable breaking of its rules. That rare potentilla, for example; I am allowed by the Complete Trespasser to put one root of it into my box, for transference at the day’s end to the soil of Arcady; but, had I stumped up half the dell and carried the results home in a sack, I should have been hissed by all true vagrants.

So, too, in the matter of a limestone wall which we scale by-and-by. It is eight feet high, if a foot, and I attempt to climb it first It tapers beautifully to the top, and, just as I sit astride the coping-stones and bring my other leg across right cautiously for the descent, I feel that the world is slipping from me—not rushing, for a limestone fence has no rudeness or abruptness in its falL Long practice accustoms one to sit lightly on the debris; and, though I have no witty impromptu at command, I smile benignly on the Wanderer.

" Thanks, boy,” he observes. “I’ll go through the gap, I think”

We survey the ruins—not fiddling, as Nero did above Rome’s ruins, but sorrowing for the man who owns the fence.

“Can it be done?” I venture, referring to our obvious duty in the matter.

“Yes, sir; anything in this world can be done, with patience; but it will take what little of the day your late habits have left to us.”

True to his whimsical self, the Wanderer discovers a half-crown in one of his pockets and leaves it on the wall “Labour by proxy, sir,” he says, tapping his snuff-box gaily. “The first to find the half-crown, I think, will be the farmer himself, when he sees the rent in his wall and comes hot-foot up, invoking plague and pestilence on him who did it."

Quixotic, friendly to all, most scrupulously just, is this my Wanderer. And sometimes people laugh at him because he prefers always that his neighbour should owe a little to him, rather than he be in debt, whenever there is question of give and take—should owe just a little, but not enough to rouse his neighbour’s spleen. I find, however, that those who laugh are inevitably strangers to Arcady—except in the case of Timothy Brailes, our rustic cobbler, who, according to the manner of all cobblers since men first needed footgear, would sneer at anything that lay outside the circle of his own peculiar whimsies.

I am striving constantly to reach that big-little adventure of ours which charmed us both by its simplicity; yet, knowing the Wanderer as I do, seeing in true proportion the child-like joy and man-like vigour of him, I have a trick of halting round my memories of him, as one halts and lifts one’s hat when Royal folk go by. Moreover, I find that, after a haphazard journey across country, the mind will not admit a definite direction.

We have a magnificent day together, in brief. We encounter keepers in the woods and keepers on the moors, and river-watchers where sequestered streams flow over speckled trout But the game of trespass is played, as all games should be, by two opposing sides who know the rules; and these farmers and keepers and river-watchers, when they approach for parley, all know instinctively that we are “jannock,” to use the hillside term for a man when he is honest Great preambles we have, of course, and great interchange of tobacco and of matches in the middle distance of the picture, and then great talk of weather and the breeding seasons of this and other years; we part at last in fragrant amity, and a hope—from the man who just now approached us with a sullen front—that he will meet us soon again.

One tough nut we find to crack. The Wanderer beguiles me ruinsup yet another rocky steep—to see the of an ancient Peel Tower this time— and discourses on the ills we suffered in old days from raiding Scotsmen.

“Flodden paid the debt,” he finishes abruptly, with a fine gleam in his eyes.

The Wanderer has that rarest charm, the faculty of looking past our little day into the wide alleys of the past. He cares little for the happenings of to-day, and in defence of his standpoint argues that the dust and hurry of events obscures their real meaning—that we must let the dust settle for a generation, or two, or three, before our own day can be rightly judged. All his thoughts turn instinctively to the older faiths and the older habits. The Parliament that is sitting now is vague to him, as a ghost might be; but he can hear the uproar of Fodden’s battlefield, can see them fighting yonder in homespun stockings— their boots thrown off to get a better foothold on the slippery grass—as if ’

’twere a pageant passing now before his eyes. Our histories should be written by such as the Wanderer; for he has fancy, judgment, an instinct for the truth so nicely blended that he could—an it liked him— be a chronicler standing some six feet or so above the tallest of bis compeers. I think that Froude, the sweet singer of our English history, must have possessed most of my Wanderer’s credentials for undertaking such a life-work.

The glow of Flodden Field disappears on the sudden, and the battle-cries die down. We are seeking the lower ground again, after leaving the Peel Tower, and are met in the middle of a five-acre pasture by a big farmer, preceded by a lean and smooth-haired collie who growls at us uncivilly.

We let the collie smell and approve us; that part of the business is simple enough.

“This is my pasture, I reckon," says the farmer, all his face and body stiffening.

“You are fortunate to own it,” observes the Wanderer, taking his snuff-box out “It is a fine pasture.”

Our enemy declines to see the humour of the situation; and his wrath increases perceptibly when my comrade takes a pinch at leisure, looks round upon the landscape, and asks if the hay crop is likely to prove good in the far meadow.

“Now, look ye here,” says the farmer, his anger, pent up for awhile from sheer surprise, exploding suddenly. “’Tis easy for ye two to come like dumed squires across my land and talk o’ hay crops, and think all’s over. Ye?"—his glance sweeps ruthlessly from one to the other—"I warrant neither o’ ye know a scythe-blade from the haft’’

“No,” I murmur, thinking with tranquil glee of the acres which Tom Lad and myself have mown aforetime with the honest scythe.

"Yet ye come here taking pinches o’ snuff, and dandying, and what all, fair as if ye owned all th’ country-side. Well, ye don’t own my bit o’ land, and I mean to have the law on ye.”

“Do you see the yarrow is in bloom, farmer?” asks the Wanderer gently, pointing with his stick to a clump of the blossom lying just under the other’s feet “No, I don’t, mister! Though I’ve no quarrel wi’ yarrow myself, I own, for ’twas my mother’s favourite. We’re not talking o’ flowers; we’re talking o’ law.”

“Are we?” asks the Wanderer gently.

Our enemy ponders awhile, makes neither head nor tail of the Wanderer’s quiet refusal of battle, then goes forward like a bull whose head is down.

“It runs i’ my family, does law,” he goes on. “My father’s folk and my mother’s both were fond o’ law, though it nigh ruined us.”

“Observe,” says the Wanderer aside to me, “how simple a matter it is to give the quiet answer and see wrath expend itself in talk.”

“I’m sick o’ dandy folk,” goes on the other. It is ludicrous to see his smooth-haired collie lying in the grass, one eye on the master, one eye on us, waiting patiently for the result of all the talk. “Sick o’ dandy folk, I. Have had too many o’ that breed come trespassing across my lands. They break the hedges, and they bring dogs wi’ ’em and scare the sheep, and they trample down my clover grass. Seems fair as if poor farmers were made for other-some to ruin!” Our friend, in build and countenance, would serve as a model for the picture of a prosperous John Bull; but the Wanderer assumes an air of sympathy, and deftly plays upon the other’s weakness as upon a stringed instrument “Times are hard for you farmers, eh?”

“Hard? Hard isn’t the word for't. Damnation cruel, I call ’em, what with rents dear and prices cheap, and one thing and the t’other. As for weather—I’m sick on’t Was a time, so I’ve beard my grandfather tell, when summer was summer, and winter, winter; but now, dang me if I ever know one season from another. Weather’s head-piece is where her tail should be these days.”

" What is the reason, think you?” asks the Wanderer, pursuing still the arts of peace.

"Couldn’t say. Some has one reason, some another; but I reckon old grandfather was right, or thereabout Said it was all the Pope o’ Rome, did grandfather—I’ve listened to him many a night when he sat i’ the settle corner, dandling his churchwarden pipe in his hand as if ’twere a babby.”

"The Pope of Rome?” echoes the Wanderer, with evident surprise.

" Ay. Wonderful full of tricks, they Papishers; wonderful forrard sort o’ folk, too, when they set their minds to a thing. It all came of us turning Protestant up hereabout, so grandfather said, and the Pope he said he’d blight our crops—and danged if he hasn’t done it!”

It is at this stage that our enemy realises his mistake. If you wish to "have the law on a man,” it is unwise to open your heart to him on the subject of weather and the crops. The Wanderer has tempted his adversary into the net The farmer tries hard to regain his sour outlook on us, but fails. He plucks a clover-bloom and chews it slowly for awhile.

“Now, who are ye?” he blurts out at last “Ye don’t look the sort o’ folk, when all’s said, to go playing havy-cavy with a body’s crops, or a body's fences, or a body’s sheep."

“We are not that sort," says the Wanderer, taking an expansive pinch of snuff.

There’s another silence; but it is ^noteworthy that the collie, who knows every intonation of his master’s voice, gets up and comes to us, and licks us diligently.

The farmer chews the cud of his clover-bloom awhile. “Look here, misters,” he observes, “ ’tis what I should call dinner-time or thereabout, and my missis is off to see relations up in Thorpe Dale. What if ye stepped down, like, and picked a bone or so with me? Twill all be cold meats, but plenty on ’em, and I never did like to take my victuals lonely.”

We are continually finding answers of this kind to our gospel of taking no thought of the morrow; and now, demur as we will, we are compelled to go with our new friend. Excuse is idle; just as awhile since he was determined to have the law on us, so now he is vehement in his wish to show us hospitality.

And, to tell truth, we are hungry; not a doubt of it, now that a meal has been suggested, though otherwise we might have jogged along contentedly for an hour or two longer.

On our way across the pastures, and through a hayfield cut yesterday, and down and up a winding track across a little ghyll, I think much of “they Papishers,” of our friend's stubborn faith in the witchcraft exercised by Rome. Yet it was just " they Papishers” who helped our country folk to play manly games upon the Sabbath, instead of loafing through the afternoon; they who made feast-times a reality, and, instead of checking, fostered that spirit of pure jollity which leavens the hard work of the year. Indeed, this farmer brings back to me with odd distinctness my speculations under the lime-tree concerning feasts and festivals, and the especial need for them among a folk pre-disposed, by nature and environment, to take a hard—at times a tragic—view of life. It was such sturdy yeomen as this who lifted Cromwell into the saddle of authority; and, by the irony of circumstance, it was they who forced poor Charles the Second into contrary courses. Too much has been made, I think, of Charles's dissoluteness, too little of the fact—a fact assured, indisputable—that, if he was the leader of the reactionary movement which followed after 1660, he was also the victim of reaction. Gay, careless, friendly—cannot we let his sins go all forgotten now, and see in him the man who, by good roads or ill, sought desperately to lift our England from its period of unhealthy gloom? It needs so slight an adjustment of a point of view —so brief a space of standing off from the period, of judging it as the Wanderer loves to do—to see in the Merry Monarch the likeness—blurred and muddied, if you will—of a true patriot.

Did our guide know what was passing in my mind, he would turn his back on me, I think; but he guesses nothing, and we reach soon the trim house and farmstead which he owns. Now a house and farmstead—the mere sight of them— have a strange meaning for the man whose instincts lie all towards the land. This present house—it is long, and grey, and stoutly built, with a strip of garden, half prim, half in sweet disorder, running along its front At one end stand the mistals and the hay-mow under the same roof. That is all—description can add no more—but it is the type of northern farmstead I have known from childhood, and its beauty, quiet and grey, is one that grows with long familiarity. The house-porch, too, is grey and weather-beaten, and at the right hand as we enter is a great bush of white roses—the roses all in fashion with our grandmothers, when they wore their gowns waisted high, and thought men better than they were, and played upon the spinet Meanwhile, we are hungry, and the plain fare for which our host makes excuse is, in matter of fact, a cool and savoury feast It is against our principles—the Wanderer’s and mine—to eat much when we are afoot; but we forget our rule to-day, and prove it worthier by the breach.

Our farmer seems to let his judgment of us ripen during the meal, and by and by, when we have finished, and our smoke goes up like incense to the oak beams of the roof, his face softens, as men’s faces do when they are talking of a hobby.

“I’ve a few bits of oddments upstairs, if ye’d like to see them," he vouchsafes.

We follow him up a crooked stair ot stone, and through many bedrooms opening into one another, and reach at last a wide and airy room which lies, one guesses from the fragrance, above the mistals.

It is ludicrous to see the altered lines on John Bull’s face. He is not thinking of trespassers and law and iniquities of “they Papishers at Rome”; he is among such a collection of stuffed birds and shelves of labelled eggs as makes the Wanderer pause for breath.

“I can beat you in botany,” says the Wanderer at last; “but, man, I shall be shy at looking a bird in the face again.”

They put their heads together, these two; and I, who play about the edge of bird and beast and human lore, can only listen to a foreign tongue— but I know that the Wanderer has met his match.

When the eggs of British birds are done, fresh cupboards are unlocked, and a fine array of foreign specimens, row after row, meets the astonished Wanderer’s eyes. Even I can guess that the collection, if measured by that most foolish of all standards, money, is almost priceless; certainly our yeoman, respectably well off as he may be, could never have afforded to buy the contents of these shelves.

Little by little our friend unlocks his tongue. He seems to be possessed of the “touching mania,” for he roves among his specimens, laying a gentle hand on one, a gentle finger on another; and each touch makes him the more communicative. We learn how the foreign specimens came to him—learn by casual words dropped in between his darting to and fro between the cabinets. This John Bull of a man, it proves, is a member of half-a-dozen naturalists’ societies—the most masonic of all societies, save that of wedlock —and he is known to the big men of the craft, not here only, but abroad. We learn this, as I say, by degrees; for it is the birds themselves, the eggs themselves, on which our yeoman’s thoughts are set. It is noticeable, too, that he slips more and more into his native speech as he proceeds, as a true yeoman does when his heart is in any matter.

“Now come ye here! ’’ he says abruptly, gripping the Wanderer by the arm and leading him to a case where two storks look down upon a rude nest tenanted by mighty eggs. “They’re not the rarest o’ my lot, but somehow I like ’em best of alL Twas this way, like. A naturalist chap wrote to me, asking would I take a trip to Holland with him. I said I couldn’t anyway, because I’d to see to ploughing three fields for turnip seed. He wrote again after awhile—be dumed if he didn’t—and asked when I’d be at liberty. I said I was throng, I was, with spring near by and lazy wastrel lads to overlook while they were busy, or ought to be. ’Twas a temptation, mind ye; for Holland, from all that I’d read on’t, was a country I was fain to see—damp and grey and quietish—and I all but went that time. Then he wrote again, and I said to myself,‘ John Waterbum,’ says I,‘ the third time does it Ye’ve never left your snug part of the world afore, but now ye’re bound to do’t’ So I writes off—I write a fearsome hand, but they let me off easy through the post, like, and passed it through because John Waterbum had wrote it, as one might say. I said I’d go; and my missis laughed when I told her, and then scolded, and then fell to crying— she alius does these three things when she’s bothered, reg’lar as following on of crops—and she said I’d fall among they Papishers, I would, for sure, if I set foot in furrin soil. Said I’d chance it, I, and so I went.”

“Ay?” says the Wanderer, with his quiet talent for drawing out a man. “And you went?”

“Ay, did I, and was mighty sick in crossing. There’s a heave and an up and down about the sea that talks to a man’s innards. Got to Holland, though, for all that, and ate a breakfast there— just by-and-by, ye understand. Then set to work to see Mister Stork and his missis at home. Be dumed, but ’twas a treat! They’re that reverenced in Holland, ye might think they were English larks or throstles; and they build saucy-like fair atop o’ the houses, and the man that hurt a feather o’ them would be chucked into Zuyder Zee, I reckon. Fearful bonnie thoughts they have o’ storks, and I like yond Hollanders for’t. They say, when a bairn-child comes into the world, that the storks have brought it, just as we tell our lile youngsters that we found it under an apple-tree in the orchard."

This is the great adventure I have tried to approach so often while sitting under the lime-tree and retracing the steps of our Wander-Day. And to us—for the Wanderer and I are wise, and like the children, when we go abroad—it is an adventure worth recalling often. Such casual meetings are not to be described, unless the man to whom you tell them has lately been over hill and dale, has drunk that fine wine of liberty and vagabondage which flows about the fell-tops and the hidden dells. Three hours in all we spent with our yeoman; yet he will always be clearly limned to us, a character inconsistent and complete. His superstitious dread of Rome, his love of “having the law on folk,” his tenderness for birds and knowledge of their ways—he stands out now before me, as I pencil idle notes, and I seem to understand the sweet reasonableness of his inconsistency, his steadfastness.

Half an hour after we have set off on our homeward road the Wanderer chuckles. I demand the reason.

“They Pofiishers,” he murmurs. “A phrase replete with true comedy, sir. They Papishers! It is good to have lived long enough to hear such comedy."

He is friendly with many of the Catholic faith— of all faiths, indeed—and I know that the story will go round among them, touched here and there with that rare chiselry of which my comrade is a master.

We jog easily along, and the Wanderer, as his habit is, falls into a deep silence—so deep that you suspect him of some corroding trouble.

“You were thinking, sir? " I put in at last.

“I was thinking, boy, of a recent observation made by that arch-naturalist—about our telling children of tender years that babies are found beneath apple-trees in an orchard.”

“I scarcely follow you.”

“No; but mark how simple it is. Observe that many races have settled round the fells here, bringing many superstitions. Observe that many myths, like good varieties of greenstuff, may be mixed together into a fine salad. There is the early story of Eve and the forbidden apple; there is the late myth of the apple-tree; I shall trace the intervening links, boy.”

On one side a searcher after truth in nature, on the other a passionate lover of the whimsical in folklore—it is hard to judge whether at any time the Wanderer is serious or not. Obviously he has decided that, but for Eve’s eating of the apple, there would have been no latter-day legend concerning the finding of children underneath apple-trees. The fruit tree is the same in each case, and I know that by-and-by he will work out an elaborate history of what he will name “the apple-tree myth,” by appeals to Scandinavian, Danish, Scotch, Spanish, Irish lore; will make out a learned case for the continuity of the myth in different forms throughout the ages; will, in brief, amuse himself for weeks, and in the end do no great harm to anybody.

It is eight when we reach the Wanderer’s house again. Allowing for the time we spent so profitably at the yeoman’s, we have been on our feet, it seems, for ten hours. We do not count our miles in Arcady, nor boast of them; but ten hours of climbing hills, and of falling down in company with limestone walls, should make a tolerable achievement for one day.

“You are tired, sir?” I ask, with a solicitude which never fails to draw down wrath on me.

“Tired? I leave that to your generation, boy. You youngsters are always tired nowadays. You’re looking pale, boy; I trust the old man has not driven you too hard.”

We smile at each other with entire content and friendliness, then stand “listening to the night” Restful, cool, and sweet, the village stretches to the high-way comer, where the walnut-tree stands like a kindly guardian. The prim garden, hiding the Wanderer’s prim house from the road, is proud with roses, pansies, tall, white lilies, with Canterbury bells and bushy mallows. Clean English scents, of flowers and hayfields, drift loitering down the street “I can hold my own with him in botany,” says the Wanderer, “but I’m a child in his hands when it comes to birds.”

He is thinking of the yeoman, and I am moved to gentle laughter; chagrin, and noble jealousy, and pleasure in the knowledge of a brother-naturalist, are all mingled in those words, “I’m a child in his hands when it comes to birds.”

The Wanderer takes his snuff-box out and taps it vigorously. “Laughter comes easily, sir, to a foolish generation; but I tell you that he can beat me in bird-lore.”

In a moment he changes the topic, with the inconsequent speed which marks him, as I have said, for early death—for early death, though he live to score his century against that wily bowler, Time.

“The finest part of a stroll, I observe, is the sitting down afterwards, sir. Two chairs in a garden, and a bottle of wholesome wine between you, and the late bees saying good-night while you talk of this hill climbed and that rare flower discovered, and the fells where, but for Providence, you would have broken limbs necessary for the next day’s walk—that is to live. Step in, sir,” he breaks off, opening the white-painted gate with a bow that would serve him well at Court “A crusted bottle, well earned, and a talk, as the moon climbs higher, of days old and new.”

This is temptation absolute. I know these evening gossips with the Wanderer, what time the summer denies that our Arcady was ever shrouded in grey mists and rain; they are part of my life-history to me, and so long as the quick nerve of gratitude is awake in me I shall be grateful to this friend who taught me lessons out of school " Not to-night, sir,” I say at last “I—I have a wife waiting for me.”

The Wanderer takes another pinch—deliberately, with his eyes away from me and his back half turned.

“Yes, yes, I had forgotten. You have a wife. Listen to the boy whom I saw in small clothes yesterday! He has a wife. Run home to her then, little lad, and leave me to finish the whole bottle. I know the vintage—so do you. Pity you should miss it.”

You would think, if you chanced to come up the street of Arcady just now, that the Wanderer was some refugee from the French Court about the period when his kinsmen’s heads were rolling into baskets specially prepared. The man’s spirit is so keen and tempered, his face so mobile? that all unconsciously he looks whatever part he cares to act. Just now he chooses to seem cynical and debonair, a wine-bibber disdaining the solemnities of life.

After bidding farewell, however, I hear a quick step behind me, and halt, and feel the Wanderer’s hand upon my shoulder.

“Oh, nothing at all—nothing at all, boy!” he says, as I wait for him to speak. “Only, you might have married a fool, d’ye understand? I always thought you would. You’re a wise lad, after all, to get home to little Cathy, who was cradled by the fairies. You might have married a fool, and you didn’t.”

“I couldn’t have married any one but Cathy, sir,” I answer, absurdly conscious that plain truth sounds always commonplace.

“Ah, indeed? I’m older than you, boy, and know how wonderfully gifted men can be in that direction. Couldn’t have married any one but Cathy, quotha! Ah, this younger generation!

Well, well, I’m keeping you. No use to bid you give little Cathy my love—you daren’t, lad, for you know ’tis an older and a riper love than yours."

Now, talking quietly to the lime-tree here, and knowing that never by any chance does it divulge a secret, I may admit at once that I was grateful for many things as I walked down the village street this evening. There is Cathy; there is the Wanderer; there is enough to live upon, and free hills and valleys all about me; there are Tom Lad and his wife, west wind and east respectively, to keep our weather balanced wholesomely. It is at such times that Charity completes her nesting time, forgetful or unheeding that alien cuckoos rear alien broods in honest nests.

The Complete Rogue is nearing my doorstep as I go down the lane with longing to do good to somebody; I do not know it at the time, but as I write, looking back upon things done and undone, I know that this instinct to show gratitude was made of the stuff that strong hills are made of—hills, and watered valleys, and the real things of life. It is an instinct no man need pride himself upon, because it springs from some source sweeter and cleanlier than himself; it is an instinct none need care to deny, for there are worse matters in this world than proving one’s self—as Stylesey would say—“a fool for one’s pains.”

As I go down the lane, however, I am happily ignorant of the rogue’s near approach; and, as I turn the bend, there’s a cool, white figure at the gate. It seems too good to be true; for I have been more than half a day aloof from Cathy, and the walk from the gate to the house is apt at such times to make yards into miles.

We’ve no defence to offer, Cathy and I. We are survivals, like the Wanderer, and the comedy of needing one another after months of wedlock is not apparent to us. On the other hand, we, too, enjoy our intervals of looking on with laughter, and we would not for a great price exchange our lot with those who fancy nowadays that Boy Cupid can aim at any random mark and trust to some foolish over-god that he will hit the right one.

We meet at the gate, the Babe and I. And there’s the same thought with us both; and the thought has been put into speech by us English only, alone among the nations; and we name it " home.” I do not miss the Wanderer’s crusted port

CHAPTER VI
THE ROGUE ARRIVES

Vagabonds have a trick, I find, of seeking one when one is most tired out. Not that I would admit to the Wanderer that I am tired out, or near it, after our “stroll” of to-day. He would not admit it to me, though I know that his bones are aching at this moment It is a prime rule of the cross-country game that, when you say farewell each to the other you walk briskly down the street, as if just setting forth; and, if you needs must limp, you wait until you turn the corner, out of sight of your friend the adversary.

Cathy has waited to sup with me, declining dinner. I discover this soon after our meeting at the gate; and, while we share a casual supper, I ponder on the negligence of all women-folk with regard to meals. They do not seem to care for food, unless a hungry male is there to tempt them into eating.

Again—these many once agains—I strive to be firm, believing patiently that strength is the man’s province. Man’s faith in this direction is pathetic in its constancy.

“Babe, it is an hour past dinner-time. You are foolish.”

“Yes, Murphy. I don’t care to eat, somehow, unless you’re here.”

“Foolish again! And why?” But she has half disarmed me.

“I don’t know, Murphy. I—I miss you, and it all seems useless.”

Cathy has a happy way of strengthening one’s sense of gratitude. I am not exactly pleading for myself to-night, but it is plain that my thoughts while coming down the lane, my thoughts when the Babe has left me after supper and gone to her room, have predisposed me to be taken in by any tale of woe.

The stern and big men of the country, I believe—the men who are mightily well read in Blue-books and the works of Adam Smith— the stern men, surely, manage these little affairs of charity with greater skill. They meet each case, I take it, by a general rule of thumb, and go to bed with distinction after kicking a casual luckless one free of the doorstep.

For myself—it is my weakness, people say—the heart in a man is the thing that matters, his record only the chance of circumstance. I am wrong, maybe; but, as Stylesey once said to me in a moment of sheer inspiration, “I find poor parson right in the main, sir; but, Lord o’ Mercy, there’s a many points we differ in. I hold myself with St Peter, for he was a family man and kindly. ’Twas only Peter—asking pardon for calling him by his christened name—that was lucky enough to be a saint and yet judged all folk kindly.”

It is true that St Peter has a sure and quiet hold on many folk who are careless about such matters as a rule; and the secret of his power is that he looked for the heart of a man always, and never by any chance measured charity with a rigid two-foot rule.

I stroll across the lawn to-night and seek the shelter of the lime-tree, not to pencil notes on scraps of paper, but from old habit. The moon, silver-bright as a reaper’s sickle, is high above the land, and threads the dusk with soft and chastened light. The night dews spread the scents of flowers and soil abroad in exquisite, soft waves; a corncrake calls from my own meadows, still uncut, and, master of all other scents, the reek of the Squire’s hay comes to me from the field upon the hill. It is high summer—an English summer —a northern summer—what more is to be said in praise of it?

If the old Greek drama observed the commonplace rules of life, there should be a chorus of old men, all draped in black, behind me now—a chorus chanting, “Woe, woe, unutterable woe. Soft is the evening, but woe comes ever on the gentle breeze."

There is no such chorus to-night, however. At least, I only hear the corncrake and the hooting of an owl. I am thinking, to be candid, of the day after to-morrow, when I have promised, according to old custom, to cut my meadow grass in company with Tom Lad. We’ll have none of machinery, he and I, partly because, to the core of us, we are true Tories, and partly because we love the rhythm of a scythe. It occurs to me that one kind of stiffness is happily cured by another, and that, after a rest to-morrow and a full day’s mowing afterwards, I shall be able to seek out the Wanderer and approach him with a jaunty step.

A ghost-moth blunders against my face, disturbing my foretaste of the morrow’s rest, and, just as I have dismissed him with a caution, I see a tall, gaunt figure crossing the lawn towards me. Accustomed as one grows in Arcady to casual visitors at unlikely hours, I am surprised to see a stranger here. Ten o’clock struck some time ago from the clock of that “decent church” of ours which always reminds me of Goldsmith; it is a good hour for a friend to arrive, but for a stranger—no.

He comes and stands in front of me, and the moonlight shows me a man of thirty or so, lean, clean-shaven, silent Only his coughing breaks the silence, until I hazard, “Well?”

“Nothing,” he says distantly, while the cough rakes him fore and aft. “I only came—I only came "—again that cough—“to see the chap that had written to a poor devil in hospital as if he were a Christian, not a dog that begged for a crust of bread.”

I like the man. He is here, an answer to my wish to do some little thing to prove my gratitude for Cathy and the rest He is lean, and carries every credential possible of his claim to be consumptive.

“Sit down,” I say, “and talk it over. You’re tired.”

“Yes,” he answers. “Leaving hospital, and walking ten miles afterwards, has tired me.”

Little by little I draw him out. He is certainly a 'Varsity man, or he could not respond in our own dialect so naturally as he does; there are little signs which make the two ’Varsities a freemasonry of a strict and ring-fenced order, and there’s no doubt of my visitor on that score.

Then we talk of literature; and, though I know his name as a writer of clever novels, he seems listless and ill at ease when we touch upon the topic. He is sick of books, he says, sick of everything connected with them, and has no hope of writing another. I tell myself that he is tired, just as I am tired, each after our own respective walks. I do not doubt his claim to authorship. To me his ten-mile walk from hospital dwarfs my own happy travels of to-day entirely, for I was fit and well, while he was not.

And still no chorus of old men sounds from the background to warn me. I am beset by my first conception of this man, and I hear his racking cough, and I want to help him—want to be Cathy’s proxy, in short, for some little kindness done. It is funny—infinitely funny—as I look back upon that moonlit scene, with the corncrake croaking from the uncut meadow and the scent of hay descending from the Squire’s mown hill-top. Yet even now I can realise, underneath the light haze of humour playing over the scene, how thoroughly in earnest I was that night; nor can I see any alternative finale.

I offer him a cigar by way of promoting fellowship; but he produces a short clay from his pocket, and fills it from my pouch.

“A poor devil of a pauper has no right to smoke cigars,” he says, in his cultured, broken voice—a deep voice, full of major chords. “I keep this old clay with me nowadays; it’s about all the property I own, and stands for my record, after all, in this queer game of life.”

He seems happier when the pipe is fairly alight, and tells me that my “loan” enabled him to buy a pair of boots—“our own line, five and eleven-pence-ha’penny," he explains, with the true irony of the “gentleman" pauper, and a few other items of apparel He admits, with fine candour, that he spent the last of the change—exactly fourpence—in a couple of glasses of ale at the village tavern. My rogue, clever in many directions, is most clever—so it seems to me in looking backward—in that trick of his of confessing to his human frailties. The note sounds many a time during the progress of our talk beneath the lime-tree, and always rings in tune. I like him the better because of his frankness, not understanding that it is art concealing art.

He explains, too, that after my letter reached him he could stay in hospital no longer. He felt he must make the most of my “loan,” and get out into the world and do something to repay me. The doctor had cautioned him to stay; but the doctor and the nurses had not won his confidence. One pauper was much like another to them—a dog to be kicked. He was sick to be free again—free, and working for his livelihood Again my old men in the background failed me, as they would never have done in the strict Greek drama. I have learned since, and would pass the knowledge on to any one who cares to pick it up, that the true unfortunate—man or woman—speaks always well of doctors and nurses in these cases. I say always, because the need to speak ill is honourably rare and negligible. By their way of viewing the infirmary we can know these vagrants according to their species, and dispraise of the help they have sought and found should be a whisper in one’s ear of danger.

I do not know this to-night, however. In imagination I can see my friend—brother scribe, 'Varsity man, and the rest—fretting in hospital among a crowd of aliens. He is a number merely, tapped and physicked all by rote, the doctor not guessing that his courage and his heart are dead within him.

Egad!—as the Wanderer would say, handling his snuff-box the while—I must have been tired after the day’s strolL Perhaps my judgment— and one’s judgment is always the first to feel fatigue—has gone to sleep an hour or so before its time. Perhaps I am obstinately attached to the simple faith that here is one who has wandered to my gate to give me a chance of showing gratitude for Arcady. The result is the same, whatever the excuse.

I’m too generous, doubtless. It would have been easy, as I said, to approach this bit of personal history from another standpoint; easy to provoke pathos instead of soft derision; easy to make myself a good King Alfred, baking cakes upon the hearth of good Dame Charity. In that case, you would miss the after history, and would feel sorry to the end for my consumptive vagrant, for I should tell you nothing of the odd happenings that followed.

My road is taken, however, and I must plod forward diligently to prove myself a complete Arcadian, who trusts a summer’s night and listens for the tread of fairy feet.

I notice that my friend’s pipe goes out too frequently; notice, too, that his hand is a little shaky when he relights it, and that his talk of happier days is apt to stumble over the foolish syllables necessary to human speech. If he had not written manly letters—if he had not known a raking cough and all the hardships of disease—I should say that his refreshment at the local inn was merely the train-bearer to many gallant quarts which had preceded this night’s vagaries.

Observe—again as the Wanderer would say— observe how fixed opinions bind one, as curb and bit will guide a horse. I want this vagrant to be all that his letters made him out to be; I want to help him; I want my judgment to be lulled to sleep.

I tell myself—it is easy to confess these matters when the grey, soft light of humour hides the grave where foolishness is buried—I tell myself that he has walked ten miles: that he was weak and, ill at the beginning of his tramp; that the chance stimulant he chose was all too much for him. It tallies with his frank confession of awhile ago.

We talk of this and that, and constantly he proves that, at the least, he has been among gentlefolk. Once a gentleman, always a gentleman, is a proverb hotly defended and hotly attacked; it is hard, seeing the little signs that show the breed in a man so clearly, to know whether my vagrant is proof or disproof of the saying. The flashes of courtesy and humour, the gleams of wit, the indescribable, quiet air of knowing dinner-tables of the past, render him a good companion; on the other hand, he wears another look which, too, is quiet and indescribable —the look of one whose heart has wandered permanently into the region of his boots, of one who cares no more for nice distinctions, nice prejudices, a nice palate for the well-bred things of life.

He is silent by-and-by. And I listen to the corncrake on the hill, and scent the mingled sweets of Arcady, and wonder what is to be done with this man of the unsteady hand and the lacklustre outlook upon everything.

If a man does not feel something of this forward wish to offer help—a man who has much, while the other, sitting at his elbow, has nothing—he must, I think, be transitory, a trifling incident among the real episodes of life, scarce noticed, now or afterwards, though he die at forty or fourscore. Nothing the Wanderer has shown me in our travels—and he has shown me much—has influenced me so strangely as a tombstone standing in a bleak and riven churchyard of the north.

We stood there, many a year ago, the Wanderer and I, and he tapped his snuff-box and he said, “Observe."

“He had the forward wish to help,” was all the unknown’s epitaph.

To me, at the time, and since I saw that headstone first, there’s text and sermon, both in one, in those seven words. He had the forward wish to help! Lie back awhile, my friend, and ponder, and ask yourself if you have ever heard so good a sermon, save from the sun when he comes shining strong and ruddy through the rain-mists.

On the other hand, observe me here in my motley to-night, like King Lear’s fool, running down the wind before the coming storm. I half repent my dress of motley, and altogether wish that I had chosen to make you understand instead the depth and strenuousness of the seeming tragedy which my vagrant opens up so suddenly. It is real at the time to me, this tragedy.

“Do you know why I came to-night?" asks my guest, breaking the long pause.

“To find a friend," I answer, taken off my guard.

“There's not much left to me,” he goes on, rubbing the stem of his clay pipe. “I’m retiring . from the game to-night; but I wanted first to see the chap who wrote a book I liked. It was all on the cards that you were fooling when you wrote that book, but I rather fancied that you had a heart behind it all.”

My Greek chorus does not intervene. The old men who are its members have been infected with the new labour theories, I fear, and have marched to town to interview smooth politicians, instead of sticking to easier and more lucrative employment Even the familiar suggestion that I “have a heart" strikes me with fresh and untried pathos.

“I am retiring from the game to-night,” he repeats, and on his face—handsome still, though battered by the world—there's a look that frightens and disarms me.

“How?” I ask. " Going out—how?”

“The world can kick you once too often. Then you turn your back on the world and the coroner brings it in as temporary insanity. Temporary sanity, I should call it, when nothing’s left to a man."

I understand him now, and the horrible and cowardly meaning of the man jars on the tempered quiet of Arcady. It seems impossible that nothing should be left to any one so long as the corncrake calls to him from the hill, so long as the breeze stirs all about the hayfields and the big moths blunder down against his face.

“So you are going out?”

" Yes,” he answers. “Going out. So does the candle when it’s tired of burning.”

The flippancy, the desperate seriousness underneath, the devil-may-care, odd manner of the man perplex me. And to this day, in spite of all my after-knowledge, I think that he meant a good deal of what he said. We are ready to believe that no saint deserves his title altogether; but we are ready, too, to be assured that no rascal has moments of self-blame, of torture, of asking only to be rid of the insults following after indiscretions of the earlier years. To me it seems that, if no saint is altogether white, no rogue can be entirely black; and to-night, I feel assured, my vagrant came to me—muddled and three-quarters sober—in search of help. The world will laugh, of course, at this extreme belief in a rogue’s needs; for the world—that little portion of it lying beyond the bounds of Arcady—is apt not only to disbelieve in saints, as I have said, but also to blacken a rascal’s character needlessly when he comes up for judgment.

The fool in motley, who looks on at the game, sees that the world is always on the side of disbelief; that, rather than give a good name to a dog, the world would consistently prefer to see him hanged.

In Arcady we do not hang our dogs. And so I listen to my rogue. And out of the summer’s night his tragedy grows big and bigger to me, till it hides the moon-dusk of the hills.

I talk to my vagrant, not finding argument come easily. It is a one-sided conversation, of the type that gives one a headache afterwards. Opposition may be a tonic, leaving a glow, as of wholesome exercise, behind it; but the temper is dead in this man who sits with me under the lime-tree, and no appeal to his manhood, no gibe, no frank abhorrence from the crime he proposes almost lightly to commit, affects his mood. Whatever his record, he is a hopeless man to-night; and hopelessness is one of the diseases that no physician, save one’s self, can pretend to cure.

Observe—I have caught the Wanderer’s favourite trick of speech again—that I am alone here with a man who has nothing at all to live for, as he thinks; that his desire to “go out” may be a pose, but that, on the other hand, it may be real; that he has put the responsibility entirely on my shoulders, giving me the choice between life and death. Comedy plays lightly round about the fringes of the situation, but tragedy makes up the core.

There’s nothing easier than to conduct him to the gate—forcibly or otherwise—and tell him it is no concern of mine. At the same time there is nothing harder. The key to the situation is held by that slender one chance in a hundred— the chance that he will do deliberately what he has in mind.

So I talk to him; and presently, by dint of constant hammering, I wear his purpose down. It is not an employment one would choose at the end of a fairly long day’s walk, but even in Arcady we are not always allowed to choose our recreations. Moreover, even at the time I am conscious of a resentment which it is hard to conceal. Either he means to forfeit the remainder of his lease of life, or he does not. In the latter case, he is wasting a good deal of that helping power which is almost like physical energy in its consciousness of strength, of weakness after too much draining. In the other alternative—that be will make away with himself in face of all persuasion or remonstrance—he is making two men share the crime.

Undoubtedly my rogue has genius. He must have read that injudicious book of mine with understanding, have grasped at once the outstanding weaknesses attaching to its author, and have played upon my feelings with the unerring master’s touch.

Still, that is beside the mark to-night. If this fellow, with the vague scent of yester-year’s gentility about him, is to be found dead somewhere in the neighbourhood of my gate tomorrow, I shall feel myself for ever an intruder into Arcady."

He has a gift for suggesting mind pictures, with little said and much left to the fancy. I can see him—I, the fool in motley—lying stark in one of my convenient fields; can see the still look in his face when I am summoned to the Inquest. Observe that the Greek chorus is far away from me.

One plucky bid for common-sense. I make. “How do you propose to go out?” I ask, with sudden inspiration.

He falters, but I attribute hesitation to the fact that he is three-quarters sober and has walked ten miles from hospital.

“There are twenty ways,” he says at last. “That is the only way in which one could name life easy. Water, gunpowder—it would be foolish to enumerate the ways and means. By the bye, can you lend me a gun? I want to—to do a little shooting, you understand.”

“No, I can’t, but I can give you a jolly good hiding, if you want it,” I answer unexpectedly, for I am careful of my temper usually.

The fool in motley talks on, earning a fine headache; and the rogue listens, and grows listless, and obviously wants to go to bed. I have tired him out—achieved my purpose, in short—and I get to my feet. So does he, unsteadily.

It is at this point that the Greek chorus intervenes. I have blamed them rashly, for they really do step in just now. Angry with this vagabond I may be, and spent with the toil of persuading him to be a man; yet I want to offer him a bed somewhere in the house, want to be near him and overlook him till the morrow. In the inconsequent bachelor days I used to do these things, and frequently missed many family heirlooms afterwards—silver chiefly; but to-night those good old men in black come chanting at my elbow. They tell me Cathy would object.

Stylesey objected always on principle; and, when my doubtful guests had gone, she would make offensive play of sweeping out the room, and dusting it, and spreading insect powder broadcast. I fought good Stylesey on that point; but Cathy—well, Cathy would not like it, and I have conquered, I know, the special purpose of this special rogue—the purpose, if it ever existed, to make a troublesome corpse of himself within a stone’s throw of my gate.

“Come down to-morrow morning,” I say to him, “and tell me you have been a fool.”

“No news, that,” he answers wearily.

“You’ll come?”

“Yes. I don’t say much, but—dashed if you haven’t saved a chap to-night.”

He grips my hand. I feel cheerful, for the first tune since he invaded my refuge under Arcady’s especial lime-tree. I also slip a coin into his hand.

“A loan,” I hazard.

He walks five paces off, five back again. He may be near the edge of death, but he cannot forget that he is a consummate actor.

" I’ve had one loan already,” says he.

"Take another then; get yourself a night’s lodging.”

Frankly, I do not care for the itch of his fingers as they close upon the coin; but, when I see him vanish into the darkness of the lane—lost, a hapless wanderer through the thickets of adversity —I chide myself for the suspicion. I want once more to follow and to give him a night’s hospitality. The Greek chorus comes to my aid again, however, assuring me that he is safe, for to-night at least, from the folly he proposed.

So I let him go, and find that I am hot, as with physical toil, when I return and cross the lawn. Tom Lad, as it chances, is crossing at the moment towards his cottage. We stop, as a matter of course, to pass the time of night and to talk learnedly of the morrow’s weather. Perhaps I am nervously apprehensive, for I fancy that Tom glances at me in an odd, quizzical way; but he says nothing that suggests knowledge of my visitor’s coming, and I can only hope for the best Why one should wish to escape notice at these moments, I can hazard no conjecture; but the average man would almost prefer to be caught doing ill by stealth than good.

