THE TWENTY-NINTH OF OCTOBER

1902

NINE years ago, as I was sitting in the "George" at Robertsbridge, drinking that port of theirs and staring at the fire, there arose in me a multitude of thoughts through which at last came floating a vision of the woods of home and of another place the lake where the Arun rises.

And I said to myself, inside my own mind:

"What are you doing? You are upon some business that takes you far, not even for ambition or for adventure, but only to earn. And you will cross the sea and earn your money, and you will come back and spend more than you have earned. But all the while your life runs past you like a river, and the things that are of moment to men you do not heed at all."

As I thought this kind of thing and still drank up that port, the woods that overhang the reaches of my river came back to me so clearly that for the sake of them, and to enjoy their beauty, I put my hand in front of my eyes, and I saw with every delicate appeal that one's own woods can offer, the steep bank over Stoke, the valley, the high ridge which hides a man from Arundel, and Arun turning and hurrying below. I smelt the tide.

Not ever, in a better time, when I had seen it of reality and before my own eyes living, had that good picture stood so plain; and even the colours of it were more vivid than they commonly are in our English air; but because it was a vision there was no sound, nor could I even hear the rustling of the leaves, though I saw the breeze gusty on the water-meadow banks, and ruffling up a force against the stream.

Then I said to myself again:

"What you are doing is not worth while, and nothing is worth while on this unhappy earth except the fulfilment of a man's desire. Consider how many years it is since you saw your home, and for how short a time, perhaps, its perfection will remain. Get up and go back to your own place if only for one day; for you have this great chance that you are already upon the soil of your own county, and that Kent is a mile or two behind."

As I said these things to myself I felt as that man felt of whom everybody has read in Homer with an answering heart: that "he longed as he journeyed to see once more the smoke going up from his own land, and after that to die."

Then I hit the table there with my hand, and as though there were no duty nor no engagements in the world, and I spoke out loud (for I thought myself alone). I said "I will go from this place to my home."

When I had said this the deeper voice of an older man answered:

"And since I am going to that same place, let us journey there together."

I turned round, and I was angry, for there had been no one with me when I had entered upon this reverie, and I had thought myself alone.

I saw then, sitting beyond the table, a tall man and spare, well on in years, vigorous; his eyes were deep set in his head; they were full of travel and of sadness; his hair was of the colour of steel; it was curled and plentiful, and on his chin was a strong, full beard, as grey and stiff as the hair of his head.

"I did not know that you were here," I said, "nor do I know how you came in, nor who you are; but if you wish to know what it was made me speak aloud although I thought myself alone, it was the memory of this county, on the edge of which I happen now to be by accident for one short hour, till a train shall take me out of it."

Then he answered, in the same grave way that he had spoken before:

"For the matter of that it is my county also and I heard you say more than that."

"Yes, I said more than that, and since you heard me you know what I said. I said that all the world could be thrown over but that I would see my own land again, and tread my own county from here and from now, and since you have asked me what part especially, I will tell you. My part of Sussex is all that part from the valley of Arun, and up the Western Rother too, and so over the steep of the Downs to the Norewood, and the lonely place called No Man's Land."

He said to me, nodding slowly:

"I know these also," and then he went on. "A man is more himself if he is one of a number; so let us take that road together, and, as we go, gather what company we can find."

I was willing enough, for all companionship is good, but chance companionship is the best of all; but I said to him, first:

"If we are to be together for three days or four (since it will take us that at least to measure the whole length of Sussex), tell me your name, and I will tell you mine."

He put on the little smile which is worn by men who have talked to very many different kinds of their fellows, and he said:

"My name is of a sort that tells very little, and if I told it it would not be worth telling. What is your name?"

"My name," I said to him, "is of importance only to those who need to know it; it might be of importance to my masters had I such, but I have none. It is not of importance to my equals. And since you will not tell me yours, and we must call each other something, I shall call you Grizzlebeard, which fixes you very well in my mind."

"And what shall I call you," he said, "during so short a journey?"

"You may call me Myself," I answered, "for that is the name I shall give to my own person and my own soul, as you will find when I first begin speaking of them as occasion serves."

It was agreed thus between us that we should walk through the whole county to the place we knew, and recover, while yet they could be recovered, the principal joys of the soul, and gather, if we could gather it, some further company; and it was agreed that, as our friendship was chance, so chance it should remain, and that these foolish titles should be enough for us to know each other by.

When, therefore, we had made a kind of pact (but not before) I poured out a great deal of my port for him into a silver mug which he habitually kept in his pocket, and drinking the rest from my own glass, agreed with him that we would start the next day at dawn, with our faces westward along the Brightling road that is, up into the woods and to the high sandy land from which first, a long way off, one sees the Downs.

All this was on the evening of the 29th October in the year 1902; the air was sharp, but not frosty, and, outside, drove the last clouds of what had been for three days a great gale.

Next morning, having slept profoundly, without giving a warning to any one who had engaged us or whom we had engaged, but cutting ourselves quite apart from care and from the world, we set out with our faces westward, to reach at last the valley of the Arun and the things we knew.

THE THIRTIETH OF OCTOBER 1902

THERE was still wind in the sky, and clouds shaped to it, and driving before it in the cold morning as we went up the lane by Scalands Gate and between the leafless woods; and still the road rose until we came to Brightling village, and there we thought that we would step into the inn and breakfast, for we had walked four miles, and all that way up hill we had hardly said a word one to the other.

But when we were come into the inn we found there a very jovial fellow with a sort of ready smile behind his face, and eyes that were direct and keen. But these eyes of his were veiled with the salt of the sea, and paler than the eyes of a landsman would have been; for by the swing of his body as he sat there, and the ease of his limbs, he was a sailor. So much was very clear. Moreover, he had a sailor's cap on with a shiny peak, and his clothes were of the sailor's cut, and his boots were not laced but were pulled on, and showed no divisions anywhere.

As we came in we greeted this man and he us. He asked us whence we had come; we said from Robertsbridge; he told us that for his part he had slept that night in the inn, and when he had had breakfast he was setting out again, and he asked us whither we were going. Then I said to him:

"This older man and I have inclined ourselves to walk westward with no plan, until we come to the better parts of the county, that is, to Arun and to the land I know."

The Sailor. "Why, that will suit me very well."

Grizzlebeard. "How do you mean that will suit you very well?"

The Sailor. "Why, I mean that it is my intention also to walk westward, for I have money in my pocket, and I think it will last a few days."

Myself. "Doubtless you have a ship in Portsmouth or in Southampton, which, if you come with us, you will join?"

The Sailor. "No, nor in Bosham either, of which the song says, 'Bosham that is by Selsea.' There is no little ship waiting for me in Bosham harbour, but I shall fall upon my feet. So have I lived since I began this sort of life, and so I mean to end it."

Grizzlebeard. "It will not end as you choose."

When I had asked for breakfast for us two as well as for him, I said to the Sailor, "If you are to walk with us, by what name shall we call you?"

"Why that," said the Sailor, "will depend upon what name you bear yourselves."

"Why," said I, "this older man here is called Grizzlebeard. It is not his family's name, but his own, and as for myself, my name is Myself, and a good name too the dearest sounding name in all the world."

"Very well," said the Sailor, pulling his chair up to the table and pouring himself out a huge great bowl of tea, "then you may call me Sailor, which is the best name in the world, and suits me well enough I think, for I believe myself to be the master sailor of all sailors, and I have sailed upon all the seas of the world."

Grizzlebeard. "I see that you will make a good companion."

The Sailor. "Yes, for as long as I choose; but you must not be surprised if I go off by this road or by that at any hour, without your leave or any other man's; for so long as I have money in my pocket I am determined to see the world."

Myself. "We are well met, Sailor, you and Grizzlebeard and I in this parish of Brightling, which, though it lies so far from the most and the best of our county, is in a way a shrine of it."

Grizzlebeard. "This I never heard of Brightling, but of Hurstmonceaux."

Myself. "There may be shrines and shrines on any land, and sanctities of many kinds.

