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Ebook has 382 lines and 64833 words, and 8 pages

And I heard sounds of insult, shame, and wrong, And trumpets blown for wars,--

and it was of Arthur's last battle that I dreamed. But the sky cleared, and I seemed to let go of the folds of the curtain and to see a red dragon triumphing and the shielded Sir Launcelot again; and next, it was only a tournament that I saw, and there were careless ladies on high among the golden dust. And, at last, I could once more think happily of the little white house where I lived, and the largest and reddest apples in all the world that grew upon the wizened orchard, and the smoked salmon and the hams that perfumed the long kitchen, and all the shining candlesticks, and the wavy, crisp, thin leaves of oaten bread that were eaten there with buttermilk: and the great fire shook his rustling sheaf of flames and laughed at the wind and rain that stung the window-panes; and sometimes a sense of triumph arose from the glory of the fire and the vanity of the wind, and sometimes a sense of fear lest the fire should be conspiring with the storm. That also was Wales--a meandering village street, the house with the orchard, and a white river in sight of it, and the great music of the national anthem hovering over it and giving the whole a strange solemnity.

Just beyond the village, but not under the same solemn sky, I see an island of apple trees in spring, which in fact belongs to a somewhat later year. It was reached by a mile of winding lane that passed the slender outmost branches of the village, and lastly, a shining cottage, with streaked and mossy thatch, and two little six-paned windows, half-filled with many-coloured sweets, and boasting one pane of bottle-glass. Outside sat an old woman; her moist, grey, hempen curls framing a cruel face which had been made by three or four swift strokes of a hatchet; her magnificent brown eyes seeming to ponder heavenly things and really looking for half-pence. A picture would have made her--wringing her hands slowly as if she were perpetually washing, or sitting bolt upright and pleased with her white apron--a type of resigned and reverend and beautiful old age. On the opposite side of the road was a white and thatched piggery, half the size of the house; and alongside of it, a neat, moulded pile of coal-dust, clay, and lime, mixed, for her ever-burning fire. The pigs grunted; the old woman, who would herself watch the slaughtering, sat and was pleased, and said, "Good morning," and "Good afternoon," and "Good evening" as the day went by, except when the children were due to pass to and from school, with half-pence to spend.

Just beyond this dragon and its house, an important road crossed the lane, which then narrowed and allowed the hedgerow hazels to arch over it and let in only the wannest light to the steep, stony hedge-bank of whin and grass and fern and violets. Little streams ran this way and that, under and over and alongside the lane, and at length a larger one was honoured by a bridge, the parapet covered with flat, dense, even turf. The bridge made way for a wide view, and to invite the eye a magpie flew away from the grassy parapet with wavy flight to a mountain side.

Between the bridge and the mountain, and in fact surrounded by streams which were heard although unseen, was an island of apple trees.

There were murmurs of bees. There was a gush and fall and gurgle of streams, which could be traced by their bowing irises. There was a poignant glow and fragrance of flowers in an air so moist and cold and still that at dawn the earliest bee left a thin line of scent upon it. Beyond, the mountain, grim, without trees, lofty and dark, was clearly upholding the low blue sky full of slow clouds of the colour of the mountain lambs or of melting snow. This mountain and this sky, for that first hour, shut out, and not only shut out but destroyed, and not only destroyed but made as if it had never been, the world of the old woman, the coal-pits, the schools, and the grown-up persons. And the magic of Wales, or of Spring, or of childhood made the island of apple trees more than an orchard in flower. For as some women seem at first to be but rich eyes in a mist of complexion and sweet voice, so the orchard was but an invisible soul playing with scent and colour as symbols. Nor did this wonder vanish when I walked among the trees and looked up at the blossoms in the sky. For in that island of apple trees there was not one tree but was curved and jagged and twisted and splintered by great age, by the west wind, or by the weight of fruit in many autumns. In colour they were stony. They were scarred with knots like mouths. Some of their branches were bent sharply like lightning flashes. Some rose up like bony, sunburnt, imprecating arms of furious prophets. One stiff, gaunt bole that was half hid in flower might have been Ares' sword in the hands of the Cupids. Others were like ribs of submerged ships, or the horns of an ox emerging from a skeleton deep in the sand of a lonely coast. And the blossom of them all was the same, so that they seemed to be Winter with the frail Spring in his arms. Nor was I surprised when the first cuckoo sang therein, since the blossom made it for its need. And when a curlew called from the mountain hopelessly, I laughed at it.