“You’re late, Tom Lad,” I say, as we stand listening to the half-hour chiming from the church upon the hilL It is half after eleven, and my rogue came to me at ten!

“Ay, the wife, sir,” he answers cheerily. “Age no way mellows her, as a body might say. The years turn round like a grindstone, just whetting and whetting and whetting her temper, that was sharp enough to begin with. Oh, ay, I’m keeping latish hours just these days; ’tis over-warm for indoor nattering.”

My recent victory over Stylesey has something to do with the domestic situation, I suspect; but I maintain a strict reserve on this point towards Tom Lad.

We talk of this and that, with the exquisite, cool night about us, until Tom suddenly breaks into a gentle laugh.

“Well?” I ask.

“Nay, naught at all, sir. Only another tale of Timothy Brailes, the cobbler. He’s that anxious to be big, is Timothy—littlish men are apt to be, I’ve noticed—that he makes us laugh once eveiy month or so.”

Tom has an instinct for scenting any casual frolic; indeed, it cannot be always due to chance that he is present whenever one of our Arcadian jests is in the making.

"It was this way, like. I happened to want a pair o’ boots soleing, and I took ’em up this morning to Timothy. You know his way, sir— all for the rights o’ man and dangment take the rights o’ master. Well, he looks my boots over, and he squints sideways at me over his red beard and his spectacles, and he twists his rat-trap of a mouth all out of shape.

“I know summat about boot leather,’ says he, ' or should do by this time.’

“Never found aught yet that ye didn’t know more about than anybody else,’ says I.

“So Timothy glowers at me again. 'Ye’ve worn these boots out,’ says he, fair as if he were speaking to a gathering of folk as greasy as himself, 'ye’ve worn ’em out in service. Now,’tis servitude degrades a man, I alius said and stick to, and will your master pay for soleing of 'em ? Will he? Not if I know masters.’"

Tom Lad pauses awhile, and looks at me. If I could paint my henchman’s face, with its slow smile, its wrinkles where the comedy of life finds shelter, it would stand, so long as the colours held the canvas, for a true Shakespearean portrait.

“Just ye give up your cobbling trade, then,’ I says to Timothy. ‘ Ye’re paid by your betters, eh, the same as me?’

" That bothered Timothy for awhile; and then he sticks his under-jaw out and waggles his spectacles till I thought they’d leave his nose for good and all. ' I haven’t got no betters,’ says he. ' The sun shines on honest Timothy Brailes as it does on another man. Equality is what I sticks to, seeing ’tis my birthright. No selling it, Tom Lad, for a mess o’ pottage, not though Squire himself came down to buy it of me.’

“Well, sir, this is all by the way. What I’m coming to is what I set out to tell ye. Just as I was fleering Timothy—and never a man easier to trail—a littlish chap came by Timothy’s doorway. He was dressed more like a tramp than a gentleman, and his hat was built by Noah, as the saying is, when he had a bit o’ spare time on his hands in and betwixt the building o’ yond ark. I could see he was gentle-born, for all that, but the cobbler had stuck to his last over long to heed such trifles.

“‘Can you tell me the way to the Coppice Pond, my man? ’ says the stranger, stopping at Timothy’s door.”

The Coppice Pond lies two miles up the hill, I may explain, and is a cherished fishing ground belonging to Cathy’s father. And I knew at once who the trampish stranger was—the Squire had spoken of him a day or two ago; but I would not spoil the even flow of Tom Lad’s story.

“Timothy looks him up and down, and waggles his beard,” goes on my henchman. Even in the moonlight I can see the humour filtering softly through the furrows of his cheeks. “And the t’other chap stands there, quiet as Christmas. And Timothy, who was bom a fool, says, ‘ Ay, lad, I know where th’ Coppice Pond is. Are ye going to carry lunch—what plain folk call their dinner—up to they dandy fishermen? ’

" Then I see the stranger chap look queer, as if he wanted to laugh, and wouldn’t, for fear of spoiling a good frolic. And his face goes solemn, as if he were entering into church, after not being there for a month or two—the sort of time ye fear old parson's eye.

“Yes, going up to carry lunch,’ he says. ' Poor men must live.’

“Timothy Brailes—he was rocked in a silly man’s cradle, as they say—waggled his red beard like to frighten a body. ‘Take my advice,’ says he. ' Squire is this and that, and we don’t think much of him just hereabout. Squire is squire, but what does he do for the place? ’

“' I couldn’t tell you,’ says the stranger, keeping his laughter in, though he and me were like to burst, know. ‘ I’m here to carry rod and bait, and ask no questions.’

“D’ye want a cobbling job? ’ says Timothy, all as if he were giving a penny to a roadside beggar. ‘ Stay here wi’ me, lad, for I like the look o’ ye. Stay here wi’ me, for I’ve more boots to sole than I know what to do with.’

“Well, the stranger body says he’d rather stick to the job he has in hand, and goes off, after getting directions from Timothy as to how and when he’ll strike into the Coppice Pond.

“' Poorish fool, yond,’ says the cobbler. ' 'Tis all land, and land, and land after that, just hereabout For my part, I’d split yond acres up among honest men, and let these dumed squirishes fend for theirselns and earn their living honest.’

“' Ay, ye’d do a lot, ye would, Timothy,’ I says, with a grin. ‘ Pull the world down, wouldn’t ye, and build it all afresh? ’

“I got no further with my trailing of the cobbler though, for a carriage and pair comes bowling along in the slipperty, smooth fashion a carriage has—as if ’twere greased well at the joints. It pulls up sharp at Timothy’s door, and there’s coachman and footman on the box, but never a soul inside.

“The coachman leans over from the box. Says he,' Have you seen the Duke of’—something or other, I forget what—and says Timothy, waggling his beard as if 'twere a house on fire—and that, for sure, is own likeness to Timothy’s beard—says he,' I know naught o’ dukes, and want to know less. The only chap I’ve seen go by was littlish, and dressed like a sort o’ tramp, and he stopped to ask the way to Coppice Pond.’

“Well, coachman looked at footman and footman at coachman; and ’tis against their dignity to laugh, but, lordie, how they smiled! Then they drove forrard, and I saw the queer side of it on a sudden, and I sat down—and wasn’t ashamed to laugh. Laugh? The tears ran down either side o’ my nose, as if ’twere a watershed with thunder rain about. And Timothy Brailes just glowers at me over his spectacles, and takes up a boot, and begins to hammer nails intul’t.

“‘ Foolish lads laugh in and out of season,’ says he, with his wise, big air.

“'Ay, but this time ’tis in season, Timothy! D’ye not know yet who the littlish chap was?’

“Not I,’ says he—for he’s slow at the uptake, is Cobbler Brailes.

“‘ Well, ’twas the Duke himself. Dukes are not what ye might call measured by the size of ’em, and, now I come to think on’t, I’ve seen this one before, though I couldn’t rightly call him to mind at first Has a fancy for walking on, and telling his coachman to drive after him and pick him up if he happens to feel like riding for a change. Terrible keen to walk, and terrible keen to fish, is th’ Duke—oh, ay, I call him well to mind, now I’ve bethought me.’

“Timothy Brailes lets fall his boot and hammer, and waggles his beard worse than ever. Likewise he lifts his game leg—ye’ll know his trick, sir—and brings it round in a curve, like a scythe at mowing-time, and clumps it down on the floor with a bang.

“Are ye fooling a body, Tom Lad? ’ says he.

“‘ Nay,’ says I,“for I call him back to mind. He was here a year agone for the fishing.’

“‘Well, now, I’ve been and done it,’ says Timothy, and I laughed again, for his face was pitiful to see.

“‘ Done what? ’ says I, innocent-like. ‘ A duke’s just same as ye and me, Timothy, or where’s your fine talk gone to? Same as ye and me, is a duke, only idler.’

“Well, Timothy loses his temper, fair as if he had cracked in two like a bursting gun. Red-bearded men are that way, I’ve noticed.

“'Get out o’ my honest shop!’ he shouts, twirling his game leg, and nodding his head, and driving his beard abroad as if a gale were blowing, till I didn’t know t’other from which among the several parts of him. ‘Get back to your servant’s work down yonder, and don’t come flouting me.’

“‘ Easy now, lad,’ says I. Why make such a din about a poor slip of a duke? If't had been an honest worker now, like ye and me—’

“And Timothy—well, his talk isn’t very choice, sir, time and time, and I’d be hotter than I’ve ever been at hay-time if his wishes for me happened to come true. So I lets him cool a bit, and turns away, and then comes back.

“‘ Timothy,’ says I, very soft and quiet, ‘ where’s all your talk of man and man? ’

“He looks as if he’d kill me. ' Dukes is different;’ says he, and falls to hammering the boot again, and willun’t speak another word. That’s all the tale, sir, but I’m laughing still.” Timothy Brailes, owing to a past indiscretion of his, has been known for awhile as “ Timothy Bean-Pod,” and I thought the name would last his lifetime; but I know to-night that a new title will be given him by Tom Lad, and will be spread abroad in Arcady. I can see it in Tom’s roguish eye. “Dukes is different,” will be the cobbler’s by-name henceforth, and he will find it hard, I think, to talk effectively of the rights of men.

“I’ll be saying good-night, sir,” says Tom Lad presently, after a long, impersonal outlook on the hills. “My wife, shell be fast asleep by now. Wonderful restful matter, sleep, ’specially when it comes to a body’s wife. Ye’ll not forget that we begin the hay-cutting the next day after to-morrow?”

“I have not forgotten it other years, Tom Lad.”

“Nay, but—asking your pardon—ye’ve joined our wedlock club, and it takes different men in different ways. I fancied ye might forget, like, this one year.”

With this cryptic farewell Tom Lad departs, and I am left alone with the night-scents and the under-noises that inhabit Arcady’s quiet sleepingtime. Far up the moor a curlew will not rest and calls to me. A bat comes close enough to brush my face in passing. It is undoubtedly the time and place when the man who seeks with faith for them may surprise the fairies as they dance. I surprised them once myself, and captured Cathy.

Yet I can only think of Tom Lad’s story. There’s a lilt and a suggestiveness about the cobbler’s desperate cry of “Dukes is different” that appeals to me. Timothy Brailes, I think, has been greater than himself to-day.

CHAPTER VII
REAPPEARANCE OF THE ROGUE

In spite of Tom Lad's story, I have a troubled night. You cannot talk for an hour and a half with a man who, to all appearance, means to take his life, and decline afterwards to feel the strain.

My dreams are troubled. I am perpetually striving to rescue a comrade who is slipping down a steep and slippery rock, and perpetually failing in the enterprise. I wake to hear the church clock strike two, and three, and five. Then, growing tired of this ghostly fellow who persists in slipping down the rock, I get up.

It is a good hour for fishing, after all I do not even peep into Cathy’s room, lest I wake her— though, if truth were told, one hungers for a companion at five of a summer’s morning.

Whatever the early bird does with the worm, I have no luck with the fly this morning. I put my rod down presently, and tell myself that there are compensations attaching to early rising, though you bring home an empty basket. We see so many gloamings, if one comes to think of it, so few dawns; yet, for a right understanding of each, we need a knowledge of the other. Dawn and dusk are like twin sisters—one eager, swift, impetuous, a brunette; the other blonde and gentle. Pity they cannot go about together, like the sisters they are, each setting off the other’s beauty.

The sweetness of the young, keen morning! The faith re-born—faith that to-day will be unlike all other days, fuller of work securely finished, riper in fragrance, more steadfast in its foothold up the steeps of life—it is in its faith that the dawn is so human, in its faith that lies the quick appeal it makes to all men’s hearts.

There is a superstition—and a poor one—that farmer-folk are by nature grumblers, preferring constantly to see the dark side of a matter. I have found it otherwise, here in the grey north land where farming-work is always hard, and often disappointing. Let no dog bark when I speak of the farmer who lives within twenty miles of Arcady; for I have known the man from childhood, have seen him in fair weather and in foul, have sat beside his hearth o’ nights and tramped beside him through the turnips and the pastures. His grumbles are the outer shell, and within there is a kernel of sheer strength to persevere— strength to be kind toward weakness, strength to believe that, though this year’s hay crop may be spoiled by drought—or, oftener, by rain—the next year will be better. He may have a narrow creed, a wide one, or no creed at all; but inevitably—I am not speaking of the rare weaklings— he is religious. The man who tills his fields well, tills his life well also, and, if he comes home after market-day, “a lile bit frolicsome,” in the suave language of the farm-wives, sloth never by any chance steps in between the headache and the duties of the morrow.

Now, I may be wrong, but I attribute much of the farmer-faith to the man’s early rising. If not up at dawn always, he is abroad while yet the day is prime and youthful. He does not know it, but the crisp, clean breeze, the upward sun, the thousand signs of Nature’s busyness, play all their quiet, insistent parts in his life. It is not so much that man in his time plays many parts, but rather that the bigger life about him refuses to let him harp only on the one tune. For Nature, prudent lady, gets up in the cool of the morning, and has her housework done, and can afford to rest, before the most part of her human children leave their beds to labour through the heat; and for this reason the farmer sees many things denied to other men.

For myself, I catch no trout this morning; but, as I wander down the stream, casting a fly here and there, I, too, have caught the burden of that song, “To-morrow will be better.” To-morrow for me; next year for the farmer. It is all one, my friends; and the best gift the gods gave us was this child-like faith in the next year or the morrow.

Few poets have really seen the dawn—seen it constantly and by fixed habit—and, therefore, few have sung the truth of it. A man may rise at noon, and saunter to the nearest hedge, and pen verse—pretty, doubtless—touching the dawn above the hills, and the lark’s note, and the rest; but it is no way poetry, because it owes nothing to that experience, long and steady, which makes for truth.

Once on a time—as the children say—a farmer wrote poems that will last to the world’s end; and his name happened to be Robbie Burns, and we applaud him still. Yet few guess that the true poet must first of all be truly wedded to the land.

The breeze blows from the church, and the chimes—which seem to round off and to sweeten the choir of Arcady—tell me it is eight o’clock. Three hours have slipped by me—lightly, like the trout—and I could not tell you by what quick, easy road they have travelled. But I am sure of present hunger, and the thought of Stylesey’s rashers, supported by plump eggs laid specially for me by Cathy’s fowls, stirs thoughts and longings of the happiest It is good to see the dawn, good to be hungry, though I have caught no trout.

At the bend of the stream, as I am making quickly for home, I see a slim figure standing on two stones set wide apart in the river’s bed. Far out toward the hazels on the further bank a thread of gut runs taut. It is my wife, of course, who is fishing; and, with her quiet, persistent luck, she has hooked a trout where I have failed. Afterwards, I learn that she heard me go out this morning, guessed my purpose, and thought that she would steal a march on me.

"Shall I help you land him?” I whisper, running to her side.

“Thank you, no,” she answers promptly. “Land him or 'lose him, Murphy, he’s mine; and, please—oh, please, Murphy—don’t talk, for he’s a big one, and hard to manage.”

I watch the struggle, and, greatly as I care for the Babe, I wish that the cast had been my own. The feeling is natural, I take it, and does not interfere with the joy of looking-on. No man who follows cricket seriously has ever watched a century made, I think, without a hidden wish that he were in his own person the hero of the moment.

Cathy lands her fish, after desperate endeavour; and my share in the game is to dispatch our friend as quickly as may be.

“That’s the worst of it, Murphy,” says my wife, as I put the fish into my own empty basket, and shoulder the two rods.

Her voice is low and tragic, and all the joy of capture has departed.

“Undoubtedly,” I answer, knowing well what is to come.

“You see, dear, there’s all the difference in the world.”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Between the catching, and—and the horrid finish, Murphy. It’s too late, I suppose, to put him back again into the river?"

“Much too late,” I answer cheerfully. “Poor folk must live, as Timothy Brailes says, and we really need the fine boy here for to-night’s dinner.”

“You are rather horrid, Murphy."

“Why did you catch him at all, then, Babe?”

“For the fun of playing him. Dear, you’re very stupid—men always are before the gong sounds for breakfast—or you’d see at once the difference between playing a fine trout and killing him.”

This seems to touch remotely on the Wanderer’s apple-tree myth, for Eve and her descendants in the female line have shown a curious faithfulness to this desire to kill and to let live, both in one. As an old farmer said to me not long ago, “You can’t have your bread buttered on both sides in this life, sir. More’s the pity. There’s my housekeeper, now. Buried her lile and soft, last Michaelmas. Was glad to be rid of her masterful ways, I own—but duraed if I don’t miss her cooking. A joint o’ lamb—green peas—a duckling—never met her like. Eh, well, ye can’t have it both ways, sir—now, can ye?—and I’m fairly pleased to have the old house to myself again, and live on cheese and bread. For ye can’t have it both ways, can ye, now?”

Obvious as the philosophy seems, it is odd that so many gentle anglers desire to catch their trout, and at the same time see him following the old haunts up-stream.

I am diverging into “greenhouse talk”—of the kind that Tom Lad taught me in my youth to understand. To be candid, my rogue’s promise to come down this morning has recurred to me, and I cannot rid myself of the feeling that there’s a troublesome disillusionment awaiting me after breakfast Is it strange that I find myself disposed to wander down any more pleasant by-track that offers itself? Disillusionment is always painful; it is not that one’s faith suffers in the long run, but that the rebuilding demands energy and sheer hard work, which, one feels with a sense of exasperation, might have been far more profitably employed. Illusion—in the sense I mean—stands nowadays for all that is necessary to the joy of life—stands for faith in human nature, belief in ghosts and elves and fairies, in the quieter, secret notes that still sound musically—granted a man can hear them through the uproar of the modern traffic, the modern chink of coin.

A stranger came from the desert into Arcady once on a day, I remember, and waxed confidential with me. “Well and good,” was his summing-up of our discussion; " but there’s nothing I believe in, save the true ring of a sovereign as you slap it on the counter."

I disagreed, hazarding a guess that the ring of a sovereign, good or bad, was the least important matter in the world, unless you had the saving grace of knowing how to spend it to the best advantage.

“Ah, you’re young,” he said, with an air as if he closured the debate “You’re young, and have illusions.”

I have illusions still; and, when the day is fair and full of hay-scents, I dislike intruders who compel me to fight the old battle on behalf of human nature One’s faith—illusion, if you like the word better—comes always with stronger thews and livelier courage from these combats, but at the time one does not think of this.

Just now, however, when we are two hundred yards from the home-gate, Cathy and I, she challenges me to battle of another kind.

“Give me thirty yards’ start, Murphy, and I’ll beat you to the gate.”

She does not refer to the added handicap of a couple of fishing-rods and a basket; but I accept the challenge. As it happens, she stumbles at the end of fifty yards, and loses a few useful seconds in the recovery. I see my chance, and sprint. It is odd that people can grow eager in a moment, whatever the game, so long as no one names it work.

In turning the sharp corner near the gate, I forget that the stump of an old oak-tree is waiting for me round the bend. The rods drive headlong into it, and I stop, chained and surrounded by splintered wood, and hooks, and yards of gut.

“I knew you hadn’t a chance, Murphy,” says the Babe, turning at the gate—breathless, but serene.

She returns to help me out of my difficulties; and, just as we reach the house, Stylesey comes out in majesty to meet us. Stylesey is cool and neat—we are not—and she glances, first at us, then at the broken rods. Her face was moulded from babyhood, I think, for the expression of a disapproval, cold and sharp, as if an iceberg met you in the open.

“Breakfast has been cold for half-an-hour, sir,” she says distantly.

" Never mind breakfast,” I respond, with that air of cheerfulness which most annoys our tyrant. “We’ve caught a trout, Stylesey—a big chap—put him on your scales, and weigh him for us.”

Ah, but she is great! The quiet dignity with which she takes the fishing-basket is in itself reproof. So is her momentary silence.

“It is well to be gay and light-hearted, sir,” she says, when the pause has reached dramatic limits; “but, for my part, I never see a fine day, and gay faces, and a good breakfast spoiled for want of eating, but I think of the poor lambs who haven’t naught at all. It’s queer to me, sir—and always has been—that we don’t sit on the doorstep all day, and cry for other folk’s misfortunes.”

“Thank you, Stylesey; but what good would it do?”

“’Twould be becoming, sir, at least, even if it did no good to speak of. Folk would be dressed in mourning all their lives, if I had my way, to show they sorrowed for their neighbours' sins.”

Stylesey is undoubtedly refreshing. The sequence of her thoughts may seem at times to leave something wanting; but afterwards, when her many casual speeches touching life have been pondered over and arranged in order, one sees that she is singularly consistent. “Whatever is, is wrong,” is the philosophy underlying all; and absence of excuse for grumbling is the one thing which would induce her, in sober earnest, to sit down upon the doorstep and weep. Our wonder is that Tom Lad has not six greenhouses, placed in six distinct and widely separated counties; he must need so many different kinds of rest.

Heighol I should like to dwell upon that breakfast which we had earned so well; but it is no use. The rogue insists on coming through my gate once more, and I must get through the remainder of this absurd and semi-tragic episode. It is not until I glance at the clock, after a leisurely meal, that I remember him, or realise that he promised to be here in exactly fifteen minutes from the present—promised to come and report himself alive, as it were, instead of dead in the neighbourhood of my garden-gate.

“You are fidgeting, Murphy,” says the Babe. It is our strength and weakness that we cannot hide from each other the trivial signs of ill-content or welL

“Not in the least I—I was thinking of your fowls. Surely it is time to feed them?”

“You are prevaricating, Murphy. You want to be rid of me.”

This happens so seldom that I am unprepared to meet an accusation obviously true.

“I am only going to have a pipe under the lime-tree, Babe,” I say, knowing that I am guilty of that half-truth which, unlike the half-loaf of bread, is worse than no truth at all Frankly, I am shy of letting even Cathy see me in company with my fellow ’Varsity man of last night. The tiring hour-and-a-half I had with him, the nightmares afterwards, have robbed me for the moment of the glamour attaching to his poverty and hectic cough. It occurs to me that possibly angels might have feared to harbour such a guest, and there seems no reason why the Babe should see me as the hapless one who—well, who rushed in, to put the matter courteously.

I want to cover up the traces of my enterprise; and this is foolish, for Cathy, if any one, would understand the rough-shod rides one takes when sympathy chances to be the good saddle-horse beneath one.

She looks at me across the table. I know that steady, humorous regard; it is as if you tried to tell a partial truth to the blue and candid ocean, and found the little waves come up to laugh at your deceit “I shall share the lime-tree with you, Murphy," she says quietly. “You are just running into mischief, or just trying to get out of it”

And all this, if you please, has been brought upon me by a man I never asked to read a book of mine, never asked to share my hospitality for purposes of felo de se. Luck, as Tom Lad justly observes, is like his goodwife—“try to please her, and wait for her whimsies, and be the bonnie lad in his best bib, and she’ll never look your way; but take a good, stout ash-stick to her—or a bendable, slim switch o’hazel—and, straightways, she’ll want to put your boots on for ye.”

We stroll to the seat, Cathy and I. I pretend to smoke, to read the morning’s news.

“You are trying to get out of mischief, I think,’ says Cathy presently. Her tone is judicial.

I am conscious of a trivial hope that my consumptive friend will not appear at all; but experience tells me that good works come home to roost at least as patiently as evil deeds.

"Good deeds hatch like the cuckoo’s eggs, sir,” as Tom Lad says repeatedly. “Lay ’em in any chance-like nest ye please, they’re sure to hatch out—cuckoos always do—and grow to be feathered, and play goodness knows what o’devilment with the other nestlings.”

Oh, wise Tom Lad t If only you had been at hand last night t “I think I understand, Murphy,” says my wife, with sudden intuition. “You have been helping some vagabond or other. You have been wearing your kind heart on your sleeve, Murphy. Shall I help you through with it, dear, as I did with the rods and the hooks this morning?”

“No!”

I am firm on that point, at any rate. My friend may have been a gentleman, and may possibly be suffering from phthisis; but I do not contemplate a meeting between my wife and himself.

I am conscious of a gentle laugh from Cathy as I get up and move restlessly about the lawn. Sometimes I wish she understood my foibles less, or disguised her knowledge more; but, then, we should in that case never treat each other’s follies with such spontaneous gaiety, and we should miss much of the salt of life.

As it chances, my trouble is entirely wasted, for the rogue does not appear at all to-day. By an unkind stroke of fate, however, Cathy is with me on the morrow—on the same seat under the limes and at the same after-breakfast hour—when I hear the click of a gate and, looking guiltily along the drive, see the lean, unhappy figure of my vagabond.

Somehow the rogue seems more than an acquaintance of yesterday. His diffidence, as he stands at the gate and looks, first across the lawn at Cathy, then at myself, is what I should have expected. He has consummate art, I think; for, like the rare and heaven-born actor’s, his treatment of each scene is the inevitable result of the scenes that have gone before.

“Good morning!” he says, with sombre jauntiness. “I’ve kept my word, eh, if I am a day late in redeeming it? You saved me that night, if ever one man saved another.” He glances towards Cathy. “I’ll not come further into your garden, if you don’t mind,” he goes on. “Used to be able to meet a lady, you understand, in the old days; but now—well, I’d rather not. Neither my boots nor my manners are quite what they were.”

I feel vastly limp. This man must have some special gift of dusting sane men’s eyes with cobwebs. My anger disappears. I begin to believe in him again. Ay, and so would you, friend — I see your suave, complacent smile appearing—if you had been privileged to know my prince of rogues.

“Bedad! he has a way with him,” an Irishman once said of Charles the Second. And the words, I fancy, ought to be chiselled on the gravestone of my rogue, when his time comes—late, as in most such cases—to die. For rogues, in spite of theoretic medicine, die old more frequently than humbler folk.

I begin to believe in him. Observe—observe, my Wanderer friend—that I begin afresh to believe in my vagabond. It would have been pleasanter to have kicked him over the hedge than to let him meet Cathy, but he himself has declined the privilege, and a new friendliness takes hold of me.

“Glad to see you alive, and—and sober,” I answer, almost genially.

“Oh, the night before last?” he answers. “I was sick of it all, and didn’t care. You’re right; I was not strictly sober. But I meant it, and you saved me—meant to take my life, and all the rest. Now, I ask you!”

He straightens himself. He is picturesque. He makes more use of the good figure given him by nature than he did last night “Yes?” I prompt, glancing at the lime-tree seat and noting, with gratitude, that Cathy is going to look after her long-neglected turkey chicks.

“I ask you, was I worth saving?”

“No,” I answer promptly. Now that he is alive, and sober, and something more like a human being than a mad hatter, a little wholesome criticism can do him no harm.

He laughs—delightfully—and brings his clay pipe out, and takes a fill from my pouch.

“Another loan. You’re too good to me," he says, borrowing a match as well “Better live to smoke a pipe, eh, than be viewed by a coroner’s jury?”

“Much better,” I answer, wondering how to rid myself of him. Sober, he is no longer a pathetic scoundrel, I find; his good figure and his easy manner help him to sustain a lighter part, and to play it just as well as he did the more tragic one.

He admits himself a rascaL He disdains penitence, as coming too late in any case, even if he had aptitude for it It is plain that my responsibility has ceased; that, whatever he might have done the other night, he intends simply to go forward to-day on that road of genial villainy which he has chosen. Again I allow any superficial person to smile; for I confess that the relief is great I wasted my efforts, possibly, but I do not feel just yet the soreness of being duped— I feel instead that he is alive and fairly vigorous, that he has spared me also that interview with a coroner’s jury to which he referred so tactfully awhile since.

Moreover, he assails me at another weak point in my armour. Alive as I am—foolishly alive, they say—to the woeful side of a man’s story, it is the ludicrous aspect that appeals to me more strongly, once I give it the chance. This morning I set aside the obvious fact that I am duped; I listen instead to the rascal’s easy flow of words, and frankly enjoy his conversation as we stroll up and down the garden path. We are on a new footing, he and I, and I need trouble myself no longer with the question, “Am I to believe in him or not?’’ He has answered the question, and disproved himself to the hilt He knows it, indeed, and arranges the emotional scenery with a deft, instinctive hand.

This way of approaching the alms-giver for the second time may be the wiser move, I think, from the rogue’s point of view—provided the rogue has wit, a good bearing, and the faculty of judging at a glance whether his victim has much or little sense of humour. At any rate, this particular rascal, when he tells me lightly that he is penniless again, makes my right hand seek one pocket, my left seek the other, neither member knowing strictly what the other is about. I am not being duped now. The local tavern has long ago absorbed my earlier gift; I know it; but I want to make some acknowledgment to my rascal for this morning’s entertainment He has told me three good stories, as we stroll up and down the garden path, and has added to that treasury of anecdote which the Wanderer and myself delight to fill.

Now, old or new, a good story is an almost priceless gift, I take it, to the sum of human happiness. A good story needs so much, like a good salad, to make a true appeal to the palate. There may be fifty of such stories in the world; the Wanderer, gleaning diligently across the fields, has two-and-twenty tales that I should place among the classics; this morning I’ve found three to add to the number. And that is why my right and left hand seek different pockets, each anxious to acknowledge a just debt.

Tom Lad intervenes, however. He strolls across the lawn, not seeming to observe my rogue. Yet, as I catch sight of him, there’s a look in his face—a playful grimness, rounded off by irony—that makes me pause for thought As a matter of fact, I have not felt easy in the handling of this affair from the start, and I am ready now to believe that Tom Lad knows more of it than I do. The belief is encouraged by my henchman's behaviour; as he nears us, he is too obviously intent on watching the bird and insect life of my garden, the trees and the scudding clouds above them. I know Tom Lad by heart He reaches us at last, and the rogue falls back a step or two—surprised, outwitted, so it seems, as he meets Tom’s eye.

"Begging your pardon, sir,” says Tom Lad quietly, “but were you going to give what a body might call a present, like, to this chap? Now, I know it’s no business o’ mine—but would you mind, sir, if I gave him a little summat to drink afore ye do aught else? He’s poorly, is the chap —ye can see that by the look of him—and he needs heartening.”

Of a truth we are in the midst of- a rustic comedy, we three. The rogue is puzzled; so am I; only Tom Lad understands the true relish of the jest But I notice that the rogue loses something of his distrust at once when he hears Tom’s hospitable suggestion.

“Observe,” the Wanderer once said to me— “observe that there are men possessed of such thirsty palates and such keen imagination that if they only hear the cork of a bottle drawn they will grow livelier. I have known a dull man grow witty on the instant, though the wine was a room's-length from his lips.”

My brother ’Varsity-man is of this breed, it seems. Puzzled as I am by Tom Lad’s suggestion, by his air of secrecy and quiet enjoyment, I know that he is always to be trusted. So I withhold my alms, for the time being, and watch the pair as they disappear in the direction of Tom’s cottage.

My responsibility in the matter has ceased. It is obviously the time for a tranquil pipe beneath the lime-tree; and, while awaiting developments, I try to rearrange the details of a past night’s adventure. Tragedy has put on the mask of comedy, undoubtedly; but on that summer’s evening it wore a darker guise. There’s no foible of human nature so enduring, I take it, as this trick of reconstructing a scene gone by and done with. Had one said this, done that, at crucial moments, how different the result! The sanest of us are victims to this foolish passion for living over again things done and ill done; yet all the while we know that the past is like a hedgerow-nest of yester-year—the brood has flown, and our business is to construct a new cradle for another batch of nestlings.

“Observe,” says the Wanderer to me, once a week at least—“observe that reason, on which we pride ourselves—forgetting how the jay once went in peacock’s feathers and was found out— observe that human reason is the weakest of all nature’s attributes. Reason taught us how to build houses—which we do not need—how to build roads from place to place, when we should travel better on the greensward—how to make clothes and manners of more importance than the inward heart of a man. Human reason, sir, is a cheap-jack selling trumpery wares in the marketplace. Tis all made up of worthless metal, brightened to seem like gold or silver. Reason? I’d rather trust the true instinct of the brutes.”

The Wanderer is right It is a habit of his, within the limits of fallibility, to judge always rightly. Why, for instance, should I trouble myself this morning because a stranger came to me and took me in? Reason, if she wishes to fulfil her boasts, should tell me that the episode is done with, should forbid me to look backward. In times of need, however, reason does little to help any human being, and our continued faith in such a charlatan is at once pathetic and absurd.

Once again has Charity been beguiled by a foolish lover, and she fears to show her face abroad; yet repining, surely, does not help her case, and Charity must set about the mending of Faith’s ravelled sleeves. That is her work in life—my own work in life at the moment— and yet I can only cover yesterday’s old ground. Given the situation—one man, obviously lacking self-control, who proposes to do away with himself—another, who at the time is sole intervener between a projected crime and its fulfilment—what could the other do, less or more, than I did?

My reflections are happily broken into by Tom Lad. As he approaches, I notice that his right cheek is badly scarred, and that the left eye seems, for some reason, to be more prominent— more obtrusive, one might say—than a strict sense of proportion would demand. He is laughing gently, nevertheless, and I invite him to share my seat beneath the lime-tree.

“Well?” I ask, using the simple form of question most in favour with all Yorkshire people.

“Oh, I gave him summat to drink all right, sir, as I promised. But he and me had a bit of an argument, like, before he’d take his drink.”

I wait. There’s no man likes better than Tom to be leisurely in the telling of a narrative.

“Fill your pipe, Tom Lad," I say.

“And thank ye, sir I If I could clap een on the chap who first invented ’baccy, I’d praise him to his face, I would. ’Baccy, once ’tis fairly lighted, draws so cool and soothing-like—it should make good men out of bad, I always fancy, for it has a lile way with it. As for me, I’ve found the folk who willun’t smoke—or cannot, likely, owing to queasy stomachs—have always worse things to say of their neighbours than honest smoker-folk. Seems to me—and always did—as if bad feelings drifted right away along the track your pipe-reek takes.”

Tom Lad pursues his discursion into the smoke-topic. It is not for me to say that he preaches the true faith; for I hold it, too, and am biassed therefore.

“Well?” I ask again.

“Oh, ay, ’twas well,” says Tom Lad, blowing grey-blue clouds into the air. “Twas very well, sir. I promised him a drink, and gave it to him; but I own there was a bit of a scuffle before he got his mouth to water.”

“I thought you promised him a glass of beer?”

“Nay, sir! Promised him a drink. Cold water was what I had in mind, and plenty of it. Naught like the spout-end of a pump when a man’s in need of it.”

There’s a silence between Tom Lad and myself. Listening back along the years, these silences of ours are full of pleasant speech to me: we may have a good jest between us, or a poor one, but the process of telling it is in itself a comedy. I watch Tom’s face this morning; there’s a faraway look in his eyes, and the wrinkles round about these same grey eyes—one of which is sorely damaged—keep lacing and interlacing in curious patterns.

“He has gone?” I suggest at last, with a pious hope that the surmise is a true one.

“Gone, sir!” answers Tom Lad, with increasing cheerfulness. " Gone right enough. Wetter outside than he came—wetter inside he couldn't well be, if he tried. ’Twas this way, ye see, beginning at the start of the tale. When yond chap came to see ye two nights ago, I happened to be coming down the lane behind him; and I looked him up and down—ye can oft tell more from the look of a man’s back than ye can from his face—and I no way liked the hang of him. Moreover and besides, he didn’t tick-tack from side to side o’ the lane, as your simple fool does when he’s half over-seas; yet ye could see he wasn’t sober. Now, that’s the chap I mistrust, sir—the chap who’s clever enough to keep straight in his walk when he ought to be rolling like a ship. So, when he opened the front gate and marched up the garden path as if he owned it—well, asking your pardon, sir, I thought ye needed looking after. Ye generally do, I’ve noticed, when queer folk come a-begging.”

“Go on, Tom Lad,” I murmur. It is not pleasant altogether to be fooled by a casual vagrant, and at the same time to know that one’s own henchman has been overlooking one, as if one needed the supervision of the local constable.

“Ye’ve too big a heart for your body, big as that same body is,” says Tom.

“So I’ve been told. Are you, too, in need of half-a-crown, Tom Lad?” I reply, with gentle irony.

“Thank ye, no, sir. ’Twas all about yond chap I wanted to tell ye. Watched ye twain, I did, as ye gossiped on the lawn that night. Watched over ye, sir, fair like a hen-bird watching over her brood. Saw ye were bothered, like—me keeping at a safe distance all the while, and no way overhearing aught—and I was glad, I own, when ye got rid of him at last.”

“I am very grateful to you, Tom, but was all this interest in my doings necessary?”

“Was it, now? I believe ye, sir! I took a fancy, like, to follow him up the lane, just to see what he did with your money.”

“And how did you know that I gave him money?” I put in quickly. “You were too far off, on your own showing, to see what happened clearly."

Tom Lad smiles gloriously at me. “How did I know? Because I know you, sir I Bless me, ’twas certain from the start that ye’d give him something. So I followed; and he went straight to the inn, as I guessed he would, and rapped smartly at the door. Well, it was after closing-time, and I could follow him no further that night; but I’d learned where he was biding, and so, when yesterday’s work was nicely done, I stepped up in the cool o’ the evening, and popped into Joshua’s bit of an inn, and sat me down, quiet-like, among the company, and nodded to a mate here and a mate there, and waited. There was another chap—last year, sir, if ye call to mind—that went straight to yond same inn with what ye’d given him. Meaning no malice, sir, ye drive a roaring trade for publicans.”

“Beggars are beggars, Tom Lad.”

“Right, sir!” Again that smile, wide and irresistible, which always makes me at peace, even with my own shortcomings. “Right, sir! Then I’ll get forward with my tale. Your friend was there right enough; I’d a fancy he would be, somehow. He didn’t know me from grandad Adam, as the saying is, and he was all the big gentleman. He treated us all—I took it, sir, knowing it was your pocket it came from, after all, and not from his—and he treated himself; and he told us he’d been to see you the night before, to claim a debt of twenty pounds ye owed him, like, for horse-racing. Said he’d got a beggarly half-sovereign from you, but ye’d promised to see him later and pay the balance.”

It is at this stage that I lose my temper for a moment. My rogue might play with the fixed opinions I chance to hold concerning charity, might accept sympathy, and give me an uneasy night for nothing; but stark ingratitude—a wilful lying, not for love of romance, but from sheer devilry, gives me a feeling which I can only liken to sea-sickness.

“Exactly, sir!” says Tom Lad quietly. “I know what you’re saying to yourself, unbeknownst-like, and parson will forgive you for it, certain sure. I was that mad myself last night, listening to his lies, I could have throttled him. But, just as I was getting up to tell him—with my fists—what I thought of him, there was a regular uproar from the lads about him. Knew they were fond o’ ye, sir—I’d dress their jackets for ’em if they weren’t —but never guessed they’d get so cock-a-midding all in a minute when this stranger-chap told lies about ye. He changed his tune, he did—he’s clever as the serpent in Eve’s bosom—and he laughed it off. Said he was in his cups—lifted his gentleman, big face, and laughed—said ye were his best friend of other days, when ye were both at college together, and that the horse-racing story was all a piece of fun. Now, sir, there’s one thing I want to ask ye; the chap’s so slippery that even my old head can’t rightly judge ’twixt truth and lies. Did ye, or did ye not, offer him a lodging for the night?”

“Certainly not, Tom Lad." Yet I remember, guiltily, that only Cathy’s presence in the house had saved me from such oft-repeated and oft-abused hospitality.

“Well, he swore you did, sir; and again he lifted that gentleman-face of his, and said he’d forgotten most of his manners, but knew better than to stay with a friend when he knew that he wasn’t in fit state to meet a lady.

“‘ Let’s have a night of it, boys! ’ says he, all of a sudden.

“He’s a way with him, sir, I own, and I left them to make a night of it—making a sore head for the morning, I call it—and I came away.”

Tom Lad halts, and I do not break the pause. Difficult as I found the combat with a would-be suicide, it brought no heart-sickness such as I feel now. I was so much in earnest—yes, I was in earnest, shallow cynic!—in my wish to save a comrade from self-murder. The sympathy I gave him was stamped in a mint remote from this world’s coining-presses; and I recall a fine saying of the Wanderer’s: “There’s a piece of money, sir, which every man is able to carry in his pocket, whether he be poor or rich. Observe that it is stamped on the one side with Faith’s image, on the other with Charity’s; and, though you give a score such coins in a day, you find your pockets fuller at the day’s end than at its beginning.”

It was such coin I gave freely to my rogue, and I asked so little in return. One thing I did ask, though—that, whatever use he made of the gift, he should be reasonably loyal to the giver.

"You kept him under the pump some time, Tom Lad?” I say at last, and Tom laughs at the desperate seriousness of my inquiry.

“Long enough to cool him, sir! He’ll be up to no devilment to-day, at any rate.”

In this respect Tom Lad is judging hastily, but we are not to learn this just yet “He told me he was dying of consumption, Tom. He seems fairly strong, for all that, judging from the look of your face.”

“Oh, I believe you, sir! We had an argument. I said ’twas plain he was going under the old pump, and he said ’twas plain he wasn’t So we fought for’t, and a tough customer he was to tackle. But I minded what he’d said o’ ye last night, and I let him have a straight one at the finish, and the rest was kittlings’ play. I like to think of yond old pump,” he adds reflectively. “He went so quiet and smooth-like under it, and the water did him a terrible deal of good.”

I admit that I am sore on the subject of my rogue; and, when I see Cathy coming from the poultry-yard and go to meet her, I am disposed to talk of any other topic.

“He looked interesting, this latest protege of yours,” says the Babe, in her airy way.

“Very,” I answer curtly. “It is his trade in life.”