For you will notice, Grizzlebeard, or rather you should have noticed already, having lived so long, that good things do not jostle."

The Sailor. "But why do you say this of Brightling? Is it perhaps because of these great folds of woods which are now open to the autumn and make a harp to catch the wind? Certainly if I'd woken here from illness or long sleep I should know by the air and by the trees in what land I was."

Grizzlebeard. "No, he was thinking of the obelisk which draws eyes to itself from Sussex all around."

Myself. "I was thinking of something far more worthy, and of the soul of a man. For do you not note the sign of this inn by which it is known?"

The Sailor. "Why, it is called The Fuller's Arms '; there being so many sheep I take it, and therefore so much wool and therefore fulling."

Myself. "No, it is not called so for such a reason, but after the arms or the name of one Fuller, a squire of these parts, who had in him the Sussex heart and blood, as had Earl Godwin and others famous in history. And indeed this man Fuller deserves to be famous and to be called, so to speak, the very demigod of my county, for he spent all his money in a roaring way, and lived in his time like an immortal being conscious of what was worth man's while during his little passage through the daylight. I have heard it said that Fuller of Brightling, being made a Knight of the Shire for the County of Sussex in the time when King George the Third was upon the throne, had himself drawn to Westminster in a noble great coach, with six huge, hefty, and determined horses to draw it, but these were not of the Sussex breed, for there is none. And he--"

Grizzlebeard. "You say right that they were not ' Sussex horses,' for there are only two things in Sussex which Sussex deigns to give its name to, and the first is the spaniel, and the second is the sheep. Note you, many kingdoms and counties and lands are prodigal of their names, because their names are of little account and in no way sacred, so that one will give its name to a cheese and another to a horse, and another to some kind of ironwork or other, and another to clotted cream or to butter, and another to something ridiculous, as to a cat with no tail. But it is not so with Sussex, for our name is not a name to be used like a label and tied on to common things, seeing that we were the first place to be created when the world was made, and we shall certainly be the last to remain, regal and at ease when all the rest is very miserably perishing on the Day of Judgment by a horrible great rain of fire from Heaven. Which will fall, if I am not mistaken, upon the whole earth, and strike all round the edges of the county, consuming Tonbridge, and Appledore (but not Rye), and Horley, and Ockley, and Hazelmere, and very certainly Petersfield and Havant, and there shall be an especial woe for Hayling Island; but not one hair of the head of Sussex shall be singed, it has been so ordained from the beginning, and that in spite of Burwash and those who dwell therein."

Myself. "Now you have stopped me ii the midst of what I was saying about Fuller, that noble great man sprung from this noble great land."

The Sailor. "You left him going up to Westminster in a coach with six great horses, to sit in Parliament and be a Knight of the Shire."

Myself. "That is so, and, God willing, as he went he sang the song ' Golier! Golier! ' and I make little doubt that until he came to the Marches of the county, and entered the barbarous places outside, great crowds gathered at his passage and cheered him as such a man should be cheered, for he was a most noble man, and very free with all good things. Nor did he know what lay before him, having knowledge of nothing so evil as Westminster, nor of anything so stuffy or so vile as her most detestable Commons House, where men sit palsied and glower, hating each other and themselves: but he knew nothing yet except broad Sussex.

"Well then, when he had come to Westminster, very soon there was a day in which the Big-wigs would have a debate, all empty and worthless, upon Hot Air, or the value of nothingness; and the man who took most money there out of the taxes, and his first cousin who sat opposite and to whom he had promised the next wad of public wealth, and his brother-in-law and his parasite and all the rest of the thieves had begun their pompous folly, when great Fuller arose in his place, full of the South, and said that he had not come to the Commons House to talk any such balderdash, or to hear it, but contrariwise proposed, then and there, to give them an Eulogy upon the County of Sussex, from which he had come and which was the captain ground and head county of the whole world.

"This Eulogy he very promptly and powerfully began, using his voice as a healthy man should, who will drown all opposition and who can call a dog to heel from half a mile away. And indeed though a storm rose round him from all those lesser men, who had come to Westminster, not for the praise or honour of their land, but to fill their pockets, he very manfully shouted and was heard above it all, so that the Sergeant-at- Arms grew sick with fear, and the Clerk at the Table wished he had never been born. But the Speaker, whose business it is to keep the place inane (I do not remember his name, for such men are not famous after death), stood up in his gown and called to Fuller that he was out of order. And since Fullei would not yield, every man in the House called out * Order! ' eight or nine hundred times. But when they were exhausted, the great Fuller, Fuller of JBrightling, cried out over them all:

"'Do you think I care for you, you insignificant little man in the wig? Take that!' And with these words he snapped his fingers in the face of the bunch of them, and walked out of the Commons House, and got into his great coach with its six powerful horses, and ordering their heads to be set southwards he at last regained his own land, where he was received as such a man should be, with bells ringing and guns firing, little boys cheering, and all ducks, hens, and pigs flying from before his approach to the left and to the right of the road. Ever since that day it has been held a singular honour and one surpassing all others to be a squire of Brightling, but no honour whatsoever to be a member of the Commons House. He spent all his great fortune upon the poor of Sussex and of his own parish, bidding them drink deep and eat hearty as being habits the best preservative of life, until at last he also died. There is the story of Fuller of Brightling, and may we all deserve as well as he."

The Sailor. "The great length of your story, Myself, has enabled me to make a very excellent breakfast, for which I shall pay, bidding you and Grizzlebeard pay each for your own, as is the custom of the parish where I was born, and one I hope you will admire while I still have cash, but forget when I have spent it. And if in talking so much you have eaten little, I cannot help it, but I must take the road."

So saying the Sailor rose up and wiped his lips very carefully with his napkin, and put down a sum of money upon which he had agreed with the landlord, and we also paid for ourselves, and then we all three set out under the high morning for Heathfield, and were ready to talk of Jack Cade (who very nearly did for the rich, but who most unfortunately came by a knock on the head in these parts), when we perceived upon the road before us a lanky fellow, moving along in a manner quite particular to men of one sort throughout the world, men whose thoughts are always wool-gathering, and who seem to have no purpose, and yet in some way are by the charity of their fellows kept fed and clothed.

"Mark you that man." said Grizzlebeard, "for I think we can make him of our company, and if I am not mistaken he shall add to it what you (speaking to the Sailor) and Myself there, and I also lack. For this morning has proved us all three to be cautious folk, men of close speech and affectation, knaves knowing well our way about the world, and careful not to give away so much as our own names: skinflints paying each his own shot, and in many other ways fellows devoted to the Devil. But this man before us, if I mistake not, is of a kind much nearer God."

As Grizzlebeard said this, we watched the man before us more closely, and we saw that as he walked his long limbs seemed to have loose joints, his arms dangled rather than swang, he steered no very straight course along the road, and under his felt hat with its narrow brim there hung tawny hair much too long, and in no way vigorous. His shirt was soft, grey and dirty, and of wool, and his collar made one with it, the roll of which just peeped above his throat, and his coat was of velveteen, like a keeper's, but he was not like a keeper in any other way, and no one would have trusted him with a gun.

"Who knows but this thing may be an artist?" said the Sailor in an awed voice to me, as we came nearer.

Myself. "I do not think so. An artist would not be so nonchalant. Even in youth their debts oppress them, and they make certain fixed and firm gestures, for they are men that work with their hands. But this thing is loose hung, and though I will make certain he has debts, I will be certain also that he cares nothing for them, and could not tell you their amount to within half of the true total."

By this time, since we walked steadily, and he shambling, as I have said, we had nearly come up with him, and we heard him crooning to himself in a way that might have irritated any weary listener, for the notes of his humming were not distinct at all, and he seemed to care little where the tune began or ended. Then we saw him stop suddenly, pull a pencil out of some pocket or other, and feel about in several more for paper as we supposed.

"I am right," said Grizzlebeard in triumph. "He is a Poet!"