When I came again and saw the apple trees in flower, the island was very far away, and the unseen cuckoo sang behind a veil and not so suitably as the curlew. There was something of the dawn in the light over it, though it was mid-day; and I could hardly understand, and was inclined to melancholy, until chance brought into my head the poem of the old princely warrior poet Llywarch H?n, and out of his melancholy and mine was born a mild and lasting joy. He sang:

Sitting high upon a hill, to battle is inclined My mind, but it does not impel me onward. Short is my journey, my tenement is laid waste.

Sharp is the gale, it is bare punishment to live. When the trees array themselves in gay colours Of Summer, extremely ill am I this day.

I am no hunter, I keep no animal of the chase, I cannot move about: As long as it pleases the cuckoo, let her sing.

The loud-voiced cuckoo sings with the dawn, Her melodious notes in the dales of Cuawg: Better than the miser is the lavish man.

At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing, On the blossom-covered branches; Woe to the sick that hears their contented notes.

At Aber Cuawg the cuckoos sing. The recollection is in my mind, There are that hear them that will not hear them again.

Have I not listened to the cuckoo on the ivied tree? Did not my shield hang down? What I loved is but vexation; what I loved is no more.

And I thought that perhaps it is even true, as Taliesin sang, that "A man is wont to be oldest when born, and younger all the time," and that the apple flowers did but remind me of old capacities laid waste.

These little things are the opening cadences of a great music which I have heard, and which is Wales. But I have forgotten the whole, and have echoes of it only, when I hear an old Welsh song, when I am trying to catch a trout, or am eating bread and butter and white cheese, and drinking pale tea, in a mountain farm.... One echo of it I had strangely in Oxford, when, entertaining an old wise gipsy, and asking him of his travels, and whether he had been in Wales, he meditated for a long time, and then sang in an emotionless and moving tone the "Hen wlad fy nhadau," up there among the books, the towers, and the stars. I have had a vision of a rose. But my memory possesses only the doubtful and withered dustiness of a petal or two.

Having passed the ruined abbey and the orchard, I came to a long, low farmhouse kitchen, smelling of bacon and herbs and burning sycamore and ash. A gun, a blunderbuss, a pair of silver spurs, and a golden spray of last year's corn hung over the high mantelpiece and its many brass candlesticks; and beneath was an open fireplace and a perpetual red fire, and two teapots warming, for they had tea for breakfast, tea for dinner, tea for tea, tea for supper, and tea between. The floor was of sanded slate flags, and on them a long many-legged table, an oak settle, a table piano, and some Chippendale chairs. There were also two tall clocks; and they were the most human clocks I ever met, for they ticked with effort and uneasiness: they seemed to think and sorrow over time, as if they caused it, and did not go on thoughtlessly or impudently like most clocks, which are insufferable; they found the hours troublesome and did not twitter mechanically over them; and at midnight the twelve strokes always nearly ruined them, so great was the effort. On the wall were a large portrait of Spurgeon, several sets of verses printed and framed in memory of dead members of the family, an allegorical tree watered by the devil, and photographs of a bard and of Mr. Lloyd George. There were about fifty well-used books near the fire, and two or three men smoking, and one man reading some serious book aloud, by the only lamp; and a white girl was carrying out the week's baking, of large loaves, flat fruit tarts of blackberry, apple, and whinberry, plain golden cakes, large soft currant biscuits, and curled oat cakes. And outside, the noises of a west wind and a flooded stream, the whimper of an otter, and the long, slow laugh of an owl; and always silent, but never forgotten, the restless, towering outline of a mountain.

The fire was--is--of wood, dry oak-twigs of last spring, stout ash sticks cut this morning, and brawny oak butts grubbed from the copse years after the tree was felled. And I remember how we built it up one autumn, when the heat and business of the day had almost let it die.

We had been out all day, cutting and binding the late corn. At one moment we admired the wheat straightening in the sun after drooping in rain, with grey heads all bent one way over the luminous amber stalks, and at last leaning and quivering like runners about to start or like a wind made visible. At another moment we admired the gracious groups of sheaves in pyramids made by our own hands, as we sat and drank our buttermilk or ale, and ate bread and cheese or chwippod among the furze mixed with bramble and fern at the edge of the field. Behind us was a place given over to blue scabious flowers, haunted much by blue butterflies of the same hue; to cross-leaved heath and its clusters of close, pensile ovals, of a perfect white that blushed towards the sun; to a dainty embroidery of tormentil shining with unvaried gold; and to tall, purple loosestrife, with bees at it, dispensing a thin perfume of the kind that all fair living things, plants or children, breathe.