“Poor boy!” The touch of her arm on my sleeve would be welcome at any other time. “You’ll never grow up, dear, never! You’ll open your heart to anybody who’s clever enough to realise that you have one, and you’ll go on, quite patiently, being taken in—won’t you, Murphy?”

“Yes. That is my trade in life.”

I am on the verge of being rude to Cathy—a rare, deplorable accident—but she is too friendly, too much herself, to allow it.

“I’m glad you’re like that, after all,” she goes on, her wise little head all on one side like a bird’s; “because, if you hadn’t been—”

“Well?”

“There’d have been no Mrs. Murphy. At least, it wouldn’t have been this little wife, you see. It is your absurdities I love, Murphy. Not a doubt of it."

Go to, shameless rogue! You’ve brought grievous happenings into Arcady; but the result of all is a love-glance from my wife. You are laughing at me after recovering from your cooling argument with the old pump; but I’m content if you are!

CHAPTER VIII
CONCERNING DOGS

There has been another happening in Arcady; and Cathy has cried; and I myself have felt a nasty feeling in my throat. Old Flick is dead; I found him outside the door of my dressing-room when I went down for breakfast on the day after the rogue’s interview with Tom Lad. Flick was an old dog, and full of sores and great decrepitude; it was pitiable to see him waddle through the winter of his life, but to the end he was Flick, and we loved the beast as if he had been a sort of foster-brother.

The way of his going was pathetic Undoubtedly the dogs have subtle instincts denied to us, and in no direction is their “other sense” so keen, so delicate, as when death nears a threshold. It may be their own death that they foreknow; it is oftener the death of some human comrade. Search as you will through stories of the northern lands, and you’ll find constantly a shuddering faith in the dog’s power of prophecy when he howls beneath the windows of a homestead; search as you will, you will find the dog has a peculiar place in men’s lives, so that one is tempted to believe the old legend true when it says that erring souls are prisoned in these bodies, condemned to work out their purgatory, fighting ever against that so-called dumbness, which is only, after all, a foreign tongue.

When I said farewell to Flick last night, after establishing him in his usual lodging on the mat at the foot of the stairs, he gave me a curious look—a long and searching look—and he put up a feeble paw for me to shake. He was not by way of being sentimental, even as a puppy, and I wondered what he meant Indeed, half-way up the stair I turned, and looked down towards the shadows which hid his bed on the mat. He made no sound. I knew that he had water and a biscuit near at hand, and thought nothing more of the handshake he gave me as we parted.

Yet this morning I find him at the door of my dressing-room; and he’s a dead dog, and his face is turned towards me, jaws agape, as if he had tried to utter one farewell. That was Flick’s way ever—game and faithful to the last—and I am stunned for the moment when I see his glazed eyes meeting mine.

He wanted me last night, and, what with tiredness after honest exercise and tiredness after fighting with a rogue dishonest, I did not listen to him.

Here’s Flick dead at my feet; and you who have owned and loved a dog will know what I am feeling. None—saving my wife—has ever been so lenient with my faults as Flick. None has ever waited for my goings out and comings in—Flick asking never a question—as this boy did—the game, quiet boy who lies so still on the mat of my dressing-room, his jaws agape.

We’ve lost a brother, Cathy and I, and I am wondering how to break the news to her. Flick watched us while the young, keen love was growing between us, and he understood, but we did not He watched us through our courtship, and when we returned to Arcady from our honeymoon it was not his fault that he failed to keep pace with the other dogs as they came racing up the lane to greet us. He was waiting for us lower down, and his welcome was just as cordial, though his would-be friskiness was all an old gentleman’s who remembers the gladness of his younger days, yet can only give expression to it stiffly.

And now he’s dead; and in sober truth I feel, as I go to break the news to Cathy, as if I had to tell her of the death of one of our own family. She takes it bravely enough; but we eat little breakfast, or none, and afterwards I go out into the garden, for I know that the Babe needs to cry.

I meet Stylesey by-and-by, and she stops, and looks distant, prim, and over-good for this sad world. So I know that she has something unpleasant of which to deliver herself.

“Asking your pardon, sir,” she begins, with the accustomed formula, “but I’ve tried to serve up good breakfasts, and I want to ask you what was wrong this morning.”

“With the breakfast?”

“Yes, if you please, sir. The fish was done to a turn, and the eggs were warm from the nest, and the bacon, sir—”

“It was we who were to blame, Stylesey, not your breakfast”

“Well, I saw it all left, just as I’d brought it on to table, and I wondered what we were coming to. When folk forget their breakfasts, sir, I always did say there were queer happenings in store—Bonnyparty landing again with they Frenchisers, and no men to meet ’em, for what can a man do save and except he’s eaten a hearty breakfast?”

I find that an air of serious pleasantry is most useful when Stylesey begins to address myself and the outer universe.

“Bonaparte never did land, good soul, and, moreover, he is dead!” I answer suavely.

“Must take your word for it, sir, but I find it hard to believe. Yond bothersome chaps don’t die oft—they like as they linger on, ’specially if they be Frenchisers.”

I am subdued by the breadth and fearlessness of Stylesey’s outlook upon home and foreign politics, and she meanly takes advantage of my momentary pause.

“Your poor mother, sir, would have cried her heart out to think of you eating no breakfast on the very day that Bonnyparty might be landing. Ah, we’ve a lot to put up with, us poor women!”

I find my breath again. “Stylesey, so have we poor men. Believe me, we have our sorrows, too."

“Tis not for me to show you disrespect, sir, by doubting your word. Your poor mother never did, not though you said with your cherub-face that you hadn’t never robbed an orchard, while •all the time you held two red-cheeked apples in the hands behind your back.”

Stylesey is too dazzling; she has a strange and nimble faculty of tangling up an argument with references to forgotten years, with appeals to that better side of one which knows no logic, with twenty-and-one outrageous deviations from any known system of human reasoning. The marvel is that she reaches so constantly the goal she aims at—the goal of a plump, well-fed, and rather cheerful disbelief in all the pleasant things of life.

“I may have few rights, Stylesey,” I go on, with excessive, almost stagey geniality, “but I claim one—the right to choose whether I want much or little breakfast.”

“Tis all along of Flick, sir,” she answers, coming at last to the kernel of her argument.

I lose my geniality. The picture of a dead comrade lying at my door, with his last message unheeded and unheard, is too vivid to admit of peace of mind.

“You see, sir, I can’t take it the same way as you,” says Stylesey, carefully avoiding my regard. “He was old, and none too clean in his ways, and even the mistress found him a fearsome trouble round about the house, just time and time. Twas convenient he should go to his long home, as I said to my daft husband Tom, soon as I heard the news.”

Undoubtedly I have gained in courage these latter days. I compel Stylesey of the apple-red cheeks to meet my glance.

“Suppose that you were old, and a trouble round about the house, Stylesey?”

She begins to spoil her apron by playing with the edge of it I have noticed that Tom Lad's wife, who rails against all vices—all cheery habits, she means, not understanding the proper value of words—ruins many aprons in a day. She does not keep a snuff-box, or smoke tobacco; instead, she tortures innocent linen for her soul’s delight, and frequently twists neighbour-bodies' characters all askew in the like fashion, so that they, too, stand in need of washing clean.

“Well, I’ve always hoped I went on two feet, sir, and not on four,” she answers, with studied calm.

“I agree with you, Stylesey,” I respond with equal gravity.

“I always hoped I went on two feet, sir. But there! Your poor mother—ay, and your poor father before you—were just the same. They never could understand that no number of four-footed things are worth one Christian; treated 'em all alike, they, dumb or human. Terrible heathen religion, that, sir, though I wish ye to know that I mean no disrespect, for I’ve loved the family, as ye might say, since I was kissing-height But I’m glad, I own, that Flick has gone. He’d a smell with him—ye’re honest, sir, and must own to that—and he took more following, in a house that in your mother’s days was clean and sweet, than any three quiet humans. I often think, sir, there’s a lot of comfort to be gotten out of burials, if ye only come to them with a right spirit."

It is a happy gift of Stylesey’s that she gets out of breath. It is at these times that I seize my opportunity, and confound my adversary.

“Stylesey, if you wish to leave us—I often think you do—you had better tell me so at once.”

“How, sir?" Again the twisted apron, and the accustomed tear whose rise and fall I have watched, as if it had been—this round, wet tear— a Dutch Republic or a mighty Rome.

“Religion is a quarrelsome business, Stylesey, and we’ll not discuss it I happen to believe that worse folk have gone on two legs than ever went on four. And Flick is dead. That is all”

“Well, now, and, indeed, I meant no harm, sir, and I was fondish o’ the dog myself. ’Twas only his worritsome ways.”

“He had none but lovable ways. Kindly understand that in future, Stylesey."

My friends say that I am phenomenally easygoing, while my foes use another term, I suspect, for that indolence of habit which makes me loth to feel angry toward any one. Yet, somewhere in a snug corner, I’ve a temper hidden away; and it has a trick, this temper, of making no signs of its approach; it simply appears, with an abruptness that astonishes myself. I may say little; but Stylesey has learned to understand the look of my face at these times, and she invariably grows humble. She is a bully, I fear, this wife of Tom Lad’s.

I leave her, but turn again with a sudden inspiration, to find Stylesey looking at me with that laughable air of consternation and surprise which comes to her at these times. It is good policy, they say, that the victor in a combat should treat the fallen with respect—should approach him with deference, even, and so enlist him on his own side.

“Stylesey,” I say, “I want your help."

“Well, now, sir, I should call ye just a bit o’ sheer bewilderment, like, if ye wouldn’t think it forward o’ me. I don’t know you these days. One minute ye’re all masterful, and the next ye want my help. I don’t know ye these days.”

“I have two to think of, Stylesey, instead of only one. It alters one’s scheme of arithmetic entirely.”

She eyes me doubtfully, as if suspecting irony; yet she has gathered the gist of my meaning—she is quick in intuition, like her husband—and I see a certain grudging admiration in her face “Wish more men thought in twos, sir," she observes. “Some only think in ones. Tis ’baccy here, and a greenhouse there, and foolishness elsewhere—and the poor wife sits at home, with never a word to say."

I do not smile, though outright laughter would be good for me. Stylesey’s portrait of herself—a meek Griselda, shy of speech—is one to shake the heavens with laughter.

“I want your help,” I repeat.

“And how, sir, if I might ask?”

“Well, it is this way,” I go on, adopting unconsciously the countryman’s cautious approach to a difficult subject “Your mistress is very happy here.”

“She has no reason to be other, sir,” puts in the other, with a sense of coming battle.

“She is so happy that she never will confess she misses anything.”

“Dear lamb!” interjects Tom Lad’s wife, with sublime inconsequence. “I knew your mother long before your time, sir, and sometimes I wonder if ’tis treason to think the new mistress bonnier—I mean just as bonnie—as the old. Poor lamb, with all life’s sorrows stretching out before her, fair like a turnpike roadl Poor all of us, say I, seeing life is what it is, but ’specially womenkind.”

Stylesey is undoubtedly one of the people who “ought to be put into a book,” as the simple folk are wont to say. She can run up to heaven, and fall down again, more speedily than any one I have ever met in this world. Yet, because she rises easily, she falls softly; so that, now and then, I suspect that the hidden core of Stylesey’s mind is made of such stuff as feather-beds are made of.

“But I know that she misses one thing," I proceed, with that calm which approaches genius —the calm which a man feels, I have always fancied, when he has scored ninety-six at cricket, and needs a useful boundary-hit to make his century complete. “Your mistress had a maid in the old days. Couldn’t we make room for a maid, Stylesey, you and I?”

Stylesey plucks at her apron—a white sign, not of truce, but of warfare. “French, I suppose, sir?” she says. “All lady’s-maids are French. 'Tis only another landing of a female Bonnyparty, I take it, and poor women—low-born or high— must give in to what their masters say. For myself, I never liked frog-eaters; there’s something slippery about ’em, not to say slimy— meaning the frogs, sir—that a good farm-wife could never abide. But women were born to trouble, poor lambs, as the sparks fly upward.”

I wait until the uproar and confusion of Stylesey’s rhetoric has passed me by.

“I wanted your help, Stylesey." I am growing tired, for the good woman’s obstinacy is a steep hill to climb.

“Ye never lacked it, sir,” she answers briskly.

“It is not that the mistress needs, or asks for, a French maid. Can you think of no one who would come to us? Some pleasant, farmer’s daughter?”

“Could think of twenty, sir; but somehow— somehow—”

“You lack the will? Then I shall choose her for myself, Stylesey.”

She laughs despairingly. “You, sir? Meaning no disrespect, ye’d choose something betwixt a bit o’ slippery moonshine and a comely lass. Oh, I know ye, sir—meaning no disrespect, and should mean none—I know ye, just as your poor mother did. Half good common-sense, half moonshine. Oh, ay, I reckon the fairies danced when ye were born—two of a summer’s morning, sir, and ’twas me as held ye up to your good father’s eyes—and him a-fretting and a-fuming down below-stairs, thinking the world was coming to an end, and that your mother was dying, certain sure."

"Stylesey,” I observe, striving to put on my mask of resolution and authority, “I was little then. I have grown, Stylesey. I want you to find a maid for the mistress.”

I am certainly tired; but the Wanderer taught me long ago that pretence of friskiness which all good hill-climbers assume towards the journey’s end. Stylesey, my bully of the plump and apple cheeks, is again subdued.

“If so be that ye’ve made up your mind, sir, 'tis not for me to be disrespectfuL But I’d like to choose the maid myself”

“You may, on one condition. You must make things smooth for maid and mistress both. And, Stylesey, this is our secret I want you to arrange it all, without a word to any one.” When all is said of Stylesey’s east-wind character, no man can doubt her judgment She may rebel against the suggestion that Cathy should be reasonably looked after; but, once she has agreed to the suggestion, she will be loyal to her word. You can trust her, in brief, as you can trust a house-wall to stand upright when it boasts three feet of thickness. She will choose a trim maid for Cathy, and one with whom she herself can live in peace; and, for my part, I feel that I have done a good morning’s work.

“’Tis her birthday, sir, next Thursday,” she says. “That is exactly what I had in mind.”

“Well, to be sure I ’Twould be a bonnie surprise for the mistress, now, wouldn’t it, sir? And I know a girl who would fit the place as thimble fits a finger.”

Stylesey is not only acquiescent now; she is interested. My wife’s birthday gift is more than ever assured.

Flick is dead, though, and my spirits drop directly I am alone again. I can settle to nothing, and finally stroll up to the Squire’s; he, if any man, can make me forget my trouble for awhile.

I find him in the stables, admiring a new purchase—a lean, raking chestnut that well deserves such praise as comes his way. He listens to my news of Flick, and grips me by the arm.

“I know, boy! Bless me, haven’t I buried old dogs in my time? Let’s talk of something else.”

We stroll out into the paddock, and the Squire pursues his wholesome theory of “talking of something else.”

“I had an odd visitor yesterday morning,” he says.

I grow alert at once. My brother scribe— ’Varsity man, would-be suicide, and complete rogue—has a way of recalling attention to himself at unexpected times. There is comedy toward, if instinct is speaking truth to me.

“Indeed?” I put in quietly.

“Yes. One of the queerest chaps I ever came across. I was watching the chestnut go through his paces, when a big, lean fellow sauntered up. How he got there, I don’t know; for I don’t fancy any of the servants would have told him where to find me.”

“And what did he want, sir?”

“I’m coming to that As I say, he was big and lean, and he looked a gentleman; and he was dripping-wet from head to foot"

It is good to remember how frequently my father-in-law—my other father, as I prefer to think of him—has chided me for entertaining casual vagabonds. It is good to recall how often he has boasted that he is never taken in by vagrants. From his tone I know that he has been swindled in one way or another by my fellow-scribe; and I say little, but conceal much laughter.

“Dripping-wet?”

I ask, with feigned surprise.

“As wet as ever I saw a man. If he’d lain in the river’s bed for a week or so, he couldn’t have been wetter. He came up to me, and said he’d heard I wanted a groom. And I stared at him, for grooms don’t talk his sort of English. Then he laughed.

“‘A gentleman may be allowed to know something of horses?’ he said. ‘May be allowed to have to work for-a living, too, I suppose? ’

“I liked the man, somehow. He was so straight, and not a bit ashamed to ask for a post as groom. He soon made it plain, too, that he knew what a horse is. I should have given him a place there and then, I believe, if I had had room for him. As it was, I explained that he had been misinformed, and he laughed again.

“‘ My luck/ he said. ' It has followed me pretty well round the world.’’’

It is not right, of course, to laugh at one’s elders; a long-ago incident, connected with a prophet and she-bears, should warn me against such profanity. Yet I am enjoying the Squire’s talk; and, if I have to pay the penalty, I shall not grudge it My only trouble is that some few bubbles of laughter may rise to the surface of the hidden spring, and so betray me.

He is so serious in his outlook on the rogue, just as I was when the same rascal came to me by night and longed to be a corpse. And weak human nature, when it is fooled, seeks always for a comrade.

Moreover, the Squire ought to know that a man, when he blames his luck, is making vain excuse. For my part—forget the principle as I do at times—I have no belief in luck, as the word is understood. The hills, and the winds, and the succession of the seasons, teach a different lesson; as a man ploughs, and sows, and reaps, so he gathers his harvest, and Circumstance is no fickle jade, but a just and upright judge of our past deeds. The luck-superstition, in fact, is the antithesis of faith, of that wholesome zest for following the gleam ahead, come smooth going for the feet or foul.

“I was in a difficulty,” the Squire goes on. “I happened to have a couple of sovereigns in my pocket, and some loose silver, and I stood there, jingling them, and wondering whether the poor chap would be hurt if I offered him money.”

Truly my rogue is splendid Just so did I feel; just so did I fear lest this gentleman of the grand manner should be offended by suggestion of crude coin.

“You didn't learn, sir, how he came to be wet through?” I ask, with painstaking solicitude.

"Yes, I did! I asked him, while I was jingling that confounded money in my pocket; and he seemed shy of telling me, until I pressed him.”

I am not surprised that he was shy; but I am bewildered when I learn what prompt and sporting use he made of opportunity.

“I dragged the truth from him at last. He passed Dark Pool, it seems, on his way up to me along the river-bank, and a child had tumbled in. You know how deep it is, boy, and how the current swings round into a whirlpool there.”

“Yes, I know,” I answer, struggling constantly with that absurd desire to laugh.

“He dived in, it seems, and saved the child, and carried it home to its parents, and then came on to me, for all the world as if nothing had happened. What do you think of that, boy? ”

“It was splendid,” I answer, thinking of the lie, not of the imaginary deed.

“Splendid? Such men deserve better luck than they get I pulled out all the money in my pocket. ‘Will you take this as a loan? ’ I said. ‘Strictly as a loan, to be repaid?' he answered. Egad, I like a man of that breed!”

It would be useless to deny that I am enjoying the situation. The Squire, as a rule, conceals his misdirected charities better than I am apt to do, and I recall the open glee which he has shown on many past occasions.

“There’s one comfort that you have, sir,” I remark, after we have strolled as far as the paddock-gate and back again.

“Eh? " he answers blankly.

“It cost me rather more than two pounds and the odd shillings. Our friend has done a good three days’ work.’’

Then I tell him—lingering over the details— what chanced to me. And the Squire declines to believe at first that he has been deceived, until I repeat Tom Lad’s tale of the rogue, and explain how the consumptive happened to be wet to the bone. When he realises the situation, I regret to say that my father-in-law stumps up and down the paddock in childish fury; that he turns on me, as if I were the culprit; that his speech suggests an attack of gout in its worst form. Finally, he opens the gate, and sets out for the house. To my anxious queries, as I follow him, he responds that he is going for a gun and a couple of cartridges, in the hope of getting a shot at vermin.

Better counsels prevail, however, and at last he begins to laugh.

“You’re only a young fool, boy, but I’m an old one, d’ye see?”

“The man’s clever at his trade, that is all.”

“Clever? If he comes this way again, I’ll shoot some fresh air into his cleverness.”

I am inclined to think that he would; and for this reason I warn my brother ’Varsity-man— wherever he may chance to be to-day—that he is likely to find the death he seeks if he cares to call upon the Squire again.

I have enjoyed my meeting with the Squire; but, after I have left him, the old feeling returns inevitably. Flick is dead.

There is a quiet burial later in the day, and Cathy stays with me afterwards while Tom Lad finishes off the neat grave. Tom’s voice is subdued, his face full of a real and upright pity, as he looks at me over his shoulder.

“Where do they go to, sir?” he asks, pointing downward to the grave.

“I cannot tell you, Tom Lad.”

It is curious how big, hearty fellows of Tom’s class appeal instinctively to their masters when any point of faith or doctrine is raised. They feel, I think, that “book-learning” holds the key to all such doctrine, whereas the natural, sweet soil in which they work has more to tell them than they’ll find in all, save three, of the world’s books.

“Ye see, he was a good ’un, sir, and he's gone, and I’ve known him from a puppy. They’re for telling me he’s just dead meat now, no more, no less, and I willun’t believe it”

“Nor I, Tom,” puts in Cathy vehemently, lifting her brave little face and pretending that there are no tear-stains there. “How can he die altogether? He was so keen and game.”

“He’ll be keen and game again, mistress,” says Tom Lad. “Such as he couldn’t be lost and put out of sight, and no more said. There was too much went to the making of old Flick for all to be wasted, like.”

We three are in accord. Out of the mystery of life and death, out of the hidden years that went before our time, the hidden years that lie in front, we catch some glimpse of light from another world. Assuredly we trust that our dead comrade is “not to be wasted, like.”

“I shall never want another dog, Murphy,” says my wife, as we go down together to the house.

That is Cathy's way—my own way, too—yet I think that by-and-by, when the first grief is blunted, she will seek for a new friend to replace the old. The other dogs will not suffice; she will need a successor to old Flick.

Well, he's dead, poor chap. I began the day with that thought, and so I end it, after troubling Stylesey again by my treatment of the last and chief meal of the day.

For we knew and loved each other, Cathy and Flick and I, and in Arcady we do not forget our friends.

CHAPTER IX
CONCERNING THE LAVENDER LADIES

We have finished our mowing, Tom Lad and I. The old, keen rivalry has shown itself, the old, recurrent gladness in the rhythmical swing of the blade and the scent of the falling grass.

The ancient stiffness, too, is upon me to-night, now that all is done and well done, and I am too lazy to saunter across the lawn as far as the seat which is over-watched by my boon comrade, the lime-tree. I am sitting, instead, in the corner half walled-off from the drawing-room, with its window looking out across the valley to the moors. It was a priest’s “hiding-chamber” in the unquiet times which followed the reign of that Tudor who had difficulty in finding a wife to survive him. Some forebear of mine removed one-half of the dividing-wall, and to-night I am grateful to him, because he spared the other half and left me food for many a year of fancy. The chamber now is furnished cosily; but half the inner wall is left, a jagged edge of masonry, to lead one back to history.

Perhaps I have mowed too many swathes; perhaps, on the other hand, I am in that middle state ’twixt great health and great tiredness which is .apt to show one rapid pictures, true and candid, of the past. However that may be, my old dislike of Henry the Eighth recurs to-night, as I sit in this priest’s hiding-chamber. It may be, of course, a casual weakness of the monarch that he liked to marry often and unhappily. His statecraft may have suffered nothing in the process. He was “bluff,” and bluffness, I find constantly, is a character hard for a man to sustain. Yet I confess that, in my weakness, I shrink instinctively from a monarch who beheads his wives—beheads them, not in temporary aberration, but from fixed habit It is his treatment of the monasteries, however, that is more strongly still suggested to me by the piece of broken wall Whichever of my folk it was who opened the chamber and made it a snug comer of the drawing-room, he showed rare artistry. Furnish the bigger and the lesser rooms as we will, there is always the broken line of masonry between the two to bring back the past to us.

The Wanderer loves this hiding-chamber. When he is not walking, or looking after his garden, or talking casually with vagrom men upon the highroad, he steals into this comer— whether we’re at home or not—and takes much snuff, and reconstructs the past.

“Observe, boy,” he will say to me after these vigils—“observe, that one bit of broken masonry is more than all the railways in the world. Steam takes you constantly to the over-crowded centres. Steam has no fear of God, and disdains the hills where truth seeks refuge from the moderns.”

If I am older, and younger, than my years, I think the Wanderer is to blame. He will die, because nature wills it so—as game old Flick did—but the good in him will live with me until my own turn comes to face the last, great fight.

Undoubtedly there are ghosts—truthful, friendly ghosts—about this room in which I sit to-night, after mowing many swathes with Tom Lad.

I find myself thinking of the Church lands given away, with the eternal imprint of sacrilege upon them, to favourites of the king. I am wondering if the monasteries of those days, with all their acknowledged crimes of evil-living, could not stand out in open country and ask the king who robbed them if he had lived a better life than they.

I cannot answer. The Tudor did great work for England. The beneficent, glad mother of all Englishmen knows the greatness of the work more intimately than any of her sons can ever know it. It is not by a man’s sins that we judge him, but by his work; and that edge of jagged wall asks me constantly the question that Pilate asked once—in all sincerity, I think—the abiding question: "What is truth?” From Henry’s daughter, or from the gallant men she had about her—Raleigh and Clifford, Frobisher and Drake and Howard—came our Riding of the Seas. How can we judge the two, father and daughter?

One fact recurs to me, however—a proven fact —that a curse has rested, even to this day, upon the inheritors of lands stolen from the Church. Popular tradition has always had it so; crude practice has supported legend in many instances. There was one man I knew—a keen shot, a fresh-air man—who laughed at all superstitions, except one; he had inherited a property which not once since Henry’s reign had gone in straight descent from father to son, and he feared the curse, although he would not acknowledge that he dreaded it. He had four sons, and I dined with him on the night when the heir’s coming of age was toasted.

“The luck’s broken,” he said, as he lifted his glass for the toast Yet within six months the heir broke his neck in the hunting-field. Two sons were lost together at sea the next year, and afterwards the sturdiest of the four fell ill and died in a few days of some disease which the doctors could not name. My host of that night is a broken man to-day, and he believes in every superstition, great or small, that haunts the country-side.

To-night, as I sit in the snug hiding-chamber, I am asking that piece of broken wall if it knows what truth is. Many secrets have been told to it; it has ears, if the old proverb holds good; but, like the dogs, it cannot answer me in human speech.

Perhaps, after all, the riddle of Bluff King Hal is the riddle asked by humbler folk, each day they rise at the dawn of hope, each night they go to bed with certainty that they have done less with the daylight than they should have done. Not the Greeks of old, I think, asked more cunning riddles than you and I, if we are honest, ask of our daily lives.

In some odd fashion of his own, surely, the Bluff King was better than his record. He did much for England, and we must let him rest beside his wives. And we, who do not like the man, must look to the end he sought, not to the miry road he chose.

These serious pencil-notes proceed from that bit of broken wall in front of me. Cathy and I could not live in any but an old house; we pay the penalty in listening to the tales which all old stones try hard to tell.

To-night it gives me a curious sense of wellbeing and security to know that my folk, at least, had no part in that bygone game of robbing Peter to pay indifferent Pauls. We did not rob the priests; we hid them, when Elizabeth began her persecution, until the storm was overpast It has been our characteristic, indeed, to shelter people who sought a refuge, and I would plead heredity in extenuation of those quiet escapades of mine— say, when strangers come, and I forget to inquire as to their record before giving alms.

The evening light steals downward from the moor on quiet and silvery feet; it seems to linger about the patch of broken wall, as if tracing the story of the centuries across the rough-hewn stone. Surely I have worked to-day and earned my leisure, and may be allowed to journey down those fairy-lanes that lead to bygone years.

Is it nothing that this room has sheltered, over and over again, folk who lived through the stormy times of history? It has heard their heart-beats as they listened to the tramp of feet outside, and knew the enemy was searching for them, and wondered—half between hope and dread—if their sanctuary would prove inviolate. Is it nothing? Yes, it is much, and I think that history should be written in some such room as this—some haunted room, where the real passions, the sobs and heart-cries and bewilderment of hunted men and women, are played out again each evening-tide. You can hear the furtive uproar of the dead, here in the “priest’s hiding-chamber”—if you have an ear for music of the kind—and you see the past—not as so many propositions of rigid fact, but as a living, human story.

My people had a constant quarrel with the Tudors, it seems; for when Elizabeth came to the throne—a riddle of character as hard to guess as her father’s is—we were true, not only to the priests, but to Scottish Mary. When Mary was imprisoned here in Yorkshire—not very far from the borders of Arcady—we dined and supped and hid the gallant gentlemen who framed wild plans for her release. And I count it still an honour to Arcady that one brave youngster from among us went out and rescued Mary the Queen—if only for an hour—and died for it Then, in Stuart days, Cromwell headed the Rebellion, and loyalists came to us after disastrous battles, and we sheltered them. There was something of poetic justice in the fact that this old hiding-chamber, which had given hospitality to many strangers, should save the life of its owner, fleeing with his wounds upon him from Marston Moor.

We saw the Stuarts ousted, and afterwards we heard the trumpet-call of Charlie in the Highlands—of Charlie, debonair and bonnie, as he came to seek the throne for his father, James the Third. He passed near to Arcady as he marched south, and a younger son of our house went with him; they turned about at Derby—the most tragic and most pitiable day, save that of Culloden fight, in all our history—and again we entertained the refugees, the younger son among the number, until we could smuggle them abroad.

Is there any wonder that they laugh at me to-day, saying that to cry “Stuart!" to me is to make me lift my head like a sleeping pointer who dreams that he’s among the game? Once in the year, if I must confess the truth, I celebrate a Stuart birthday—Prince Charlie’s—and I pass my wine across the water-jug, and drink to the better luck of one who well deserved to win his fight It is in the blood. When we suffered under Cromwell, and Charles the Second forgot afterwards to give us recompense, we could not blame him. He was a Stuart, that was all; and we struggled on, making the best of our diminished patrimony, giving the King our loyalty. To me— remember that I am speaking with the voices of men gone before me, not only with my own—to me it is clear that loyalty to one’s sovereign is a thing apart, like faith, from the rutty roads of life. If your King forgets, it is not for you to question. He is your King. The loyalty survives his casual deeds or misdeeds, which are attaching to the manhood of him, not the kingship. The feeling is out of date, illogical, our wise men tell us; it may be, but it is the only feeling worth the name of loyalty.

Good wheat was never reared from tare-seeds. How comes it, then, that this passionate loyalty of old produced such fruits of chivalry, of knightliness, of deeds that make one’s heart beat fast? There have been gallant dames, and gallant gentlemen, before and since the Stuart times, but I can remember no period of England’s story which is full of such high spirit, courage and self-abnegation, as that which came to flower in the days of Scottish Mary and of the Charleses.

How can one help recalling Colonel Lovelace tonight? Courtier, warrior, loyal subject and loyal lover, his " Song to Althea” stands out for ever as a world-song—one of the few which we English have given to the world, although the Irish and the Scots have given many. And in loyalty—in the real sense of the word—the song was rooted; the rains of royal adversity watered the growing plant; the sun of perfect trust in kingship brought it to full flower—a flower which lives among us to this day, fragrant as on the dawn that first saw its petals open.

“Observe,” says the Wanderer, “that the right way of conducting thought is to choose one topic, and then to let another catch you unawares.” If this be so, I have done well to-night, for I came here—here to the hiding-chamber, where ghosts congregate—with no thought in my mind save that of the Lavender Ladies.

There is method, perhaps, in my irrelevance; for these ladies held the true faith to the last, as the Royalists did—the true faith, I mean, which counts gardens worthier than streets, the starlight more tempting than the gleam of crude and minted gold. They are at home, here in the priests’ hiding-chamber, for they are friendly with the spirit of the Stuart days.

Where have our Lavender Ladies gone? Even we, who are young, can recall the grace and tenderness of them, as one recalls a fragrance lost for ever, or as an exile looks back upon the homeland he will never see again. And to talk of them—to try to say in few words or in many where their charm lay—ah! that is useless quite, as if we sought to explain the fragrance of potpourri to one who had never known it It is akin to the charm that little children have, for I hazard a shrewd guess that these Lavender Ladies I remember were, in truth, little children at heart, to whom age had only given an older and more assured charm.

What were they, then, as memory draws the picture? Slim, grey-haired, pretty—comely, perhaps, I ought to say, in their own language— robed in lavender silk, and wearing silken mittens, and careful always—how one recalls the characteristic smoothing of the lavender-silk skirt!— that their feet should be hidden from the public gaze as much as might be. Then, too, my fancy pictures them as always in a garden, filled with the gracious, olden blooms of gillyflower and pink, auricula and double-stock. There are beehives under the southern wall, and rows of ordered raspberry-canes, and a dovecote mounting high into the summer blue. Or else, since summer did not shine always even upon Lavender Ladies, I see her, this one little lady who is the type of all, in a parlour cool and low, wainscoted high in oak as old as her own pedigree. There are family portraits reaching almost to the ceiling, and brass and silver candlesticks and snuffers, and one of Miss Austen’s novels on the little table near the window-nook—the table that is too dainty and too slight for other literature. There is a great bowl full of rose-leaves, and a couch on which the smallest of Lavender Ladies could never quite be at her ease, and a cat, too round for beauty, stretched before the fire of logs. And she is looking into the flames, this little lady of mine, seeing the past move by in stately fashion; and the tears are in her eyes from time to time, because so many have fared forth into the last silence. So many? Nay, all, it seems; for, even in her gentle experience, it has been the good, the brave, the happy, who have left the inconsequent and the ne’er-do-wells to live, and prosper, and forget their betters who are dead and gone.

She is afraid of men, or at the least distrustful Throughout the long years of maidenhood she has drawn a veil, as it were, between the modesty she cherishes and the rude forcefulness of males who fight, and earn haphazard bread, and dole out the bread so won to wives and children. She is secure from battle of that sort, by virtue of her slender patrimony; though the amount of that same patrimony—remembering how much she spends in charity—would astonish us, I fancy, by its littleness. I say that she shrinks from men; but, when she stoops to care for one of the distrusted sex, she may command him anything.

I have asked Cathy to help me in this forlorn hope of the Lavender Lady enterprise; for she has known at least one of the dying race, who lives, as it chances, almost at our own door. But Cathy, who Is singularly prudent at odd times, refuses to help me.

"You can’t describe them, Murphy,” she has said constantly; “you can try, of course. You tried to describe charity once, if you remember, and a vagrant learned your views, and came to you. Oh, he was interesting, I admit! And some day you will tell me all about it?”

“Babe,” I respond, “you will kindly go into the next room, and play and sing to me for an hour—or two, or three, or twenty-four—and I will get my Lavender Ladies down in pen and ink, or I’ll never touch a pen again.”

“You never do touch a pen, dear. It’s all pencil and odd scraps of paper. Now, Murphy, do you think it worth your while to scribble pencil-notes that nobody will ever read—nobody, I mean, unless they think of coming a-begging?”

“Babe,” I repeat, “you will go and sing to me. Sing old ballads; and, first of all and last of all, you will give me ‘The Sands of Dee.'"

Of course she obeys me ultimately. I find that a good wife always obeys her husband when inclination or innocent vanity is tickled; and, just because there are so many husbands gifted with that power of second-sight, there are so many happy marriages.

At any rate, Cathy goes into the next room and sings to me. I sit down to paper and pencil, resolved to give my bonnie Lavender Ladies their due; but speedily, in spite of my good intentions; it comes home to me that I am attempting the impossible. Who shall reconstruct the scents of last year’s rose-gardens? Who shall tell how fragrant was the smell of stocks when last year’s August sun was hot upon the garden-beds?

I put the pencil in my ear and lie back, and hear Cathy’s songs, cool, low, and soft, steal out to me. At any rate, I have her voice to listen to, though the Lavender Ladies are shy to answer to my bidding. The child is singing old-time ballads—English ballads, with the sweet of the hayfields in them—simple, upright, cleanly ballads, of human love, and human woe, and human aching after dreamland. I let myself drift, and a kindly glamour lies about the land whereto the Babe’s voice leads me. It is as though I came, at mid of a June night, to an enchanted land, all gold and pearl and purple under the full moon; across the tree-tops steals a rainbow thread of mist, and owls are hooting, and great moths are blundering down the breeze; and down below, among the flowers, walk maids and heroes buried long ago in the prime of the world’s glory.

And still the Babe is singing; and now, without knowing how I came there, I am back again in the garden of my Lavender Lady. I can see the velvet lawn, can scent the fragrance of gillyflower and primrose, of pansy and auricula, of clove-pink and rose and honeysuckle. And now again the two dreams merge one into the other, and I realise that my lavender folk are the last descendants of those prime-o’-the-world’s dream-women and dream-men who walked in the enchanted land. Ah, surely, yes! Proud, with a pride that was humble and secure—dainty, with a daintiness that sprang from generations of sweet thinking —tender, with the tenderness which came of joy and suffering alike borne reverently—my Lavender Ladies surely had the qualities that once on a day, when the world was young and brave, went to the making of heroes and of heroines alike.

Under all their frailty, behind their gentle primness, beneath the timidity that shrank from men, there lay a gallant spirit. When suffering came, of soul or body, they said little to their neighbours, these prim little Lavender Ladies, but fought the battle silently and cheerfully. The lavender silk—I seem to hear it rustle yet —was armour hiding warriors, after all, and not the least of their combats was that waged against steam, against the money-spirit, against the uprising of a new and uncouth generation. A hopeless combat, this last; slowly and steadily the steam-tide drove them back and back, engulfed them, tossed their lives and hopes and fancies whither it listed; but they died gallantly, protesting to the end, like true martyrs, that the old faith was better than the new faith, that they were glad to die rather than see the hard days come when men, believing nothing and therefore blind to all romance, asked nothing better than to live at the steam-speed. They died with the scent of their own white roses to guide them on the unknown road.

Well, they are dead and gone, these Lavender Ladies—with sadly few survivors of the battle— and we are left to ask what better things have come to us, now that the turmoil and the dust of strife are round about us. I cannot find any recompense myself; but, then, I am kin to the Lost Folk who believe that hayfields and country lanes, gillyflowers and pinks and English ladies, are the first gifts of God. We are not wanted to-day, we whom I call the Lost Folk, and it is idle of us to stand at the grave of the Lavender Lady—to stand bare-headed, looking down the lanes of yester-year. And yet—and yet—we miss her sorely in our modern life.

Quite suddenly—Cathy is singing an Irish ballad now—I return once again to that garden where the flowers are orderly, and sweet, and fragrant. I see my Lavender Lady as a girl, and she is leaning on the sundial. The dial has its motto: “Move quietly and by Nature’s laws, as I move”; and it has always seemed to me that some ancestor ot my own was gifted with exceeding common-sense.

Nay, I will not write down her thoughts, though I seem to listen to and understand them. There is a gallant—and he has come and gone— and in the little lady’s heart there are long thoughts of him. Such thoughts as would have made him happy, had he known of them; such thoughts as were made up of gillyflowers and pansies; such thoughts—but would you have me pry into secrets that were whispered for my ear alone? I am faithful to my lady, as knights of old were faithful to ladies of younger and less proven charm.

Perhaps he did not understand. Perhaps he was dull-witted, and deserved to lose her. At any rate, he rode away, and reared a family, doubtless—the ride-away type of gallant always does—and left the Lavender Lady to make glad a younger generation. She would have been gracious as a wife, no doubt, but she would not have been the Lavender Lady whom we know.

“Why, Murphy, you’re asleep! cries the Babe, coming softly in from the next room.

“No, only dreaming, Babe—and dribbling. Look over what I’ve written."

She takes the pencilled scraps, reads them with that air of over-wisdom which, as I have said elsewhere, invariably reminds me of a kitten wearing spectacles, and nods sedately at me.

“They’re all very right and very pretty, Murphy, but—but you haven’t quite caught the picture, after alL I told you it was a mad enterprise."

Alas! The Babe is right, and I know it. I have only done my best—and that is a different matter from putting just the true, inevitable colours on the canvas.

“I suppose you must have sung out of tune,” I answer, with good-tempered malice “Murphy, I didn’t I I—"

She stops, and, seeing that I am laughing, she laughs, too. It is a foolish habit we have, this of laughing on the slightest pretext Our kindly doctor here in Arcady, while taking beverages which he denies his patients, asserts to me that laughter, if developed on strictly foolish principles, would rob him of three-fourths of his income.

“At any rate, I was writing to your singing, infant,” I add; “and I thought I was in tune.”

“That is prettier than anything you’ve scribbled about the Lavender Ladies,” says Cathy.

“Ah!" I murmur. " So it was jealousy, after all! Dear Babe, they’re dead and gone, nearly all of them, and-”

But the Babe is near to me, and her face wears that familiar look of a dumb and comely friend when he has had the worst of an argument and pleads with you to remember that he is silent, small, and vastly comely.

CHAPTER X
BIRTHDAY PRESENTS, AND A VILLAGE BLACKSMITH

It is not always that a birthday present is the one right gift to make, choose it as carefully as one will. Yet Stylesey and I, this once, have plotted to a noble end.

Cathy’s birthday is more important to me even than Charlie Stuart’s. Without the least wish to trouble any one with an account of the poetry and the glamour attaching to all that the Babe does or says, I feel compelled to put it on record that there’s something fine and epic to me about the child’s birthday. She might so easily have been less, or more, than Cathy; whereas the Fates arranged it so that she is just herself.

For this reason I grow fidgety always about the time of year which saw full summer and herself arrive together. I purchase some half-dozen presents feverishly, trusting that one among the number may be the right, inevitable gift This year, however, Stylesey helps me to achieve real greatness.

On this Thursday morning the breakfast-table is littered with odd packets—as of old, when we lived in different houses, when I used to run up to the Hall later in the morning to see if I had chosen luckily. To-day I am privileged, for the first time, to watch the beginning of all this opening of parcels.