Hearing our voices for the first time the youth turned slowly round, and when we saw his eyes we knew indeed that Grizzlebeard was right. His eyes were arched and large as though in a perpetual surprise, and they were of a warm grey colour. They did not seem to see the things before them, but other things beyond; and while the rest of his expression changed a little to greet us, his eyes did not change. Moreover they seemed continually sad.

Before any of us could address this young man, he asked suddenly for a knife.

"Do you think it safe to let him have one?" said the Sailor to me.

"It is to sharpen this pencil with," said the stranger, putting forth a stub of an H.B. much shorter than his thumb. He held it forward rather pitifully and uncertainly, with its blunt, broken point upwards.

"You had better take this," said Grizzlebeard, handing him a pencil in better condition. "Have you no knife of your own?"

"I have lost it," said the other sadly. His voice was mournful as he said it, so I suppose it had been his friend.

Grizzlebeard. "Well, take mine and write down quickly what you had to write, for such things I know by my own experience to be fugitive."

The stranger looked at him a moment and then said:

"I have forgotten what I was going to say ... I mean, to write."

The Sailor (with a groan). "He has forgotten his own name!" ( Then more loudly), "Poet! Let us call you Poet, and come your way with us. We will look after you, and in return you shall write us verse: bad verse, roughly verse into which a man may get his teeth. Not sloppy verse, not wasty, pappy verse; not verse blanchified, but strong, heavy, brown, bad verse; made up and knotty; twisted verse of the fools. Such verse as versifiers write when they are moved to versifying by the deeper passions of other men, having themselves no facilities with the Muse."

The Poet. "I do not understand you."

But Grizzlebeard took his arm affectionately, as though he were his father, and said, "Come, these men are good-natured enough, but they have just had breakfast, and it is not yet noon, so they are in a hunting mood, and for lack of quarry hunt you. But you shall not reply to them. Only come westward with us and be our companion until we get to the place where the sun goes down, and discover what makes it so glorious."

On hearing this the Poet was very pleased. He had long desired to find that place, and said that he had been walking towards it all his life. But he confessed to us a little shamefacedly that he had no money, except three shillings and a French penny, which last some one had given him out of charity, taking him for a beggar a little way out of Brightling that very day.

"If, however," he said, "you are prepared to pay for me in all things no matter what I eat or drink or read or in any other way disport myself, why, I shall be very glad to drive that bargain with you."

Myself. "Poet! That shall be understood between us! And you shall order what you will. You shall not feel constrained. It is in the essence of good fellowship that the poor man should call for the wine, and the rich man should pay for it."

"I am not a poor man," said the Poet in answer to me gently, "only I have forgotten where I left my money. I know I had three pounds yesterday, but I think I paid a sovereign for a shilling beyond Brede, and, in Battle (it must have been) I forgot to pick up my change. As for the third pound it may turn up, but I have looked for it several times this morning, and I am beginning to fear that it is gone.... Now I remember it!"

The Sailor. "What? More luck? Be certain of this much! We will not turn backwards for your one pound or for five of them."

The Poet. "No, not that. When I said ' I remember,' I meant something else. I meant the line I had in my head as you came along and changed my thoughts."

The Sailor. "I do not want to hear it."

The Poet. "It was,

'I wonder if these little pointed hills '..."

Grizzlebeard. "Yes, and what afterwards?"

The Poet (a little pained). "Nothing, I am afraid." He waved his hands limply towards the north. "But you will perceive that the little hills are pointed hereabouts."

The Sailor. "I never yet thanked my parents for anything in my life, but now I thank them for that which hitherto has most distressed me, that they set me to the hard calling of the sea. For if I had not been apprenticed, Bristol fashion, when I was a child to a surly beast from Holderness, I might have been a Poet, by the wrath of God."

Grizzlebeard. "Do not listen to him, Poet, but see! We have come into Heathfield. I think it is time either to eat or drink or do both, and to consider our companionship joined, and the first stage of our journey toward the West accomplished."

Now in those days Heathfield was a good place for men, and will be again, for this land of Sussex orders all things towards itself, and will never long permit any degradation.

So we sat down outside the village at the edge of a little copse, which was part of a rich man's park, and we looked northward to the hill of Mayfield, where St. Dunstan pulled the Devil by the nose; and they keep the tongs wherewith he did it in Mayfield to this day.

Now as the story of the way St. Dunstan pulled the Devil by the nose has, in the long process of a thousand years, grown corrupt, distorted, and very unworthily changed from its true original, and as it is a matter which every child should know and every grown man remember for the glory of religion and to the honour of this ancient land, I will set it down here before I forget it, and you shall read it or no, precisely as you choose.

St. Dunstan, then, who was a Sussex man (for he was born a little this side of Ardingly, whatever false chroniclers may say against it, and was the son of Mr. Dunstan of the Leas, a very honest man), St. Dunstan, I say, having taken orders, which was his own look out, and no business of ours, very rapidly rose from sub-deacon to deacon, and from deacon to priest, and from priest to bishop, and would very certainly have risen to be pope in due time, had he not wisely preferred to live in this dear county of his instead of wasting himself on foreigners.

Of the many things he did I have no space to tell you (and as it is, my story is getting longer than I like but no matter), but one chief thing he did, memorable beyond all others. Yes, more memorable even than the miracle whereby he caused a number of laymen to fall, to his vast amusement but to their discomfiture, through the rotten flooring of a barn. And this memorable thing was his pulling of the Devil by the nose.

For you must know that the Devil, desiring to do some hurt to the people of Sussex, went about asking first one man, then another, who had the right of choice in it, and every one told him St. Dunstan. For he was their protector, as they knew, and that was why they sent the Devil to him, knowing very well that he would get the better of the Fiend, whom the men of Sussex properly defy and harass from that day to this, as you shall often find in the pages of this book.

So the Devil went up into the Weald of a May morning when everything was pleasant to the eye and to the ear, and he found St. Dunstan sitting in Cuckfield at a table in the open air, and writing verse in Latin, which he very well knew how to do. Then said the Devil to St. Dunstan: "I have come to give you your choice how Sussex shall be destroyed, for you must know that I have the power and the patent to do this thing, and there is no gainsaying me, only it is granted to your people to know the way by which they should perish."

And indeed this is the Devil's way, always to pretend that he is the master, though he very well knows in his black heart that he is nothing of the kind.

Now St. Dunstan was not the fool he looked, in spite of his round face, and round tonsure, and round eyes, and he would have his sport with the Devil before he had done with him. so he answered civilly enough:

"Why, Devil, I think if we must all pass, it would be pleasanter to die by way of sea- water than any other, for out of the sea came our land, and so into the sea should it go again. Only I doubt your power to do it, for we are defended against the sea by these great hills called The Downs, which will take a woundy lot of cutting through."

"Pooh! bah!" said the Devil, rudely, in answer. "You do not know your man! I will cut through those little things in a night and not feel it, seeing I am the father of contractors and the original master of overseers and undertakers of great works: it is child's-play to me. It is a flea-bite, a summer night's business between sunset and dawn."

"Why, then," said St. Dunstan, "here is the sun nearly set over Black Down, westward of us, so go to your work; but if you have not done it by the time the cock crows over the Weald, you shall depart in God's name."

Then the Devil, full of joy at having cheated St. Dunstan, as he thought, and at being thus able to ruin our land, which, if ever he could accomplish it, would involve the total destruction and effacement of the whole world, flew off through the air southwards, flapping his great wings. So that all the people of the Weald thought it was an aeroplane, of which instrument they are delighted observers; and many came out to watch him as he flew, and some were ready to tell others what kind of aeroplane he was, and such like falsehoods.

But no sooner was it dark than the Devil, getting a great spade sent him from his farm, set to work very manfully and strongly, digging up the Downs from the seaward side. And the sods flew and the great lumps of chalk he shovelled out left and right, so that it was a sight to see; and these falling all over the place, from the strong throwing of his spade, tumbled some of them upon Mount Caburn, and some of them upon Rackham Hill, and some here and some there, bu most of them upon Cissbury, and that i how those great mounds grew up, of which the learned talk so glibly, although they know nothing of the matter whatsoever

The Devil dug and the Devil heaved until it struck midnight in Shoreham Church, and one o'clock and two o'clock and three o'clock again. And as he dug his great dyke drove deeper and deeper into the Downs, so that it was very near coming out on the Wealden side, and there were not more than two dozen spits to dig before the sea would come through and drown us all.