What a thing it is to reap the wheat with your own hands, to thresh it with the oaken flail in the misty barn, to ride with it to the mill and take your last trout while it is ground, and then to eat it with no decoration of butter, straight from the oven! There is nothing better, unless it be to eat your trout with the virgin appetite which you have won in catching it. But in the field, we should have been pleased with the plainest meal a hungry man can have, which is, I suppose, barley bread and a pale "double Caermarthen" cheese, which you cut with a hatchet after casting it on the floor and making it bounce, to be sure that it is a double Caermarthen. And yet I do not know. For even a Welsh hymnist of the eighteenth century, in translating "the increase of the fields," wrote avidly of "wheaten bread," so serious was his distaste for barley bread. But it was to a meal of wheaten bread and oat cake, and cheese and onions and cucumber, that we came in, while the trembling splendours of the first stars shone, as if they also were dewy like the furze. Nothing is to be compared with the pleasure of seeing the stars thus in the east, when most eyes are watching the west, except perhaps to read a fresh modern poet, straight from the press, before any one has praised it, and to know that it is good.

As we sat, some were singing the song "Morwynion Sir Gaerfyrdd-in." Some were looking out at the old hay waggon before the gate.

Fine grass was already growing in corners of the wrecked hay waggon. Two months before, it travelled many times a day between the rick and the fields. Swallow was in the shafts while it carried all the village children to the field, as it had done some sixty years ago, when the village wheelwright helped God to make it. The waggoner lifted them out in clusters; the haymakers loaded silently; the waggon moved along the roads between the swathes; and, followed by children who expected another ride, and drawn by Swallow and Darling, it reached the rick that began to rise, like an early church, beside the elms. But hardly had it set out for another load than Swallow shied; an axle splintered and tore and broke in two, near the hub of one wheel, which subsided so that a corner of the waggon fell askew into the tussocks, and the suspended horse-shoe dropped from its place. There the mare left it, and switched her black tail from side to side of her lucent, nut-brown haunches, as she went.

All day the waggon was now the children's own. They climbed and slid and made believe that they were sailors, on its thin, polished timbers. The grass had grown up to it, under its protection. Before it fell, the massive wheels and delicate curved sides had been so fair and strong that no one thought of its end. Now, the exposed decay raised a smile at its so recent death. No one gave it a thought, except, perhaps, as now, when the September evening began, and one saw it on this side of the serious, dark elms, when the flooded ruts were gleaming, and a cold light fell over it from a tempestuous sky, and the motionless air was full of the shining of moist quinces and yellow fallen apples in long herbage; and, far off, the cowman let a gate shut noisily; the late swallows and early bats mingled in flight; and, under an oak, a tramp was kindling his fire....

Suddenly in came the dog, one of those thievish, lean, swift demi-wolves, that appear so fearful of meeting a stranger, but when he has passed, turn and follow him. He shook himself, stepped into the hearth and out and in again. With him was one whose red face and shining eyes and crisped hair were the decoration with which the wind invests his true lovers. A north wind had risen and given the word, and he repeated it: let us have a fire.

So one brought hay and twigs, another branches and knotted logs, and another the bellows. We made an edifice worthy of fire and kneeled with the dog to watch light changing into heat, as the spirals of sparks arose. The pyre was not more beautiful which turned to roses round the innocent maiden for whom it was lit; nor that more wonderful round which, night after night in the west, the clouds are solemnly ranged, waiting for the command that will tell them whither they are bound in the dark blue night. We became as the logs, that now and then settled down and sent out, as we did words, some bristling sparks of satisfaction. And hardly did we envy then the man who lit the first fire and saw his own stupendous shadow in cave or wood and called it a god. As we kneeled, and our sight grew pleasantly dim, were we looking at fire-born recollections of our own childhood, wondering that such a childhood and youth as ours could ever have been; or at a golden age that never was?... The light spelt the titles of the books for a moment, and the bard read Spenser aloud, as if forsooth a man can read poetry in company round such a fire. So we pelted him with tales and songs....