I am in the breakfast-room long before Cathy appears. I look on, while she darts from one packet to another, rather like a bird seeking the early worm on Arcady’s own lawn. It is a pleasant five minutes for me; indeed, there are few luxuries comparable with that of giving presents. I seem to be lucky in my choice, and Cathy says very creditable things of me—things undeserved, of course, and so possessed of that added flavour attaching to all stolen fruit.

Observe that gift-making is an art, as well as a science—an art so delicate that years of apprenticeship are needed if one would learn its details. The small boy offers practice to the learner; his wants lie all in the elementary stage of the subject, and there's a wide range of choice— beginning with books on moths, birds’ eggs, beetles, butterflies, and other small fry, going forward to the charmed land where fishing-rods and cricket outfits grow, and passing into the fairyland known as “The Land of the First Gun.” The boy is simple, unspoiled, and he welcomes gifts with a broad, outspoken grin that in itself is flattery.

The girl, however—small, or big—is a serious matter. Her tastes lie in odd directions, as a rule, and the traffic in presents, as between her sex and mine, suggests vaguely the kind of barter in vogue with the old traders in savage lands. A handful of beads would purchase ivory or skins in those happy days of commerce; to-day a handful of pearls, strung on a slender thread, will purchase a surprising return of gratitude from the recipient Women, even when grown up, maintain, I take it, an elemental childishness which is akin to that of savages. As for the girl-child, she shows open traces of this primeval instinct; as witness those chains of blue beads which you can buy in the market-places of provincial towns. So far as I know, they are only to be bought in these particular markets; in no usual shop will you find beads of the same lustre, the same deep blue; and you pay sixpence for the shorter, a shilling for the longer, chains. It seems a tawdry price; but see how the girl-child’s eyes expand and glisten when you bring the gift She is again a sweet and natural savage, roaming long-forgotten prairies. Believe me, the gift of pearls and other trifles, dearly bought, will never in her after-years bring half the rapture of those deep-blue beads.

As I have said, the boy is primitive, too, but in a reasonable way. I remember one such boy. I had bought him a new bat; and he clutched it with one hand, my arm with the other, and led me out into a neighbouring field, after snatching up a ball and some wickets on the way.

“You bowl at me,” he said, with the boy’s clear sense that he has only to give orders and see them instantly obeyed. “You bowl at me. I want to try this bat”

So I bowled at him. Not all my fondness for cricket has ever taught me the art of batting, bowling, or fielding; but lovers of a game, as of a lady fair, may be clumsy in their wooing, yet no less true and honest for that reason.

I bowled at him; and he hit treely, until—such lucid intervals come to the worst ot bowlers— I happened to send down a ball of decent length, with a leg-break that surprised us both. He was so astonished, indeed, that it bowled him, and he came up to me.

“I say, it’s a jolly good bat,” he observed. “What a sensible chap you are!”

I responded to his frank grin; for it is seldom that people realise .the obvious truth that I am sensible.

“You see, a fellow knows what a fellow wants,” he proceeded, making imaginary cuts and drives with the new treasure. “It’s girls that make you laugh. Nell ’’—Nell was his sister, fresh from the triumphs of her first dinner-party—“Nell was awfully pleased this morning, when the governor fetched a bracelet out of his pocket He’d forgotten to give it her the night before—just like the governor—but she didn’t mind. She just went for it, like a terrier for a rat, and was as pleased as if she’d hit up fifty in half-an-hour. Girls do go off their heads like that; and she didn’t like it when I came up and asked her why she was so pleased. ‘ You can’t play cricket with a bracelet,’ as I told her; ' so where’s the use of it?'”

Now, I can see the humour of that verdict, delivered with an assurance final and complete. I can understand the delicate absurdity of such a point of view. Yet, by some illogical process, my own outlook on the question, if I were honest with myself, is just the boy’s. I should have phrased it, “You can’t play golf with a bracelet,” and should have counted up instinctively how many diverse and gallant clubs could have been purchased at less cost than this trifling ornament It is a simple point of view, after all; but, in making gifts to those who are neither boys nor men-boys, it is well to forget the abiding truth of the formula, “You can’t play cricket with a bracelet”

Cathy, however, is pleased with my judgment this morning; and I preserve a decorous silence, all through breakfast-time, as to the big present which Stylesey and I are giving her.

It is only afterwards that I suggest carelessly a stroll into the garden. Cathy, suspecting no guile, comes with me; and in the hall, as we go through, is Stylesey—Stylesey, and with her a slim, dark, comely-looking lass.

“This is your new maid, Cathy," I say, beating a retreat as if I had been guilty of a felony.

We arrange these little scenes in Arcady, and somehow I think them vastly wholesome. They have the spirit of a game of hide-and-seek in them—the spirit of bygone expeditions into haunted woods, when one went forward on tiptoe, expecting goblins, fairies, knights and their winsome ladies—the spirit of romance and mystery which underlies the superficies of life— the spirit which makes life life-worthy until the end.

Even Stylesey is innocent and a child again,

I catch her roguish glance as I go through the hall. I have a glimpse of Cathy's face—surprised, and pleased, and full of wonder. I exit chuckling, like any usual villain of the drama.

Our scheme proved more than successful; it was brilliant in its results. For Stylesey had shown keen judgment, and the little maid, useful at first, speedily grew indispensable. She came of yeoman stock—there’s hone cleaner and more wholesome—and to some little past experience of her duties she added a quickness, a willingness to learn fresh details, which was the subject of more than one of Cathy’s " discourses.” My wife resents the term “discourse”; but, indeed, when she has a topic at heart, she is apt to catch fire at the sacred lamp of rhetoric, and to address an imaginary meeting. That the meeting happens to consist of two—the orator and myself—does not trouble her; nor does the fact that usually we are entirely in agreement, and that her heated argument is directed toward converting one who already holds the faith. There’s an Irish strain in Cathy’s family, though her pedigree attempts to deny it Dog Flick is dead; but the new maid—her name is Pansy, and she is worthy of the old, sweet-smelling name—bids fair to make my wife forget her grief. Pansy, as I say, comes of yeoman stock, who settled in the neighbourhood of Arcady two centuries ago; it follows that she has the two prime qualities—wholesome pride, and wholesome humour. Abhorring the servant-problem as I may, standing far off from it as I do whenever I can, I think—absurdly, doubtless— that I could speak winged words upon the topic. Yet such discussion brings one back to the old, vexed question of democracy. To serve willingly, master and servant each, is the secret of the whole foolish problem. Pansy, the new maid, is proud, as we are; and, because she knows that her pride comes straight from generations of forebears who have lived upon the land, we understand each other—Cathy, maid Pansy, and I.

Some day—if I were not too lazy—I should like to write a history of the yeoman. In Arcady, and round about the neighbourhood, we call him a statesman; and he regrets to this day that the sound old term has grown, by long misuse, to be applied to vagrant and haphazard politicians, catching votes as sun-dew catches flies and feeds on them.

The yeoman, surely, is gentle. He has other habits—healthier ones—than ours; he breaks his fast soon after dawn, and dines at midday; but in essentials he is of the gently bred, and the fine, ripe hospitality of the man, when he welcomes you beneath his roof, is not a growth of yesterday, or yester-year, but of a past whose roots go down into old soil. His sons, one finds, are tall and broad, his daughters comely; and when he comes to die, we have no sentimental death-bed scenes to tell of him, because his end is peace and silence —peace, and a looking-up toward the hills.

“Observe,” says the Wanderer, “that, when a man’s time comes to die in Arcady, he thinks always, and peacefully, of the everlasting hills.”

It is Utopian to wish that every man were so well known in his own valley that to carve his name only on the headstone should be enough. It would be a sufficient epitaph for Tom Lad, as I have said; it would be a fitting chronicle of the good life-story of a half-score yeomen who live in honour here in the Vale of Arcady, and who, I think, will die in peace. How the old names return to one!—names known to the traditions, not of one generation of cheery, tough farm-masters, but of five generations, or six, or seven.

It was these statesmen who marched long ago to Flodden Field, and decided the battle at the last edge of nightfall. It is the yeomen who to-day win victories over fields more tranquil, and prove themselves the battle-winners; for none who know the work of pasture and of meadow, of mistal, laithe, and stable, could ever grudge the yeoman his slender earnings.

He earns so little, as we judge wealth. Times were better in the days of his forefathers, and so he can well afford to farm for recreation's sake, because they left him what stands for riches in his simple life. He farms from love of battle, too. He farms, as his ancestors fought on Flodden Field, to win a fight, and to lose as little blood and sinew on the way as need be, while he daunts his adversary, the land. For battle of some sort, after all, is physic to a man, and ever will be, though gentle theorists, remote from life and from experience, have always striven to prove that we could thrive upon the food of peace alone, without admixture of a coarser diet.

Undoubtedly I am in the saddle of another hobby. I can feel the swing of the gallop under me, as if I rode a Stuart horse. The yeoman— the statesman of abiding strength and constancy —is so little known to history that we are apt to overlook him in our survey of past days. Yet it is he who has made our history—he, and the land-bred gentry who led him. It was inevitably so; for Nature wills it that the tree grows the sturdiest whose roots have grown deepest into mother soil—wills it that such a tree, moreover, has anchorage most secure when the tempests gather on the hills and break in fury. Look where you will in history—our English history, I mean—and you will find that no movement had useful or continuing results that was not carried through by men whose roots went deep into the land. Men, owning no such roots, have lifted themselves to giddy heights, have shone in splendour for a moment across the pageant of their time, have seemed to lead and to inspire a forward movement; but they have perished, and their record lies like a glittering bauble crushed by some passing heel.

Again, it is all so logical, so simple. History is no tangled briar-hedge of random impulse, casual achievement; it is a clear road, leading from the distant and more distant truths to the gleam that lights the further hill-tops. Your men who accepted evil government so long and patiently—your men who rose at last because they had looked round and about them, unhurriedly and with judgment—your men who broke down tyranny, and lifted England nearer to a fine ideal—they had learned strength and patience, these reformers—had been pupils of the winds that had battered their ripened crops, of the sun that gladdened, and the rain that fed their lands, of the mist and the dew and the mating warmth of spring. How could they fail to be leaders, though they seemed to follow only?

Even Cromwell and his Ironsides were drawn from the busy haunts where the plough rides down the furrows, and all the year's work calls a man to labour. It would be frankly humorous if I made pretence of admiration for those who raised the most disastrous rebellion we have known; but I realise the strength, the bravery, the steady endurance of the farmward men who followed the country squire of Huntingdon. In right or evil doing, one likes a man to be strong and forward-stepping; the weak evil-doer, the weak well-doer, are enemies always of their own cause.

I do not claim, indeed, that our farmers and our yeomen have all, or nearly all, earned goodly epitaphs; I claim that, though their view of life be right or wrong, they follow it as brave men should.

Through the horrors of what followed the rebellion and its temporary success, through the days, half tragic, half ludicrous, which saw Cromwell the victim of his sacrilege, which saw him glance sideways, like a thief, at the crown whose sanctity he had despised—throughout that mad, unhappy time we, who hate the man, can still admire his constancy, his struggle for the cause which once had seemed to him the true one. There is a legend that Cromweir once had no ambition save to make England free, and we in Arcady, who are a little prone to believe in all good legends, credit the bluff squire with that intent There was a time in his life, undoubtedly, when he juggled not at all with his own conscience, but his Ironsides carried him to the top of a high hill, and showed him England and the crown, and he was dazzled.

Cathy, coming across the lawn to me, is met by the last pencilled sheet, which the wind snatched as I laid it down. She picks it up and reads it, and she approaches me with that air of dainty raillery which is her own.

“King Charles's head again, Murphy,” she observes, with studied sweetness.

“I was merely talking to myself, Babe—without any boredom—and surely any man is allowed so much of liberty?”

“Yes, but Bridget, the brown hen, has just hatched out her twelfth chicken—her twelfth, dear, out of fifteen eggs! I think she’s splendid, and I ran across to tell you.”

Bridget is a lady of uncertain age. Her natural pugnacity has led to the loss of one eye, but from the other she still regards one with a glance fierce and undismayed, and takes neat pieces out of one’s hand whenever it is necessary to lift her from the nest. But she is a marvellous sitter, this elderly hen, and a more gentle mother never rode chickens on her back.

I have to inspect the new brood, as a matter of course, and a number of fine contributions to Stuart history are lost, I fear, in consequence. It is, as a rule, idle to go fishing to-morrow for the trout you saw rise this evening, and fancies are oddly like fish in that respect.

It is Pansy, the new maid, who has led me into all this discussion. She has pride, she has humour, she is neat in person and in habits, and already she is a welcome new-comer into Arcady.

Stylesey and I look at each other now and then. We say nothing, since Stylesey’s reticence is so well known that all the parish guesses why Tom Lad is “fondish of his greenhouse.” We look at each other when Cathy praises her new treasure-trove, and we smile guardedly, as who should say, “We two, alone, have done this goodly thing.”

I want to get away to my village blacksmith, but it is marvellous how many interests lie in wait for you about the shrubberies, the lawns, the garden-paths of Arcady. In vain you set out with a clear purpose—to talk of blacksmiths, for instance—in vain you settle down to a sure topic. Some memory of old days assails you, to begin with, as you pass the priest’s hiding chamber on your way through the house. Some specious rogue or hapless wanderer meets you next on the threshold of your own main entry. Some hen is hatching out her chicks in the field beyond, or some new animal has been lately purchased at great price, and must be viewed at once.

Still, I mean to reach my blacksmith at last It is towards the end of Pansy’s first week with us, while I am full ot the big work done among the hay, that I go forth to seek the Wanderer I find him at his gate, dusting his nostrils after a long pinch of snuff, and I suggest a stroll.

“I’ve a twinge of gout, boy," he answers, “and you’re in rudest health. You are seeking to take a mean advantage of the old and the decrepit. Well, a walk now? Sit down and let us ask counsel of a glass or so of dry sherry. In wine there is wisdom, as some one rightly, and for all time, observed."

The result is that we go out together once again into the unknown, and we walk till we are foot-weary, and late in the afternoon we reach a village cradled in grey hills. We have eaten little food, nor needed much, but the sight of a village reawakens hunger. The village has no inn; we walk down the street, passing grey, substantial houses, big and little, but we find no door at which to knock with a request for victuals.

At the end of the street—and we are really hungry now, with appetite deferred—there is a smithy, flanked by a little cottage on one side, a little garden on the other. In the garden sits a fine figure of a man, his shirt-sleeves rolled up above his elbow. The fence dividing highroad from garden is so low as to be negligible, and we have a clear view of the man. He is forty, I should guess; he has a clean-cut face, tanned to a rich mahogany tint; his beard grows thick and brown, though neatly trimmed; his arms are modelled on the lines of Vulcan’s and the Elder Gods’. Withal he is a striking picture of what, for lack of a better phrase, I must call the deep repose of strength. There’s repose in the way his pipe-smoke curls up among the clouds of gnats, repose in the lines of his folded arms, in the curves of his old, snugly-fitting clothes. Clean, strong, honest—those are the three words that come into one’s mind while looking at him.

The Wanderer and myself are so surprised by this sudden vision that we halt instinctively, and then my comrade points his cane at the stranger across the low dividing-wall, and flourishes it daintily.

“Observe,” he says, “that here are a couple of tramps upon the King’s highroad. They have walked far, and they are hungry, and there is no hostelry at which to call.”

The blacksmith, not unnaturally, looks surprised; but there is something about the Wanderer that appeals at once to most people. The smith eyes us gravely for a moment, then a slow smile spreads upward through the wrinkles of his face.

CHAPTER XI
CONTINUATION OF AN ODD ADVENTURE

“There is cheese and bread in my cottage yonder," he answers; “but that is only food for gentlemen nowadays. The tramps have daintier palates since we began to pamper them."

They measure and approve each other, the Wanderer and the blacksmith. I notice that this village smith has a voice refined and musical, deep as it comes from his big chest. We are once more on the trail of an adventure, the Wanderer and I, and I wonder what may be our friend's story.

Without more ceremony the blacksmith joins us on the highway, leads the way to his cottage, past the closed smithy-door, and ushers us in. The room is small, white-washed, with little save necessary furniture; but it has a book-case, and there are good prints on the walls, and in the corner on the right hand of the hearth there's an easy chair—not a chair named “easy" only by convention—which carries one back, somehow, to old ’Varsity days.

Our host brings forth, from a secret cupboard, cheese and bread and yellow butter. He fills a pan with water, sets it on the fire, and brings out eggs from another hiding-place. Raspberry jam appears, moreover, and a jar ot honey, and we feel as hungry as good King Alfred when, once on a day, he' watched the cakes a-baking and wished that they were ready.

After our meal we stroll out again, by the smith’s request, into his strip of garden. The sun is near to setting by this time, but still the bees go humming at their task. A pleasant task, I fancy, and one which, to a man who watches these same bees in flower-land, suggests an altered outlook on their reputation for hard, disinterested labour. Small as this garden is, it is more full of old-world herbs and flowers than many a richer man’s, and the bees are obviously enjoying their late meal. One or two are growing drowsy at the nectar-cup, and would go home to bed, if they were wise. Toil of honey-making in the combs will come afterwards, but it is idle to deny that your bee enjoys his banquet of the many courses. On returning to the hive, doubtless, he talks of labour in the fields: and the drones who hang about the hive, a despised and listless race, may credit all his tales of noble toil.

We sit there, the Wanderer, the blacksmith, and myself. We smoke tranquil pipes beneath a tranquil sky, and we talk at random.

A silence follows, and we watch the sun go down in splendour behind the raking hill-tops. An owl hoots near at hand. The scent of herbs and flowers steals quietly from the garden space, and the bees drone home to bed.

The Wanderer is moved. He rises, like some minstrel of the olden time, throws back his head, and quotes fifteen lines of Homer—quotes them triumphantly in face of the quiet, pearl-grey sky.

“Observe," he says, after waiting, so it seems, until the last echo of the gallant lines has gone to sleep among the further hills—“observe that there is not another man in all the Dale who can quote the lines following after mine."

Whereupon the village blacksmith gets to his feet in turn, and opens his big chest, and gives us the next thirty lines. It is all undoubtedly like some old Tournament of Song; and I should wonder if the fairies had glamoured me, making me see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears, had I been less accustomed to strange happenings when the Wanderer leads me into open country. The smith’s deep voice, his joyous lingering over the phrases and the long, rolling lines that have lived down the ages, proclaim him a true lover of the Greek.

The Wanderer is astonished. He takes three successive pinches of snuff. He looks the blacksmith up and down. There is something bellicose about him, as always when he encounters serious rivalry.

“You may know your Iltad, sir," he says, “but I shall quote from the fifth book of a finer work, the Odyssey, and you will scarcely tollow me over that fence, I think.”

My own preference leans slightly towards the Iliad; but my comrade could not well do otherwise than cherish the Odyssey, for in love of open-air adventure, in pleasant humour, in downright strength of purpose, he is modelled on that Arch-Wanderer, Ulysses of the many voyages.

The Wanderer sends up into the quiet night again some five-and-twenty lines of sonorous Greek. The blacksmith smiles, as he picks up a worn and dog’s-eared book from the end of the garden-seat “I chanced to be reading the fifth book before you came,” he says, “but I knew it all by heart before. The lines follow on, if I remember them—”

Again the Grecian stride goes rosy-footed up the hills; and I would halt here, where giants of the language meet together and give battle, to ask how it comes that the Greek, alone of alien tongues, rings true to Arcady’s own speech. Our mother-language here is made up of Danish, Norse, and Scotch, built up on a folk-speech older still. The Latins never yet have influenced our northern tongue; and this is a sure token that we have resisted constantly the Latin view of life. The Norman came here to the north, as to the south: but we rejected him, his language, and his Latin outlook on the world: we clung steadfastly to the faith of the northern blood— mixed blood, but pure northern, all of it—while in the lower and the sunnier lands of England they grew reconciled to the French invader, and came at last to fawn on him, trying to speak his tongue, succeeding only in corrupting their own language.

To-day—here in the north—we resist and half-despise all Latin speech. How comes it, then, that the Greek rings true and musical, alone of all the over-seas tongues, to such good haters of alien languages as the Wanderer and myself? I do not know. The Wanderer—a man of longer experience, of better judgment, than myself—can find no answer to the question, though we discuss it often. Of one outstanding truth only are we sure—that Greece stands like a solitary mountain up-rising from the plains of history. Greece sang as only the Bible and our Shakespeare sing. Greece played not at all with quips, conventions, falsities, when she painted that strenuous, earnest picture on which the gods look down, naming it human life. Greece—God rest her—gave out to the world for all time a message which, to all time, will lift her high among the nations. Old Homer sang. What finer history can we English boast—we, who sent out Raleigh, Clifford, Drake —Ulysses all—into the Spanish Main? Old Homer sang. And the joy and the grief of his soul went out for ever, and we hear the music still, and Greece is deified.

The blacksmith finishes, and it seems as if the voice of some strong, sweet wind had ceased, leaving a silence threaded through with afternotes.

“Sir," says the Wanderer, with something of reverence in his voice, " you carry yourself like a gentleman. In my time all gentlemen knew Greek and loved it. Egad, you’re one of the old, fine school, sir!”

“I have aimed high, then, sir,” the other answers cheerily.

Again we fall to talking, and gradually we learn the life-story of our blacksmith. The charm of the story lies in its simplicity, and I laugh as I recall the peace of that July dusk, as I remember the absolute content and vigour of our host—I laugh, when it occurs to me to give his history as a riddle to be solved, a riddle awaiting foolish answers. All of us, I think, would be ready to suggest one or other obvious explanation of a case so far removed from usual experience, and none would guess the simple answer.

What a field of surmise is opened outl Our host, for instance, is “the victim of intemperate habits”—uttered softly, with a dry, uncharitable sneer and a drooping of the eyelids—and has come down in the world. Our host, on the other hand, is rigidly abstemious, but a Secret dogs his footsteps like some phantom hound of moorland legend. The face of the riddle-guesser grows warm and sanguine as he suggests a taste for bigamy on the blacksmith’s part, or a murdered enemy buried underneath a too luxuriant potato-crop in some far-distant county. The last supposition is enticing, I admit, with all its atmosphere of Eugene Aram—Aram, not all whose scholarship could save him from the crime of murder. Frankly, I have a weakness for that suggestion of the potato-crop, and can understand the fine zest with which the riddle-guesser hunts his theme. The blacksmith forgot, when he hid his victim in the nearest available ground, that potatoes were the special crop for next year; he buries the murdered man a little deeper than the owner of the garden tills his soil; it is only when the owner comes to dig up his marvellous crop that his fork strikes deep into some alien substance. Then detection and the gallows follow, and the tale runs trimly. " ’Tis pity ’twere not true,” our friend will sigh when he learns the gentle finish of the blacksmith's tale; for I notice that, with those who have a palate tuned to mystery and sudden death, they have little real sympathy for the dead, but prefer instead to show their prowess in hunting down “the corpse's owner,” as I once heard a parish constable describe a murderer.

The Blacksmith’s Tale has too quiet a finish, I admit, to allow of dallying with dramatic possibilities. Yet I would suggest further luckless guesses. Our host, gentleman, lover of Greek, is decoy-duck for a gang of swindlers. Or does he hide a coiners’ plant behind his anvil? The latter plot might be developed happily; there would be a dramatic and engaging moment when the officers of justice came tapping at the smithy-door. Our coiner would throw the tokens of his nefarious trade upon the fire, would blow the bellows vigorously; and, when the officers at last broke down the door, they would find him at the honest task of forging horseshoes, the while he quoted Homer blithely.

Poor blacksmith, clean of heart and body! Your riddle holds no mystery at all; it holds only the pleasant fact that strong men find strength to break their fetters now and then—the fetters made in city-forges—that strong men are apt to revert to the strong and ancient faiths. There’s no other mystery about our host than his answer to the call of a primeval, sane simplicity. He does not tell us this in so many words; it is only by piecing together scattered fragments of talk that we learn his story.

The tale is roughly this: and though it offers no heart-stirring episodes of bigamy, wild living, or promiscuous murder, it is enthralling by reason of its sanity. Nowadays we have lost the old, rough methods of judging whether folk are sound or ill of mind, for it is undoubtedly singular—according to modern rules—that a man should regard life from the standpoint of the hills and fields; further, it is eccentric that he should shun the uproar and the dust of cities made with hands, while it is proof absolute of lunacy that a man should say openly, without shame, but rather with a modest pride, that the lowing of the kine, the smell of the wind from the moor, are worthier than all the streets in all the world. Yet it is odd that our blacksmith shows no outward trace of lunacy. Mind and body and heart seem all well cared for, wholesome; perhaps he has the deep cunning of the feeble-minded, which bids him hide his weakness from prying eyes.

His story, then, is roughly this. He was the son of poor and well-bred parents, so we gather, who found the means, with hardship, to send him to Cambridge—Trinity, to be exact. Afterwards, he had to earn a livelihood. With brains and a good degree to help him, he drifted naturally into the most exacting and ill-paid of all professions, the schoolmaster’s. He had no heart in it, and he was not the man to labour well at any task which was alien to the best in him.

Touching the question of a good degree at either ’Varsity, I recall often the heart-felt gratitude of a friend of other days, who came to see me here in Arcady after the years had sundered us. He found me still a happy idler in my small domain, fixed in my habit of scribbling notes beneath the lime-tree, constant in my love of vagrancy, my zest for- watching the seasons go by in sweet procession. He, meanwhile, had painted pictures—pictures which grey elders welcomed, though they were shocked and disappointed when they met the painter of them and saw how young he was. They had looked for grey hairs, for ripe experience; they forgot that second-sight is a cradle-gift.

How clearly I can see that painter friend of mine, as he sat beneath the lime-tree with me— much as the Wanderer, the blacksmith, and myself, are sitting now, but in a clearer light We talked of olden days; and then we talked of painting; and my friend’s eyes grew big, and bright, and eager; and I knew that he was seeing fairies. He talked—heaven, how he talked!—of wanderings by hill and dale, of purples, magical and other-worldly, which he had seen in furrows of the gloam-tide moors. He talked of the sick, long striving to put down on canvas, so that all the world might see, these greens and golds, these purples, browns, and butter-yellows, which opened out to him the freedom of God’s highest city. He might be young in looks, but he was old in effort.

He was striving, ever and ever, to make men see that the littleness, the treacheiy, the dirtiness of life, are empty lies that shadow for a moment the strong, wholesome sun. He was painter and poet and prophet, and his work abides among us to this day, tempting the folk of little faith to reconsider their mean outlook upon life.

And what was it he said, think you, after one of those speech-laden silences which good friends know?

“Thank God I missed my First at Cambridge."

That was all, and I smiled as I remembered his desperation, when he came to me, years ago, hammering at my sported oak—I was encouraging the delusion that I was doing a hard morning's work—and compelled me to open and to take him in.

“I’ve lost my First,” he said; and his head was hanging down, and he was woe-begone.

“There are worse losses,” I answered, trying foolishly to comfort him.

" There's no worse loss, and you're a fool" said he, striding to the door and banging it behind him.

Some day we shall have the pathos and the humour of examinations described for us by one who has wit, and sympathy, and a knowledge of realities. The bitter fall, when a man has worked as my friend had toiled; the sitting on the ground, bruised and shaken, with all a boy’s desperate certainty that never again will there be a getting-up; the blank-verse tragedy that courses through the man-boy's mind on these occasions—it is all so real, though built upon the dry sand named a Tripos.

My friend’s life was done with, so he thought, when he lost his First; and May Week found him a misanthrope, packing his clothes in readiness to get away and hide himself. He had hoped for a Fellowship and a something which he always named, with bated breath, a career.

He found his true career, and lived to see purple in among the folded hills, and came again to me, as I have said, with devout thanksgiving that he had “missed his First.” He had missed the wrong turning, likewise, on his road of life, and had found himself instead a joyous traveller up that steep, seductive lane which leads to the hill-tops and to the land which country-folk call “the Over-Beyond, as a body might say, where the fairies always dance and the mushrooms always grow.”

The blacksmith, sitting here to-night between the Wanderer and myself, and blowing lragrant smoke into the eyes of winking stars, had no such luck. He gained his First, and his well-bred, unimaginative parents applauded him. He applauded himself, possibly, for the man-boy looks always at results—a First in Classics, a century at cricket, a conquest over the little girl at the tobacco-shop who sells him cigarettes at famine prices—and never halts by any chance to ask himself the reason for his pride.

The blacksmith scored his First, and went out into what was to him a land of drudgery; for, indeed, the schoolmaster, if he lack the true birth-instinct for his work, had better grow potatoes for a living. Our friend had not the instinct; he abandoned a good post, and his parents, dismayed and startled, made sure that he was destined for the gallows.

He tried many professions—still haunted, mind you, by the superstition in his family that gentility comes from the nature of a man’s occupation, not from the cleanly zest he brings to it He followed many genteel roads of livelihood; and then his parents died, within a few months of each other; and it occurred to him that at last he was a freeman—a freeman of that little commonwealth which is made up of a man’s soul, a man’s wayward heart and fractious body. He no longer needed to follow, for duty’s sake, hard roads that were abhorrent to him. Like a garment that is soiled, he cast from him his false gentility.

He was strong of his hands. As a lad he had delighted to slip out and learn the great business of forging horseshoes and the like from the village smith. He packed his books into a trunk, and he cast the dust of servitude from off his feet for ever, and he came to the smithy-shop, here at the end of the grey village. Moreover, he maintained and deepened his love of Greek; and I think he could never have loved labour quite so well, loved he not Homer more.

And now? What of the ten years he has spent here, earning tranquilly the means to feed his simple wants, earning leisure to live with heath and pasture-land and to learn their secrets, earning long hours of repose in which to better his acquaintance with the Greek? You cannot sit beside him, as the Wanderer and I are sitting, you cannot listen to the free, strong voice, as we are doing, or you would have no need to put the question. Like a big and comely tree our blacksmith rears himself amid the peace and the seclusion of a favoured land; to look at him is to acknowledge the virtue of the soil in which his roots are planted deep; reliant, thick of his thews, joyous and alert, he stands for the portrait of a man.

He has heard the call of the hills, and God is with him. He has seen the moors grow ripe to harvest, what time the heather takes a brown hue on its purple wing, what time the bracken mellows and lies in long, sweeping patches—reaching to the sky that tops the jagged line of heath—like some new, and worthier, Field of the Cloth of Gold. He has seen the snows of winter lie virgin-white, tracing the exquisite, slim shape of virgin twigs—twigs waiting for the spring to come, waiting for their marriage with sun and rain and for the after-motherhood of leafing time. He has heard the thunder bellow down between the chasms of the over-topping fells, has listened to the fury of the waters as they roared through deep-mouthed glens and seemed to prophesy a second Flood; has heard the sorrowful complaining of sheep high up the moors, when the drifts have hidden them, and their friends and masters come to lift the snow-white burden from their backs. He has seen the war of tribe against tribe, in bird and beast land, and has watched the softer play of sympathy, and courtesy, and help, among the members of a tribe attacked. He understands that in our foolish, human life, all wars would cease if war ceased to bring out fine qualities of chivalry.

Has not our blacksmith, too, heard spring come whispering, lusty and full of faith, about the land? Though men decline, for nine months of the year, to acknowledge God, there are three months when the halt, the maimed, and the blind must surely know that the old world has gone through healing flames. You thought this same world was a grey and haggard beldame? Yet spring comes in, soft-footed down the leafing glens, and even the cynics sit, and blink their eyelids, and find themselves hard put to it to account, with wonted pessimism, for this sudden, new uprising of the best in a troubled world. The world’s not old at all, my masters, in the spring of the year; she has risen, a maiden radiant, from out the brown leaf-drifts of a dead winter; and our blacksmith, because he has watched this recurrent miracle with seeing eyes, holds gaily to his great possessions—to his cottage, to his garden, to his Homer, to his faith, and hope, and charity, to his lusty body and his fine tranquillity of soul. Of all the men whom I have met by chance—or seeming chance—upon life’s highway, I know none, save my unlettered Tom Lad, who has left me with the same abiding sense of manhood—manhood finely come by, finely carried, finely developed to its true breadth and height We say farewell to him at last, the Wanderer and I—we have eleven miles to walk, and it is growing late—and we carry out with us into the fragrant night that curious sense of well-being which always follows a meeting with like-minded folk.

“Life is just, boy,” says the Wanderer, as we walk down and up the grey, bat-haunted road that leads us back to Arcady. “Life is a finer judge than any we see sitting on the Woolsack.”

I answer nothing, but let my comrade bide his time, knowing that he will teach me knowledgeable things. I hear the click of his snuff-box, and scent the dust of it as we go down the hilL

“Life is just,” he repeats, by-and-by. What we seek for faithfully, we are sure to meet Our blacksmith, now—his choice was to live free, and he has found the only freedom. You are silent, boy,” he breaks off, finding no answer from me. “Do you not guess that we have met a gentleman to-day?"

“I do not guess—I know it, sir,” I answer, and the Wanderer laughs, that deep, quiet laugh of his which is neither boy’s nor man’s, but a fine mixture of the two.

“It is not every day one meets a gentleman,” he says, opening and shutting his snuff-box as if he were firing at rising grouse or falling snipe. “In my time, boy, one met a gentleman by habit, as one took a glass of port or sheny; to-day one finds him a rare bird."

We tramp along the starlit road, the Wanderer and I. There’s never a moon to guide us, but the sky is clear from west to east, and the lesser lamps of heaven are all well trimmed and burning brightly. The highway stretches, a grey line, in front of us; the hills lie dark, yet showing all their lines, rounded, or sharp, or rolling; the bats flit round us like so many genial ghosts, and away and up the fells a curlew goes crying like another Ishmael. Scent of the strong, ripe summer goes with us constantly. Dust from the Wanderer’s recurrent pinch of snuff does not disturb, but rather joins amicably in this revel of night-odours.

We are silent, and I know that we are thinking of the day’s adventure. There’s something of magic always in these meetings on the by-roads— meetings with folk who are so obviously kindred of one’s own that it is startling to realise that we have met them for the first time. Though we see our blacksmith friend again, or miss that good luck by some accident of time and circumstance, his memory will remain with us as an abiding and a happy friendship; and, when we come to join the company in Valhalla’s Arcady, we shall know each other and rejoice, we three—and Homer, surely, his blindness gone and his eyes alive, like stars, will sing as strongly and as sweetly as of old among us.

I am supposed, to have only two bees that hive diligently and perpetually in my bonnet—Stuart love and deep regard for the North Country yeoman—but I admit the crime of harbouring a third bee. He buzzes more gently than the others, because he knows it useless to talk good Greek to most folk nowadays; but he is there in the hive, for all that And this third bee, bumming softly in Homeric metre, reminds me— to-night as we walk through the dusk o’ starlight— that Homer knew men and the bigger nature, as David the Psalmist did, as Shakespeare did, knew also the company of that fairy who visits mortals seldom, whose touch upon the strings of old romance dates back to Eden’s days.

We are thinking each our own thoughts, discursively, the Wanderer and I. It is permissible to let one’s fancies run abroad, like a keen dog scenting game, when the walk has been long and one’s feet are weary.

The sixth milestone goes by us as we stride, a silent, happy pair, along the highway. Five more miles to Arcady I And I am thinking of the Saxon and the Norman. They fancy to this day that they have conquered England; but in the last result they are foiled, as they always were, Saxon and Norman both, when they met the men from Arcady’s wide vale.

We are anything save Norman or Saxon, or any odd admixture of the two. The Britons reared their camps upon our hill-tops. The Danes swept out from the east, and the Scots rode down from the north. In later years, when the conquest-wounds were healed, we liked many qualities of Scots and Danes, and absorbed the same; but never for a moment did we give welcome to those who tried to teach us alien lessons from warm, alien climates.

Compact of the storm and the sun, built up by the good sea-rovers and the landsmen-lovers of the land, we stand apart to-day, a race that loves England and sends her best sons into battle. We are British, and often we are misunderstood, because our whole ideal of life is different, a thing apart, from the ideal of our Norman-English allies in the south.

Tramp, tramp along the pleasant road, and the Wanderer breaking silence to tell me a folk-legend of the hill that lies on our right, silver in the starlight haze, or the story of the old tower on our left, which sent a youngster forth to rescue Scottish Mary.

Late candles bum in upper windows of a farmstead here, a cottage there, as we go by. It is at such an hour, on such a road, that men should walk who boast that they have no faith in poetry. They should walk thereon, and yield themselves to the thousand silences, the thousand gentle voices, which surround them. Faint, yet clear, like silver music, would they not mark the beat of goblin hammers underground? Could they miss the magic of the owl’s call over green valley and grey fell? Could they lack knowledge, deep and penetrating secret groves, that the real world is a world of mystery and portent, a world in which flesh and bone and brute prosperity are merely shadows thrown on the screen of the Beyond?

Ay, they could miss it all—and more’s the pity. They miss it every night of every day that finds them presumably alive. For your man who makes a boast that he is dead to poetry could never, with all the will in the world, bring himself to yield to any such unpractical affair as a walk, for the walk’s sake, along the grey night-roads of Arcady. If he found himself compelled to such unwonted exercise, he would be hurrying toward the nearest town that watches malevolently on Arcady’s outskirts—the outskirts which the fairy sentries guard with watchfulness and gallantry. He would be thinking of the money to be made to-morrow, not guessing that the mint can send no sovereigns out until it spoils true gold with false alloy. Does he of the proud waistcoat ask himself, I wonder—say, when the softest bed and longest dinner have found him sleepless still—does he ever ask himself what he is doing with his life? He is making money fast; he is spending it with an absurdity which is apparent to the over-watching gods who superintend our human laughter. His piles of gold are children’s sand-castles—sand, built on sand—and, though his beard grow white and his body take on the outward semblance of a reverent old age, he is still a baby-child, building neat piles of yellow sand into the semblance of strong-walled castles. He has never listened to the night. God help him, he has neither will nor power to do it!

To die young is the desire of all men; but to die a baby-child, building castles out of sand until the last, deep trumpet calls, is to die senile. Youth is a buoyant matter, made up of strength and faith and mystery; youth comes only, and stays only till the end, when we have learned, and kept at heart, that lesson of “listening to the night.” For one has always fancied—or did the fairies tell it to us in our cradle-time?—that good spirits hate our human daylight din, and lie in wait for travellers by night. Indeed, the old conceit of Claude Duval, Dick Turpin, and the rest holds good to-day; phantom highwaymen, striding phantom mares, still haunt our country heaths and by-ways, holding up all night travellers and looking into the condition, fat or lean, of the purses that they carry. They rob the rich, these ghostly horsemen, and they give freely to the poor; and, if the modern constable should ask them for their name and true address, they answer lightly that they are bats, and owls, and curlews, singing men home into the lands of childhood.

“What are you thinking of, boy?" demands the Wanderer, with the abruptness of a gunshot near to one’s right ear.

“Of fairies, sir, and Robin Hood,” I answer meekly.

“Good diet for the mind. I thought you were dreaming of little Cathy, waiting for you now, and thinking you lie dead beneath a limestone scree."

“Cathy is more than Robin Hood, and more than fairies, sir.”

“Ah, tut-tut! Allow me, boy, to take a pinch of snuff. More than fairies and than Robin Hood? Well, then, you have more luck than I can claim."

So much is obvious, since the most successful of bachelors can never hope for that wide outlook and serene tranquillity which attends the successful Benedick. It is useless to explain this to the Wanderer, however. Again we part at his gate, after a moment’s contemplation of the village street " Greek is not dead in us yet, boy,” says my comrade joyously. “Observe that I shall walk out to see our blacksmith friend again.”

It is not till I reach home that I realise how late it is; for on the Highway of the Night time makes no sound as he goes by. Cathy, as the Wanderer prophesied, is picturing me, I find, in three places at once, making me therefore even a cleverer being than Sir Boyle Roche’s bird. She is sure that I have slipped on a limestone precipice, and am lying at the foot with three broken limbs; it is no secret to her that I am reposing in a “shivering bog” high up the moors; it is a matter of faith that I have been beset by thieves on the highroad and am tucked snugly into some wayside ditch. Happily, the Babe has been so bewildered by my many lodging-places that she is only beginning to think of a search-party when I arrive—arrive dusty, and surrounded by a day’s fresh air, and as hungry as if the blacksmith’s cheese-and-bread and raspberry jam were so much mediaeval history.

Of course I am to blame—at least, the Wanderer is, who leads me into escapades—and of course I feel a brute when Cathy weeps whole-heartedly upon my shoulder. And yet—and yet—it is rather good to meet such welcome. In the old days it was Stylesey who met me on such occasions, and on her face there was the stem and ancient question, “What, sir, not killed yourself as yet?” I trust I am something—if only a little—less than a coward; yet assuredly in the old times I died many times before my death, according to Stylesey’s view. She was merely disappointed, though, when I arrived at last, in cheeriest spirits and in rudest health; I was the anti-climax to her supreme belief in her own judgment, and she would rather have shed chastened tears, while planting daisies on my grave, than admit herself in fault.

I prefer Cathy’s greeting. It has some unknown quality in it which Stylesey’s lacked consistently

CHAPTER XII
A GUEST ARRIVES

Cathy said that she would never welcome a new dog after Flick died. I ventured to think otherwise, for a new grief needs always to be stop-gapped by a new joy.

A week and a day after my journey with the Wanderer, after our Homeric meeting with the blacksmith, my wife comes in from the village, and finds me studying the habits of a mason-wasp in a cranny of an ancient wall. The occupation may seem an unimportant, even a trivial one, yet somehow it is just these details of the world’s great business which are worth attention.