But St. Dunstan (who knew all this), offering up the prayer, Populus Tuus Domine (which is the prayer of Nov. 8, Pp. alba 42, Double or quits), by the power of this prayer caused at that instant all the cocks that are in the Weald between the Western and the Eastern Rother, and from Ashdown right away to Harting Hill, and from Bodiam to Shillinglee, to wake up suddenly in defence of the good Christian people, and to haul those silly red-topped heads of theirs from under their left wings, and very broadly to crow altogether in chorus, so that such a noise was never heard before, nor will be heard thence afterwards forever; and you would have thought it was a Christmas night instead of the turn of a May morning.

The Devil, then, hearing this terrible great challenge of crowing from some million throats for seventy miles one way and twenty miles the other, stopped his digging in bewilderment, and striking his spade into the ground he hopped up on to the crest of the hill and looked in wonderment up the sky and down the sky over all the stars, wondering how it could be so near day. But in this foolish action he lost the time he needed. For even as he discovered what a cheat had been played upon him, over away beyond Hawkhurst Ridge day dawned and with a great howl the Devil was aware that his wager was lost.

But he was firm on his right (for he loves strict dealing in oppression) and he flew away over the air this way and that, to find St. Dunstan, whom he came upon at last, not in Cuckfield but in Mayfield. Though how the Holy Man got there in so short a time I cannot tell. It is a mystery worthy of a great saint.

Anyhow, when the Devil got to Mayfield he asked where St. Dunstan was, and they told him he was saying Mass. So the Devil had to wait, pawing and chawing and whisking his tail, until St. Dunstan would come out, which he did very leisurely and smiling, and asked the Devil how the devil he did, and why it was he had not finished that task of his. But the Devil, cutting him short, said:

"I will have no monkishness, but my due!"

"Why, how is that?" said St. Dunstan in a pleased surprise.

Then the Devil told him how the cocks had all begun crowing half-an-hour before the right time, and had unjustly deprived him of his reward. For the dyke (he said) was all but finished, and now stood there nearly through the Downs. And how it was a burning shame that such a trick should have been played, and how he verily believed there had been sharp practice in the matter, but how, notwithstanding, he would have his rights, for the law was on his side.

Then St. Dunstan, scratching his chin with the forefinger of his left hand (which he was the better able to do, because he had not shaved that morning), said to the Devil in answer:

"I perceive that there is here matter for argument. But do not let us debate it here. Come rather into my little workshop in the palace yonder, where I keep all my arguments, and there I will listen to you as your case deserves."

So they went together towards the little workshop, St. Dunstan blithely as befits a holy man, but the Devil very grumpily and sourly. And there St. Dunstan gave the Devil a chair, and bade him talk away and present his case, while he himself would pass the time away at little tricks of smithying and ornamentry, which were his delight. And so saying, St. Dunstan blew the bellows and heated the fire of his forge, and put his enamelling tongs therein, and listened while the Devil put before him his case, with arguments so cogent, precedents so numerous, statutes so clear, and order so lucid, as never yet were heard in any court, and would have made a lawyer dance for joy. And all the while St. Dunstan kept nodding gravely and saying:

"Yes! Yes! Proceed!... But I have an argument against all of this!" Until at last the Devil, stung by so simple a reply repeated, said:

"Why, then, let us see your argument! For there is no argument or plea known or possible which can defeat my claim, or make me abandon it or compromise it in ever so little."

But just as he said this St. Dunstan, pulling his tongs all hot from the forge fire, cried very suddenly and loudly:

"Here is my argument!" And with that he clapped the pincers sharply upon the Devil's nose, so that he danced and howled and began to curse in a very abominable fashion.

"Come, now!" said St. Dunstan. "Come! This yowling is no pleading, but blank ribaldry! Will you not admit this argument of mine, and so withdraw from this Court non- suited?"

And as he said this he pulled the Devil briskly round and round the room, making him hop over tables and leap over chairs like a mountebank, and cursing the while with no set order of demurrer, replevin, quo warranto, nisi prius, habeas corpus, and the rest, but in good round German, which is his native speech, and all the while St. Dunstan said:

"Argue, brother! Argue, learned counsel! Plead 1 All this is not to the issue before the Court! Let it be yes or no! We must have particulars!" And as he thus harangued the Devil in legal fashion, he still pulled him merrily round and round the room, taking full sport of him, until, at last, the Devil could stand no more, and so, when St. Dunstan unclappered his clippers, flew instantly away.

And that is why the Devil does to this day feel so extraordinarily tender upon the subject of his nose; and in proof of the whole story (if proof were needed of a matter which is in the Bollandists, and amply admitted of the Curia, the Propaganda, and whatever else you will), in proof of the whole story I say you have: Imprimis, the Dyke itself, which is still called the Devil's Dyke, and which still stands there very neatly dug, almost to the crossing of the hills. Secundo, et valde fortior, in Mayfield, for any one to handle and to see, the very tongs wherewith the thing was done.

And if you find the story long be certain that the Devil found it longer, for there is no tale in the world that can bore a man as fiercely as can hot iron. So back to Heathfield.

*

Well, as we sat there in Heathfield, we debated between ourselves by which way we should go westward, for all this part of The County is a Jumbled Land.

First, as in duty bound, we asked the Poet, because he was the last comer; and we found that he could not make up his mind, and when we pressed him we found further that he did not know at all by what way a man might go west from these woods. But when he heard that if any one should go through Burgess Hill and Hayward's Heath he would be going through towns of the London sort, the Poet said that rather than do that he would leave our company. For he said that in such towns the more one worked the less one had, and that yet, if one did not work at all, one died. So all he had to say upon the matter was that whether we avoided such places by the north or by the south, it was all one to him; but avoid them one way or another we must if we wished him to keep along with us.

When the Poet had thus given his opinion, Grizzlebeard and I next put the question to the Sailor, who frowned and looked very wise for a little time, and then, taking out his pencil, asked the Poet to say again exactly what his objection was; which, as the Poet gave it him, he carefully wrote down on a piece of paper. And when he had done that, he very thoughtfully filled his pipe with tobacco, rolled the paper into a spill, set fire to it, and with it lit his pipe. When he had done all these things, he said he did not care how we went, so only that we got through the bad part quickly.

He thought we might do it in the darkness. But I told him that the places would be full of policemen, who were paid to throw poor and wandering men into prison, especially by night. So he gave up the whole business.

Then Grizzlebeard and I discussed how the thing should be done, and we decided that there was nothing for it but to go by the little lanes to Irkfield, particularly remembering "The Black Boy" where these little lanes began, and then, not sleeping at Irkfield, to go on through the darkness to Fletching, and so by more little lanes to Ardingly. In this way we who knew the county could be rid of the invaders, and creep round them to the north until we found ourselves in the forest.

Having thus decided, we set out along that road in silence, but first we bought cold meat and bread to eat upon our way, and when we came to Irkfield it was evening.

The wind had fallen. We had gone many miles that day. We were fatigued; and nothing but the fear of what lay before us prevented our sleeping in the place. For we feared that if we slept there we should next day shirk the length of the detour, and see those horrible places after all. But the Sailor asked suddenly what money there was between us. He himself, he said, had more than one pound, and he put down on the table of the inn we halted in a sovereign and some shillings. I said that I had more than five, which was true, but I would not show it. Grizzlebeard said that what money he had was the business of no one but himself. The Poet felt in many pockets, and made up very much less than half-a-crown.