And one of the songs was "The Maid of Landybie," by the bard, Watcyn Wyn. Here follows the air, and a translation which was made by an English poet. The na?vet? of the original has troubled him, and the Welsh stanza form has driven him to the use of rhymeless feminine endings; but I think that his version will, with the air, render not too faintly the song I heard.

'Rwy'n car - u merch o Lan - dy - bi - e, Ac y mae hith-e'n fy nghar - u i O bob merch i - fanc yn Sir Gaer - fyrdd-in, 'Does neb o hon - yn' mor hardd a hi, Ar ei grudd-iau mae rhos- - yn - au, Cym - ysg liw - iau coch a gwyn: Y hi y'wr un - ig ferch a fyn - af, A hith - e -- dim ond y fi - ne fyn.

I love a maid of Landybie And it is she who loves me too. Of all the women of Caermarthen None is so fair as she, I know. White and red are her cheeks' young roses, The tints all blended mistily; She is the only maid I long for, And she will have no lad but me.

I love one maid of Landybie. And she too loves but one, but one; The tender girl remains my faithful, Pure of heart, a bird in tone. Her beauty and her comely bearing Have won my love and life and care, For there is none in all the kingdoms Like her, so blushing, kind, and fair.

While there is lime in Craig-y-Ddinas; While there is water in Pant-y-Llyn; And while the waves of shining Loughor Walk between these hills and sing; While there's a belfry in the village Whose bells delight the country nigh, The dearest maid of Landybie Shall have her name held sweet and high.

When we are by this fire, we can do what we like with Time, making a strange solitude within these four walls, as if they were cut off in time as in space from the great world by something more powerful than the night; so that, whether Llewelyn the Great, or Llewelyn the Last, or Arthur, or Kilhwch, or Owen Glyndwr, or the most recent prophet be the subject of our talk, nothing intrudes that can prevent us for the time from being utterly at one with them. They sing or jest or make puns; they talk of hero and poet as if they had met them on the hills; and as the poet has said, "Folly would it be to say that Arthur has a grave."

In such a room are legends made, if made at all. In fact, I lately saw a pretty proof of it.

The valley in which the farmhouse lies is not so fortified that some foreign things of one kind and another cannot enter. And a miner or a youth on holiday from London brought a song of Bill Bailey to the ears of one of the children of the house, a happy, melancholy boy named Merfyn. The elders caught it for a day or two, and though the song does not recommend itself to those who are heirs to "Sospan bach" and "Ar hyd y nos," the name of the hero stuck. The child asked who he was, and could get no answer. When anything happened about the farm that could not easily be explained, it was jestingly said that Bill Bailey was at the bottom of it. The child seriously caught up the name and the mystery, and applied it with amusing and strange effect. Thus, when he had asked who made the mushrooms in the dawn, and was not satisfied, he himself decided, and with pride and joy announced, that they were Bill Bailey's work. Looking into the fire one night, and seeing faces that he could not recognise among the throbbing heat, he saw Bill Bailey, as he surmised. Thus is a new solar hero being bred. The last news is that he made Cader Idris and Orion and the Pleiades, and that the owls cry so sadly because he is afoot in the woods.

And yet, if we are so unwise as to draw back the curtain from the window at night, the illusion of timelessness is broken for that evening, and in the flower-faced owl by the pane, in the great hill scarred with precipices, and ribbed with white and crying streams, with here and there a black tree disturbed and a very far-off light, I can see nothing but the past as a magnificent presence besieging the house. At such times the legends that I remember most are those of the buried and unforgotten lands. What I see becomes but a symbol of what is now invisible. And sometimes I dream of something hidden out there and elaborating some omnipotent alcahest for the world's delight or the world's bane; sometimes, as when I passed Llanddeusant and Myddfai, I could see nothing that was there, because I was thinking of what had been long ago. There is still a tradition on the coast that Cardigan Bay now covers a country that was once populous and fair and rich. The son of a prince of South Wales is said to have had charge of the floodgates on the protecting embankment, and one night the floodgates were left open at high tide, while he slept with wine, and the sea was over the corn. "Seithenyn the Drunkard let in the sea over Cantre-'r-Gwaelod, so that all the houses and lands contained in it were lost. And before that time there were in it sixteen fortified towns superior to all the towns and cities in Wales, except Caerlleon on the Usk. And Cantre-'r-Gwaelod was the dominion of Gwyddno, King of Cardigan, and this event happened in the time of Ambrosius. And the people who escaped from that inundation came and landed in Ardudwy, the country of Arvon, the Snowdon mountains, and other places not before inhabited...." The sands in some places uncover the roots of an old forest. According to one tradition the flood took place during a feast. The harper suddenly foresaw what was to happen and warned the guests; but he alone escaped. There is also a tradition that Bala Lake covers old palaces. It is said that they have been seen on clear moonlit nights, when the air is one sapphire, and that a voice is heard saying, "Vengeance will come"; and another voice, "When will it come?" and again the first voice saying, "In the third generation." For a prince once had a palace where the lake is. He was cruel and persisted in his cruelty, despite a voice that sometimes cried to him, "Vengeance will come." One night there was a bright festival in the palace, and there were many ladies and many lords among the guests, for an heir had just been born to the prince. The wine shone and was continually renewed. The dancers were merry and never tired. And a voice cried, "Vengeance." But only the harper heard; and he saw a bird beckoning him out of the palace. He followed, and if he stopped, the bird called, "Vengeance." So they travelled a long way, and at last he stopped and rested, and the bird was silent. Then the harper upbraided himself, and turned, and would have gone back to the palace. But he lost his way, for it was night. And in the morning he saw one calm large lake where the palace had been; and on the lake floated the harper's harp....