If one’s tastes do not lie in that direction, it is idle to attempt the pastime; but the man who has such tastes possesses, I think, the right of entry into lands as varied, strange, and full of mystery as any which the old World-Wanderers sought. They sure real lands, moreover, where real labourers toil whole-heartedly, helping to maintain the fabric of the world; and to any one who happens to be weaiy of the stir and hum of useless things, I would play the good physician, and advise him to study, say, the mason-wasp—the look of him, his methods of transacting world-business, the house he builds, and all the history of his forebears.

At the worst, the patient will be merely bored; but then he was in no better case when he arrived at the door of the mason-wasp’s house. At the best, he will see new, wide lands open out before him; dinner-parties, taxes, the up-keep of a house that is never in this world a home, drift by him like so much idle thistledown. His cult of boredom grows to be in itself a boredom and restriction, like the chrysalis which butterflies leave on the garden-patch while they stretch free and newfound wings towards heaven. Once the patient will allow himself to be enthralled by the doings of the mason-wasp, the romance of him, his steady purpose and his workmanlike, clean way of doing needful tasks, he will go forward and more forward into the quiet places where, if you bend your ear, you can hear the mills of nature humming—the places where the threads of useful life are spun on fairy-spindles, where the cloth is woven upon fairy-looms—the places where none needs raiment, save such as he was given at his birth.

It is in this under-world and over-world about us that the cynic meets a clear and living refutation of his gospel. He may deliberately close his ears and shut his eyes to what is going on, but he cannot open eyes and ears, and see and listen honestly, without a thrill of faith, of hopefulness, of awe. This civilisation or that may be old and outworn; temples, manners, all the hundred matters built up by man, may fall to ruin; but that has nothing to do with the world herself. After centuries, and tens of centuries, and tenfold tens of centuries of motherhood, the world is youthful still— youthful, alert, as tender, strong, and anxious over the business of this year’s spring as if it were her first-born child. The birds build nests of the self-same size and shape, lay eggs of the self-same shape and colour, as their fore-mothers did. The insects stir abroad, and mate, and rear their families, as of old. The unconquerable winds of spring stride over heath and wood and pasture-land, bringing that scent of mingled rain and sun and greenstuff which they brought a thousand years ago.

Then summer comes, dressed up for pageantry and revel, and throws her perfumes broadcast. And after that the world grows sober and reflective, and puts on the russet of a chastened autumn. And then she seems to die, and snow-flakes come to hide her grave and to sing a silent requiem. The winds howl down, and the wildest of the heath-birds seek the farmsteads and the fences of low-lying fields. The old earth is dead, leaving her children to starve outright.

But is she dead? When the snow has melted, peep into some deep hollow of a wood, or seek the steep bank of a stream which is sheltered from the north and east, or look into a gully of the moor which runs slantwise from west to south, and you will find life stirring at the Mother’s breast. It may be a starveling daisy-bloom, or an old gnat trying to stretch his wings to the wintry sunlight, or a throstle sitting in the thorn-bush and pretending that his slender pipe is a full-throated love song to his mate. It is life, though, and I think that the daisy, and the old gnat, and the throstle, are finer priests of faith than any you will meet in summer-time. 'Tis easy enough, my masters, to preach of faith when all the church is warm and all your congregation believes your gospel true before you utter it; but give me the wintry heath, the pastors of the chilly glens, who preach of faith when hope seems dead as the old world herself. Give me the old gnat’s faith, or the throstle’s, and let the spring come in again, strong, irresistible, to prove our faith secure.

How shall one put into words the truth which is foundationed deep as the ancient hills? It is a truth so obvious that some men will not look it in the face; they prefer instead the excitement of a falsity, whose name is Street Worship. It is a truth so obvious, to us who know the hedges, the field-ways and the moors, that we can understand no man, who has free-will in the matter, disdaining the free-handed gifts of God, and saying openly that he is “bored by dull rusticity.”

How shall one tell him—so he be compelled to admit the gospel true—that boredom, lack of faith, all restless goings to and fro in search of street-pleasure, are toys of boy-manhood, to be cast aside when the real man’s estate arrives? In the big world of the country, as distinct from the few crowded acres, there is magic, there is real toil towards a real end, real pleasure towards an end equally sane and real; there is perpetually that glory of the old romance which was from the beginning and will be to the end.

All this proceeds direct from the mason-wasp, who has been talking while I watch him at the business of housekeeping. It is Cathy, as I say, who interrupts our talk—Cathy, who said she would never take a new dog to her heart.

“What are you doing, Murphy?” she demands. Then, without waiting for any explanation as to mason-wasps, she holds up a basket. “I’ve found such a treasure!”

The basket is small and slight, like Cathy’s self. It is the one she uses when taking flowers to those spinster ladies of the village who have grown grey in service to the fragrance and the charm of life. It is so small, indeed, this basket, that, although Cathy holds it too high for me to see the contents, I know that the “treasure” must be small in bulk.

It is my habit to smile pleasantly when treasures are brought into Arcady; the smile is stoical, however, for treasures always mean new animals of some kind, and I have suffered from new animals. There were Tom Lad’s geese, which once on a day lunched sumptuously on prize-strain pansies; there was the goat, which showed a patient and consistent devilry throughout his days, and died only under protest; there was the tame otter that would come to be fed so prettily, and afterwards would decimate my trout-stream. Indeed, I have as large an experience of treasures as any man who has not been proprietor of a menagerie or keeper of zoological gardens.

“I've found such a treasure!” the Babe repeats.

Her triumph is so evident that I fear the worst; we have never had a pet snake yet, and snakes I utterly abhor.

“Guess what it is,” says my ridiculous wife.

“A baby anaconda,” I hazard.

“Murphy!”

I give a big sigh of relief. Cathy is so evidently shocked by my suggestion that the snake-fear must be groundless.

“Guess again, Murphy."

My imagination cannot take me further than a suggestion of white mice or an infant tortoise— a basket of this size can hold so little, after all— and the Babe, eager to show me her treasure, absolves me from any further guessing. Dear Babel When she is sixty, she will still value her newest animal above the rubies of the East.

With a fine air and great deliberation, as if she were doing a conjuring trick, Cathy reaches down the basket to me. Snugly lying therein is a round ball, all gold-brown hair, and fluff, and shapelessness. I am at a loss; but presently the ball unrolls itself, and a sharp-nosed head appears, and I am greeted by a gentle “Whoouff!”

“Is it—is it a puppy, Babe?” I hazard diffidently.

“Of course it’s a puppy! Isn’t he a, Murphy? Look at the funny way he wriggles his nose, and rubs his eyes with his paws.”

When Cathy has settled down a little, I ask her how she chanced to find her treasure-trove.

“Oh, I was just coming home from seeing our Lavender Lady—she gave me saffron cake and cowslip wine, dear soul!—and I met a doggylooking man. Under the doggy man’s arm was the puppy—and—and I couldn’t help it, Murphy —I just stopped and asked if the dear beast could be bought.”

“Humph!” I murmur. For I have some knowledge of the Babe’s business transactions.

“He said it could, and I asked how much; and he said that its pedigree was long enough to reach ' from here to Scotland,’ but that, as he was a poor man, and never in his best days could bear to bargain with a lady, he would only ask two guineas.”

“And you gave it him, of course?”

“I was so clever, Murphy. I remembered what you always tell me—I did really, dear—and I said, quite sternly, ‘ Pounds, not guineas.’ And he said, ‘Done, ma’am,’ at once—and isn't he cheap, Murphy?”

All our animals have been cheap, in theory. It is idle to cross the graves of vanished bargains, but my smile has in it something of the Stoic’s pain.

“Two pounds!” I murmur. “Two pounds for a round ball of fluff?”

The Babe grows matronly at once; it is her habit whenever I offend her zeal for treasures.

“Very well, dear,” she says quietly. “He is mine, after all, because I bought him out of my poultry-money; and so, of course, I have a right to say whether he is dear or cheap.”

I decline all argument on this question of the hen-money. In my own conscience—of which let no man discourse to his wife, if he be wise—I am well aware that I buy the hens, the eggs for sitting purposes, the corn and what not; aware that I purchase eggs from Cathy for the breakfast-table and the fowls which come up—roast, or boiled, or curried—to the table. I pay the market price, moreover; for the Babe studies each day’s poultry prices, and sometimes I wonder, in a vague, impersonal way, what my business footing is in these transactions. Illusion—distinct in character and influence from her bad step-sister, delusion—is a high priestess here in Arcady, and undoubtedly her reign is fruitful and benign. Illusion, rightly understood, is truth; if you doubt it, surprise a band of fairies dancing on some green, watered islet of the moors, and listen to their songs.

Cathy’s fixed belief that she is growing rich from the proceeds of hen-yard industry is certainly to be classed among illusions—joyous illusions, such as make for mirth and betterment.

“Babe," I answer soberly, “he is yours by hard-won earnings; but I do think him a trifle dear at two pounds.”

“And in a week, Murphy—oh, yes, but mark my words!—in a week you will say he would be cheap at two guineas. Just wait and see, Murphy.”

“But, dear, you were never going to own another dog.”

“Ah, he won’t be Flick! Never think that, Murphy. But one can’t cry for ever.”

Cathy is oddly wise, despite her notions of barter and exchange in this world’s goods. I had never thought of life, in so many words, according to that inspired phrase, “One can’t cry for ever.”

Tears are a tribute to the dead, while the grave shows fresh and new-tilled earth to the sky; they are necessary, righteous, and cleanse the heart of many follies. But tears indefinitely prolonged grow sacrilegious, a menace to the peace of those who have gone before us to the Happy Shores. Have they not mourned—our dead before our time—and sought courage from the hidden corners where courage lurks, like any shy-faced maid? Then shall not we go forward once again, and praise our dead by doing better and still better work within the limits of this life’s kingdom? They do not need our tears, our happy dead, after we have watered their graves with righteous and affectionate sorrow; they walk in the lands of Asphodel, and trust that we, too, shall join them—not by the road of useless tears, but by the way of effort—the way sincere, and clean, and hard to tread.

And this springs altogether from an old dog’s death, from Cathy’s inspired conviction that “ one can’t cry for ever.” A man’s death, or a woman’s, would have lent dignity to the topic, according to the narrow judgment passed by two-footed upon four-footed beings. Yet has the lesser death no dignity, no pathos? Does death come more easily, so far as we can tell, to the four-footed than to the two-footed? Do we not miss all folk we loved aforetime, forgetting almost whether they were dumb or human? I know at least that Cathy and I have sorrowed for Dog Flick as for an equal and a comrade.

As for the guest so lately come to Arcady, I decline acquaintance with him for two days. I am jealous of Flick’s memory, and know how he would have hated a supplanter. On the third day Cathy brings the ball of fluff to me, as I sit scribbling at the lawn’s end, and places him upon my knee, scattering my notes on man, and destiny, and the world beyond our ken. Wives have scant respect, I find, for scraps of paper, and I hazard a shrewd guess that Homer, king of scribblers, must have suffered at times through the medium of his womenfolk. The ball of fluff is on my kness, however, and I make the best of him, because it is pleasure and good policy to yield, just now and then, to Cathy’s whims.

The Babe leaves me, and I begin—for duty’s sake—to play with the new puppy. Presently I find his ways engaging. By-and-by I find him a companion to my liking. When the Babe returns—I suspect her of hiding in ambush, for otherwise her re-entry would have been less dramatic—she finds me speaking in puppy language—finds the ball of fluff, with four brown legs and a brown underside reared joyously to heaven, answering me in his own tongue.

“I thought you would love him in a week, Murphy,” says the Babe. “I gave you so long to grow sensible.”

“I don’t want to love him,” I answer sternly, guessing all the while that Cathy knows, and laughs at, my deceit. “He’s a poor little hound, and I remember Flick in his young days.”

“Flick is dead,” says Cathy, with sincere and unexpected severity. “How can we cry for ever, Murphy? Stylesey said to me only to-day, When the bairn dies, missis, ye’ve got to fill its place somehow.’ She has seen children buried, dear, and—and we’ve seen only Flick go under-sod."

There’s a note in Cathy’s voice that is foreign to me, in these latter days. She’s impatient with me at times, yet is vastly tender to the outer world and to all dumb things. She is older and younger both, and I am puzzled.

The Babe is apt to be a wise little prophet, however. After four days the puppy and I are comrades; at the end of five he is rather necessary to my happiness; when we have been acquainted for the allotted week, he and I, he seems decidedly cheap, regarded simply as a bargain.

He is a winsome rogue—no doubt of it— and is, moreover, what, for lack of a better phrase, one names "a gentlemen.” I mean that, young as he is, all his instincts are of the gently bred, apart from the rank he holds in the dog world—that world which has its smart set, its superior people, its rude, unmannered class, its simple, kindly gentlefolk, as surely as our own big-little race has its separate classes. A Borzoi would pass by our latest acquisition, I know, with effeminate nose in the air, and dainty insolence of movement. An Airedale terrier would glance at him for a moment and pass on, after deciding that he came of no rough fighting-stock. A mastiff, on the other hand—magnificent in strength and tenderness and true gentility—would halt to play with him, as with a baby. Yet none of these would guess his station and his place in the dog’s world.

I seldom touch upon the question of Tiko’s breed—Cathy has already named him Tiko, according to some hidden wisdom of her own, or lack of wisdom, in choosing names—because raillery of this sort brings doubt, and a sense of insult, to my wife. In fairness I must admit that he is like no known breed of dog; indeed, with his bushy tail and his sharp nose and his nut-brown coat, I suspect him, in contemplative moments, of being a squirrel.

Squirrel, or dog, or whatever he be, Tiko is a gentleman. He has the faults and the absurdities attaching to all youth, but he is faithful, clean, and buoyant, and an epitaph framed upon the like ideal would be a goodly finish for the life of any dog—or of any man.

Decidedly he is cheap at two pounds. The Babe, I think, might almost have agreed to guineas.

CHAPTER XIII
A LITTLE TALE

I profess to have no faith in luck, yet believe in it all the same, like all my brethren. Was it luck, or destiny, that led me out only yesterday across the green hills and the fields new harvested? The Wanderer could not join me, for he was chained in earnest to his old enemy the gout; Cathy had promised many visits between luncheon-time and dinner; so, perforce, I went alone.

The details of my scramble matter little; the heart of the adventure was a village tale I heard, half-way between out and home. The tale can be left or taken, but for my part I wake in the night sometimes—dream-worries troubling me—and I recall that story of Sexton Thew, who lives to this day and smokes many pipes in the forgotten hamlet lying under Sheepscar Fell.

Half-way between out and home, as I say, I overtook a traveller on the grey and dusty road. His hair was white, and his back was arched like a rainbow; yet he moved forward as if he owned his own grandson’s feet We passed the time of day, and walked on together. And presently we saw a little church, below us on the right hand. It had grey walls, a grey, slim belfry-tower, and the rising woods behind it met the sky.

“You’ll have heard yond laughable, queer tale?" asked my companion. “Why, it only happened the hinder end of this last March,” he added, surprised because I shook my head.

Nothing, surely, is more true to the historic methods that have built up our land-eamings and our sea-defences than this village faith that all the village happenings are known to all the world. Our friends abroad, who build smaller navies and win fewer battles than ourselves, are cursed by that odd longing to be cosmopolitan—to be, in brief, all things, and therefore nothing. We, here in Arcady, hold fast to our own village, to our Lavender Ladies and our men whose lives are measured by the belfry-chimes that ring the dead hour past into the living hour to come. My friend of the arched back stands, in brief, for England and the true ideal; that is his faith— and mine—if any man should ask it idly of us in the street, or in the lane, or when death beckoned to us.

“Well, now, I’ll tell ye that same tale,” he goes on, resting his arms upon the limestone wall. “

Ye see yond ancient kirk? My father was christened there, and so was I, and many a gradely, ancient body before my time and his. D’ye see the grey slope of roof, just over and beyond the kirk? Well, that’s the Seven Magpies, so named because there’s luck in seven, magpies or crows or what not, so they say. William Thew has the house now, and sells fairish liquor—though nothing like to what his father sold before him—and he’s churchwarden, and sexton, and publican, and farmer, and Lord knows what beside. William’s trades are like th’ inside of a pedlar’s pack; ye never can guess what’s likely to drop out.

“Well, he’s churchwarden, in among other jobs, and there came a Sunday i’ this last March when parson was due to ride over to preach and pray at evening service. We reckon to start at three o’ the clock i’ winter, for folk have far to come and far to go if they think o’ worshipping i’ yond grey kirk. Parson, I should say, had seven mile to ride, for he serves two churches, like, and lives near t’ other.

“Well, it was a right proper day for early March. It blew and it snew, and it snew and it blew, and, when it were tired o’ snowing, it popped some masterful, big showers o’ rain in betwixt the snow. Parson, as ye’ll guess, was proper and wet by th’ time he’d ridden his seven mile, and William Thew took his horse to stable.

“'Now, step in, parson,’ says William, 'and take a sup o’ something hot, or ye’ll be hoarse as a corbie-crow come Sabbath next. Now, step in,’ he says, ‘ tor it wants ten minutes yet afore service time.’

“Parson was no way shy about the matter, as you may guess. And William’s wife was ready with her kettle, and a glass, and summat heart-some; and parson sits him down on the lang-settle, as snug as a rabbit in its burrow, and he watches the steam go up from his clothes.

“William Thew puts his head in at the door, by-and-by. ‘ Bide where ye are, parson,’ says he. ' There’ll be none coming to kirk through all this snow and hail and rain and sleet. I’ll just step across,’ he says,‘ and come back and tell ye if the kirk be empty.’

“Well, parson was no way shy, not he, for it was rare and snug in the settle-corner of the Seven Magpies. So he sits and watches the steam go up from his clothes again, and he sips at his summat hot out of the wide and deepish glasses that they keep at the Seven Magpies, and he gossips with William’s wife—who was a sort o’ relation o’ mine on my grandfather’s side, and a decent body enough, for all she had red hair.”

As we lean against the wall, my greybeard and I, he pauses as he nears the finish of his tale, with true dramatic instinct, and surveys the whole grey countryside with an air of distant friendliness.

" Well, as I was saying,” he resumes, “William Thew comes back from his visit to the kirk, and steps into the house-place, and sits him down beside parson on the lang settle.

“‘ There’s not a soul i’ kirk, parson,’ he says, comlortable-like.

“Parson stretches himself, and smiles all over his face. ‘It speaks ill for my ministry, William,’ says he. ' Was there not one who braved the storm to come and listen to my discourse?’

“‘Well, now, ’twas this way,” says William Thew. ‘ When I got into kirk, I found a halfscore childer there. Parents, I’ve noticed, have a trick of saying their prayers through their childer on weathersome days. I sees ’em there, and I thinks o’ ye, parson, sitting snug here and no way wanting to be meddled with. So I looks the youngsters up and down, and I fetches out my biggest voice—the sort I use when lads are robbing my orchard—and I says, “What are you doing here, childer?” And a lile lass says, “Please, Mister Thew, we be come to praise and pray.” “Oh, have ye?” says I. “Well, there’s neither prayer nor praise to-day. Off with ye, childer, and never let me see yout faces here again childer, and never let me see yout faces here again! That was the way o’t,! That was the way o’t, parson, and another brew of kettle and cask would do ye no harm i’ this world.’”

One does not laught outright at a story of this kind. It is too subtle. Subtle, too, is the greybeard’s casual remark, after I have bidden him good-day.

“They be masterful well brought up, our childer hereabout," he says. “There’s no halfmeasures, whether it be schooling, or gospel-lore, or what else. Packed ’em off, did William Thew, to save parson’s voice for next week’s praise and prayer.”

The tale accompanies me along the homeward road. I like it better, and still better, as the miles drift by; and, when I find Cathy, she has to listen and approve.

Off with ye, childer, and never let me see your faces here again!

I must run across to the Wanderer after dinner, lest he miss an added flavour to his port.

CHAPTER XIV
CONCERNING OLD AGE

We lead a free life and an open, most of us here in Arcady, and it is well for our local doctor that he has private means to keep his table well supplied, that he has two engrossing hobbies—entomology and golf—to occupy his time.

Yet journals from the outside world drift through the postman’s hands into our Arcady, and more and more one finds articles—medical or pseudo-medical—which treat of diet and self-preservation. In a presumably Christian country our journals give advice—with a persistent harking-back to heathendom—as to the best means to dodge, not only to-morrow, but to-morrow's fiftieth anniversary. They—or their clients—fail to see the kindly, Christian humour of it all. Take no thought for the morrow, once on a time, was the true gospel; to-day, it seems, the health-professors are preaching from a widely different text.

What is it all about, this talk of health methods? Frankly, to us it is sheer absurdity. Once a man begins to think of to-morrow he is on the road to disaster. It may be he is thinking of his health; it may be he is thinking of the solid money to be made next day. In either case he shows a lamentable lack of piety and humour. To-morrow may find him broken in fortune, crippled in limb, the victim of a malady which strikes him from some hidden corner. To-morrow may find him anything, in brief; but he owns the birthright of to-night—to-night, with its looking forward to the dawn—to-night, with its pillow -spread for sleep—to-night, with its dreams from fairyland.

The bluff, country doctors laugh at these elaborate health-systems, for they work with real tools; and, because they travel often through the wintry roads, to visit folk who know what winter means, they come like priests among us. It is not only kindly skill they bring; it is knowledge of our frailty, too, and a large, ripe charity which in itself is physic.

We are told, in these cheerful journals of to-day, that we must sit and contemplate our digestive organs. There is a coloured race somewhere across the seas, I believe, that holds the like religion. We are told that this and that upon the dinner-table is poison, disguised like the wicked baronet in fiction. We are told—Heaven help us—that everything we eat and drink is a menace to our health.

The real menace to our health comes from thinking of the matter at all. It is no glory to a man if he dies at a hundred, and on his deathbed confesses that his only aim in life, his only work, has been to keep body and soul together until he made his century.

It is a mean affair, this modem ideal of old age —a thing attained, men fancy nowadays, by rigid self-suppression, by constant watchfulness, by stratagems and rules and odd devices which absorb a man’s whole time, leaving him no leisure in which to think of others or to give to them. The system is entirely mathematical, and old age becomes merely a tally of days and months, chalked on a barren slate. The votaries of the system, little by little, lose whatever talents were given them at birth—charm, or wit, or power of sympathy—and each recurrent year finds them harder, less intelligent, more like a dead and sapless tree—firm and upright, possibly, but naked of the leaves which spring-time brings to its brethren of the wood.

Moreover, he does not live longer, necessarily— this man who is so miserly about the counting of his days—than his more careless fellows. I have known men—real men, of flesh and blood and heart—who took each day as it came, and spent themselves each day in reckless and exuberant giving-out of energy, and made themselves and others happier for the rash expenditure. And I have known such men live to old age and die in full possession of those faculties—sympathy, eagerness to be up and doing, readiness to wash the tear-stained face of life at the well-springs of humour—which had carried them so far and worthily.

I have known the “careful” man succumb at forty to a regimen that took no heed of impulse or of kindliness; and I wonder now and then, with something near to consternation, what answer he will give when asked that sure and necessary question which greets the traveller into the Beyond—the question, “What have you done with your life?” He will realise at last—surely he must!—the weakness of his answer:

“I have lived carefully on two meals a day”— his words will come haltingly—“I have not smoked. I have eschewed all liquor, save a half-pint of water thrice in the day. I have tried to keep the temple of my body clean and worthy.”

“And what of the temple of your soul?” will come the inevitable question.

He will be dumb. To have helped a beggar in the street would have pre-supposed a sentiment of charity, and sentiment would have upset the nice balance of his organs. To have listened to a vagabond, whose sins were heavy and whose heart was contrite, to have held out to him a hand of real friendship, would again have caused grave, if not hazardous, disturbances. He has earned not a smile, not a pulse-beat of gratitude, on his road of life, and the winds that move about the Judgment Seat blow raw and cold on him.

Surely old age means something more than the well-preserved result of a "careful” middle-age, following a “careful” youth. Man, with his marvellous body, his gifts of sight, and mind, and soul, was meant lor finer labour than that of tending machinery which is looked after, if he will let it be, by a more watchful and far-seeing Power. The miser, in all ages, has been reckoned despicable; it has been left to our generation to admire the health-miser, who counts his niggard days, and stores up the record of them, and disdains his brother who is spending health and vigour.

We are here to spend, I take it We are here to give out from whatever store we happen to possess —ay, to give recklessly, if you will—and to find the constant miracle performed which fills again, and yet again, the exchequer of the generous. It is inconceivable to me that any doctor, any poet, painter, priest, can ever be great in his own chosen work until he learns to spend himself. Wife and bairns may bid him halt and take a rest, when he is in the thickest of his battle; he may be tired at heart, each task demanding thrice the usual output of energy and strength; he must go forward, all the same, to the task’s appointed end, for his own weariness is personal, his life-work is a matter touching the happiness of scores, or of thousands, or of ten thousands. He may die at his post—my spendthrift hero — but he dies worthily, and his after-life, I like to think, fulfils and makes apparent his sundered labours of this world.

Of course we live in an enlightened age. No man, who is too lazy to provoke and to accept a battle, would care to deny it Science has taught us names for mysteries. Our schools are telling children that the primrose, gathered joyously at the stream’s brink, as they went to school, is no miracle—as they believed before they fronted “teacher”—but a common-place affair, made up of stamen, pistil, and the rest, all duly labelled. Our towns are rearing men in the faith that we were bora to a round of useless pleasure and of useless toil. We live in an enlightened epoch, yet constantly our reverence for old age decreases and grows dim.

Old age l The words ought to sound like silver music, heralding a song of elder days. Old age should be a shrine, whereto the pilgrims come for worship. The old have shed more bitter tears than we; they have laughed more often, and - found the after-bitterness; if they have grown really old—old in worthiness and charity—they are so generous toward our faults, so friendly toward our casual virtues, that they offer us a real and tranquil sanctuary in time of need.

What are we doing, we younger men, that we do not look to it that children are taught—creeds and politics apart—that reverence for old age is a happy and a needful thing? They are looking backward at the much or little done, these old folk; they are looking forward to that, as yet, unopened door which will show them the kind and charitable world beyond; they can teach us more, believe me, than any science, any so-called worldly wisdom can do. They stand upon the threshold of two worlds, and they see with the eyes that look before and after.

It has been my good fortune to know many of these elders who trod the garden of their lives at eventide and found it fragrant; and they all, I remember, had the gift of humour—humour which kept its savour, like crisp and wholesome salt, until the end.

I wonder how many of us stand aside from life, just now and then, and attempt to measure the good work done by humour? A fine jest, a racy tale, are more than idle players, rousing idle laughter and helping useless moments to go by. A good story, to my thinking, is an abiding legacy, coming as if some rich old uncle—so plentiful in fiction, so rare in usual experience—left one money vested solidly in Funds or Consols. A good story, though it be ancient as the Pyramids—and most good stories are—is like those favourite elder-folk of mine who have gathered charm as they go down the hill of life; age has only mellowed the tale, and each fresh hearing of it reveals an added charm. A good tale, in brief, is a good angel, strolling through the thick, perplexing groves of everyday experience.

Were I at the helm of State—which Heaven forbid!—I should appoint a Jester Laureate, who would diligently collect the good tales of all countries. It would be no sinecure, this post; none but stories that made thinking men laugh promptly and unthinkingly would be admitted to the national collection. The Laureate, therefore, must have wit, courage, rare apprehension, a knowledge of the tender mainsprings which guide and regulate men’s laughter.

I say the Jester must have courage; for, if he tell a tale that makes a cheap-jack bid for laughter on the score of foolish profligacy, or still more foolish malice, he will be hanged within the hour —hanged by the neck till he be dead—and a worthier Laureate appointed.

Quite seriously—though I seem to perpetrate a bull—laughter is a grave item in the world’s forward work. Laughter softens the rough edges; laughter, if it come from the heart outward, not merely from the throat, is a great physician; laughter heals old feuds, staunches new wounds; laughter, like Maid Charity, demands a statue in our midst.

It is true—to one haphazard Benedick, at least —that God knows how serious is our north-bred temperament He does not ask us to harp only on the one tragical, wild string. He sends us kindly messengers, who tell good tales, and force the laughter out, and bid us think that even the old Puritans have learned by this time, in the upper spaces of God's universe—have learned, slowly and by painful steps—to find the road of honest laughter. Would they had found the highway earlier, or else had left alone all interference with the serious business of this present life of ours. For all men are short-sighted, and all need the spectacles of humour to correct the malady.

The children laugh, laugh frequently, and in the open, and for no cause that is founded on strict logic. We say—it is cant, mere cant, with many sober-minded elders—that the children are better than ourselves, more innocent Yet these sober-minded elders check laughter constantly, as an affront to heaven, not understanding that it is like a lark’s unstudied praise going up to the blue sky. Egad, as the Wanderer would say, is the God just who made us, if He declines to give us physic in our times of need?

The Wanderer tells me that criminals—hopeless criminals—are bred almost exclusively among those who lack the fairy-gift of humour. Apart from criminology—a topic I avoid since the Complete Rogue came to me for succour—there’s no question in my mind as to the kinship between humour and the attainment of that old age which alone is justly honoured by the name of “ripe.” Your dull dog never ripens; he is like a pear-tree nipped by frost at blossomtime.

Our village elder-man spoke once and for all on the topic not long ago. We were chatting, he and I, at the turn of the roadway where stands the “good-to-lean-over” gate beloved of all Arcadians.

“Had a stranger come to me last night, sir," he says. "He looked like a school-bred man—all head, as you might say, and neither heart nor body to make much fuss about. He was fearful anxious to know how I’d managed to live to fourscore and two, and still be able to do my ten miles’ walk a day.

" ‘ You’ve lived careful?’ says he.

" ‘ Nay,' says I. ‘ I’ve lived as I pleased.’

“So then he looks bothered, as parson does when I tell him I’ve spent Sunday morning in God’s Kirk of the Moors.

“‘ How have you lived, then?’ he asks, all like the school-inspectors the children talk of nowadays—though such cattle were not known or thought of when I was i' prime o’ life.

"So I tells him how I’ve lived, and his face grows as long as Dickie Midwinter’s fiddle—ye’ll remember Midwinter’s fiddle, sir, and his long face? He had a wife that nagged at him, and every year his face grew longer by an inch, till we wondered where ’twould stop. Seemed as if his chin was going to reach his toes, if the good-wife hadn’t died convenient-like.

“‘ Well, now,’ says I to the school-bred chap, ‘it'ye want to know, I’ve lived by laughter. Tobacco-smoke has helped me, too, and I’ve not played yea-and-nay with wholesome ale. But laughter’s been my stand-by,’ I says. ‘ Laughter physics a body, and th' only rule o’ life I’ve held by is to fetch one rare break o’ laughter out soon as I wake, another when I get me down to break-my-fast, and as many more till night-time as I can ’tice out of my daft, ancient body. Tis at waking-time, when I’m hali-mazed wi’ sleep, that laughter’s hard to find,’ I says to the school-bred chap, ‘ but I’ve found the trick of thinking at these times of Dickie Midwinter’s face and his fiddle—there’s not much difference i’ shape—and, betwixt ’em, they alius make me laugh, the fiddle and Dick Midwinter.’ That’s what I said, sir, honest as I’m talking to ye now, and the school-learned man—well, he went away, as if I’d bothered him. He seemed, like, as if he’d got a feed notion of how a man ought to live, but never a notion of how us poor, wayward folk must take our lives along.”

There is the customary pause, as the old man changes his position at the “good-to-lean-over” gate.

“Why, bless me,” he says at last, “I’ve buried a wife and more bairns than I care to reckon up. I’ve had my sorrows, same as other men; but I’ve stuck to that habit o’ laughing, right side o’ the mouth or wrong. Ay, and when neighbour-folk have met me on the road, I mind many a time when it seemed I’d little heart or cause for jesting; but I remembered a joke right enough, and passed it on, and found it did me good. A cheerful heart is worth a pound a week to a man, sir, and that’s how I’ve come to live to fourscore year and two. I’d not have done as much by donkeying about with whimsies— feeling my little finger ache, and running out to sexton straight away to bid him dig my grave.”

If I have talked of old age and humour, my roadside elder is responsible; such good sense and cheeriness as his come as a tonic to the mind, and set one wondering that so simple a health-system, and one so certain in its results, has not more advocates. My friend, indeed, reminds me of the gallant fox-hunter who was discovered lying in a ditch, with a broken leg and three ribs out of place. They put a flask to his lips, and he tried to lift himself, and he laughed.

“Life’s the jolliest game I know!” he muttered. “I’ve had my run—and, Gad, I mean to have another before the season’s done with.”

That is the temperament which is apt to cany men to old age and to a peaceful deathbed.

CHAPTER XV
HOW TOM LAO FOUND ADVENTURES FOR US

We are watering a bed of mignonette, Cathy and I, at six of a hot July evening, when Tom Lad comes mysteriously—out of space, so it seems—and stands before us.

“There’s something you ought to see, sir, up at the Island,” he says, in his gravest voice.

The Island is not spacious, according to the views of those who measure kingdoms by the brute square-yard. It is some six hundred yards long, a hundred yards in width; the river, brown and pebbly, is divided by the sharp-nosed end of it, runs forward, and washes either bank, then meets itself again and roars joyously down the long rapids to the deep and silent pool where good trout lurk.

Though not big, it is an island, and I own it. There’s a hidden pride in every Englishman, I fancy, who over-lords an island; for we come of island folk, and we love a kingdom that is washed by water, salt or fresh. Some casual sentiment led me to build Cathy a summer-house upon the Island; and we picnic there, pretending we are gypsies, with no other house above our heads, and we enjoy the company of that good fairy who is called Illusion.

From Tom Lad’s excessive gravity I judge that some comedy is being gone through on the Island; but he has a well-developed sense of the dramatic, and moves away without vouchsafing any details of the “something we ought to see.” Had he given us a hint as to what was going on up the river, the anxiety of two parents would have been relieved much sooner, and the Babe and I would have missed the best of an idyllic drama.

Just as Tom Lad disappears in the direction of the red-walled kitchen-garden, and just as we are setting off for the Island—it is a habit of ours to accept all Tom’s challenges to explore paths romantic and unknown—we hear the click of the gate that opens into Arcady, and turn and see a good friend of ours who lives on the river’s edge three miles or so up-stream. He is obviously hot, and out of breath, and anxious. He is seeking—so we learn, after the first hurried greetings are done with—his eldest son, aged ten, who has disappeared in company with a double-barrelled gun. “Has the boy come to us?” he asks desperately. He knows that the youngster has a weakness for us, and trusts he is somewhere about the grounds of Arcady. It is laughable that, in the midst of his evident concern for the boy, he is also troubled about the gun, which he has recently purchased for fifty guineas.

We can give him little consolation as regards either gun or boy, for we have seen nothing of the pair. He declines all offers of hospitality, and goes forward feverishly on his search.

Again we are setting off for the Island, and again the garden gate of Arcady is opened with a brisk, imperative suddenness. Again we turn, and see a little lady whose house also is on the river's brink, four miles up-stream. She, too, is hot and anxious, and the business of this tranquil summer’s evening grows to the likeness of a nightmare.

“They’re not single spies, Murphy,” whispers Cathy tragically. “

They’re a procession—or are we going quietly into dotage? ’’

“Some of us must be sane,“

I answer briskly; “

I hope it is ourselves, Babe.“

The little lady, it appears, has lost her girl-child, aged eight, and is extremely anxious to learn if she, too, is sheltered within or about the precincts of Arcady. I glance at Cathy, and meet an answering glance; we assure each other that, so far as we know, we are sound of mind. The little lady, after some hesitation, accepts our statement that we have no eight-year child concealed about the premises, and retreats in the same disorder and confusion as did her nearest neighbour awhile ago.

“Let us make haste, Murphy,” says the Babe. “There’s an epidemic of lost children, and really we can do nothing.”

We reach the Island without further interruption. We are astonished to find, after rowing across to the usual mooring-stage, that it is occupied by a punt. Then I guess suddenly the solution of that mystery which is perplexing two anxious parents; for the only punt on the river, so far as I know, is owned by the father of a scapegrace son, who at the age of ten elopes with a damsel of tender years, and, as though one crime were not enough, takes also with him a valuable gun. It is a guess merely, but I believe and hope that we shall find the truants; their speedy restoration in that case will be placed entirely to the credit of Tom Lad, who sent us to the Island.

Any doubts I may have as to the truth of my haphazard guess are silenced, abruptly and effectually. The path to Cathy’s summer-house turns sharply soon after it leaves the mooring-stage, and there’s a thick growth of shrubs— elderberry, blackthorn, and bird-cherry—which lends an air of mystery and hazard to this bending of the track. As we near the corner we are confronted by a bright and eager face, by the shining barrels of a gun—all half-hidden in the tangled growth of leaves and twigs and branches.

“Stand and deliver!” cries a joyous voice.

We certainly obey, for the triggers of a fifty-guinea gun are apt to be dainty of mood, like a lady, and a youth of ten does not always realise how maidish and uncertain his weapon is. Instinctively I place Cathy behind me.

“Your money or your life! “our assailant adds, in a high and buoyant key.

Cathy begins to laugh—a foolish thing to do, when you stand in front of two well-directed barrels and know the meaning of hair triggers.

“I rob the rich and give to the poor,” proceeds the hero of the bright eyes and sunburnt cheeks.

We have played cricket together, he and I; we have fared abroad together, seeking birds’ nests and the fat, armoured beetles that haunt the pasture-ditches, and those green-and-purple caterpillars which feed on heather and are destined to become Moor Emperor moths. Yet now he is playing some lofty drama, and disdains to acknowledge any previous acquaintance with me. If I could paint, I should set down on canvas this picture of the green, thick leaves, the boyish face out-peeping from the tangle, the keen, adventurous look of him, as if he stood for the living portrait of all that has gone to send our Nelsons out, our Cliffords and our Nortons, of all that English or North Country breeding can do toward the making of a lad.

“Maid Marion waits for me,” our hero tells us. He is at once alert and dispassionate, as if he knew his play by heart and had no uneasiness regarding the welcome of his audience.

“Hadn’t—hadn’t you better go to her, in that case? “

I suggest diffidently. The gun is still pointing directly at my head.

“I must not go empty-handed,” answers he of the bright eyes. “I’m Robin Hood, and no man says me nay.”

“Ah, you are Robin Hood? Then why are you not carrying bow and arrow?”

The eager face, set in its thicket of leaves and twigs, grows serious for a moment, though the gun-barrels point constantly my way. He is obviously disconcerted by my rejoinder, but soon gains heart again.

“Maid Marion has borrowed bow and arrow, sir, to slay the dun deer with, so I picked up a gun and came to this lonely thicket of the woods. “

Cathy laughs like some foolish sprite let loose from fairyland, but I answer this outlaw with such solemnity as I can muster.

“Shall we parley, Robin Hood?” I ask, trying to find an echo of his own heroic speech.

“Ay, caitiff, we will parley. Maid Marion, when I left her in the summer-house—in her bower, I mean—bade me bring home the ransom of a princess.”

“Did she?” I return, still” with my eye on that confounded gun. “I don’t happen to possess it, Robin Hood.”

“Then you must die,” he says laconically.

It seems extremely likely that I shall die, if the gun chances to be loaded.

“Robin—Robin Hood,” I suggest persuasively.

“Ay, caitiff?”

“Hadn’t you better run to Maid Marion and get your bow and arrow back? Hair-triggers were invented long after Robin Hood’s time, and he may not have learned the handling of them.”

“I parley not with varlets,” says Robin, with the large air of a constable directing street traffic in the towns. “Your money or your life, for I have ridden far from London out to York to-day, and I am saddle-weary.

“Are you Dick Turpin, then?” says Cathy slily.

“Ay, madam-”

Our hero’s further tangling up of history is cut short by the appearance of a slim and long-legged maiden, who runs up to us and greets us both by name. My guess was right, after all, and I know why an anxious mother is seeking her daughter far and wide about the boundaries of Arcady.

Robin Hood looks once at her. He is a modern boy again, and mercifully he lowers his gun.

“You little silly!” cries Robin, otherwise Dick Turpin. “Are you playing Maid Marion, or fooling?”

“I tried to, Dick,’ she protests. “I tried so hard, but I grew tired of waiting in the summerhouse.”

“The bower,” says Robin Hood, with needless anger.

“The bower, Dick,” she answers, patient as a second Griselda. “I thought it was lovely at first, but I had to wait and wait, and nothing happened, and I came out.”

“Yes, you would,” breaks in the youngster ruthlessly. “Girls are such sillies. Have you slain the dun deer, lady, as I bade you?”

“No—no, Dick. I—I didn’t see any deer.”

It is obvious that Dick has been reading many adventure books of late, that his fancy is alive and glowing, prepared to overcome mere practical details of the moment The glance he gives Maid Marion is scathing, and says, as plainly as if one heard the words, that the dun deer ought to be slain, that the trifling obstacle presented by the absence of the quadruped would have been surmounted by any one less “silly” than a girl.

“Come and see Friday’s footprints on the sands,” he says abruptly, as if glad to return to congenial topics.

We follow him to the strip of golden sand that fringes one side of the island, and Dick points to a score or so of little footmarks.

“I was Robinson Crusoe when we landed on the desert island,” he remarks casually; “so, of course, Hilda had to be Man Friday.”

There is another ripple of laughter from my wife. She is thinking, possibly, that Hilda has been a hard-worked actress to-day, though constantly a minor part has been assigned to her.

“Yes, naturally she would be Man Friday,” I answer gravely.

“I made her take off her shoes and stockings, you see, because Friday didn’t wear any. Then she pattered up and down the sand, and went and hid, and I came out of the thickets.”