Not until all this had been done did the Sailor tell us that he had hired in that same house a little two- wheeled cart, with a strong horse and a driver, and that, for a very large sum, we might be driven all those miles through the night to Ardingly, and to the edge of the high woods, and that for his part we might come with him or not, but he would certainly drive fast through the darkness, and not sleep until he was on the forest ridge, and out of all this detestable part of the county, which was not made for men, but rather for tourists or foreigners, or London people that had lost their way.

So we climbed into his cart, and we were driven through the night by cross roads, passing no village except Fletching, until, quite at midnight, we were on the edge of the high woods, and there the driver was paid so much that he could put up and pass the night, but for our part we went on into the trees, led by the Sailor, who said he knew more of these woods than any other man.

Therefore we followed him patiently, though how he should know these woods or when he had first come upon them he would not tell.

We went through the dark trees by a long green ride, climbing the gate that a rich man had put up and locked, and passing deeper and deeper into the wild, and in the little that we said to each other, Grizzlebeard, the Sailor and I, we hoped for rest very soon; but the Sailor went on before, knowing his way like a hound, and turning down this path and that until we came suddenly to a blot in the darkness, and a square of black stretching across the trees from side to side. It was a little hut.

The Sailor first tried the door, then, finding it locked, he pulled a key from his pocket and entered, and when he had got inside out of the breeze, he struck a match and lit a candle that was there, standing on a copper stick, and we all came in and looked around.

It was one room, and a small one, of weather boarding on all the four sides. There were two small windows, which were black in the candle light, and on the side to the right of the door a great fireplace of brick, with ashes in it and small wood and logs laid, and near this fireplace was a benched ingle-nook, and there were two rugs there. But for these things there was nothing in the hut whatsoever, no book or furniture at all, except the candlestick, and the floor was of beaten earth.

"Sailor," said I, "how did you come to have the key of this place?"

It was wonderful enough that he should have known his way to it. But the Sailor said:

"Why not?" and after that would tell us no more. Only he said before we slept, late as it was, we would do well to light the fire, and put upon it two or three more of the great logs that stood by, since, in the autumn cold, we none of us should sleep however much we wrapped our cloaks about our feet, unless we had our feet to a blaze. And in this he was quite right, for no matter what the weather, and even out in the open, men can always sleep if they have a fire. So we made an agreement between us that Grizzlebeard, being an old man, was to have the bench and the rugs, but that we three were to stretch ourselves before the fire, when it should be lit; and, talking so and still wideawake, we struck matches and tried to coax the flame.

But at first, on account of the wind without, it lit badly, and the small wood was damp and smoked, and the smoke blew into our faces and into the room; and the Sailor, shielding it with his coat and trying to get a draught in that great chimney-place, said that a smoking chimney was a cursed thing.

"It is the worst thing in the world," said the Poet peevishly; to which the Sailor answered:

"Nonsense! Death is the worst thing in the world."

But Grizzlebeard, from where he lay on the broad bench with rugs about him, and his head resting on his hand, denied this too, speaking in a deep voice with wisdom. "You are neither of you right," he said. "The worst thing in the world is the passing of human affection. No man who has lost a friend need fear death," he said.

The Sailor. "All that is Greek to me. If any man has made friends and lost them, it is I . I lost a friend in Lima once, but he turned up again at Valparaiso, and I can assure you that the time in between was no tragedy."

Grizzlebeard (solemnly). "You talk lightly as though you were a younger man than you are. The thing of which I am speaking is the gradual weakening, and at last the severance, of human bonds. It has been said that no man can see God and live. Here is another saying for you, very near the same: No man can be alone and live. None, not even in old age."

He stopped and looked for some little time into the rising fire. Outside the wind went round the house, and one could hear the boughs in the darkness.

Then Grizzlebeard went on:

"When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside which is like the cold of space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly. Absolute dereliction is the death of the soul; and the end of living is a great love abandoned."

Myself. "But the place heals, Grizzlebeard."

Grizzlebeard (still more solemnly). "All wounds heal in those who are condemned to live, but in the very process of healing they harden and forbid renewal. The thing is over and done."

He went on monotonous and grave. He said that "everything else that there is in the action of the mind save loving is of its nature a growth: it goes through its phases of seed, of miraculous sprouting, of maturity, of somnolescence, and of decline. But with loving it is not so; for the comprehension by one soul of another is something borrowed from whatever lies outside time: it is not under the conditions of time. Then if it passes, it is past it never grows again; and we lose it as men lose a diamond, or as men lose their honour."

Myself. "Since you talk of honour, Grizzlebeard, I should have thought that the loss of honour was worse than the loss of friends."

Grizzlebeard. "Oh, no. For the one is a positive loss, the other imaginary. Moreover, men that lose their honour have their way out by any one of the avenues of death. Not so men who lose the affection of a creature's eyes. Therein for them, I mean in death, is no solution: to escape from life is no escape from that loss. Nor of the many who have sought in death relief from their affairs is there one (at least of those I can remember) who sought that relief on account of the loss of a human heart."

The Poet. "When I said * it ' was the worst thing in the world just now so angrily, I was foolish. I should have remembered the toothache."

The Sailor (eagerly and contemptuously). "Then there you are utterly wrong, for the earache is much worse."

The Poet. "I never had the earache."

The Sailor (still contemptuously). "I thought not! If you had you would write better verse. It is your innocence of the great emotions that makes your verse so dreadful in the minor sense of that word."

Grizzlebeard. "You are both of you talking like children. The passing of human affection is the worst thing in the world. When our friends die they go from us, but it is not of their own will; or if it is of their own will, it is not of their own will in any contradiction to ours; or even if it be of their own will in contradiction to ours and the end of a quarrel, yet it is a violent thing and still savours of affection. But that decay of what is living in the heart, and that numbness supervening, and that last indifference oh! these are not to be compared for unhappiness with any other ill on this unhappy earth. And all day long and in every place, if you could survey the world from a height and look down into the hearts of men, you would see that frost stealing on."

Myself. "Is this a thing that happens, Grizzlebeard, more notably to the old?"

Grizzlebeard. "No. The old are used to it. They know it, but it is not notable to them. It is notable on the approach of middle age. When the enthusiasms of youth have grown either stale or divergent, and when, in the infinite opportunities which time affords, there has been opportunity for difference between friend and friend, then does the evil appear. The early years of a man's life do not commonly breed this accident. So convinced are we then, and of such energy in the pursuit of our goal, that if we must separate we part briskly, each certain that the other is guilty of a great wrong. The one man will have it that some criminal is innocent, the other that an innocent man was falsely called a criminal. The one man loves a war, the other thinks it unjust and hates it (for all save the moneydealers think of war in terms of justice). Or the one man hits the other in the face. These are violent things. But it is when youth has ripened, and when the slow processes of life begin that the danger or the certitude of this dreadful thing appears: I mean of the passing of affection. For the mind has settled as the waters of a lake settle in the hills; it is full of its own convictions, it is secure in its philosophy; it will not mould or adapt itself to the changes of another. And, therefore, unless communion be closely maintained, affection decays. Now when it has decayed, and when at last it has altogether passed, then comes that awful vision of which I have spoken, which is the worst thing in the world."

The Poet. "The great poets, Grizzlebeard, never would admit this thing. They have never sung or deplored the passage of human affection; they have sung of love turned to hatred, and of passion and of rage, and of the calm that succeeds passion, and of the doubt of the soul and of doom, and continually they have sung of death, but never of the evil of which you speak."

The Sailor. "That was because the evil was too dull; as I confess I find it! Anything duller than the loss of a friend! Why, it is like writing a poem on boredom or like singing a song about Welbeck Street, to try and poetise such things! Turn rather to this fire, which is beginning to blaze, thank God! turn to it, and expect the morning."

Myself. "You Poet and you Sailor, you are both of you wrong there. The thing has been touched upon, though very charily, for it is not matter for art. It just skims the surface of the return of Odysseus, and the poet Shakespeare has a song about it which you have doubtless heard. It is sung by gentlemen painted with grease paint and dressed in green cloth, one of whom is a Duke, and therefore wears a feather in his cap. They sit under canvas trees, also painted, and drink out of cardboard goblets, quite empty of all wine; these goblets are evidently empty, for they hold them anyhow; if there were real wine in them it would drop out. And thus accoutred and under circumstances so ridiculous, they sing a song called ' Blow, blow, thou winter wind.' Moreover, a poet has written of the evil thing in this very County of Sussex, in these two lines:

'The things I loved have all grown wearisome,

The things that loved me are estranged or dead.'"