This fire, in my memory, gathers round it many books which I have read and many men that I have spoken with among the mountains--gathers them from coal-pits and tin-works and schools and chapels and farmhouses and hideous cottages, beside rivers, among woods; and I have drawn a thin line round their shadows and have called the forms that came of it men, and their "characters" follow.

MR. JONES, THE MINISTER

Jones is a little, thin, long-skulled, black-haired, pale Congregational minister, with a stammer and a squint. He has a book-shelf containing nothing but sermons and theology, which he has read, and the novels of Sir Walter Scott, which he hopes to read. I suppose he believes in metempsychosis. He is accustomed to say that everything is theology--which is fine; and that theology is everything--which is hard. He tries to love man as well as God, and succeeds in convincing every one of his honesty, generosity, and industry. In the care of souls he fears no disease or squalor or shape of death. But there is a condescension about his ways with men. He calls them the worldliest of God's creatures. But with the Divine he is happy and at ease, and in his pulpit seems to sit on the right hand. Then his Biblical criticism is absent as if it had never been, and he sees the holy things at once as clearly as Quarles and as mystically as Herbert or Crashaw. He speaks of them with the enthusiasm of a collector or of a man of science dealing with a bone or a gas. Like them, he sees nothing but the subjects of the moment. He loves them as passionately and yet with a sense of possession. He gives to them the adoration which he seems wilfully to have withheld from women, pageantry, gardens, palaces--which his speech would have adorned. He lavishes upon them his whole ingenious heart, so that, to those used to the false rhetoric and dull compliment of ordinary worshippers, there is in his sermons something fantastical, far-fetched, or smelling of the lamp. If he has to describe something naked or severe, he must needs give them a kind of voluptuousness by painting the things which they lack, and the lack of which makes them what they are. With Herbert, he might repeat:

My God, where is that ancient heat towards thee, Wherewith whole shoals of Martyrs once did burn, Besides their other flames? doth Poetry Wear Venus' livery? only serve her turn? Why are not Sonnets made of thee? and lays Upon thine altar burnt? Cannot thy love Heighten a spirit to sound out thy praise As well as she? Cannot thy Dove Outstrip their Cupid easily in flight? Or, since thy ways are deep, and still the same, Will not a verse run smooth that bears thy name? Why doth the fire which by thy power and might Each breast does feel, no braver fuel choose Than that, which one day worms may chance refuse? Sure, Lord, there is enough in thee to dry Oceans of ink; for as the Deluge did Cover the Earth, so does thy Majesty; Each cloud distils thy praise, and doth forbid Poets to turn it to another use. Roses and lilies speak thee: and to make A pair of cheeks of them, is thy abuse. Why should I women's eyes for crystal take? Such poor invention burns in their low mind Whose fire is wild, and does not upward go To praise, and on thee, Lord, some note bestow. Open the bones, and you shall nothing find In the best face but filth; when, Lord, in thee Thy beauty lies in the discovery.