Our hero is fond of the word “thickets.” The island may be small, but he declines to admit that it holds less worthy fry than lions, tigers, elephants. From a casual remark of his we gather that he has also seen buffalo and dragons.

“It was splendid!” he goes on. “I found the footprints, and then went stalking Man Friday; and I found him, and he went down on his hands and knees and beat his head against the ground.”

“Poor Hilda!” murmurs Cathy.

“Then I rode to York, and back again in time to rob the Jolly Abbot just round the comer there.”

He pauses in his brave recital, and a look of pain comes to his face.

“Say, Maid Marion, are you an-hungered?” he groans, with desperate resolve to die at his post rather than surrender that mother-tongue which all heroes of adventure are supposed to use.

“Yes, Dick—very,” she answers, Griselda-like to the last We gather, from informal questions—to which Robin Hood responds in language guarded and antique—that these youngsters have been on the Island for half a day, and have had no food at all. In view of the exercise they have taken—a ride to York and home again, the holding up of a fat abbot, and certain paddlings up and down the sand and beating of heads against the ground—it is obvious that they must be sick with hunger.

It is Cathy’s moment, and she seizes her chance of playing her own part in the drama. She remembers that behind a hidden panel of the summer-house there’s a cupboard—we pretend it is a Stuart hiding-chamber—and in it are concealed the remnants of a feast we shared only yesterday.

“Would it please you to sup with us, Sir Robin Hood?” she asks, with that little fairy’s laugh of hers.

“Ay, madam,” he answers, courteously, though he is unable to conceal his pangs; “right willingly would I sup, for this ride to York has left me”— he halts again, and finds human nature get the better of his memory for antique phrases—“has left me jolly hungry, madam. Maid Marion, too,” he adds, recovering himself, “sits pining in her bower.”

“I don’t—oh, Dick, I don’t!” protests the long-limbed maid, reaching the limit of her patience. “I’m standing here at your elbow, and I do—oh, I do, Dick—want to have supper in the summerhouse.”

“The bower, maid,” says he, carrying his tattered banner bravely to the last “Yes, the bower, Dick,” she goes on recklessly. “I’ve shot the dun deer, and made my face all full of grit through bobbing my head into the sand. And I’ve woven tapestry in the summer-house—I mean, the bower—and waited for my lord’s coming.”

“It was your duty, Marion,” says the rascal, his face turned upwards, in a distant, supercilious fashion.

We seek the summer-house—or shall I say the bower?—and Robin Hood takes off his trappings when he scents the promise of good food.

“I say, you were a muff,” he whispers in my ear, with an uneasy side glance in Maid Marion’s direction. Maid Marion, as it chances, is being comforted by Cathy for the hardships of the day, and heeds nothing else.

“Was I? ’’ I ask diffidently.

“I should think so! There was nothing in the gun. You see, there wasn’t much time for us to get off, and I knew where the gun was, but hadn’t time to hunt about for cartridges. You were a muff!”

“There was my wife behind me,” I suggest “Had I not Maid Marion, too, sirrah? She is as fair and dear to me—I say, old chap, would you mind hurrying up the meal?”

Even young Robin Hoods relapse into the commonplace at times, as old Robin did aforetime, I fancy, if we knew his history in detail.

Yet undoubtedly the spirit of his namesake is quick and eager in this modern Robin, for as soon as Cathy has pressed back the secret panel, disclosing a cupboard four feet square, he resumes his fallen mantle and roams wildly and at large among the centuries. To be strictly truthful—as becomes the historian of one of the most gallant meals I ever shared—he silences the uproar of crude nature at once by dispatching two handfuls of macaroons. They plant the old, adventurous fire in him, and he declares that his arch enemy, the Sheriff of Nottingham, is concealed within the hiding-place.

“We meet at last, caitiff!” he cries, the last macaroon rendering his speech a trifle indistinct “Shall I speed an arrow through thy victuals”— he pronounces the words so, and seems to be influenced a little still by thought of food—“shall I speed an arrow through thy victuals, or wilt thou forth and meet me in open tourney?”

The Sheriff of Nottingham is a sad coward, evidently, for he answers nothing, though named a caitiff and offered his choice as to the method of a sudden death. Robin Hood accordingly holds no more “parley” with him, but proceeds to draw an imaginary sword and summon Hotspur to come forth into the open and meet him in single combat—to the death, of course. This delicious youngster always summons his adversary with the bugle note, “No quarter.”

Mere scratches in amongst the fray he regards as girl’s work. He never fights within the precincts of the bower, but prefers to “hie him thither” after the red work is done and his slain lie heaped as high as windy-clad Olympus.

Finally, after great slaughter of fugitives who have been tempted out of their hiding-chamber— four feet square—our hero grows rather bored with victory, and looks about him. Cathy has spread the little table with a vague and curious assortment of courses—the remnant of the macaroons, half a pickled tongue, some rather stale bread, and other trifles. If the truth were known —though we are too correct and elderly to summon foemen forth from the secret chamber, lest either should secure a mean advantage by accusing the other of foolishness—if the truth were known, we are vastly like our guests, Cathy and I, and often come here for a meal, disdaining Stylesey’s well-cooked lunch or dinner and her after-wrath, and making great pretence of seeking for the hidden panel, great pretence of wonder when we find the secret store of food. We believe —we, who are sad relics of the barbarous times which sent Nelson out to die with pomp and real splendour, which earlier sent Raleigh out to fight his battles—we believe that childhood’s rich, unquestioning faith in mysteiy, hazard, and “the blue hills of beyond ’’ is the faith that makes for strength. Raleigh and Nelson, beyond doubt, had this buoyant trust, so none of our present company of four need be ashamed, maybe.

Young Turpin—known to familiars, like his predecessor, as Dick—surveys the rough slab of oak which serves as table for our random meals. He sees the meal set out, and his eyes grow bright He stands to his full stature, bows ceremoniously to Cathy, and stalks to the end of the table.

“Madam, the board is furnished. Shall we sit within the dining-hall?” he says.

The Babe bows with great ceremony. She does not laugh, because her sense of humour is delicate and keen, because she understands this boy who is taking a fine holiday.

“You will grace it well, Robin Hood,” she answers—“you and Maid Marion.”

We sit down, we two elder children and the pair of younger ones, and we give Robin Hood a free rein.

I never learned the poetry of food until I shared this meal with trespassers upon the Island. The half of a pickled tongue suggests, as I cut it into slices, a fine conceit to Dick.

“This is the boar I slew with my good bow and arrow,” he says, addressing Hilda. “I met him in a thicket of the woods, and, just when his tusks were the length of a cricket-pitch from me—a bow-shot's length, I mean—I cleft him through the marrow. Did I not say, Maid Marion, that I would bring you boar’s flesh for the banquet?”

“Yes,” says Hilda, gaining confidence from my wife, as folk are apt to do. “Yes, but you kept me waiting, Dick.”

He dispatches a slice of tongue with relish. “Why, marry, yes,” he rejoins. “To be sure, I kept you waiting. After slaying of the boar, I was commanded by Her Majesty, the Good Queen Bess, to voyage to the Indies. ‘ Sir Walter,’ quotha, when I left the banquet hall,' Sir Walter, you will go and seize me twenty Spanish ships. You will fit out your squadron at your own charges, and tiring me the treasure that you capture—a fair exchange.’ ’’

Now, I cannot guess what special tale or history this buoyant and irrepressible youngster has been reading—he has probably forgotten its title himself—but he is certainly near to truth in his summing-up of the policy of Good Queen Bess. He leaves me no time, however, to question him, but recounts, with desperate haste and glee, how he and his sailors captured forty and eight Spanish ships of the line—our friend never deigns to count his head or his captured in less than round dozens —and how at this moment he bears the marks of cut and thrust and powder—marks hidden by his hose and trusty doublet. He revels in sunken galleons, and Spanish gold, and “caitiffs” whom he brought as prisoners to the queen’s feet; and, incidentally, he gives us as stirring a recital of a sea-fight as I have listened to or read. You would guess that never in this world could he have been a mere landward man, like Robin Hood or Turpin.

Yet the next moment, as he transfers a slice of potted meat to his plate, he is back to the land again.

“The Cliffords say that all my deer are theirs, Maid Marion; yet I bring you venison of the best,” he says, transferring the crude potted meat into a nobler image of itself.

And now I am on familiar ground; for I—the poor fool who shrank from an unloaded gun-have taught him to revere the history of the Cliffords and the Nortons, who fought at all times like good gentlemen, who—when peace threatened to rob them of their vigour—began always to quarrel one with the other touching their rights of killing deer.

CHAPTER XVI
AND HOW THE GREAT ADVENTURES ENDED

In brief, we are dining sumptuously, Cathy and I. The boy is so full of wholesale enterprises, so quick in the recital of his exploits, that he is a dinner comrade to our liking; and I suspect that a good dinner gains more credit for the cook, in a world of false perception, than for the judgment of one’s hostess who places wholesome folk to right and left of one.

Dick—his alias just now is Christopher Norton —relates, pleasantly and in brief, how he rescued Scottish Mary from Middleham Castle, and how he died with the words “Mary the Queen” on his lips. He is consuming, meanwhile, a meal that would do credit to a grown and rather hungry man.

Maid Marion is impressed by his prowess, and it is good to see that, though she eats little, her faith in her good knight, and desert islander, and wild sea-rover, grows to the length of his own stride, till she out-distances him. With the absurdity peculiar to Arcady, I feel that these two ought one day to come together; they would marry happily, I think, and Cathy and I would come to the christening of their first-born. Personally, I should trust the imaginary first-born to be a true knight and gallant gentleman.

This boy—Robin, or Sir Walter, or Dick—has led me, too, along the path of great adventures. I am seeing him married; I am thinking he will find good cheer, as I have done; his own adventurous spirit will be tuned to a softer, yet a stronger key, and Griselda’s patience will grow more alert, more witty and resourceful. I should like to peep into the future, I admit, and see these two in the close and happy intimacy of wedlock.

Meanwhile Sir Walter Raleigh—whisper the phrase, lest it offend his dignity—is steadily “ tucking in.” I did not think the compass of a small boy’s frame could secrete so much without apparent strain. And then at last he sighs, glances wistfully at the table, seems to ask himself if more is possible, sighs again, and shakes his head.

Soon afterwards he grows extremely serious. Until now he has been a joyous prodigal, thinking only of high adventures; but now, I imagine, he is considering another aspect of the case—the prodigal’s return.

He maintains a strict reserve for some time, then unburdens himself in speech less flavoured by romance than that of Robin Hood.

“I say,” he observes, looking solemnly at me, “

I’m in for a jolly good licking.”

Maid Marion slips to his side at once, with a protective, almost motherly caress. She bids fair to cry, and Robin Hood, seeing this, throws back his head defiantly.

“I don’t care! We’ve had enough fun to take me through a dozen lickings.’’

It is only at this stage of our frolic that I reflect on my own share of it Undoubtedly I should have remembered that an anxious father and a distraught mother are in search of a boy, a girl, and a double-barrelled gun. The glee of adventure has stifled conscience, but now I realise that I am an accessory, and must take my share in the results. Glancing at Cathy, I read the same thought in her face.

“Murphy, we ought not to have kept them here!” she whispers, not knowing whether to yield to laughter or dismay.

“Let’s all be returned prodigals!’’ I suggest. “We are all in the same ship, Sir Walter, and we’ll stick to her. Punt us up-stream with you, and we’ll see what can be done about that 'jolly good licking.”’

Now Sir Walter would have taken chastisement with a good heart, I know—he is that kind of boy—but he would be superhuman if his face did not brighten at the suggestion. If I remember anything of my own boyhood, it is far pleasanter to meet one’s father after an adventurous day, when one is supported by an ally of riper years, than to meet him quite alone.

“I don’t care, you know, really,” says Dick Turpin distantly.

“Neither do we. Babe, are you afeared, as Sir Walter would say? ’’

“Not a bit,” laughs Cathy.

So the end of it is that we hastily clear away the remnants of the feast and put them into the secret chamber. Dick is entirely himself again— by which I mean that he is a variety of other people dead and gone—for he closes the sliding panel with a snap.

“Ha, brigand, I have thee in thy own cave!”he shouts. “There stay, till kites and ravens come and pick thy dastard bones!”

Maid Marion—her spirits revived by the hope that her knight will escape chastisement ultimately—ventures to laugh at her hero—“to flout him,” in his own chosen language.

“Methinks that kites and ravens would find no way of entry,” says she, “seeing that you have shut the door, my lord.”

He is troubled, but only for a moment. It is not for a slip of a girl to daunt his fine imagination. “What, know’st not of the chimney up which the smoke goes from the robber chieftain's fire? The opening lies high up the mountain, maid, where kites and ravens fly. Will they not scent him down the chimney-shaft?”

It is plain that we shall never restore these wanderers to their respective homes until we curb our hero’s fancy. We contrive to get him to the mooring stage and into the punt, and have a reasonable hope that the labour of carrying us up-stream will engage his whole attention. Those sorrowing parents, to confess the truth, are troubling my conscience more and more.

Our friend has another ideal, as it chances. He cannot resist the first strip of sandy beach, but straightway runs the punt amuck against it, flings the pole among us—just missing the youthful head of Maid Marion—and leaps ashore.

“Come Fridaying and Crusoeing again?” he says to us, with the eyes of an imp and the face of an angeL

I leap after him and recover him. We proceed for half a mile tamely and without adventure, until we come to a sharp bend of the river, all girdled by down-drooping branches of beech and sycamore and alder. Dick, once again, drives our craft inshore, compelling us to dodge the branches, again throws down the pole, and picks up the gun from the bottom of the punt “The French are coming down the Channel, with all sails spread,” he mutters. “Silence, men, until our guns roar out a welcome!”

It is magnificent, doubtless, but we are not getting much nearer to an anxious father and a mother all bereaved. The sun is low already, and it is later than I thought I seize the abandoned pole, push out without the least suggestion of “a parley,” and make up-stream as fast as I can take the punt.

Admiral Nelson, by his silence, assures me that he considers my conduct out of order—to use no harsher term. Yet once more he recovers himself, and, as we near his own landing-stage, he speaks.

“Why, you’re only a galley slave,” he says, with quiet derision. “They put the worst of their prisoners at the oar, and the ruddy sweat drips down them. Oh, I know a galley slave at sight”

It is dangerous to traffic in repartee with this hero of the splendid record, so I answer nothing, but bring the punt to her moorings, collar my rascal by the head and heels, and release him at the foot of the uphill path that leads, through the garden, to the house where a father waits for the returned prodigal. He seems to admire me for the enterprise, and that is odd, for neither Robin of the Long Bow nor Sir Walter Raleigh were accustomed to rough handling of this kind.

We turn to help Cathy and Maid Marion to get ashore, but they are already at my elbow.

“I say, old chap,” whispers Dick Turpin, “we’ve left the gun behind. It’s our only chance with the governor to bring the gun home safely.”

He secures the gun, and marches proudly by my side along the sandy, winding path. It is near to dusk, and a dead fir-tree, standing up against the pink and saffron sky, suggests another enterprise to Dick.

“Ha, a malefactor!” he says, with engaging jollity. “He hangs in chains from yonder bough. ’Tis I will cut him down!”

“I think not, Sir Walter.”

Again I am compelled to use brute force, and again he seems to have a rueful liking for my pluck. He is glad, I think, to forget how I tried to dodge the barrels of an unloaded gun.

When we reach the house—truants all, though two are young and two are supposed to be old and married—we find a scene of uproar and confusion. The hall-door stands open. There are many lights within, and many figures, casting shadows as they move up and down.

“I—I think you’d better go in first, old chap,”says Dick.

“You muff! Are you afraid?” I answer.

We’re all afraid at these times, but it’s unwise to tell the youngsters so. Sir Walter—with many aliases—is silent for a moment.

“No, I’m not!” he says sharply. “I’ll lead the way.”

Under the uproar from within I hear Cathy’s quiet, approving laugh from the dusk of the increasing night behind us.

I bow our hero into his father's house, and I whisper in his ear that boys—and men—have done worse deeds before his time than we have done to-day.

The whole scene within-doors is curious. Dick’s father is “in parley” with a dapper little man, who proves to be a detective from the nearest town. Our local constable, with an air of mystery and importance, is standing in the rear, with two other constables behind him. In one corner is Dick’s mother, weeping quietly into a lace handkerchief as large as a threepenny-piece.

“The boy has come to grief,” his father is saying as we enter. “He was always reckless with guns, and—”

“I’ve learned a lot about missing boys, sir,” says the detective, in the smooth voice of one’s family physician. “Some carry guns, and some don’t, but I generally find these cases end in one way—the boys come home again, ready for next morning’s mischief.”

“I’m here, dad,” says Dick Turpin, modestly presenting himself and handing the gun to his father, as if he wished to conciliate at once some hostile chief of the cannibals.

I notice—surely human nature is a curious piece of mechanism—that this father, released from a real anxiety, gives a hasty look to the gun, to assure himself that all is well with it. The mother, on the other hand, drops her threepenny-bit of a handkerchief, and runs to Dick incontinently, and embraces him in the open.

Dick Turpin very properly resents this demonstration, and would have preferred a “jolly good licking.”

“Don’t, mother!” he protests. “There’s a lot of us men in the hall, and we don’t care for this sort of thing.”

Cathy laughs. Cathy, like the Elder-Man of the village, always laughs when she is able; and to-night she breaks up the tragedy of the proceedings and turns them all to comedy. Dick’s father has a great regard for the Babe—as all decent folk have—and it is plain that she has won the day for us by that childish and ridiculous laugh of hers.

“It is not exactly a laughing matter, Mistress Cathy!” he remarks, with a fierce glance at her.

The Babe drops him a curtsey, as if she were Stuart Mary, and laughs again—one can’t help being reminded of the fairies—and speaks.

“It is altogether a laughing matter, sir—so much so that we forgot your great anxiety, and entertained Robin Hood and Maid Marion at a banquet on the Island.”

Dick’s father smiles—though striving to be firm—and that scene of the comedy is obviously finished.

But observe that, through the open door of the hall, Maid Marion’s parents enter. They have done their best, and as a last resort have come— haggard and spent with unaccustomed exercise— to know if they can hear anything of Hilda from their neighbours.

The scene that follows is indescribable. I have no clear picture of it, and never shall have. In the foreground are stray odds and ends of children, surrounded by parents who embarrass them. Only the background is steady—the detective, proud of his last diagnosis as if he were a weather prophet —the constables, who had scented business in the matter and did not like the tranquil end of all— our local officer of law, pre-eminent because he is so fat of cheek, so ruddy, and so doleful.

Heaven knows how we arrange it ultimately, I think the safe return of a treasured gun has much to do with it—that, and women’s tears and laughter, which have helped the world to its work since first the earth began to spin. Undoubtedly, my masters, we live in a world that reminds us always of a morris-dance.

When all is finished, and we have agreed together that the children are to escape that “jolly good licking,” our host—father of Sir Walter and Dick Turpin and other men-children—sends out for the dog-cart. Just as we are starting, Cathy and I, to meet Stylesey’s wrath touching a neglected dinner, I remember the constable who treads and keeps safe the boundaries of Arcady. We take him along with us. As we ride through the summer’s night—he and I on the perilous seat attaching to the rear of all well-constructed dogcarts—he unburdens himself.

“Lads are a bothersome business, sir, choose where they’re bred,’’ says he.

I lead him to confide in me, and not the least surprising of the evening’s happenings is my discovery of a vein of fancy in the constable. It appears that he has been burning to distinguish himself in the conduct of this search for the truants and that he has cherished a “clue.”

For some days past, he tells me, a band of gypsies has been camping on Willow Stream Meads, and he “has had his doubts o’ the like o’ they.” As soon as he heard of the disappearance of the children, he guessed at once that they had fallen into the gypsies’ hands, that they were being held to ransom. Now, this may seem to argue a mean power of fancy in our constable— would suggest, indeed, that he had merely recalled the tales of nursery days—but, coming from the Dogberry of Arcady, it almost startles me by its brilliance. Only we who know our Dogberry can picture him. There never lived, I think, a man who gave you a more real impression of bulk and fatness than this guardian of our properties. There have been fat men before his time, undoubtedly, and will be afterwards, men who could out-scale him easily; it is not so much his actual weight that awes one, as the way in which it hangs about him; every line of his body, every curve of his plump, weather-beaten face proclaims him fat. He is pompous, and his pomposity is fat. He is vain, and his vanity is fat. He daunts slenderer men by sheer genius of avoirdupois.

Only in mind does he seem to fail in bigness, and his sporting bid for establishing a “clue” enthralls me. He tells me in detail how he has laboured since first he was appealed to on behalf of the truants; he describes his journey to the gypsies’ camp and the temperature attained by his plump body before he reached it; he narrates how the gypsies were not impressed at all by his uniform—and how they laughed at him, like the heathens that they were—and how he sought unavailingly for the missing children. Undaunted still, he repaired to the house on the river, where we found him not long ago, to proclaim his faith in the clue. He was sure that the truants were hidden somewhere in the neighbourhood of Willow Stream Meads, and the fact that the gypsies laughed at him was clearly, to his mind, a sign that they were attempting to lead him away from the clue. We who know Dogberry are not surprised that the vagabond folk were merry when he appeared amongst them, tremendous in bulk and in authority; but then he cannot see the picture of himself in true perspective.

I am sorry for the constable. He has drowsed so long and patiently at his post, and now imagination has been stirred in him. The malady may well prove latal.

“Boys are no manner o’ use, sir,” he says tragically. “I alius said it, and I stick to it Constables' sons, or better born, they’re boys—just boys. This one, now, if he’d had any decent feeling for a constable, and the father of ten, he’d have been among they heathen gypsy-folk, and I’d have brought him home.”

Adventure seems to be in the air to-day, for surely Dogberry is imaginative and brave beyond my previous knowledge of him.

“Boys is boys, sir; thank ye, sir, I need a little king’s money to keep my heart up nowadays,” says Dogberry, as we set him down at the corner of Arcady’s long, winding street “You see, sir, boys is boys, and they like as they perplex a body.”

The day’s adventure has been comedy; but, as we drive through the scented night of Arcady, I see tragedy ahead for Dogberry. He has a fat and unimaginative body, but the inner lamp of fancy has been lit His last, despairing message reaches me as we go forward.

“Boys will be boys—and I thought I had a clue!”

We’re all made out of a piece, as the little, cross-legged tailor in the village says often. Clothes, the little man argues, are worthier than the men who wear them; for clothes are made from varied pieces, while “human bodies—rich or poor, low or high—they're all made out of the one piece, and a contrary pattern on the cloth at that.”

The dapper detective, alert and quick, has joined hands with Dogberry, the slow and ponderous; for Dogberry has lost the placid sleep of old, and has watched the will-o’-the-wisp of a “clue” that danced before him and lured him to the marshes.

It is roughly true that we are all made out of a piece, and I have wondered often why tailors and cobblers are invariably so full of quiet and philosophic maxims. I put the riddle to the Wanderer once, and he answered it so readily that my own stupidity was plain.

“Observe, boy, that your cobbler and your tailor have time to thmk. They sit at their work —one at his open door, the other at his window— and they look out, and see the foibles of the village, and turn to needle and thread again, or to nails and bradawl, and weigh the village history in their minds. And village history, observe, is just world-history in little.”

The Wanderer and the tailor, it would appear, agree therefore as to the prime truth that “ we’re all made out of a piece.” Yet to-night I am sorry for the constable. He had so rare and complete a talent for sleep that I fear he can never hope for greatness in the new country opened out to him. “If I held the truth in my hand, I would let her fly,” once said a philosopher; and it is sure that Dogberry, if by accident he held a clue in his hand, would also let it fly, and then ponderously run after it Poor Dogberry! Arcady’s grey street will soon be too narrow for him, and too innocent of “clues.”He will leave us, I’m afraid, for some city whose streets are paved with gold and clues.

My ridiculous wife laughs as we reach home.

“Murphy!” she says breathlessly, “have you ever enjoyed a dinner-party as much as to-night’s?” “Well, frankly, I never have, Babe.”

“You see, the guests were all so interesting. Dick Turpin, Sir Walter, and Robin Hood, all seated at one table, Murphy! And Maid Marion, and good Queen Bess, and Mary Stuart—oh, I’m a child, dear I I know I am.”

So am I, and Cathy knows it. That is why I am compelled to let her run wild. An elderly, stern husband was needed, obviously; but then I think he would rarely have heard Cathy laugh.

CHAPTER XVII
ON SUPERSTITION

It is curious that one meets many folk who deny all superstitious feeling, yet seldom one who is speaking strict truth when he denies it. Indeed, I cannot name a man or woman of my acquaintance who is altogether free from what the smaller-minded of the scientists name “the taint.” In the bigger world that lies within and without the narrow, prosy realm of material bread-and-butter, the taint of superstition is no taint at all, but a virtue. So far as one can look back with a seeing eye on history, the little men have always made pretence of disdaining superstition; the big men have always harboured it, and acknowledged their own thraldom.

Superstition is the youngest sister, surely, of the maidens Charity and Faith. If a lass curtseys to the young, sickle moon at first sight of it, and speeds a welcome to her lover, is she as foolish as that odd type of materialist who tells us there’s no superstition possible about the moon, because he knows her parallax—there’s a fine word for you!—and her distance from the earth?

The big worlds stretch out and away from us, and their guide-posts are the lamps of heaven.

Can any man fancy that, because he gauges the distance of a star by human measurement, he has dimmed the lustre of that special star? As well say that Helen of Troy had no charm, because her height was five feet and so many inches added. She is still the World’s Desire, and one cannot understand the point of view which measures all things by crude length and breadth, then says triumphantly, “There is no illusion, no romance, no superstition, about all this sum in plain arithmetic.”

Does any calculation in astronomy matter, when the lass comes up the dene to meet her lad, and sees the moon ride gently on the tree-tops? Does arithmetic play any part when, after wedlock, they watch another spring-moon brighten at the time of leafing boughs, when they turn to look one at the other, with a thrill of simple, cleanly happiness, turn to ask, “D’ye love the little bairn that’s come to us?” The moon that lighted their trysting-time may be, in theory, some thousands of miles away; but she is, in practice, a close friend and a neighbour.

It is hard to say just when true superstition meets and mates with fancy, as it is hard to say just where true superstition begins to trespass on the lands of Faith; but it is certain that they are all of the one good family. I am not especially a person of robust and stony heart—Stylesey would at once refute my claim to the title, were I to advance it—but there are moments when I would, almost with gaiety, revive the gibbet, the cart-tail, and the whipping-post These kindly instruments would be used exclusively on behalf of those sinners who assert aggressively that they know not superstition; for to boast of a lack of soul-fibre is proof, not of casual, but of hardened criminality.

Superstition stands half-way up that hill upon whose summit Faith stands, crowned and everlasting. You must 'pass superstition, and halt to greet her, if ever you mean to gain the cleanly heights. For this reason, the folk who live near to moors and lofty fells have always many superstitions, and usually they have faith as well. Their faith may be this or that, but it rings true; and, though they die in sanctity, they remember also the superstitions—fanciful, or kindly, or tragical—which helped them on their uphill climb.

We are robbing children of their birthright constantly to-day. Not all the sums that were added up on all the slates in all this world would be equal to one good fancy, rightly sown and rightly watered till it grew to be the strong plant, superstition, and ripened, and bore the sweet-smelling blossom, faith.

There are sums enough in life, God knows, and too much of our leisure goes to useless adding-up of the same. If the children, in their after-days, are to enjoy the full worthiness and usefulness of life, teach them in infancy the love of legends, love of high romance, love of the chaste and gentle dignity which field-flowers wear—teach them, at all hazards, the charm that lies in cleanliness, and chivalry, and high endeavour. Tell them that Raleigh spread his cloak abroad, lest Elizabeth should soil her feet—tell them that the fairies they heard singing yester-night are real, hardworking members of the big universe—tell them constantly that the halfpence and the other coins of barter are useful only when they can purchase a peep into the Beyond. Could we begin to teach our children on these lines, we should stand on the threshold of true education, which is a stranger at the board where politics, of all shades and hues, dine sumptuously at expediency’s expense.

We need a more lively superstition in these days. We need more fairy-tales. We need more of that poetic breadth and clarity of vision which the Greeks had, and the Scandinavians—which the true Highlander to this day possesses as a birthright. The race is to the strong, undoubtedly, as when Adam first began to till his garden-plot, and wondered vaguely if his love for Eve were worth this enterprise of sheer, hard digging. Yet Adam, had he known it, worked by faith in this same Eve; his fairy-tale, deny it as he would, was a true tale to him, or his labour had been insupportable. His fairy-tale was true, and he worked on, and reared men-children; fear of his God quickened romance, and romance in turn made livelier his fear of God; and the legacy he left is with us to-day, hide it deep as we will.

The race is to the strong, but that epithet of “strong” is the most ill-used of all our words. One hears the term applied to the man who, forsaking all charity and all usual morals, works steadfastly for his own hand; he is strong, apparently, because he disdains the flowers that grow beneath his feet. One hears of great political economists as “strong,” because they turn a deaf ear to the vagrant in the street, constantly denying that any tale of misery can be true unless the tally of it is set down in rows of figures, added neatly up to fit their own peculiar theory of economics.

Yet these folk, pieced together like a well-made bit of machinery, are not strong in any way, according to the judgment of the over-world; for they lack the ground-work of all strength, a noble fancy.

Moreover, the man of fancy, even in this world’s struggle, is more royally equipped for fighting the battle than his brother of the tape and yard-measure. Trafalgar would never have been won had Nelson known a weaker fancy, a weaker inspiration from romance; he was a better sailor than his fellows because he knew his sailing work, because also he understood the meaning of that inner fire which some name folly, which others know as faith—faith in God and faith in God’s romance. The great generals of the world have acknowledged superstition in one shape or another, and it is curious to note that such leaders are loved and trusted by their men, so that they may command them anything.

I would go further, and say that the great merchants of a wider and an older generation were swayed by lively superstition. Romance would seem to-day an alien in the midst of commerce, but it was not so in the days when the big merchants sent their big ships down into the deep, and welcomed home-returning cargoes from the Indies. The spacious times of Raleigh shed still a glory, as of flame and battle, above these enterprises in mere merchandise, when Commerce —say, in the days when Bloomsbury was built— sat throned between the gods of Love and War.

Heigho I The days drift by, and any one who is brave enough to-day to travel so far into the wilderness of London streets as Bloomsbury will find no trace of Raleigh. The princely merchants have gone each to his own kirkyard, carrying their pride and buoyant superstitions with them. These quiet, or once quiet, squares are in themselves so many graveyards of dead aspirations, dead gallantries of hope, adventure, speculation; and the roar of the town hums overhead, not heeding that princes once lived here.

Superstition! There’s somehow a magic in the word which enlightens and informs this mazy country-dance that men call life. The tales we were told by half-believing, half-mocking nurses as they cradled us—are they not fixed and steadfast through the after years? If not, how comes it that fathers, when they bring home the newest version of Hop-o’-my-Thumb and Jack the Giant-Killer, sit down to read it—with eagerness almost— before they pass it on?

There are few men of the north, I think, who can hear a certain wind blow keen about their ears, and whistle down the glen, without thinking of the Hunting Squire. It is superstition, if you will, but it helps us always—that wind with the sobbing cry in it—to do forward and more forward work. We hear the yelp of the ghostly hounds, the cry of the phantom fox, the glee and fury of the filmy squire, seated astride his filmy horse, as they follow the ghostly quarry. We are at home; and, whatever our work may be, we take it at the gallop when we hear the Hunter’s Wind. If that work be good, if it helps the world in the least degree to be stronger, happier, saner, the Hunter has not chased the ghostly fox for naught; crown him as illusion, sneer at him as delusion, he has lit and kept alive the fire—and without fire the sturdiest anvil must rust in idleness.

When Whittington heard the bells of Bow, and listened, and was sure that their message was “Turn again,” he was a dreamer and a fool, according to the arid creed which denies all issues save those of physical touch, and sound, and scent. Yet he listened to the bells of Bow, and the heart of him was quickened, and he went forward to win honour and a renown that has survived him by many centuries.

Joan of Arc stood on the threshold which leads from superstition into the well-kept house of faith. Her enterprise was madness, so the gossips said. She was a young girl led astray by fancies stronger than the ordinary, they whispered to each other. She was held in thrall by witchcraft, they murmured with the downcast eyes of calumny—and so she was, but it was white witchcraft, such as the angels use without reproach. She, too, went forward, following the gleam, and all men know what deeds she did for France.

There were men who met at the Ship Inn at Bideford, in the good county of Devon, and formed a Brotherhood of the Rose. Not only Kingsley tells us so—Kingsley, the knightliest and most gallant amongst those who have lit our boyhood’s and our after days with stories—but histoiy, too, would have us accept the tale so far as its main details go. The Rose was a Bideford maiden, bonnier than her sisters, but no way remarkable, so far as we can tell, for anything but beauty. She was “good and bonnie,” as the country phrase goes; a little wayward, as maids must be, a little fond of worship from the gallants who lived here and there about that coastland of blue sea and grey-white shingle which girdles the sweet Bay of Bideford; she was a usual maid, in brief, intended for the serviceable and tranquil joys of wedlock and of motherhood. Yet, to the hot young gallants who met at the Ship Inn, she was something other-worldly; through the lamp of this world’s beauty they caught a gleam from the starry over-world, and they followed the gleam, and it led them into high and desperate enterprises which proved, and cleansed, and chastened them.

The Brotherhood of the Rose was founded on a superstition. It lived by superstition and by faith. We know what it did for the honour of the West Country.

Ghost stories, one gathers, are regarded nowadays as sport for children when Christmas days draw near and all the light within doors as we sit about the hearth is furnished by a roaring fire. Nay, we are growing shy of ghost stories even at such propitious hours, for, unless the children are unspoiled indeed, they criticise us and condemn. If the elders disbelieve, the children disbelieve; it is not they who are in fault, but we.

And yet there are true ghost stories. Once on a day all such tales were credited; we run now to the opposite extreme, and discredit all; in the middle way lies truth. Because a farm lad plays a silly prank and frightens the farm wenches by sticking a turnip lantern on the top of a pole at some lonely cross-roads, he does not convince us that all ghosts are make-believe; as well argue that all men are dishonest, because once you saw a rascal picking pockets.

I know something of family ghosts, from those who have inherited them along with lands and title-deeds. These friends of mine are not lacking in sanity, or humour, or quiet and unassuming courage; they are, I should say, quite usual and level-headed Englishmen; but in the rare moments when they talk of hidden things they speak of ghosts as of realities. The over-watcher of the race may be a White Lady, a Phantom Huntsman, may be nothing more palpable than a breath of keen, wet wind, or the sound of water trickling in a room where no stream of this world can be found. It is all one, for each portent has a message for them, according to the terms on which they gained their heritage. They will prosper or fail—fail or prosper—as the fleshless servitor bids. Believe me, there is no room for doubts or gibes when you have sat hearth-neighbour to such men in times of stress.

One such friend I remember. His folk were from the Highlands, though they had settled in the Vale of Arcady some fifty years ago. Their Ghostly Piper followed them south, playing a dirge at midnight whenever one of the family was destined to cross that troubled, narrow sea which separates us from “the blue hills of Beyond.” I met him last November in the hunting-field, and his face was grey—the grey of wood-ashes when the fire has left them.

“Good-bye, old chap,” he said, reining his horse close in to mine and putting out his hand.

There was little time for surmise, none for question, for the hounds gave tongue, and we were following at the gallop before I could ask his meaning.

At the third fence my horse refused the jump, and much good time was lost before we came to a proper understanding, he and I. When we were clear at last, I saw, far ahead, near the bend of the pasture field, a knot of horses and horsemen gathered in a straggling circle round an unseen something in their midst.

I found my way among them, and the unseen something proved to be my friend, lying face upward to the sky.

“Broken spine. The confounded place is alive with burrows,’' muttered a neighbour hoarsely to me behind his hand.

His wife was there, and I noticed that her face was still and set, as if she had met the tragedy before it came and had fought with it. Afterwards —long afterwards—she told me that both had heard the Piper go wailing round and round the house as they sat at dinner on their last night together. It was characteristic of them both that there was no suggestion that the morrow’s hunt should be abandoned. There’s a dignity, a courage, attaching to the truly superstitious; these two were well aware that one of them was soon to cross the blue hills of Beyond, and they took that night a reverent, quiet farewell, I think, each of the other, as if some unerring physician of this world had given his patient only a day or two of life.

This happened, mind you, among people who were leading lives inimical, one would have said, to superstition. They were hunting, shooting, fishing, dining, dancing, looking after their estates. Yet, in the temporary silences of their lives, these two could hear, did hear, the Ghostly Piper skirling.

What if I took you to the moors where men live wide apart, one from the other, where little fret of human intercourse occurs to rub smooth the crude, rough face of superstition? Wind in the heather—snow and sleet and rain—mist on the rugged hills and palpable, affrighting darkness of the winter’s nights—these cradle the natural, superstitious, faith-abiding soul of a man, and they teach him terrible things.

Because you are blind to ghosts, my friend, mid so count them all disproved, are you sure that those who have sight do not smile at your malady with a pity charitable and tender? Go and live with some shepherd on the moors, I say—do not visit him, with dainty curiosity, for an hour of some day when June has laid light fingers on the heath, hiding the wildness and the stress—go and live with the shepherd, and hear his tales beside the hearth o’ nights, and listen to the wind as it howls, or raves, or whimpers round the weather-beaten lump of stone which the shepherd calls his home. Walk abroad when night has hidden all the moorland tracks, and feel the weight of God’s immensity about you, and listen—listen—listen constantly. You will hear strange tales.

Have not the prophets and the poets come constantly from the wide and windy spaces where ghosts walk and fairies dance? The reason is not far to seek, for they were reared on superstition, and found themselves, when manhood came, far on the road to faith.

How they ring down the moorland glens, these tales of haunted houses, haunted woods, haunted men and women who lived before our time! The corner yonder where the fir-wood meets the open heath—can you pass it, at red sundown of a November day, and not remember that three men—father, son, and grandfather—were hung in chains here for stealing of a sheep when they and theirs lacked bread? Can you forget that their ghosts, according to the faith of all the countryside, walk still at time of gloaming?

Some men have second sight and some have second hearing, if one may coin the phrase. For myself, I have seen no phantom shapes when passing Hangman’s Corner by night; but I have constantly heard a thin, insistent uproar, as of a breeze among the heather—an uproar which, unlike a usual wind, speaks in our human tongue.

“Bread for our wives and bairns,” says one of the gibbeted three.

“Bread for bairns and wives,” says another.

“Bread!” says the third. “We starve, while the sheep fatten on the hills.”

And long after one has passed the corner, the echo of that cry for bread goes haunting one, a constant and abiding voice beneath and above the louder wind-frets.

Indeed, I would suggest that phantom sounds are more subtle in their appeal to our finer sense than are the ghosts which show themselves in shapes half palpable. That family guardian of which I spoke awhile ago gave warning only through the medium of sound—the trickle of. water in the corner of a certain room—yet, within my own knowledge and beyond possibility of doubt, the warning has sounded from one generation to another—has sounded clearly, unmistakably—and has never lied. Sometimes, indeed, one thinks that it is only in this world there are liars.

Superstition? It is one of the prime levers of the world. Not steam, not railways and the humming factories, not the ever-widening grip of the towns upon the green lanes and the pastures, can ever drive superstition from her throne. Without faith, romance, and superstition, men would die of soul-starvation, which kills slowly but with a sureness absolute. They may disdain her, or pretend to do; she will return to pluck them by the sleeve. They may go forward, day by day, on the beaten track of so-called fact; superstition will bide her time, will take them unawares. They may prefer to live and die with less experience of the unseen world than is possessed by horses, dogs, the cattle in the fields; but superstition is a patient wife, and one who is no way daunted by neglect or downright cruelty. She will return—return again and yet again—and there are few of us, happily, so hide-bound that we can prolong indefinitely' the sullen, useless sleep which goes before the true awakening.

Superstition? I was just warming to the topic when these last notes were written. There’s so much to be said, so much to be left unsaid, about it, that I spent a tranquil afternoon under the lime-tree developing my theme. When called away by Tom Lad to discuss a matter of treeplanting in the wood, which was thinned by the gales of last autumn, I left the pencilled scraps of paper in a neat pile on the garden seat On my return, Tiko met me at the far end of the lawn.

The puppy and I have grown into a real and lasting comradeship. “He likes the smell of you, sir,” as Tom Lad puts it. The little beggar—half squirrel, half dog—was most certainly cheap at two pounds.

As he meets me this afternoon, however, you would not suspect him of any exaggerated liking for me. His whole demeanour suggests a mute request for notice, and I suspect him at once; for, when the Tiko Boy has done nothing wrong, he always barks and yelps and whines for one’s attention. When he is silent at such times, one seeks about for his offence.

Moreover, his eyes are vastly innocent as they look up at me, and tears of pathos are dropping down his squirrel nose. He seems to be saying, “Please, big master, I’m the most saintly dog in Arcady, and butter, even on the hottest summer’s day, wouldn’t melt in my mouth; and, by your leave, big master, I haven’t much wag left in my tail, but what little I have is at your service.”

The Tiko Boy, in brief, is looking a very good dog, and would deceive a casual stranger; but he gives himself away to one who knows him.

I pretend to believe him. I note, even as he licks my hand and assumes an air of friendship and well-being, that he constantly glances toward the lime-tree, then looks again at me to see if I have noticed his abstraction.

I make for the lime-tree, and the nearer we get to it the more quiet my comrade grows the more his tail hangs down between his legs. He has nothing of the coward in him, though, and keeps close to my heel.