Grizzlebeard. "'Estranged' is the word: I was looking for that word. Estrangement is the saddest thing in the world."

The Sailor. "I cannot make head or tail of all this!"

The Poet. "Have you never lost a friend?"

The Sailor. "Dozens as I've already told you. And the one I most regret was a doctor man whom the owners shipped with us for a run to the Plate and back again. But I have never let it weigh upon my mind."

Grizzlebeard. "The reason that the great poets have touched so little upon this thing is precisely because it is the worst thing in the world. It is a spur to no good deed, nor to any strong thinking, nor does it in any way emend the mind. Now the true poets, whether they will or no, are bound to emend the mind; they are constrained to concern themselves with noble things. But in this there is nothing noble. It has not even horror nor doom to enhance it; it is an end, and it is an end without fruition. It is an end which leaves no questions and no quest. It is an end without adventure, an end complete, a nothingness; and there is no matter for art in the mortal hunger of the soul."

And after this sad speech of his we were again silent, lying now at length before the fire, and the Sailor having lit a pipe and smoking it.

Then I remembered a thing I had read once, and I said:

Myself. "I read once in a book of a man who was crossing a heath in a wild country not far from the noise of the sea. The wind and the rain beat upon him, and it was very cold, so he was glad to see a light upon the heath a long way off. He made towards it and, coming into that place, found it to be a chapel where some twenty or thirty were singing, and there was a priest at the altar saying Mass at midnight, and there was a monk serving his Mass. Now this traveller noticed how warm and brilliant was the place; the windows shone with their colours, and all the stone was carved; the altar was all alight, and the place was full of singing, for the twenty or thirty still sang, and he sang with them.... But their faces he could not see, for the priest who said the Mass and the man who served the Mass both had their faces from him, and all in that congregation were hooded, and their faces were turned away from him also, but their singing was loud, and he joined in it. He thought he was in fairyland. And so he was. For as that Mass ended he fell asleep, suffused with warmth, and his ears still full of music; but when he woke he found that the place was a ruin, the windows empty, and the wind roaring through; no glass, or rather a few broken panes, and these quite plain and colourless; dead leaves of trees blown in upon the altar steps, and over the whole of it the thin and miserable light of a winter dawn.

"This stoiy which I read went on to say that the man went on his journey under that new and unhappy light of a stormy winter dawn, on over the heath in the wild country. But though he had made just such a journey the day before, yet his mind was changed. In the interlude he had lost something great; therefore the world was worth much less to him than it had been the day before, though if he had heard no singing in between, nor had seen no lights at evening, the journey would have seemed the same. This advantage first, and then that loss succeeding, had utterly impoverished him, and his journey meant nothing to him any more. This is the story which I read, and I take it you mean something of the kind."

"Yes, I meant something of the kind," said Grizzlebeard in answer, sighing. "I was thinking of the light that shines through the horn, and how when the light is extinguished the horn thickens cold and dull. I was thinking of irrevocable things."

At this the Poet, whom we had thought dozing, started to his feet.

"Oh, let us leave so disheartening a matter," said he, "and consider rather what is the best thing in the world than what is the worst. For in the midst of this wood, where everything is happy except man, and where the night should teach us quiet, we ought to learn or discover what is the best thing in the world."

"I know of no way of doing that," said the Sailor, "but by watching the actions of men and seeing to what it is they will chiefly attach themselves. For man knows his own nature, and that which he pursues must surely be his satisfaction? Judging by which measure I determine that the best thing in the world is flying at full speed from pursuit, and keeping up hammer and thud and gasp and bleeding till the knees fail and the head grows dizzy, and at last we all fall down and that thing (whatever it is) which pursues us catches us up and eats our carcases. This way of managing our lives, I think, must be the best thing in the world for nearly all men choose to live thus."

Myself. "What you say there, Sailor, seems sound enough, but I am a little puzzled in this point: why, if most men follow their satisfaction, most men come to so wretched an end?"

The Sailor. "Why that I cannot tell. That is their business. But certainly as I have watched men it seems to me that they regard being hunted as the best thing in the world. For one man having as much as would enable him (if he were so inclined) to see the world of God, and to eat all kinds of fruit and flesh, and to drink the best of beer, will none the less start a race with a Money- Devil: a fleet, strong Money -Devil with a goad. And when this Money-Devil has given him some five years start, say until he is nearly thirty years of age, then will that man start racing and careering and bounding and flying with the Money-Devil after him, over hill and valley, field and fen, and wood and waste, and the high heaths and the wolds, until at last (somewhere about sixty as a rule or a little later) he gives a great cry and throws up his hands and falls down. Then does the Money-Devil come and eat him up. Many millions love such a course.

"And there is also that other sort of hunt, in which some appetite or lust sets out a-chasing the jolly human, and puts him at fence and hedge, and gate and dyke, and round the spinney and over the stubble and racing over the bridge, and then double again through copse and close, and thicket and thorn, until he has spent his breath upon the high Downs, and then, after a little respite, a second clear run all the way to the grave. Which, when the hunted human sees it very near at hand, he commonly stops of set purpose, and this thing that has chased him catches him up and eats him, even as did the other. Millions are seen to pursue this lust-hunted course, and some even try to combine it with that other sort of money-devilhuntedness. But the advice is given to all in youth that they must make up their minds which of the two sorts of exercises they would choose, and the first is commonly praised and thought worthy; the second blamed. Why, I do not know. Our elders say to us, * Boy, choose the Money-Devil, give that Lord his run.' Both kinds of sport have seemed to me most miserable, but then I speak only for myself, and I am eccentric in the holidays I choose and the felicity I discover for myself in the conduct of my years.

"For, so far as I am concerned, my pleasure is found rather in having a game with that Great Three-toed Sloth, which is the most amiable of hell's emissaries, and all my life have I played the jolly game of tickling him forward and lolloping in front of him, now lying down until he has caught me up, and then slouching off until he came near again, and even at times making a spurt that I might have the longer sleep at the end, and give honest Sloth a good long waddle for his money.

"Yet after all, my method is the same as every one else's, and will have the same end.

"For when I see the grave a long way off, then do I mean to put on slippers and to mix myself a great bowl of mulled wine with nutmegs, and to fill a pipe, and to sit me down in a great arm-chair before a fire of oak or beech, burning in a great hearth, within sound of the Southern Sea.

"And as I sit there, drinking my hot wine and smoking my long pipe, and watching the fire, and remembering old storms and landfalls far away, I shall hear the plodding and the paddling and the shuffling and the muffling of that great Sloth, my life's pursuer, and he will butt at my door with his snout, but I shall have been too lazy to lock it, and so shall he come in. Then the Great Three-toed Sloth will eat me up, and thus shall / find the end of my being and have reached the best thing in the world."

Myself. "While you were speaking, Sailor, it seemed to me you had forgotten one great felicity, manly purpose, and final completion of the immortal spirit, which is surely the digging of holes and the filling of them up again?"

The Sailor. "You are right! I had forgotten thatl It is indeed an admirable pastime, and for some, perhaps for many, it is the best thing in the world!"

Myself. "Yes, indeed, for consider how we drink to thirst again, and eat to hunger again, and love for disappointment, and journey in order to return. And consider with what elaborate care we cut, clip, shave, remove and prune our hair and beard, which none the less will steadfastly re-grow, and how we earn money to spend it, and black boots before walking in the mire, and do penance before sinning, and sleep to wake, and wake to sleep; and very elaborately do pin, button, tie, hook, hang, lace, draw, pull up, be-tighten, and in diverse ways fasten about ourselves our very complicated clothes of a morning, only to unbutton, unpin, untie, unhook, let down, be-loosen, and in a thousand operations put them off again when midnight comes. Then there is the soiling of things for their cleansing, and the building of houses to pull them down again, and the making of wars for defeat or for barren victories, and the painting of pictures for the rich blind, and the singing of songs for the wealthy deaf, and the living of all life to the profit of others, and the begetting of children who may perpetuate all that same round. The more I think of it the more I see that the digging of holes and the filling of them up again is the true end of man and his felicity."