It is no matter to him that to the uninspired audience his holy persons appear only exquisite marionettes. His sermons are all of his love for them. Could one leave out the names of prophet and evangelist, they might seem to be addressed to earthly beauties. No eyebrow ever awakened more glowing praise. He takes religion, as he does his severe morality, like a sensuous delight. One might think from his epithets that he was an aesthete, except that he is so abandoned.

When he ventures to speak of men, their very virtues and vices are all handled in such a way that they seem to be his own imaginations. Thus, his drunkard is as unreal and as terrible as a chimera. The words are those of a man who has conceived a drunkard in his own brain, and then, seeing the real thing, has preferred his own conception, and shunned the poor human imitation. Still, he speaks of religious things, of incidents in the life of David or Christ or the Maries, as if he had seen, for example, the Holy Family in some misty barn among his own hills. I have even heard him introduce a farmer whittling a flail of hazel sticks and binding it with willow thongs, in a picture of that scene. This quaintness and clearness are perhaps the result of his not quite healthy asceticism. But even by the farmhouse fire he makes use of them, and will speak of the red or brown hair of scriptural characters, and even of the grey hair and shining eyes of Charity. In hunger or weariness or pain, common people sometimes see things thus: he never sees them otherwise. In the chapel they delight the older labourers, and yet fail because they vanish in the cold night air and "leave not a rack behind." Some hearers, on the other hand, sicken at them, when the blood is noisy in the breast and the brain is warm, as they sicken at drugs.

It is not, therefore, surprising that at one time he had gorgeous earthly dreams. But with an oddity of which nothing will cure him, he is much troubled by this pomp which he desires not to see save in celestial things. And now he allows sleep nightly but a brief victory over him.

THE LANDLORD OF THE "CROSS INN"

A very pretty companion for Jones was Owen, the innkeeper, a robust man of words, who called himself the preacher's best customer, because he needed so much of his charity.

He was a perfect Celt, according to the English superstition. For never was there such a failure who was also such a swaggerer as he. He had fair hair, blue eyes, and a small, elegant beard, which

Business could not make dull, nor passion wild.

His voice, whether he sang or spoke, was of wide range and exquisite adjustment, and he spoke with care and gusto, as if he loved his native tongue. Under its influence, he respected nobody of any importance. Thus, he was once pretty justly thrashed; when, having tired his chastiser by his patience, he remarked at great length that he supposed the other did not know who he was, and the splendour of his manner overcame his heated companion. No sooner had he got home than he gave a rapturous description of how one had given another a thrashing down the road. He did it so well that he was asked whether he was the beater. "No," said he bravely, "it happened that I was beat."

Had he lost by a bargain, had he taken a bad coin unawares, had he been worsted in argument, he could so rant that he moved every one, and himself obviously first of all, and made the worse appear the better. He kept a genealogical tree in constant use by pruning and watering, and though there was not only a prince but a poet in it, I think he gloried less in the old splendour of his family than in the length of its fall, as who should say he had once been so high that he was "from morn to dewy eve" in falling.

When first I saw him, he had just come into the "Cross Inn." It was mid-day; the weather was cold and wet; and since he never liked to see a man drinking by himself, and the shepherds coming down from the mountains to market had called pretty often, he was not sober. He told me that his was a fine house--the finest in the village, and therefore in the county; and that it had not paid the former tenant well, who had, in fact, sold but eighteen gallons of beer in a month. He was going to do better than that, he said; to make a beginning, he was going to drink that quantity himself. I asked for brandy. He had not a drop, and explained that he had a weakness for it himself--took a drop very often; and that therefore, to get out of temptation, he had finished his stock on the night before. "But," said he, "I have upstairs such a bed as you--pardon me--never slept in yet."

"I have no doubt," said I, and sat down.

But when he heard that I was walking across Wales, and had therefore tried many beds, he insisted that I should see the thing. It was the finest in the village--in the county--in Wales--"I don't see why I should not say in the whole world." Truly it was a noble bed, in a great, empty, raftered, uncarpeted room; the wood all darkened oak, with a dusky gleam; the hangings ample and of a rich crimson stuff; the purity of the linen splendid. If a royal person or a poet had not slept in it, "that was their misfortune." He stood by, awed and reverent, beholding the bed. I was not his equal in eloquence, and he echoed my praise with an elaborate "of course": and for the sake of hearing some of the words he loved, he finally invited me to spend a night in the bed, "as his guest," so he magnificently said.

All his family were of the same temper. His father and mother had gone to London years ago, and, at seventy years of age, to the infirmary of a workhouse....

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