On reaching the seat, I find some of my pencilled sheets there. Others are scattered broadcast on the turf, in smaller or larger scraps; one would think there had been a snowstorm, with a slight rain of ink to follow it.

Alas, for notes on superstition! Alas, for notes on anything when you give hospitality to fourlegged treasures.

Tiko sits On his haunches. His nose is in the air, and he is gazing, not at the snowstorm of his own making, but at the distant hills. He looks as if the problems of this life were too much for him, as if he were seeking counsel from the truth which broods upon the hill-tops.

“Tiko,” I observe, with the gloved urbanity that hides the grip of steel.

He glances at me hurriedly, then resumes his contemplation of the larger world.

“Tiko!”

His tail wags feebly. His air of detachment is otherwise complete. A rogue more plausible never stood his trial at the dock.

“This is your doing, sir?” I proceed.

Three thumps of the tail put in a plea of “Guilty,” for Tiko is above all things truthful, young as he is, and disdains to shirk his punishment. So rational is he, indeed—so awake to the fact that evil doing must meet with chastisement —that he abandons his detached air, lies down in front of me, and frankly asks me to get through with the matter in hand as speedily as possible.

The little chap nearly disarms me; but puppies and boys are vastly alike in temperament, and they are merely spoiled by sentimental sparing of the rod. Just as I am giving him a thrashing— one suited to his tender youth, and half of it pretence—my wife comes out of the house. She sees what is going on, races across the lawn, and regards me with accusing eyes.

“Murphy!” she cries, all out of breath.

Tiko retires a little, and looks on. Did he possess a sleeve, I could swear that he was laughing in it “Puppies must be trained,” I suggest—limply, and with a sense that it is I who am the culprit, after all.

“But what has he done, Murphy?’

“Oh, nothing, Babe I Nothing at all. He has only eaten half my notes on superstition.”

Cathy permits herself to look candidly astonished. It is clear that she regards my notes on any topic as the harmless, necessary recreation of one who might otherwise employ his time in getting into mischief.

“He is only a puppy, dear” she says at last.

Tiko gives forth that happy “Whoo-uff!” of his which is like the speech of some soft, human voice. He gauges the situation with curious accuracy, and is, in fact, already putting on airs— the airs of a martyr who is conscious of his own integrity.

My part in the drama is less clearly defined.

Cathy thinks me a brute. The ball of fluff—kin to the squirrels and some unknown breed of dog —declines to admit, now that his chastisement is over, that there is any harm in eating scraps of paper. I am alone in the world, and those who profess to care for me preserve a chilly silence, which asks, more clearly than the spoken word, if it is a manly employment, this of thrashing a family friend so much smaller than one’s self.

I glance at Tiko Boy. His expression would make me laugh, if I were not bent on being serious. He is so obviously enjoying himself, and is giving free play to a trick he has of winking his right eye. Tiko’s wink is a thing absurd and admirable.

No one understands—save those who are happily married—how desperately in earnest one can be about the business of feeling aggrieved and serious. Cathy’s face, the repeated wink of Tiko Boy, should assure me this is comedy; but I am thinking of those vanished notes on superstition, and I prefer to play in tragedy.

“Only a puppy/” I echo. “The notes might have been immortal, Babe.”

“True, Murphy—they might have been.”

Cathy’s disdain—light as mist on the hills, dainty as the first white frost that glamours all the blades of grass—is not a thing to quarrel with. I laugh, without thought or reason; so does the Babe. Tiko, knowing all is well with the three of us, casts off his martyr’s cloak, comes up to us, and is ridiculously spoiled.

Yet I dream of the lost notes on superstition, and in my sleep they come to me, averring that they have travelled to Olympus and have returned to tell me of the fine reception they have met with there. It is so simple—in dreamland— to meet the immortals on their own hill-top and chat with them as easily as with one’s next-door neighbour. I wake regretfully, and remember that the notes which should have crowned me have “gone into the interior,” like the missionary to a distant country where the cannibal held sway.

“He’s only a puppy,” I murmur, half awake.

I suspect that, after all, there was nothing in those notes that was even remotely connected with Olympus. It seems to me an unlikely supposition, now that I am thoroughly awake. Tiko, when I go down to breakfast and meet him on the stairs, says softly, “Whoo—whoo-uff— whoo-uff.”

He was cheap at two pounds, this Tiko Boy, though now and then he disconcerts me.

CHAPTER XVIII
IN PRAISE OF OLD TAVERNS

Yesterday Cathy and I drove out to the Abbey and dined in the cool of the evening at the hostelry near by. Pleasant as one’s home may be, however well-served its meals, there’s something wholesome in a lunch, a dinner, or a breakfast, taken under the roof of an old tavern such as this which stands neighbour to the Abbey. It lies only a few miles from us, but we feel always, after our return, that we have had a holiday and an adventure.

And now I am sitting under the lime-tree, listening to the rooks’ clamour overhead and thinking of the vanished hostelries. A few still remain within reach of Arcady, but in the outer world their ranks are sadly thinned; indeed, odd as the connection of the two may seem, the Tavern and the Lavender Lady disappeared, or all but disappeared, at the same stage of our history.

I am using those two fine words, tavern and hostelry, in no loose sense. The words— identical in meaning—seem obsolete in an age that has only pot-houses or hotels; but in Arcady they still possess a meaning. It is hard to explain what goes to the making of a tavern; rather, it has for one that inexplicable charm which attaches to a meeting with some friend of old, old days.

This Abbey tavern of ours has a grey, orderly front that stretches from the well-kept strip of garden on the right to the crowded mass of stables on the left; there’s a wide highway in front, grey as the hostelry itself, and a wide doorway, opening on a wide, well-furnished hall. Trophies of the chase are on the walls of every room, and in among them are sporting prints— not prints bought yesterday, but such stuff as the pictures of our forefathers were made of, true in line, true in detail, true to the days when artists and engravers both had consciences and leisure.

As for mine host of the Abbey tavern, he is like the butler, old in bottle, of a house which one has known from childhood. His goodwife is like a suave housekeeper in the same family, dignified and conscious of her record, yet knowing the right moment when she may unbend and grow motherly. The food they give you, this well-matched pair, is admirably cooked; but more important is the serving of it—the white, fragrant napery, the smell of flowers about the room, the covert flattery of the waiting-maid, as if she handed dishes to the great ones of the land.

Then, too, there is the company that shares the dining-room with you. Such pleasant folk seem to haunt your true, old-fashioned tavern; they have beep fishing, or shooting, or riding, all the day, and zest o' the wind is in their cheeks and in their conversation. The freemasonry of healthy appetite and vigour is abroad, and the men and women dining here look with instinctive kindliness, not with instinctive criticism, at newcomers searching for a table.

This question of the tavern is not an unimportant one. There have been inns, I suppose, ever since man first began to rove away from his own immediate home. There will be inns so long as the world lasts. Is it a trifling matter, then, that our houses of call should inspire, rather than depress, the wayfarers who halt there day by day?

England, if she has given the word “home” to the world, with all its suggestion of warmth and good cheer, has given also the words “tavern” and “hostelry.” Our English taverns of an older day had a standard of orderliness, of welcome well assured, of service gladly rendered to the guest, which has not been challenged by any other nation. They scarcely let you know, these old-time hostelries, that they stood there — spacious, comfortable, warm—to make a reasonable profit. You stepped into the cosy hall, and at once you were accepted as an honoured guest.

Why are we throwing away our heritage? They tell me that all old ideas are dead, or dying, because they “will not pay.” That is a lie direct, for the old ideas had much of truth in them, and therefore, by a law of nature, “paid,” and—also by a law of nature—could never die, once having truth in them. The old ideas—chivalry, say, and welcome of a stranger with ft smile until he proves himself unworthy, faith in the ultimate survival of the fragrances of life—are as alive to-day as ever. Moreover, in the strict monetary sense, the old-fashioned tavern “pays,” and more than pays. They are rare, but to be found more often than might be expected, if one has a keen scent for this kind of hostelry. I know of them in places as far apart as Yorkshire and Devon and East Anglia, and every one of them is a prosperous house of call. Their custom is not dependent so much upon haphazard travellers as upon those who make constant pilgrimages, year after year, to the old, pleasant haunts—folk who live dependable, clean lives, folk who are interested in good sport and a good table, folk who give the minimum of trouble, yet are willing to pay comfortable prices for their entertainment.

Why are we throwing away so many of these houses? Every year sees one or other of them modernised. Willing service—the plump head-waiter, pleased to see one again—the neat-handed waiting-maids—the landlord, counting it an honour both given and received when you share a nightcap with him in the smoke-room and talk over the day’s sport—these are disappearing from our midst, and strange creatures take their place, creatures who, for the least service rendered, reach out an itching palm for dole. Nowhere is there a hint of comfort, though everywhere there is a futile suggestion of magnificence. There must be people who care for this sort of thing— the country hotel would otherwise go bankrupt; but my wonder is that we others are not thought of more when it conies to the issue whether a tavern shall be modernised or whether it shall retain its ancient dignity. One’s preference for a hostelry, rather than a hotel, has not only sentiment behind it; we may be slow and old-fashioned in our outlook upon reality and comfort, but we meet our bills—nay, we would cheerfully see them larger, if the well-being of the house depended on it—and we return. The tavern does not cater seriously for people coming from the unknown and disappearing after a day or two into the further unknown; it caters for folk known, approved and trusted, who do not forget old hospitality.

For myself, I believe that the hostelry will return before long to some part of its old kingdom. There is so much to be said in its praise. There are so many people eager to see it come to pride of place again. No tavern, managed according to the old traditions, could ever fail to be prosperous so long as it had true country-lovers for neighbours or for visitors.

Consider how the tavern has been the centre of romance, of poetry, of practical good cheer, for generations out of mind. It is no figment of the fiction-writers, all this affair of Boniface, and the plump wife of Boniface, and the warm hostelry awaiting eloping couples. The man who wrote once that he found his warmest welcome in an inn was, surely, not far wide of the mark. They tell us there were never such houses of call—none so cheery, robust and warm of welcome, as they are pictured by romance— but some of us are privileged to-day to know that the sneer is unworthy and untrue.

Perhaps it is that the gentleman, in the strict sense of the word—the lady, in the strict sense of our subtlest English word—walk rarely on the highroads nowadays unless compelled. The dust of modern traffic, maybe, the crudities of public intercourse, keep them to their own gardens, their own houses. Yet they are there, and wherever there’s a hostelry of the true type within reach of walk or ride, the gentlefolk will lunch there, or dine, or sup, as often as the house’s needs require.

Some day, if I am not too idle—Cathy tells me this is my favourite reservation—I shall write the history of one such tavern as I have in mind, shall give the true, authentic story of its doings, backed up by footnotes supplying dates and references and the rest. To my own knowledge a future duchess tarried here for a hasty bite and sup, and rattled afterwards along the road to Gretna before mating with one who at that time was a younger son of a younger son, who did not look to come to income or to title. They prospered afterwards, and one son of the match was famous.

A parson’s daughter halted here on a like errand. Her folk had refused their consent to the match, because her hero was poor and a painter of pictures. Boniface and his plump wife helped them forward in the nick of time, retarded the parents when they arrived in hot pursuit, and the wedding was safely accomplished at Gretna.

The bridegroom lived to paint pictures which folk to-day applaud and buy for tragic sums— sums tragic, I mean, in view of the money which, in his lifetime, he found hard to earn for wife and bairns.

Did not Nevison, too, halt here during one night of peril, the honoured guest of a landlord who knew well the risks he took in harbouring him? Nevison recalls the past to few nowadays, for his adventures on the Yorkshire roads are overshadowed by the more or less mythical performances of Claude Duval, Dick Turpin, and the rest. Yet there is reason to believe that he was, in sober truth, what Turpin and his comrades made pretence of being—a large-hearted, kindly gentleman, who never hurt a woman’s modesty upon the road, who robbed such rich as could well afford these wayside taxes, who gave blithely to the poor and out-of-luck. A curiously elusive personality, this Nevison. We catch stray glimpses of him here and there —always a hard rider, always gay and courteous, a figure born to lead men into some honourable breach, had he found his true calling. We catch these glimpses, and are tantalised; for night shuts down again about his record just as we are reading the eager page.

He was a big figure once, however, in our Yorkshire life. From south to north of the good county they talked of him at fair and market, in taverns and by lonely farmstead hearths. He was a second Robin Hood, firing the half-dead ashes of romance, rousing the wholesome fancy in folk too prone to let their daily round of work grow meaningless and dull At feast-tides they toasted Nevison, and any fanner who had met the outlaw on the road, however long ago, became at once the hero of the moment. Women reproached their men-folk, when they were “feckless,” with the taunt that Nevison would have ridden a better mare to York.

For it appears—and here again the evidence is crisp and precise for a moment, so that we cannot doubt it, then disappears again into the darkness —that Nevison was the true hero of that ride to York which has immortalised Black Bess. The tradition lingers even yet among us, and no reasonable man dared, two generations ago, to cast doubt upon it. It seems reasonable, indeed, this view of the Ride; for of all English counties we can claim from of old the finest taste in horseflesh, the finest men to stride a saddle and to flick a horse into the gallop. Were we not once the merriest horse-stealers in the country? And men seldom steal what they do not love at heart.

Nevison, as a matter of fact, would have been better known had he been hanged at Tyburn, like certain of his brethren. There has always been among the crowd, and always will be, one fears, a sweet and awful fascination about the gallows. The rabble likes to see a person hanged; the dead criminal becomes at once a greater hero to them, and so his praise lives after him, as Turpin’s did and Claude Duval’s.

Nevison, so far as we know, escaped the gallows, and doubtless a good many of his friends and worshippers were chilled by lack of that excitement and that doubtful pity which attached to Tyburn Tree. They felt, in brief, that Nevison had cheated them out of a good scaffold scene, and in revenge refused to push his name about with the goodwill that otherwise they would have shown. This is conjecture on my part, but it may explain one of the curiosities of history— that here we have, to all appearance, the true figure of the gentleman-highwayman, not a sham one dependent upon strange oaths and picturesque wearing-gear and occasional minuets danced upon blasted heaths. We have a man who recurs persistently for brief intervals, then vanishes, leaving a strange certainty of cleanliness and chivalry behind him. We have a man who could challenge so widely-spread a legend as that of Turpin’s ride to York. Yet we know scarcely anything of him—scarcely anything, I mean, on which one could lay a finger and say “here is documentary evidence.”

One record of him—graved in solid stone— tells us a definite fact concerning his career, but here again we are left with a sense of conjecture and of doubt. Here Nevison slew Fletcher, stands the simple record. No guilt is necessarily implied; they were days when one man could slay another in fair and righteous quarrel, without a suggestion of the crime of murder.

Here Nevison slew Fletcher. The record haunts one; in its directness, the bare statement appeals to fancy and conjecture. One longs to know the motive of the quarrel, to learn more of Fletcher than the brief name tells us. Here Nevison slew Fletcher—this simple phrase, graved on a simple slab of stone, suggests to me somehow that Nevison had done a good deed in ridding the world of Fletcher, so far as the judgment went of that nameless man who set up the monument. Had a friend of Fletcher been responsible for the inscription he would certainly have worded it quite otherwise—as, for instance, “Here Fletcher was foully slain by Nevison.” The simpler phrase, surely, suggests that Fletcher was so notorious a scoundrel that every man who knew the district could understand the monument as one reared in obvious praise of Nevison.

Sometimes I am tempted to commit robbery myself, when I think of that stone. I know exactly where it stands. I should like to see it reared inside the garden here, tempting me, every time I cross the lawn, with its elusive call of “Here Nevison slew Fletcher.” Perhaps, once the coveted stone stood in my own grounds, I should gather a sudden inspiration from it, and know at last why these two fought together.

All this divergence into Nevison’s shadowland story may seem remote from praise of old taverns; yet praise of one, in sober fact, is praise of the others. I never cross the threshold of that special hostelry—from which the future duchess sped hot-foot up to Gretna—but I think of Nevison, remember how he lay here a whole night, with all the official magnates of the county seeking him, with all the unofficial people praying for his welfare. My meals here are salted by the recollection of brave days gone by; I eat here with a better appetite, because the gallant, decent dead sit down to meat with me; l am in my own inn, not only because food and service alike are good and friendly, but because the company, though I seem to dine alone, is of the best.

I am not singular in this respect There's a certain English reticence which forbids us to speak often of our sentiments; yet I know that here in Arcady, however it fares with the world outside, we have sufficient men, who love the flavour of the past, to keep our hostelries secure and profitable.

Pull down your tavern. Rebuild it spaciously, and cover it—roof to cellar—with tinsel purchased yesterday. Give your devices the title of “modern comfort,” and fill your hotel-book with the names of people who care only for the busy present—do all this, and you will miss, though you have not sense to understand it, the friendly ghosts who peopled the old inn, who fled for ever from the new hotel You cannot buy historic legends, memories, ghosts; like reverence, and love, and chivalry, they are not to be cozened into your house, bought when you purchase the property. Nor will you earn so much, my landlord of the newer day, as did our kindly host of other times. You will find your hotel, resplendent in tinsel and discomfort, entertaining only the hand-to-mouth folk, here to-day and gone to-morrow; you will not be able to tempt servants of the olden type into your parlours, but will hire instead mean sons and daughters of the horse-leech, whose cry is always “Give’’; if you are not ruined in a twelvemonth, it will not be for lack of total blindness and stupidity on your part.

Yes, certainly I am here at this moment to praise old taverns. Inns we shall have always with us; it is when the taverns of a nation cease to give upright welcome to the wayfarer, bidding him take his rightful ease, that the nation lies under shadow of a danger. As surely as you can judge a man by his manners, you may judge of a nation’s health by the conduct of its taverns. Manners—old-established ones, as opposed to those donned for purposes of convenience—are not of yesterday, and admit of no forgery. So, too, with hostelries—they have dwelt so long in the midst of human intercourse that they, too, have learned a delicate, keen sense of courtesy; you may judge an inn at sight by this same courtesy, and your inn in turn will pass judgment upon you.

“You are scribbling, Murphy,” says my wife, coming up quietly behind me like a thief and peering over my shoulder at the scattered sheets. One of the Babe’s constant reminders that we live in an age of innocence, she and I, is her persistent faith in this ancient jest of startling me, of scattering my thoughts abroad, of ridiculing the work which, like Audrey, is poor, but mine own.

I do not love the Babe less for this unhappy trick of hers; but I decline to believe that she has not destroyed much further and more gallant praise of the English tavern than I have pencilled yet. Moreover, she has Tiko with her—

Tiko, his brown eyes fixed on me with desperate affection, his brown ears tilted with desperate longing for a game. His last game, so far as I remember, was with some random notes of mine on superstition; it was a game I did not care for, and to-day I pick up hurriedly the sheets lying all about the lawn, just where I have thrown them down, or just where the wind has chosen to carry them.

“He’s only a puppy, dear,” says Cathy, suggesting, in her large impersonal way, that I am robbing the poor of food.

“Yes,” I answer trenchantly—it’s so wholesome for one’s wife to be trenchant with her—“yes, he’s only a puppy! But where are half my notes on superstition, Babe?”

The Babe glances instinctively at Tiko, who is already fatter than is good for him without assistance from a heavier diet supplied by me. Then she looks casually at my recovered sheets, and asks what I’ve been writing about.

“Old taverns,” I hazard.

“Not a very reputable topic, Murphy.”

“You are angry, Babe, because I decline to feed Tiko with the notes.”

“No, not angry—only hurt, dear. He’s such a round little ball of fluff that I thought no one could have grudged him—well, innocent fun, Murphy.”

Tiko sits up on his hind legs at once and looks at me. He knows that Cathy is putting me in the wrong, with a patience worthy of a better cause. He is entirely a theatrical dog, and can assume the most engaging pose of martyrdom at pleasure. I return to my ancient faith that he was vastly dear at two pounds.

“He was a squirrel yesterday, cracking nuts at the top of a tree,” I observe. “Babe, you can’t believe that he’s a dog, hard as he pretends to be?”

“I think him perfect," she responds—“and, after all, Murphy, I bought him with my own money.”

Cathy is as sensitive about Tiko as I am about my pencilled sheets of paper. I recover myself at once, for nothing in this world is so helpful as to see one’s friendly enemy lose her temper, and still to keep one’s own.

“As a squirrel, dear, he’s unimpeachable,” I admit. “The tail, and the nose, and the colour of his coat—any judge of squirrels would award him all the prizes possible.”

We laugh—a foolish habit of ours—and Tiko licks us both without regard to observations past and done with. The joy of a friendly dog, after all, lies in the fact that you have not to woo his favours as if he were a pampered voter at the polls; you have just to tell him all is well, and he answers always, at once and unmistakably, that all is well with him, that all old differences are reconciled.

Tiko, for instance, swaggers a good deal, in a quiet way, since his elevation to the ranks of dogdom. He seldom plays with nuts, and will not talk to you if you mention squirrels in his hearing. Yet to-day he forgives my frequent jests upon the topic at once, and peaceably intends to eat my notes again. Again I rescue them, and Cathy suggests, in a quiet, well-bred way, that worse things may happen to the pages.

“He is trying to save you from yourself. Good Tiko dog!” she murmurs.

This business of possessing a wife is rather hopeless, after all, when you have some sort of faith in your own pencilled sheets. It was easier, as a bachelor, to approve the scribbled pages, and there were fewer puppies waiting to snap up outlying sheets.

Cathy has snatched up the pages, meanwhile, and has pounced upon that reference to Nevison.

“‘Here Nevison slew Fletcher,’” she repeats, and looks at me accusingly. “You are always hankering after King Charles’s head, Murphy.”

“Nevison and King Charles’s head lie far apart, Babe.”

“No! They’re all the same—you want to know the finish to the tale—you want to know what Bishop Juxon knew, when King Charles whispered Remember on the scaffold—you want to know what Fletcher thought, while Nevison was killing him— and whether they fought for love of somebody— and, in that case, whether the maid was dark or fair. Oh, but I know you, Murphy!”

The humour of this accusation is apparent to one acquainted with the Babe’s temperament “And you?” I suggest.

“I? I have just the same feeling! I’m haunted, just as you are, by' Here Nevison slew Fletcher’

But suppose we learned all about it, Murphy? Might we be disappointed, after all?”

This view of the matter has much to be said for it. I recall what a fabric of romance the Babe and I built up once on a time on the slender foundation of a pigeon’s feather, found on the lawn and bearing a mystic inscription—an inscription which afterwards proved to have reference solely to a pigeon-dealing transaction between Tom Lad and a friend.

And yet—and yet—I would risk disillusion cheerfully, had I the chance. Here Nevis on slew Fletcher. Why?

CHAPTER XIX
ON VILLAGE SHOPS, WITH A CURIOUS TALE APPENDED

If taverns and the mittened ladies dear to one's boyhood are disappearing, another reputable institution is crumbling, too—the village shop which kept “something of everything, unless 'twas something you happened to want at the time,” as the captious housewives used to describe it. In Arcady we have preserved our shop in its entirety; no competitor disputes its pride of place; it is a happiness and an education to enter it, and Cathy and I have a childish habit of running in for anything or nothing, just for the sake of a chat with its owner, for a sniff of its mingled perfumes.

They’re so cunningly blended, these perfumes, like a salad admirably mixed. At no time does the smell of soap, or of candles, obtrude itself too much. The scents of cloth and hob-nailed boots and pepper-spice are likewise unobtrusive, though in evidence. Then there are oddments of toffee, sugar-candy, bunches of dried lavender and rue and rosemary, that go to the making of this assorted perfume. And over all, pervading all, there is a clean and wholesome flavour of that dignified mustiness which has no kinship with dust or dirt.

Shades of past days, how we love the smell of Jonathan Small’s shop, Cathy and I! No garden is a garden at all unless it harbours old, remembered fragrances; no shop is less than a garden if, the moment you cross its threshold, you are met by the scents endeared to you from childhood. We bought sweetmeats here in far-off days. With desperate admiration and affright the Babe watched me purchase my first cannon from Jonathan Small, and gunpowder—real, serious gunpowder—wherewith to load the same. He had a Quaker’s love for peace, friend Jonathan, I must admit, for his powder seldom exploded, and his cracking squibs, purchased at the time of November’s festival, rarely did anything but flutter damply in the night wind and die out. I bear him no grudge for that, now I can measure our differences by the light of reason; for his cannon would have burst, I know, if tried too far.

You cannot remake old taverns or old shops, once you have flicked them disdainfully aside as out of keeping with that queer Puck whom men call progress nowadays. This place of Jonathan Small’s may be absurd, but its absurdity is obvious and friendly. If I were condemned to live in some country that is riot—well, not England—I should return in the quiet, night-time hours to the little shop I knew of old—should see again the row of bottles, containing peppermints, and humbugs, and strange sweets that were good to look upon, but lacked a name or pedigree—should see the green line of tea canisters, numbered carefully from i to io, though all their contents were the same, and the number only a tribute to the pride of purse and station attaching to Jonathan’s customers. I should scent again the happy odour of that shop, and yearn to be in Arcady. The place is so absurd, and so is Jonathan, that no right-minded man could escape great love for both.

Jonathan Small still lives and thrives among us. I wish you could see him—not small as regards height, according to the irony attaching to all birth names, but thinner than I ever thought a man could be. When there’s a draught from the staircase door of his shop, and his clothes blow round his six feet of height and his incalculable narrowness of girth, you wonder how he has weathered out his five-and-seventy years of life. That is Jonathan’s secret. It is his secret, too, how he ever finds the way to giving a customer what is asked for.

Long as I have known him, I can remember no occasion on which he divined at once where a commodity lay hid. His habit is always to look at the window-space first, then at the stairway, every step of which is built up, like a boy’s house of bricks, with merchandise that threatens to fall down each moment and overwhelm the floor beneath. Then he glances at the row of green tea-canisters, labelled i to io, which all contain the same doubtful quality of tea. Failing to get inspiration from material objects, he pauses awhile for thought, then suddenly lifts his head as if he were a terrier—a terrier vastly long and vastly lean. Honestly, I believe Jonathan, like the terrier, trusts ultimately to scent at these times; he has lived so long in the midst of odours that he prefers, by instinct, to nose out the article inquired for. At any rate, he finds it ultimately—I admit he has not been known to fail in this respect, provided the customer had patience and forbearance, and no engagement pressing him within an hour or so.

Jonathan Small may have to run to the top of his staircase for the desired article, dodging packages all the way, his progress a miracle of tact and sheer agility; but always when he returns and hands you your purchase across the counter —made of deal, and wrinkled with strange crevices and furrows, each seam lined with white flour—he is grave, assured, quite certain in his own mind that he is alert and business-like. He counts your change three times, with due solemnity, before passing it across to you, so that altogether, from start to finish of the transaction, you have whiled away a considerable amount of time.

One problem has often puzzled Cathy and myself. Between the right and left hand lines of merchandise that fill Jonathan’s wonderful stairway there is a narrow passage, up which he climbs, as I have said, with tact and hazard; but at the top his bedroom door is hidden by a wall of goods. How does Jonathan Small ever get to bed o’ nights, we ask? To endeavour to remove that bulky wall, all made of different material standing at different and perilous angles—it would mean, surely, that Jonathan would be carried down the stair by the resulting avalanche, would lie prone at the bottom, crushed and smothered by the weight of his own property. We suspect, Cathy and I, that he never risks the enterprise, but sleeps contentedly instead beneath his counter.

Now Jonathan is a grave man to-day, always doubtful of the weather, and prone to fear the worst of his neighbours. This is the right and fitting attitude for one who is laying money by, who enjoys good health, who can afford the luxury of pessimism. But there was once a time when Jonathan was young and not so prosperous, and rather disposed to be cheery and light-hearted in consequence. In fact, he is convinced that he has been a bit of a rogue in his time, and knows something of the ways of women.

The conviction is pathetic to us who know the tale of his younger days. Were there not seven strapping sisters living at the farm on the hill-top overlooking Arcady? And did not one of these look upon Jonathan—he was fifty then—and decide that she would marry him? Her sisters waxed merry about the affair; they could not see what the youngest of the family “saw in such a snipperty bit of a man.” For that matter, Phoebe herself did not understand her motive; she simply rushed headlong after instinct, and as a matter of course she secured Jonathan Small.

The pathos of the tale lies in the fact that Jonathan still believes that he had the pluck and enterprise to go wooing at the farm on the hill, whereas the maid came down to him and carried him off. The humour of the story lies in the fact that at the wedding breakfast he returned in full the sneers and laughter of the six unmarried sisters—returned them, not in malice, but from sheer fright of speech-making, by sheer force of that elemental foolishness which achieves so many unsuspected goals.

I have the tale of that wedding breakfast from the Wanderer. The Wanderer has been accustomed to go here and there among all classes— friendly, open, full of laughter and good-will, according to the custom of old-fashioned gentlefolk—and he was invited to the breakfast as naturally as the parson was asked to put on the ring that made them one—or, as Phcebe ever afterwards declared in expansive moments, “the ring that made us three-quarters. I was one to begin with, but Jonathan was only half of one. Oh, ay, you can trust me with ’rithmetic, for up at the farm I was always trusted with the hen-money —and fowls is queerish things to reckon up, what with corn and meal to pay for, and the market price of eggs each week, and whether the lady at the big house knows the difference ’twixt a good fowl and a poor when you’re selling it for table.”

This little sum in arithmetic has always tickled the Wanderer. So has the rest of the tale, and I can see his face now as it looks when he is tempted once again to tell the story of Jonathan’s wedding breakfast. He gives one—in between delicate pinches of snuff—a complete picture of that prosperous farm kitchen, low raftered, full of ancient oak and pewter, of the table crowded with strong meats and lighter pastry, of the company assembled to do honour to the bride and bridegroom.

Phoebe’s father rises, towards the end of the meal, and jovially calls upon his son-in-law for a speech. Jonathan Small rises to his feet obediently—he is “all in a twitter,” as the country phrase has it—and glances helplessly about him. As in later years he glances vaguely round his shop when a customer demands some specific article, so now he looks at the faces turned towards him from all sides of the table. He can see only his six sisters-in-law. He halts and stumbles in his speech, and a sly laugh from one of the sisters goads him into effort “Well, friends and neighbours,” he says, “I’m not much of a hand at speech-making, but it’s my wedding day, and I reckon I must. I’ve been a-looking at this bonnie row of sisters.”

He pauses, and a rattle of knife handles on the table cheers him forward.

“And I’ve been a-thinking—and bless me if I haven’t chosen the pick of the whole batch!”

Jonathan Small sits down amid uproarious cheers. Six of the company—the bride’s sisters— do not laugh any more that day, but the rest enjoy what they regard as a good pleasantry. They’ve no inkling that Jonathan, out of sheer fright, has said the first words which came into his head, and his popularity is assured henceforth among his fellows. They are relieved, moreover, that he spoke so briefly.

The bride, as she jogs down the pasture-fields with Jonathan, tells him that he made a fine speech, and Jonathan, with the instinct that has kept his shop alive and prosperous to this day, does not confess his panic—his surprise that he made a speech at alL

“Well, weren’t you the bonniest of seven, Phoebe?” he asks.

“Well, if you say so, Jonathan—if you say so, of course—”

The Wanderer always halts at this point of his story and takes another pinch of snuff, then branches off into some other tale of days gone by.

Knowing Jonathan Small as I do, I can see him at that far-off wedding breakfast—can see his slow glance round the table, his slow and fatuous smile as he sped confusion and disaster among the bride’s sisters. It is interesting, too, to know what Phoebe said of her husband after wedlock— said confidentially, of course, for she was a woman who whispered in the ear of the parish and pretended that her gossip would not be noised abroad.

“Jonathan is what you might call a puff o' wind,” she would say. “That’s why I married him, though it’s taken me a year or two to understand it all”

Her friend, according to the accepted ritual of self-righteous folk, lifts her eyes, then drops them and smooths meek hands across a meek, white apron.

“How so, Phoebe?” she whispers in answer.

“Well, you see, I’m a big, mothersome woman myself—and I wanted something to mother— and I saw how slim and like a puff o' wind was Jonathan, and so I chose him. Eh, poor Jonathan! He like as he creaks when he moves, like a rickety gate, and I fear he’s not over-long for this world.”

“Creaking gates have a trick of swinging long, Phoebe.”

“Oh, now, don’t you talk to me!Jonathan, poor lamb, is bound for his long home—I know it—and you’ll wonder, Mary, when you see me— all unbeknownst and sudden-like—in widow’s weeds.”

Yet the creaking gate was true to the old saying, and Jonathan, poor lamb, bore his widowerhood with resignation—even with fortitude—and lived on to tend his shop as helplessly, as luckily, as he rose once to speak at his own wedding breakfast I owe Jonathan Small a debt one which I am glad to acknowledge. Literature, as a rule, does not bulk large among his merchandise, but one happy day he accepted a bundle of old books in return for some empty tins and bottles. I happened to stroll into his shop not long ago— simply in search of the mental refreshment which a chat with Jonathan ensures—and I saw the books, eight of them, piled in a neglected heap on the floor between a sack of flour and a plump treacle barrel. I picked them up, and found they one and all treated of Yorkshire legends and folklore—a topic very dear to me.

A casual inquiry as to the price demanded brought out all Jonathan’s reserve and pessimism, for it is a curious trait of his that, little as he thinks of the weather, he thinks less of the goods he has to sell, and does not hesitate to tell his customer of the un-faith that is in him.

“Well, now, I was a bit of a fool to buy ’em at all,” he answers, after long reflection. “If ’twasn’t that I had so many bottles to get rid of, one way and another, I’d never have littered my shop wi’ ’em. Should we say a shilling for the lot, and pleased to get ’em out of my way?”

It is not right to impose on pessimism too far, and Jonathan Small is astonished when he learns the value I place on these eight volumes—the value I tender to him at once.

He is transparent as regards his least feelings, and the look he gives me as I snatch a bundle of string from the counter and tie my books together—Jonathan would take too long to do it, and I am eager to look into them at once—the look he gives me says very plainly, “A fool and his money are soon parted.”

“Can’t I send them to you, sir, or bring ’em by-and-by, when I’ve shut up my bit of a shop ?”he gasps.

“No, thank you, Jonathan,” I answer cheerily. “I’ll take them with me.”

How often have we trusted Jonathan Small “to bring or send” our casual purchases! I know what the fate of my books would be. Jonathan, with a forgetfulness which in its capacity for taking pains amounts to genius, would lay the parcel aside with infinite care, would grow muddled after the excitement of selling a pound of sugar to the next customer, would hurriedly re-arrange the contents of his shop, cover the cherished books with packages of many kinds, and would never again unearth them.

This process of Jonathan’s, when he sends or brings a purchase, involves no serious hardship, if it is only a question of bacon, or soap, or candles. Cathy, who prefers to market in the village whenever possible for old times’ sake, will not admit that I am right in this view of domestic economy, and once every week declares roundly that Jonathan Small shall be punished for his remissness; but then the housewife’s logic is so curious —and the Babe, moreover, returns with pathetic constancy to Jonathan’s shop, and trusts to his ancient promise “to send or bring the goods.”

Books—old, loyal Yorkshire books—are in another category. I shoulder my treasure, turn at the door to bid Jonathan farewell, and find him still regarding me with that wistful, want-wit look of his. He is not pleased with his bargain, simply because he is wondering very hard what are the motives of my lunacy.

Well, a fool and his money may be soon parted, but a fool and his books are not, in my case at least. I reach home with my treasures, lay them in a row along the seat under the lime-trees, and begin to dip into them.

That is the only way in which to treat good books—to turn a page here and a page there, and to read on until you want to go further afield between the limits of the covers. Good wine is sipped, not gulped, and so should good books be.

I am all alone, save for the jackdaws and the rooks, and a thrush that is struggling with a tough worm on the lawn. These books, provided for my entertainment by Jonathan Small, are good fare indeed. They are old and mildewed, and I shall never know, in all likelihood, from what library they fared out into the world; not one of the eight is on my own shelves; only one of the eight fails to give me curious anecdotes of bygone Yorkshire days, curious, eerie tales concerning Guytrash, the phantom hound, and concerning the Sorrowful Woman who sobs abroad on windy nights. There are stray recipes, too, for simples to ward off disease, for remedies to charm away a wart from face or hands. There are instructions how to cull certain flowers at certain seasons, to dry them, to mix them afterwards; then, so the instructions read, “every maiden must keep a bowl, containing the same, within her bower, that so her lover ceases to roam far afield.”

The insinuation here is palpably unfair, and was written probably by one who held steadfastly to Jonathan Small’s consistent pessimism. There have been faithful lovers, and there will be such; it seems rather mean to suggest to each tender maiden that her lover has already begun to “roam far afield.” It is just as cruelly subtle in its way as the entry in the ship’s log by a captain who had quarrelled with his mate—“Mate sober to-day.”

I said I was alone, save lor the birds and a worm that wished it had stayed underground. I thought so, till a soft, damp nose was thrust into my hand. Tiko has found me out, and he is pretending very hard that he is not a squirrel. The thing is so obvious as to be absurd; the more one looks at Tiko, the more one expects him to stand on his hind legs and nibble at imaginary nuts. His bushy tail, his snout, his fine, sleek coat—it is useless quite for Tiko to chaff folk into the belief that he is a dog.

I do not say as much to him, however. I am anxious to dip further and further into these books of Yorkshire folk-lore, and I dissemble. I praise this outrageous puppy to his face; I tell him he is descended from great ancestors, who in a prehistoric age were dogs indeed. He is a foolish puppy, and believes me, and goes placidly to sleep upon my knee, while I read on.

There is no finer way of being lazy than this— to sit under a quiet sky, with a line of books on one hand, a jar of tobacco on the other—to browse, as it were, among the records of old days, nibbling at a clump of clover here, a patch of lush grass there, after the manner of the kine when they are turned into the meadows to crop the aftermath. Like the kine, too, you have recumbent intervals—you lay your book aside, and chew the cud awhile.

When I look back upon these lazy hours of mine, I realise my need for gratitude, the greatness of my possessions. With Cathy somewhere near at hand, ready to appear at any moment, like the good fairy in some children’s tale—with a harvest of folk-lore to be garnered—with tobacco and a noisy rookery, and long, quiet lanes of sun and shadow on the green turf in front—is not this to sup with the elder gods and taste ambrosia?

I take up another book at random, and pasted on the fly-leaf is a poem in manuscript. The handwriting is neat and small, the verses many, and only the initials “C. N.” stand at the foot of the page. Of course, I read the verses, expecting to find some old-fashioned, formal lines from the donor of the book to its recipient, written all in the old style of respectful devotion to a patron. Instead, I find a tale concealed in these closely written lines—a tale so curious, at once so gruesome and ridiculous, that my debt to Jonathan Small is doubled.

Now, I am ignorant altogether as to the identity of “C. N.” His verses have no kinship whatever with the book itself, which proves to be a rather laboured disquisition upon the habits of the fish inhabiting Yorkshire tarns and moorland streams and the best methods of securing them with rod and line. There is nothing to tell one why “C. N.” was at pains to inscribe his metrical version of a story on the fly-leaf of this special volume; there is nothing to indicate whether the plot was his own, or whether he used some folktale that was common property in his day. In either case the story is worth repetition, and roughly it is this.

In the days when gallows still adorned the cross-roads of the country, when stage coaches plied the highways, when body-snatchers followed their appalling trade, a traveller came late at night to an inn on the outskirts of a market town in the West Riding. A grey sleet was blowing down the wind, and he pushed the inn door rudely open, glad of the warmth and shelter, though he knew that he had never a stiver with which to pay his reckoning.

Within he found the landlord, standing above ' a man who lay in a drunken sleep before the hearth.

“What d’ye want?” growled the host uncivilly.

“Supper and a bed, Master Surly—what else?”

The newcomer was a big man, and a broad, and the landlord thought better of his incivility, knowing it is better to give promptly in such cases than to await compulsion. The best the inn afforded was brought out—a York ham, a plump, yellow cheese, butter and oatcake, and a flagon of ale—and the stranger supped heartily, wondering, in a pleasant, philosophic way, how he would meet the bill upon the morrow.

“Whether I meet it or no,” he chuckled, “I shall be richer by supper and a bed.”

The drunken man lay quietly on the hearth, meanwhile, and presently the landlord jerked a thumb in his direction.

“Would give a crown to be rid of this ramshackle piece of goods,” he said tentatively.

The stranger looked up with sudden interest He preferred, from habit, to settle his lodging bill whenever it was possible. “How so?” he asked.

“Well, he’s been a good customer to-day—too good a customer, as it turns out—and I want to be rid of him and get to my own bed.”

“Open the door, then, host, and lay him tenderly outside.”

“Nay, nay, now, I’m soft-hearted—’twas a failing always of mine—and he’ll die at my threshold if I leave the sleet to cover him outside.”

The stranger finished his meal, called for a second draught of ale, then laughed in the landlord’s face.

“I’ll rid you of him, if you give me a crown, and the good meal I’ve eaten, and a fair-sized sack.”

The host, after some doubt, consented, and went to find the sack, for he had grown weary of his prone and drunken guest “You’ll treat him tenderly? My heart was always toward the weak,” murmured Boniface, as he returned with the sack.

“I'll take him to a safe lodging, never fear.” The stranger eyed the prostrate man reflectively. “He’s smaller by six inches than I am, host, and he carries narrow shoulders. I should bear the burden lightly, eh?”

They pushed the sleeping man “right carefully,” as the poem has it, into the sack, and he only cried and murmured in his sleep “for good malt liquor.”

Into the sleet and the wind went the big stranger and the little, drunken man in the sack. The host was glad to see them go.

Up the grey street they went, with the grey slush beneath them, till a cheerful lamp, all coloured red, greeted them at the corner where Sheep-street met the highway. The stranger had been moving forward steadily in search of a surgeon’s lamp, and now he knocked quietly on the door.