The Poet. "I think you must be wrong."

Myself. "Well then, since you know, what is the best thing in the world?"

The Poet. "It is a mixture wherein should be compounded and intimately mixed great wads of unexpected money, new landscapes, and the return of old loves."

The Sailor. "Oh, hear him with his return of old loves! All coming in procession, two by two, like the old maids of Midhurst trooping out of church of a Sunday morning! One would think he had slain a hundred with his eye!"

Grizzkbeard. "All you young men talk folly. The best thing in the world is sleep."

And having said so much, Grizzlebeard stretched himself upon the bench along one side of the fire, and, pulling his blanket over his head, he would talk to us no more. And we also after a little while, lying huddled in our coats before the blaze, slept hard. And so we passed the hours till morning; now waking in the cold to start a log, then sleeping again. And all night long the wind sounded in the trees.

THE THIRTY-FIRST OF OCTOBER

1902

I WOKE next morning to the noise, the pleasant noise, of water boiling in a kettle. May God bless that noise and grant it to be the most sacred noise in the world. For it is the noise that babes hear at birth and that old men hear as they die in their beds, and it is the noise of our households all our long lives long; and throughout the world, wherever men have hearths, that purring and that singing, and that humming and that talking to itself of warm companionable water to our great ally, the fire, is home.

So thought I, half awake, and half asleep upon the hard dry earth of that floor. Yet, as I woke, my mind, not yet in Sussex, thought I was sleeping in an open field, and that there were round me comrades of the regiment, and that the embers that warmed my feet were a bivouac fire. Then I sat up, broad awake, and stiff after such a lodging, to find the Sailor crouching over the renewed flames of two stout logs on which he had established a kettle and water from a spring. He had also with him a packet of tea and some sugar, a loaf, and a little milk.

Grizzlebeard, stiff and stark upon his back along the bench, his head fallen flat, unsupported, his mouth open, breathing but slightly, seemed like a man dead. As for the Poet, he lay bunched up as would a man who had got the last bit of warmth he could; and he was still in a dead sleep, right up against the further corner of the fire.

I shook my coat from me and stood up.

"Sailor," I said, "how long have you been awake?"

To which the Sailor answered:

"Ever since I was born: worse luck! I never sleep."

"Where did you get those things," said I, "that tea, that milk, that sugar, and that loaf?"

I yawned as I said it, and then I stretched my hands, which sleep had numbed, towards the rising life of the fire. The Sailor was still crouching at the kettle as he answered me slowly and with care:

"Why, you must know that near this house there lives a Troll, who many many years ago when he was young was ensnared by the love of a Fairy, upon that heath called Over-theworld. And he brought her home to be his bride, and lives close by here in a hut that is not of this world. He is my landlord, as it were, and he it was that gave me this tea, this milk, this sugar, and this loaf, but it is no good your asking where, for no one can find that warlock house of theirs but me."

"That was a long lie to tell," said I, "for I certainly should not have bothered myself to find out where the things came from, so only that I can get them free."

"You are right," said the Sailor, "and I also got them free."

And having said that he upset the packet of tea, and the sugar, and the milk, right into the kettle, so that I cried out to him in alarm:

"What are you at?"

But he told me, as he took the kettle off:

"That is the way the Troll - tea was brewed by the Master-maid upon the heath called Over-the-world. I have been there, so I know."

And with that he gave a great kick at the Poet, who sat up suddenly from his lump of clothes, looked wild for a moment, then knew where he was, and said "Oh!"

"It doesn't rhyme," said the Sailor, "but you shall have some tea."

He poured out from the kettle, into the common mug we carried, a measure of the tea, and with his jack-knife he cut off a slice of bread.

Our talk had awakened Grizzlebeard. That older man rose painfully from sleep, as though to see the day again were not to one of his years any very pleasing thing. He sat upon the bench, and for him, as to the one of honour, the tea was next poured out into that silver mug of his, and then was handed to him the next slice of bread. Then I drank and ate, and then the Sailor, and when all this was done we made things orderly in the hut, the Sailor and I. We folded the blankets and stood up the unburnt logs. We poured the kettle out and drank the milk, and stood the loaf upon the ingle-nook, and bidding farewell to that unknown place we left it, to converse with it no more. But the reason we had to put all things in order so, was (the Sailor told me) that if we angered the Troll he might never let us sleep there again.

"You are wonderful company, Sailor!" said I.

"For others, perhaps," said he, as he locked the door and put the key in his pocket, "but not for myself; and yet that is the only thing that matters!"

By this time we were all upon the forest path again, turning this way and that as the Sailor might lead us. Sometimes we crossed a great ride without turning down it, and once the broad high road. But we went straight across that, and we passed many signs where it said that any common man found in these woods would be imprisoned, and some where it said that any one not rich and yet wandering here might find themselves killed by engines. But the Sailor dodged his way nimbly about, making westward through it all, but so cunningly that even I, who know my County well, grew puzzled. I could not guess in what part of the wood we were until we came to a bottom through which a stream ran, and then I knew that this stream was the rising of the Mole, and that we were in Tilgate. Then I said to my companions: "Now the woods smell of home!"

But Grizzlebeard said that, considering what the world was like outside the County, all the County was home. And the Poet said that here were homing bits in the forest, and there were homing bits, and others that were stranger to him, and had not the spirit of our land.

But the Sailor said nothing, only leading us forward by clever paths so that the servants of the rich could not do us any hurt, and then he got us into an open glade, and there we sat and rested for a moment, with our breath drawing in the morning.

For the morning was not as the night had been, full of wind and hurrying clouds, but it was the morning after a gale, in which, on these high hills and among these lifting trees, the air was ambassadorial, bringing a message of life from the sea. But it was a halted air. It no longer followed in the procession of the gale, but was steady and arrived. So that the sky above us was not clouded, and had in it no sign of movement, but was pale with a wintry blue. And there was a frost and a bite all about, although it was so early in the year and winter hardly come. But the leaves had fallen early that year, and the forest was already desolate.

When we had rested ourselves a moment in this glade we followed the Sailor again by a path which presently he left, conducting us with care through untouched underwood, until we came to a hedge, and there across the hedge was the great main road and Pease Pottage close at hand.

"I have led you through this wood," the Sailor said, "and now you may take what road you will."

Myself. "Now, indeed, I know every yard of the way; and I will take you down towards our own country. But I will take you in my own fashion, for I know the better places, and the quiet lands, and a roof under which we shall be free to sleep at evening. You shall follow me."

"You know all this?" said Grizzlebeard to me curiously, "then can you tell me why all these woods are called St. Leonard's Forest?"

Myself. "Why, certainly; they are called St. Leonard's Forest after St. Leonard."

The Poet. "Are you so sure?"

Myself. "Without a doubt! For it is certain that St. Leonard lived here, and had a little hermitage in the days when poor men might go where they willed. And this hermitage was in that place to which I shall presently take you, from which it is possible to worship at once both our County, and God who made it."

Saying which I took them along the side road which starts from Pease Pottage (and in those days the old inn was there), but before doing so I asked them severally whether they had any curse on them which forbade them to drink ale of a morning.

This all three of them denied, so we went into the Swan (which in those days I say again was the old inn), and we drank ale, as St. Leonard himself was used to do, round about nine or ten o'clock of an autumn morning. For he was born in these parts, and never went out of the County except once to Germany, when he would convert the heathen there; of whom, returning, he said that if it should please God he would rather be off to hell to convert devils, but that anyhow he was tired of wandering, and thereupon set up his hermitage in the place to which I was now leading my companions.