The surgeon, as it chanced, was going to bed at the moment, and returned to answer the knock of this late arrival at his door. He saw a big man standing in the driven sleet without—a man who carried a bulky sack and who said nothing at all.

“Tut-tut, come in, man, and tell me what ails you,” cried the surgeon impatiently. “D’ye think I want to catch my death of cold in this confounded storm?”

The big man looked up and down the street, the sack swaying gently on his back as he turned each way; then he drew nearer and whispered in the surgeon’s ear:

“Bodies are welcome in your trade, eh?”

“Ay, man. I’m sadly in need of one,” said the other, all interest at once. “Step in with your burden, and tell me what you ask for it.”

“Nay, take it in, and take it quickly; I may be watched. ’Tis a ticklish business, this of snatching bodies. Will you give me five guineas?”

The surgeon, without further argument, took the guineas from his pocket, handed them to his visitor, and received the sack in exchange.

“Good night,” muttered the big man as he moved away. “Pray Heaven none has seen me come here!”

The surgeon, anxious to escape from the draught that cut him through and through, set down his purchase roughly, and pushed the door to with a snap. The little man in the sack, awakened by this rough treatment, began again to cry—right lustily this time—“for good malt liquor.” The first thought of the surgeon was prompted by sheer panic, the outcome of a conscience tender with regard to this illicit business of body-snatching and body-buying: he fancied that the dead man’s ghost had returned to reproach him for the night’s transaction.

The sack, however, gave such obvious signs of motion—frenzied motion—that at last he approached it, untied the neck, and liberated his recent purchase. When he saw what he had bought, fear gave place to rage. Without pausing to put on muffler or headgear, the surgeon ran out into the sleet and down the highroad, and caught up the big man, who was jingling his guineas in his pocket and whistling cheerily as he returned to his own inn.

“Here, you knave, you’ve robbed me! ’’ cried the surgeon.

The big man turned, and he laughed, though the sleet was driven down his throat. “I rob none,” he answered jauntily. “’Twould be an ill day for me, surgeon, when I thought myself less than a man of honour.”

“You sold me a body?” said the other, stammering with rage.

“Ay, I sold you a body. My honour’s pledged so far as that.”

“For five guineas?”

“Ay, for five guineas. My honour’s pledged go far as that”

“Twas not a body—you lied to me—you cozened five guineas out of me—you——”

Again the big man laughed, and his voice was cool as the sleet that blew about them both. “’Twas not a body?” he interrupted. “What was it, then, the brave sack held?”

“You sold me a corpse, you fool—”

“Nay, friend, nay! I sold you a body, and said never a word as to whether it were dead or quick.”

“I’ll rouse the Watch—I’ll waken the whole town—I’ll have my five guineas back, and see you in the pillory yet!”

Gentle and quiet, the voice of the big man answered him. “You’re too boisterous, friend. What! rouse the Watch, and have me tell the tale of how I came to your door by night and sold you—well, what you bought? You would cut a poor figure, surgeon, and, as a man of honour, I advise you not to chance the risk.”

The surgeon glowered at his adversary, while the sleet fell cold about them both. “You talk of honour vastly glibly, sir. I say you’ve cheated me.”

“Cheated you?” echoed the big man tenderly, as if he reasoned with a child. “Why, I gave you more than our bargain! I’m a man of honour, surgeon.”

The surgeon drew apart and gasped. “How so?” he asked, in a chastened voice.

“You may be over-tired or over-busy for dissection at the moment, surgeon. Keep him till you want him, and then—you take my meaning, surgeon?”

With the laugh of the ne’er-do-well, the big man carried his honour down the street, found his own inn again, slept untroubled through the night, and paid his reckoning when he went out again next day into the unknown. It was ever his gospel to pay his reckoning—when he could afford such luxury.

Is this a good tale, or not? For myself, I like the modest air with which the scales sit level between the gruesome and the humorous. It is one of the fine stories of the world, surely, though its author is unknown, and it is set forth only in limping and haphazard verse. It is a tale that no man could invent—a tale that sprang with authentic pedigree from the life of a happy ne’er-do-well.

I shall take my tale to the Wanderer to-morrow, and ask him to approve it.

CHAPTER XX
AN AUTUMN COMEDY

Time does not move through Arcady, as one would expect from so old and venerable a figure, with stately step; rather, he seems to gather up his skirts, to throw off the pretence of age, to take weeks and months and seasons as blithely as if they were so many hurdles in a race—and he a runner in excellent condition. There is something uncanny about it; only yesterday, it seems, Tom Lad and I were scything the meadow grass, yet now the horse-chestnuts are dropping fast under persuasion of a moaning gale from the north-west It is undoubtedly autumn.

On reflection, I am sure that time does catch up his robes on entering Arcady, because the Babe and I have sudden panics now and then, and clutch wildly at the old man’s skirts, but always fail to catch them. We are afraid of being ninety, she and I—all in a moment, as it were—before we have understood each inner beauty of field and hedge and garden, each hidden sanctity oi comradeship.

The gale from the north-west, however, and this arrival of autumn are destined to usher in a busy period—a period so. busy that we have no leisure to follow sorrowfully after Father Time. For three days the wind blows, and the prickly chestnut pods come down as if the lawn were in process of bombardment; if you chance to cross the garden without head-gear while this sort of artillery is thundering from the skies you will realise the weight and sharpness of the missiles, and I often want to ask Tiko—but dare not—how his brother squirrels deal with the pointed chestnut husks, without damage to themselves, when they attempt an inroad on the nut itself.

The wind-storm dies away at the end of the third day, and there is peace abroad—a peace so tender, radiant, exquisite, that autumn is a death no longer, but a living glory. The sun is a saffron ball, high up in a blue and fleecy sky; there is frost in the air—the first, soft whisper of it—and all abroad there roams a crisp, clean nutty scent, and robins are piping their bold challenge to the coming winter. It is at autumn-tide, one always fancies, that we realise most poignantly the everlasting truth that death is not a sleep and a forgetting, but an open sesame to the door which opens on a wider and a sweeter spring. High summer never yet had as much to tell us as spring-time and the russet autumn. Spring is quick and eager, looking never ahead; autumn is reticent, kind, quietly joyous, like a man who in his ripe maturity passes judgment on the world and finds it a worthier place to live in than the cynics will admit; but summer is tired with her own heat, and there is a lethargy about the green and sleepy leaves that does not make for faith.

The weather this autumn-tide may seem to make for peace, but Arcady is invaded from an unsuspected quarter.

There is a village game—all who have lived in a country where chestnut trees abound will know it—a game which boys play diligently in the autumn. They rob the husk of its nut—perhaps Tiko’s kindred taught them how to do it—and they string these nuts on a thick piece of twine, and they fight together, one against one, each striving to knock away as many nuts as possible from the other’s string. It is a good game of its kind, but this autumn comedy of mine is connected, not with the pastime itself, but with its results.

I was going out on one of these blithe mornings, when I heard Stylesey engaged in harsh argument with some one at the door. Stylesey is usually wrong when she descends to argument, so I went forward and asked the cause of all this tumult Mrs. Styles, from a respect toward me that is conventional and illusory, stepped aside; the natural Stylesey placed a corner of her apron in her mouth and played Cassandra’s part in silence.

Once the plump figure of my henchwoman was removed from the doorway, I saw an urchin standing on the doorstep. He may have been three feet high, though I doubt it; he smiled engagingly as soon as he saw me; his cheeks were tanned with sun and wind, and he looked a healthy rogue.

“Please, mister,” he says, scenting an ally at once, “I like as I thought you’d no use, like, for chestnuts, and I want a few—and there’s lots lying hereabouts.’’

Personally, I have no use for chestnuts at the moment His logic appeals to me so far—but his winsome, weather-wholesome face appeals to me far more.

“You want to gather a few from the lawn?”

“Please, mister.”

“And what will you do with them?”

“Oh, please, mister”—his voice grows rapturous—“I want ’em to play at knuckle-and-break with.”

Knuckle-and-break is the game of chestnuts on a string, and derives the first part of its name, I suspect, from the frequency with which the combatants take resounding blows upon the hand. All good and ancient games seem to base their prestige upon blows bravely given and blows cheerfully received.

There is nothing about this youngster to suggest suspicion. I am the rich man at the moment abounding in great wealth of scattered nuts; this suppliant, three feet high, is the poor man begging at my gate. What reason, of heart or common sense, can I find for sending him empty away?

“Run along, then, and fill your pockets,” I answer carelessly.

Boys run fast when they are bent on a thing, and Stylesey and I are left alone at the hall door. I am always a coward when I am left alone with Mrs. Styles. She is an old retainer, and would die for me; but she is always Stylesey when I am in rude health, and will never at these times understand that the head is always the weakling of the pair—heart and head—who contracted once a foolish marriage.

“Well, Stylesey?” I ask, tired ot seeing the apron in her mouth.

“Oh, nothing, sir! Only, there’s trouble brewing. Give a boy an inch, and you’ll have to cover many a mile in following him.”

“I would rather follow a boy across country, Stylesey, than many elder folk I know. Have you reared boys of your own, Stylesey, or have you not?”

“Ay, to my sorrow,” answers my old retainer, knowing how that trick of the apron corner disturbs and irritates me, and displaying her advantage to the full. “I’ve had a husband, sir— and husbands are only grown-up lads—and I’ve had boys—and boys are only younger-grown men —and I see the old Adam in ’em alL Meaning no disrespect, sir, I think lightly, like, of male folk.”

Stylesey drops me a curtsey—a formal curtsey— and is gone. For myself—“male folk” are shortsighted always, I suppose—for myself, I see no tragedy ahead in this matter of an urchin begging nuts, and I go out to have a chat with him, though the Squire, I know, is waiting for me to run up and discuss some troublesome matter connected with game and poachers. The urchin is filling both pockets of his coat with nuts; he is filling the two pockets of his trousers, and, when he can find room for no more, he turns and gives me a wide smile.

“I’ve got ’em, mister!” he observes.

Again he is obviously speaking the truth; it would be difficult for him to do otherwise, having regard to the distended state of his person.

We chat awhile, he and I, and I watch him depart—whistling as he goes—up Arcades quiet lane. Then I fulfil my over-due engagement with the Squire, and am cheered by the thought of the little chap who borrowed from my riches.

When I return, there are three urchins on my lawn, and a certain misgiving seizes me. It would be unpleasant if Stylesey proved to be in the right, for her nature does not admit of a generous use of victory.

Shall I be firm, and dismiss these trespassers at once? I glance again at them; they seem to be having a good time—a very good time—and I weakly turn my back, pretending not to see them. After all, why should not the little beggars enjoy their holiday?

At four o’clock, while I am dipping happily into some folk-lore books which arrived by the morning’s post, Mrs. Styles knocks discreetly at the door and enters.

“If you please, sir, the lawn is black with children, gathering chestnuts. Have you any orders to give, sir?”

“Yes, Stylesey. Let them gather chestnuts. I am busy.”

I am rather troubled, I admit There are flower borders still keeping a gay front against the winter’s on-coming, and village lads are heedless as to where they place their boots. But I acknowledge no defeat when Stylesey is within hearing, unless I am compelled to do so.

I dip into my books again, but cannot rid myself of anxiety. We have tended those flower borders so well, Tom Lad and I, that one cannot surrender them without a pang. Presently I put the books aside and go out to see what is happening in my garden. Stylesey spoke truth, undoubtedly, when she said that the lawn was “black with children.” There are more children, moreover, trooping down the lane, and a squadron approaches from the further meadows. I could not have believed that one urchin, three feet high, could have set so big a ball down-rolling to the lane that leads to Arcady.

As I stand dismayed at my own door, Tom Lad appears—out of kindly space, as his wont is—and smiles with dispassionate content in this world and the next.

“They’re what you might call busy, sir?” he suggests, jerking a thumb in the direction of the lawn. “I met Jonathan Small at the lane top just now, and he asked—all in his thin, windy-puff way—if there was a school treat in the garden, for he’d seen so many school-childen coming down the lane.”

“Yes, they are busy, Tom Lad.”

“There’s a neat row of Michaelmas daisies—ye mind how carefully we planted ’em, sir?—and they’ve trodden ’em all under heel.”

“Have they?” I answer.’

“Come with me,

Tom Lad, and we’ll—”

“Nay, now, si! Nay, now! We’re made out of the same mould, if ye’ll forgive my making free, and we could no more tamper wi’ them lads than we could fly to judgment Lads are so blithe and frolicsome, and they never nag at a body. I know one, sir, as could do the business bonnily—and I’m fairly sore, I own, about yond Michaelmas daisies.”

“Who could do it for us, Tom Lad?” I ask, meanly anxious that some braver spirit should step into the breach. In these affairs, where sentiment is pitted against justice, I always seek legal aid from Tom—though he is as weak as I am.

“Well, there’s my wife, sir—I never murmur aught against her, save to a friend who understands—there’s my wife, sir—couldn’t we unchain her?"

I laugh, but Tom Lad only smiles—that smile of his, slow and happy, which always sees the humour underlying our tragic comedy of life, but which refrains always from tempting the gods by show of outright laughter. For myself, I prefer to laugh whenever I can—prefer to take the risk which, so Puritan superstition alleges, attends upon all laughter. Like the bad little boy who went to bed without saying his prayers, “I’ll chance it”

Tom Lad is so neat, somehow. He seldom speaks anything but good of any one—never to an enemy, as he admits—yet when he talks to one who, to his knowledge, does not bear malice, does not pass gossip forward, he is crisp, witty, keen in his perception and in his outlook upon neighbour folk.

Tom Lad is a man to have beside you if fate compels you to go out into the wilderness. He shifts to no wind’s bidding, bleak east or kindly west. His sense of “dying for the master” is not Stylesey’s—it embodies, too, the sense of living for the master. Personally, I would rather see a good man by my side in all things than contemplate the picture of a slightly hysterical retainer weeping at my graveside. One of the things that troubles me most when I think of Stylesey is the certainty I have that she will revel in the tears she will shed above my grave, if I happen to predecease the good woman. Stylesey has a ghoulish love of funerals; her soul and intellect, somehow, have never reached a higher plane.

I simply laugh at Tom Lad’s verdict on his wife. It is true—it is an epigram. Couldn’t we unchain her?

Stylesey, I’m fond of you, in a way, because my instincts are kindly toward you from old habit and association; but Tom Lad has always been your better. You lack the wit to see it, and send him constantly in search of his quiet greenhouse; but you will never be the kindly, joyous, charitable human that Tom Lad is. You are proud of your harsh tongue; Tom Lad takes no pride, though he deserves it, in the softness of his verdict on his neighbours. You flaunt abroad, Stylesey, with your red cheeks and your ample figure, and you never miss a graveside scene, and they say that you are a godly and a righteous woman. You may be—but give me your goodman, whose tastes lie all in the direction of a greenhouse and a garden, whose tongue speaks ill of none.

“Tom Lad, we are rather troubled about those Michaelmas daisies,” I answer, after long reflection.

“Ay, more than rather, sir.”

“Then—we don’t like to do it—but—unchain your wife, Tom Lad.”

I cross to that side of the garden which is remote from the village gathering, and look quietly on. After an incredibly brief interval Mrs. Stylesey appears; she is running in the direction of the “school treat” with a speed more nimble than her bulk; as Tom says of his wife, “she’s brisk as a bee, sir, whenever there’s good fun to be spoiled.”

Tom Lad would have made an admirable Cabinet Minister. He is so wise, so quietly tolerant, so knowledgeable as regards the failings of his neighbours. He knew that if he and I had gone to disperse the crowd we should have ended by helping them to pick up the nuts, and afterwards have initiated a tournament of “knuckle-and-break” among them, with a prize for the conqueror and sundry other prizes for the vanquished. It is characteristic of him that he finds me out in my retreat at the far end of the garden, and points a finger at the advancing Stylesey.

“She’ll never be cured i’ this life, sir,” he whispers. “She always puts me in mind of ‘Three blind mice, see how they run.’ Put a scent o’ trouble across the wife’s track, and she’s up and away like a lurcher dog when he scents a rabbit."

Stylesey meanwhile has reached the joyous party on the lawn. They look once at her, and scatter like so many foolish sheep. If Tom Lad and I had approached them, they would have grinned amicably and have proceeded with their enterprise.

Mrs. Stylesey is proud of this capacity she has of “driving unconsidered folk from the doorstep." One wonders how pride can spring from such queer and tainted well-springs.

Tom Lad and I, when Stylesey has disappeared with banners flying, inspect the ruined bed of Michaelmas daisies. We are sorrowful awhile, but forget our sorrow speedily.

“Why shouldn't they gather chestnuts, sir?" says Tom forbearingly.

CHAPTER XXI
CONCERNING AN ANCIENT BREED OF DOG

This incidental episode, of the children gathering chestnuts on the lawn, may be a comedy, pure and simple; but, like all true comedies, it suggests something that is remote from laughter.

I don’t in the least know why, after Stylesey has dismissed the children—may the day be far distant when youngsters flee from me at the first summons!—I don’t know why the happenings of to-day have disturbed and awakened me. Yet, after Tom Lad has gone, after Stylesey has returned, her apron fluttering in the wind like a flag of victory, after I am left alone with the slant, descending lights of gloaming-tide, I realise in its entirety a point of view which has escaped me until now.

I was born, no doubt, to the heritage of a fresh-air creed. Whatever chances, I must have space about me—space of a big garden, or space of the wider moors, in which to linger and to think out an issue. The smell of a garden or a heath—the look of the great, over-arching sky above—the hearing of old bird-calls that one knows by heart—these must be with me, or I cannot, as Tom Lad puts it, “straighten out my thoughts.” I know what the Babe has suffered willingly at Stylesey’s hands. A man, I take it, shrugs his shoulders when a woman—again as Tom Lad puts it—is “unchancy-like.” But women take their fellow-women’s whimsies seriously, and the Babe has been troubled, undoubtedly, by the attitude of Stylesey during these last months. I recall the talk we had, Cathy and I, before our home-returning from the honeymoon, when I saw this trouble waiting for her; she declined to let me send Stylesey out to alien haunts, and after that— well, after that, according to the habit of careless males, I put the matter from me, and tried to think that all was well Yet I knew that Stylesey was troubling the Babe. I pretended to myself that the disquiet was temporary, and of little consequence; I was, in brief, a coward.

These disquiets—such subtle uproars as Stylesey can create—are slight in themselves, each one, but in the aggregate they grow mountainous. It is all very well to see the comedy attaching to Tom Lad's wife; but constant intercourse with such a character is apt to wear away the most buoyant disposition, as dropping water saps a sure foundation.

Thinking over the matter now—purple is creeping out from the folds of the twilight hills—I realise that it is not only Cathy who has suffered. While I was a bachelor—heedless and untutored—I accepted Stylesey as part of my heritage, a legacy unquestioned. When she troubled me too much, I laughed; when she presumed on old association, I remembered that she was faithful to the traditions of my house; not once did I stop to ask myself how long my armour would be proof against persistent onslaughts.

To-night I see the reverse side of the picture; and, through understanding of Cathy’s sufferings, I view in true perspective my own past martyrdom. Consider—once again to use the Wanderer’s favourite word—consider what it means to have Stylesey as your chief retainer. She consistently refuses to admit that there’s virtue in the sunlight and the lusty warmth of summer; she prefers to hint darkly that brightness never lasts for long, that snow has been known to fall in June, that God meant us to see only the grey, rainy aspect of our span of life; she declines always to acknowledge that the flowers, and the birds, and the beasts, have any kinship with a larger gospel that is beyond our ken. If you succeed in any enterprise, Stylesey will warn you that the devil had a hand in it, to lure you on; if you fail, the wife of Tom Lad will tell you frankly that your own past sins are the root and issue of the matter.

At the moment this childish pessimism amuses me, but afterwards one feels the strain of it. Stylesey is godly, according to her lights: no woman ever went to worship on the Sabbath in stiffer and more righteous garments: no woman, surely, has the knack that Stylesey has—call it a gift, if you will—of belittling the characters of those who worship with her and of those who worship in another way.

I am not militant to-night The rooks, cawing loud across the dusky lawn, suggest peace, and only peace. Yet I see, as in a mirror, the harm that the Styleseys of this world can compass. They speak their evil so softly, so piously, that it gathers weight in transit They are so smooth, somehow, these evil-speaking women, and their sly, nefarious genius is hard to reckon with.

The old proverb holds good to-day—Show me an evil speaker, and I hold my purse-strings tight. Stylesey, as it chances, is scrupulously honest as regards material possessions; yet the feeling underlying that old proverb is a true one. To rob your neighbour of good fame is a worse crime than to ease him of his purse; the one, with luck, can be replenished, but the other cannot, and in moments of sheer fantasy I dream of a great awakening for Stylesey. She will understand the strait injunction, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour”—will interpret it, not as she does now, as referring to transactions in the law courts, but as a wider and a deeper commandment, enjoining charity in all things. Pure fantasy, of course; for of all criminals the evil-speakers are most hardened, and their infirmity grows deeper with the years.

Perhaps, after all, I am more militant than I thought. One jogs along, year in and year out, accepting such traditions as Stylesey; then suddenly the forbearance of the years is broken, simply because it is worn out, and one realises old indignities.

The gist of the matter is—I know it to-night, but am scarcely ready to confess as much—that Stylesey must cease to exercise her high prerogative of tyranny. Tom Lad’s wife, in brief, must leave us.

The faithful servitor has had his claims acknowledged handsomely. It is he, or she, who comes forward in times of need with white head and yellow gold—the latter being the savings of a thrifty life—and helps the master when all seems lost. He!s an engaging character, this stage retainer, all made up of pathos, humour, self-sacrifice; but honestly, and as one who knows the subject intimately, I think he is a little over-rated. The faithful master is a less obvious, but a more real, candidate for the róle of pathos.

Looking at the matter quietly, it would seem that a great deal of phraseology is wasted on this question of domestic service. There’s a disposition to talk of servitude, of degrading slavery, as between master and servant; yet the slavery is apt to be borne by the master, who gets no credit for it, not by the servant, who poses as the martyr.

With rare exceptions, such as Tom Lad, our servitors have lost the old, loyal sense that we all serve each other, according to our class. The rabble nowadays refuses to understand what consideration, what forethought, one gives to a good servant. The rabble will not see how patiently we overlook the faults, how gladly we welcome the virtues, of those who serve us—ay, and how ready is our help and sympathy in times of need. It is not often that I fall so low as to pity myself; yet to-night, with the rooks cawing slumber-songs above me, I look back along the years, and realise the fret and uproar which a woman of Stylesey’s breed can bring into a quiet house. Tom Lad must have had some fairly definite reason for marrying her, I take it, but I cannot understand how he, of all men—he, who loves a cold and honest breeze from out the north and hates the sly east wind—should have chosen Stylesey for his mate.

Undoubtedly Mrs. Styles must cease to trouble Arcady. I should never have found courage, I admit, to come to this decision, if Cathy had not shown so marked a dislike during these late days of Stylesey’s methods.

She has been brave, this wife of mine. She is accustomed to less drastic service than Mrs. Styles affords, while I have been used to Stylesey’s ways from boyhood. Yet only lately, as I say, has the Babe hinted at complaint.

There’s something in the air, indeed. Cathy grows oddly restless at times, and trifles depress her unaccountably. She tries hard to be her old, buoyant self, but each day the effort seems to cost her a little and a little more. Can Stylesey’s influence be responsible? With guilt and shame I acknowledge that it may, and my only comfort lies in remembering that I secured that priceless handmaiden, Pansy, for my wife. Pansy has developed a sheer gift for service—for cheerful, honourable service, I mean. She is always reticent, yet smiling; it seems a pleasure to her to be ready at any moment to do this or that for us, and her knowledge of Cathy’s wardrobe, instinctive from the start, has been extended to my own in moments of emergency—moments which are of frequent occurrence, I confess; for when you come home from a ride at 6.30, and are pledged to dine abroad at 7.30, and have to tub and change and get to your destination, there’s little time to waste about the business of getting out your clothes.

Yet the Babe is troubled, Pansy or no Pansy, and I am haunted to-night by the sense that I have been a kind of wicked sultan, imprisoning my wife and cruelly maltreating her. Undoubtedly the wife of Tom Lad must leave us soon.

Now Cathy, in her absurd way, chooses just this moment to come behind me softly, to put both hands over my eyes, and to bid me guess who it is the king has sent me. My rejoinder is obvious, for never at any time could there be doubt upon this point; there is only one Babe, and one knows her at once by reason of the warmth, the fragrance, the sheer good comradeship, she brings with her.

Cathy is excited. She dances a minuet in front of me. She curtseys gravely. She stoops and gathers into her arms the ridiculous squirrel whom, for peace’s sake, we have agreed to call a dog.

“I have been into the village, Murphy," observes my wife, with sudden gravity. “I met a delightful old gentleman just outside Timothy Brailes’s shop; and he stopped on seeing Tiko, and lifted his hat—an old-fashioned beaver, Murphy—and, ‘ Pardon me,’ he said, ' but where did you get your dog?'"

“Indeed!" I venture mildly. “He seems to have been a confoundedly impertinent old gentleman, Babe.”

“But, Murphy, he wasn’t at all I He looked like an old family portrait, just, and was quite old and white-haired, and—and old enough to take liberties. So I told him how I came to buy Tiko, and how you said he was dear at two pounds.”

Tiko is looking at me with that air of uncomplaining martyrdom which he can assume at will. He knows his hour of triumph, and enjoys it to the full; but buoyancy of heart compels him to turn from me to Cathy, and to wink at her, a trick of his in moments of contentment " Martyrs do not wink, Babe."

“But he isn’t a martyr, dear. He has found his pedigree. My friend of the beaver hat said he was cheap at twenty pounds”

There’s no use at all in reasoning with my wife at these times. She is triumphant; she believes that Tiko is worth twenty pounds; five minutes' talk with a stranger in the village street convinces her on that point at once, despite my constant argument that Tiko, apart from one’s affection for him, is worth just half a crown.

“My friend with the beaver hat," she goes on, pointing a slim forefinger at me, “my friend who is like a family portrait, Murphy—my friend who takes snuff as delicately as the Wanderer does— he says that Tiko is worth twenty pounds. Quite apart, dear, from the fact that I bought him with my own hen-money, I think you will understand that I have saved eighteen pounds on the bargain."

This problem of political economy is too much for me. “Where is the eighteen pounds?" I ask. It is a crude question, I admit; but Cathy answers it at once.

“Why, here, Murphy! Haven’t I got Tiko in my arms?”

The Babe undoubtedly should go to Westminster, just as Tom Lad should. They both have the faculty of answering any question at random, of tangling up the issue with a cleverness approaching genius. Tiko, too, would make a great name there; to look martyrdom out of one eye, and to wink hilariously with the other, is to succeed at all times in political debate.

“Tell me more of this family portrait who takes snuff so delicately,” I suggest.

“Oh, willingly! You know how often you’ve accused the dear dog of being a squirrel, Murphy? Well, the old gentleman who met me in the village said that Tiko was of a bygone breed—a breed extremely rare, Murphy—a breed as old as the Danes and Scandinavians, who came before the Normans, as you’re glad to tell me every night we dine together—unless it happens to be Prince Charlie’s birthday, and you can think of nothing but the White Cockade."

“The Tiko boy grows interesting, Babe, and he’s winking hard at me. What is his breed? ”

“A squirrel-terrier, dear. My friend who took snuff so gracefully assured me he was worthier of his place than many dogs who nowadays pretend to pedigree.”

Cathy is an actress, and in her vehement defence of Tiko she is obviously playing understudy to this gay and unknown gentleman who taught her Tiko’s pedigree. Tiko himself looks languidly at the twilight sky, lifts his eyebrows a little, assumes, in brief, a hauteur and disdain which show him cognisant of his newly acknowledged dignity. He has been a male Cinderella until now, sitting by the hearth and spurned by all and sundry as a mongrel; his hour has come at last, and he will travel henceforward with pomp and ceremony, an admitted peer in his own right.

I dare not jest. The Babe and Tiko are too serious about the matter. Moreover, Cathy knows my weakness to a nicety, and her suggestion that the squirrel-dog descends from Scandinavian ancestry, not from Norman, undoubtedly increases my respect for the little chap.

“Murphy,” says the Babe suddenly. She has put Tiko down, and is stroking my sleeve with feverish quiet “Murphy, I—there’s something, dear, I have to tell you—it—it is so hard.”

Tiko, Scandinavians, the imminent dismissal of Stylesey, drift past me down the wind of Cathy’s trouble. I am rather in love with my wife— there’s no local by-law against the habit here in Arcady—and at these times I can think of nothing but the Babe.

She lies in my arms for a moment, then breaks away; and, before I realise her longing to escape, she is running like a startled fawn towards the house.

Tiko follows her for awhile, then turns, and looks at me, and hesitates. Finally, he comes and jumps on to the garden seat beside me, and licks my face. Like a true dog, he has decided that I am the more troubled of the two humans whom he has in charge, and he forgets for the moment the new dignities attaching to the rank of squirrel-terrier. We sit here, he and I, and I wonder all afresh what is the matter with my wife.

“It is Stylesey. Undoubtedly it is Tom Lad’s wife, Tiko,” I say at last, after earnest thought about it all; “she has tired your mistress out.”

Tiko rears his head, and mutters “Whoo-uff!” in answer, and I reason the question out with him.

“You see, I thought too little of Stylesey’s influence. When you’re accustomed to an east wind, Tiko, you learn to weather it"

“Whoo-uff!

“Mrs. Styles is leaving us, Tiko—but how? I can’t—Tiko, I can’t in reason let Tom Lad go with her—he’s essential to my happiness.”

“Whoo-uff!”

We have a long chat about it, and at last we rise and cross the lawn together, the squirrel-dog and I. When I leave the garden seat beneath the limes, I am innocent of any scheme for ridding my wife of Stylesey; yet the whole brave plan comes to me, long before we reach the house, as honest plans will come to a man when he has sought them honestly.

It is so simple, this little household plot of mine. I whisper it to Tiko, and he answers “ Whoo-uff!”

CHAPTER XXII
THE GLEAM AHEAD

I have had my interview with Stylesey, on the morning after my hatching of a domestic plot. She always knows, I think, when I'm in earnest about a matter, and she capitulated after fighting a long and losing battle.

Whenever this sort of success comes to me, I seek my wife instinctively; but Cathy is not to be found to-day about the house or grounds.

“The mistress went out an hour ago, sir," Pansy tells me, with her quiet and guarded smile.

“Into the village, Pansy?”

“No, sir. I thought she went by the river-track. You may find her at the bridge.”

Pansy has the gift of understanding, which ol all birth-gifts is the rarest. I follow the limestone, slippery track beside the stream, and on the Bridge of Amity I see a slender figure. The Babe is leaning with her arms across the rail; her attitude suggests trouble, and with my masculine stupidity I guess that she is thinking of Stylesey’s tyranny.

“I’ve news for you, Babe!” I say, blurting out my thoughts like a schoolboy.

She turns and looks at me, and not while I live shall I forget the wonder-light that transfigures and makes comelier the sweetest of all faces. A light mist of tears is in her eyes; there’s sorrow, keen happiness, awe, in Cathy’s face.

We men are always quick to understand the beauty of our women-folk, but helpless when we try to talk of it. This look the Babe has given me—it is brief, it is hidden soon by lowered lashes and by lowered head, yet it is fixed for ever among the many clean and happy memories she has given me. So many half-forgotten tendernesses are gathered to a head in that one glance; the glamour of our courtship, the surer glamour of our wedlock, are interpreted and rendered plain; the reasonable, sweet, and comely ritual of marriage stands tried and proved.

“You have news?” answers the Babe. Her voice is low, but brave and clear. I’ve heard the self-same thrill in the throstle’s voice when he is singing to his mate that spring has come, newborn from the winter’s snows. “I—dear, I have news, too—no, Murphy! You must give me yours first. My news—my news—oh, it can wait.”

I am disturbed, perplexed, yet buoyant with a sense ot coming happiness.

“Stylesey is leaving us next month. I have just arranged it all with her," I say, still wedded to my faith that Mrs. Styles is at the root of Cathy’s trouble.

The Babe is silent for a moment, then throws back her head and laughs; she is her wayward self again.

“Murphy, you’re absurd. We have talked it over so often, and we know that Tom Lad must stay with us.”

“He will stay with us.”

“How can he? Stylesey——"

“I am pledged to undertake a model dairy, Babe."

Cathy looks at me, as if to ask if I’m entirely mad, or only half-way on the road to lunacy.

“Were you not laughing—father and you, Murphy, only a day or two ago—about model dairies, and saying they could be run only as a luxury? "

“We were; and our dairy, Babe, is to be run simply as a luxury.”

Again the questioning glance; and, when I laugh, Cathy is more than ever disposed to think that I am straying from the fold of sanity.

I explain my brilliant plot for getting rid of Stylesey—explain that the only way to do it was to propose the establishment of my dairy, and flatter her into the belief that she, and only she, could manage it properly. It is a weakness of Stylesey’s that she prides herself—more than on her skill in managing Tom Lad or myself—upon her gift of butter-making. She looked backward often, like Lot’s wife, while I was persuading the good woman to cease to be our housekeeper; but she looked forward, too, and saw herself the prosperous mistress of an industry.

I explain all this triumphantly to the Babe. I look for praise. The conceit, to my heated fancy, is a good one, and better still is the assured removal of Stylesey from a place among our household gods.

The Wanderer, I know, would have applauded me. So would the Squire. So would our little Lavender Lady, who has grown old in knowledge of the tyranny enforced by family retainers. My mistake to-day is that I bring the fruits of my great enterprise to Cathy. One’s wife, for a reason inscrutable to me, does not praise one’s righteous efforts until a week or two has passed and she has had leisure to consider them.

To-day Cathy frankly smiles at my history of a great battle, well thought-out and won.

“You are so unpractical, dear,” she says suavely.

We do not lose our tempers, the Babe and I, when we indulge in friendly argument; but now and then we adopt a cold and distant outlook on each other’s point of view. I am unpractical! The charge, to-day of all days, is ridiculous.

“Don’t be angiy, dear," says Cathy, still bubbling over with a laughter silent and oppressive.

I hint, with the dignity of an ambassador who feels his country’s credit is assailed, that I have acted only in the Babe’s interests—that Stylesey is certainly dismissed.

“You have been—not quite yourself lately,” I finish, “and I realised suddenly that Mrs. Styles was at the root of it. Was it unpractical to get rid of her? Now, fairly, was it, Babe? ’’

Cathy is silent. She glances up the stream and down the stream, and once, for a fugitive moment, at my face. She has another quick retreat in mind, and I promptly put my arms about her.

“Dear, what is it?” I ask.

I shall never know what the Babe tells me, or whether she finds words at all in which to tell me her good news. Rather, looking back on that morning, it seems to me that some mantle of sheer intuition descends on me, and I understand without the help of spoken words.

Such a moment comes from the steady and unalterable righteousness of that scheme with which madmen, cynics, and precocious youngsters are pleased to quarrel. None who has lacked the moment can realise the fragrance of it and the holiness; few who have known it are apostates from the lively, settled faith it brings with it.

The river, slipping quietly down from the haunts where good trout lie, is a sheet of silver, fringed by deeper pools which soften the red and russet, the saffron, gold, and purple of the trees that lean inquiringly above the water. There's no beauty of what Tom Lad calls “the dry-ground world” which is not made rarer and more beautiful by its image reflected in the stream. Perhaps we of the north are so accustomed to our wealth of brooks and rivers and moorland tarns that we seek instinctively for the water’s soft and chastened betterment of any picture lying overhead. Cathy and I are looking up-stream diligently, and, when our glances meet again, there is in them something of the river’s quiet reflection.

“Dear, we are standing on the Bridge of Amity,” says the Babe softly.

Her meaning is clear. This grey, stone bridge, which Cathy’s folk and mine built long ago in token of an old feud healed, has always been the centre of that close and intimate affection which has held between the Squire, and Cathy, and myself. It has been always more easy to talk out any matter here on the bridge than elsewhere; and I doubt if in any other place could we so easily have understood each other to-day.

What of the newer Bridge of Amity in process of building? That is Cathy’s thought; and, with another fleeting, half-shy glance she has left me, soon as she is sure that I have read her meaning.

It is easy to linger on, one’s arms on the grey parapet, one’s ears attuned to that singing of the fairies, which is always at our bidding if we care to ask for it. And these fairies—dancing always to the silver music of their own voices—sing constantly of glamour, of the gleam ahead, of the shady thickets and the watered fields where all the casual insolences of life are lost, and only the inner worthiness of life is seen.

How long I stand there, listening to the fairies, I do not know; but I do know that, if I never have another hour of triumph—sane, glamoured, and complete—I've no complaint to make.

I am interrupted by music a little louder than the fairies’—music less silvery—yet music welcome at all times. I glance to the right, and find the Squire, standing ten yards away and shaking a thick, oaken stick at me.

“You there, sir; you there!" he cries, flourishing his stick with menace imminent and redoubled. “How dare you leave an old man to his loneliness?”

“I’m unaware—”

“Unaware? Boys and girls are always unaware. They’re selfish. They never have a clear picture in their minds of the old man sitting by dead ashes, boy, and thinking of the past."

“With a bottle of port beside the ashes, sir,” I suggest suavely, “to ripen and inform their grief?’’

“Oh, I shall thrash you soon. I knew it would always come to that. There’s only one alternative left you, sir—come and dine with me to-night.”

It is four days since we dined with the Squire, and always after the third day’s interval he falls into this quixotic rage, appeals to the dead ashes of his hearth—a clear and hearty coal fire, to wit—and patiently forbears to mention either gout or port.

“We shall be glad, sir.”

“Good boy! Good boy! I always said your heart was in the right place—though between you and me, the pair of you give me the deuce of a lonely time up yonder at the Hall”

Somehow—these affaire happen when your heart is light and you stand on the Bridge of Amity—somehow I tell the Squire what great news Cathy brings me.

He looks up and down the stream—he, too, seeks always counsel from the water—and he takes his snuff-box out, just like the Wanderer, just like the gallant nobles, who in that reign of terror, which was not their own, went up to meet the guillotine in France.

Undoubtedly I’m out of date. The grace and the distinction of a pinch of snuff—taken in the one right way—appeals to me at all times.

“Tell me the news again, boy,” he says.

I tell him, and he ponders awhile, and laughter, not to be denied, comes about his lips, though he strives to suppress it.

“There’ll be an heir, then, for the two properties?” he says eagerly. The Squire, too, is thinking of that second and that better Bridge of Amity.

“

I hope so, sir,” I answer, gravely overlooking the droll aspect of his eagerness.

Again he takes a pinch of snuff. “

Tut-tut I It must be, of course—girls are so useless—tell me just once again, boy, that it’s true!” he breaks off.

The Squire’s voice, is husky now. He is squeezing my hand with extreme and painful vigour.

“You don't know what it means to me,” he goes on. “

Little Cathy has been everything to me—you know that—but there was always something wanting. Do as you will, boy, you feel it like a cloud on your life, this having lands, and a decent family history behind you, and no heir to leave them to. Didn't I pray for an heir in the old days—and now— and now—”

A big man, this Squire, impetuous, generous in his power of feeling, his readiness to give deep feeling out; yet never have I seen him so moved, so overwhelmed. I, too, forget that we are looking far ahead, that we’re accepting as assured a doubtful issue.

“Little Cathy!” he goes on, striding restlessly up and down. ‘'It’s odd how one slim lass can alter everything for us, boy I Why, she was sitting on my knee not long since, a tiny thing asking for one more tale before bedtime. I can’t believe it—yes, I can, though—it’s too good to be disbelieved. There’s no entail, you see; the little chap can step straight into it when I am gone.”

A further restless journey up and down the river path.

“It would be rather early to send for my lawyer, and go over the title-deeds and all the rest of it? Well, yes, I suppose it would. But I tell you, boy, I must do something, or I shall find myself going round the parish and shaking hands with everybody. Let’s have a gallop!”

Two very youthful horsemen journey out, accordingly, an hour or so later; they have ostensibly arrived at man’s estate, both of them, but that is a fiction, pure and simple, and the Squire is the giddier and more irresponsible of the two.

What a ride we have! The breeze is velvety, and soft, and kind. The russet trees, the scarlet hedgerows, the moist fields underneath the scudding hoofs, are ripe with autumn’s perfume. Somewhere, faint and far behind the breeze’s track, is a crisp and cleanly hint of frost—a hint which is accepted promptly by our horses. They and we are so lively and so eager, in brief, that the last few homeward miles are covered, perforce, at a miserable pace.

“We’ve over-ridden the poor brutes,” says the Squire, with late repentance. “We’ve shamefully over-ridden them, boy; but we shall be foigiven this once."

When we reach the parting of our roads, and the Squire has called me back, for the second time, to demand my solemn oath and surety that we’ll dine with him to-night, he glances at me whimsically.

“It’s a conspiracy, all the same, and it's handsome of me to connive at it I ask you, boy, am I an old man? Can I look and feel a good ten years younger than lam?”

“A good fifteen, sir,” I answer, moved to blandishment “Yet you propose to spread it up and down the countryside that I’m a grandfather. How can I pretend to be young, when I’m a grandfather? The thing's absurd. Come to dinner to-night, sir, if you force it on me, but I’m not so sure of your welcome, after all.”

We bid each other an amicable farewell, and a tired and happy rider, mounted on a tired and happy mare, reaches the gates of Arcady, for all the world as if the tale were imaginary, not real And, just as in a tale, the Babe is there, looking up the lane to welcome me. For the gist of the matter is, that in Arcady good fairy tales come true.

THE END