For when we had gone about a mile by the road I knew, we came to that place where the wood upon the left ends sharply upon that height and suddenly beneath one's feet the whole County lies revealed.

There, a day's march away to the south, stood the rank of the Downs.

No exiles who have seen them thus, coming back after many years, and following the road from London to the sea, hungry for home, were struck more suddenly or more suddenly uplifted by that vision of their hills than we four men so coming upon it that morning, and I was for the moment their leader; for this was a place I had cherished ever since I was a boy.

"Look," said I to Grizzlebeard, "how true it is that in this very spot a man might set his seat whence-from to worship all that he saw, and God that must have made it."

"You are right," said Grizzlebeard; "I see before me the Weald in a tumbled garden, Wolstonbury above New Timber and Highden and Rackham beyond" (for these are the names of the high hills), "and far away westward I see under Duncton the Garden of Eden, 1 think, to which we are bound. And sitting crowned in the middle place I see Chanctonbury, which, I think, a dying man remembers so fixed against the south, if he is a man from Ashurst, or from Thakeham, or from the pine-woods by the rock, whenever by some evil-fortune a Sussex man dies far away from home."

"Tell me," said the Sailor, "can you fix for us here the place where St. Leonard built his hermitage?"

"Certainly," said I, and they gathered round.

"Here," said I, "was the cello," (drawing a circle with my stick upon the ground), "and here" (moving off a yard or two) "was his narthex or carfax, as some call it, and here to the right" (and here I moved backwards and drew my stick across some sand) "was the bibulatium; but all the ruins of this monument have disappeared through quarrying and the effects of time, saving always such traces as can be distinguished by experts, and I am one."

Then, wishing to leave them no time for wrangling, I took them down away through Shelley Plain, and when I had gone a mile or so I said:

"Is not the river to which we are bound the river of Arun?"

The Poet. "Why, yes. If it were not so I would never have joined you."

The Sailor. "Certainly we are bound for Arun, which, when a man bathes in it, makes him forget everything that has come upon him since his eighteenth year or possibly his twenty-seventh. ' '

"Yes," said Grizzlebeard, more gravely, "we are bound for the river of Arun, which is as old as it is young, and therein we hope to find our youth, and to discover once again the things we knew."

"Why, then," said I, "let me mock you and cover you with disillusion, and profane your shrines, and disappoint your pilgrimage! For that trickle of water below you to the left in the dale, and that long lake you see with a lonely wood about either shore is the place where Arun rises."

Grizzlebeard. "That is nothing to me as we go along our way. It is not little baby Arun that I come to see, but Arun in his majesty, married to salt water, and a king."

The Sailor. "For my part I am glad to have assisted at the nativity of Arun. Prosper, beloved river! It is your business (not mine) if you choose to go through so many doubtful miles of youth, and to grope uncertainly towards fruition and the sea."

The Poet. "There is always some holiness in the rising of rivers, and a great attachment to their springs."

By this time we had come to the lake foot, where a barrier holds in the water, and the road crosses upon a great dam. And we watched as we passed it the plunge of the cascade; and then passing over that young river we went up over the waste land to the height called Lower Beeding, which means the lower place of prayer, and is set upon the very summit of a hill. Just as Upper Beeding is at the very lowest point in the whole County of Sussex, right down, down, down upon the distant marshes of Adur, flush, as you may say, with the sea.

For when Adam set out (with the help of Eve) to name all the places of the earth (and that is why he had to live so long), he desired to distinguish Sussex, late his happy seat, by some special mark which should pick it out from all the other places of the earth, its inferiors and vassals. So that when Paradise might be regained and the hopeless generation of men permitted to pass the Flaming Sword at Shiremark Mill, and to see once more the four rivers, Arun and Adur, and Cuckmere and Ouse, they might know their native place again and mark it for Paradise. And the best manner (thought Adam) so to establish by names this good peculiar place, this Eden which is Sussex still, was to make her names of a sort that should give fools to think. So he laid it down that whatever was high in Sussex should be called low, and whatever was low should be called high, and that a hill should be called a plain, and a bank should be called a ditch, and the North wood should be south of the Downs, and the Nore Hill south of the wood, and South water north of them all, and that no one in the County should pronounce "th," "ph," or "sh," but always "h" separately, under pain of damnation. And that names should have their last letters weighed upon, contrariwise to the custom of all England.

So much for our names, which any man may prove for himself by considering Bos-ham, and Felp-ham, and Hors-ham, and Arding-ly, and the square place called "Roundabout." Or the Broadbridge, which is so narrow that two carts cannot pass on it. God knows we are a single land!

We had passed then, we four (and hungry, and stepping strongly, for it was downhill), we had passed under the cold pure air of that good day from Lower Beeding down the hill past Leonard's Lee, and I was telling my companions how we might hope to eat and drink at the Crabtree or at Little Cowfold, when the Sailor suddenly began to sing in a manner so loud and joyful that in some more progressive place than the County he would most certainly have been thrown into prison. But the occasion of his song was a good one, for debouching through the wooded part of the road we had just come upon that opening whence once more, though from a lower height, the open Weald and the magnificence of the Downs is spread out to glorify men's eyes. He sang that song, which is still native to this land, through all the length of it, and we who had heard it each in our own place first helped him with the chorus, and then swelled it altogether in diverse tones. He beginning:

"On Sussex hills where I was bred,

When lanes in autumn rains are red,

When Arun tumbles in his bed,

And busy great gusts go by;

When branch is bare in Burton Glen

And Bury Hill is a whitening, then,

I drink strong ale with gentlemen;

Which nobody can deny, deny,

Deny, deny, deny, deny,

Which nobody can deny!

II

"In half-November off I go,

To push my face against the snow,

And watch the winds wherever they blow,

Because my heart is high:

Till I settle me down in Steyning to sing

Of the women I met in my wandering,

And of all that I mean to do in the spring.

Which nobody can deny, deny,

Deny, deny, deny, deny,

Which nobody can deny!

III

"Then times be rude and weather be rough,

And ways be foul and fortune tough,

We are of the stout South Country stuff,

That never can have good ale enough,

And do this chorus cry!

From Crowboro' Top to Ditchling Down,

From Hurstpierpoint to Arundel town,

The girls are plump and the ale is brown:

Which nobody can deny, deny,

Deny, deny, deny, deny!

If he does he tells a lie!"

When we had all done singing and were near the Crabtree, the Sailor said:

"Now, was not that a good song?"

"Yes," said I, "and well suited to this morning and to this air, and to that broad sight of the lower land which now spreads out before us."

For even as I spoke we had come to that little shelf on which the Crabtree stands, and from which one may see the Downs all stretched before one, and Bramber Gap, and in the notch of it the high roof of Lancing; and then onwards, much further away, Arundel Gap and the hills and woods of home. It was certainly in the land beneath us, and along the Weald, which we overlooked, that once, many years ago, a young man must have written this song.

Grizzlebeard. "In what places, Myself, do you find that you can sing?"

Myself. "In any place whatsoever."

The Sailor. "As, for instance, at the table of some rich money-lending man who has a few men friends to dinner that night, with whom he would discuss Affairs of State, and who has only asked you because you were once a hanger-on of his great-nephew's. This would seem to me an excellent occasion on which to sing ' Golier! '

The Poet. "Yes, or again, when you are coming (yourself small and unknown) to the reception of some wealthy hostess from whom you expect advancement. It was in such a place and at such a time that Charlie Ribston, now in jail, did first so richly produce his song, 'The Wowly Wows,' which has that jolly chorus to it."

Grizzlebeard. "The reason I asked you where you could sing was, that I thought it now impossible in any place, I mean in this realm, and in our dreadful time. For is there not a law, and is it not in force, whereby any man singing in the open, if he be overheard by the police, shall be certified by two doctors, imprisoned, branded, his thumb marks taken, his hair shaved off, one of his eyes put out, all his money matters carefully gone into backwards and forwards, and, in proportion to the logarithm of his income a large tax laid on? And after all this the duty laid upon him under heavy pains of reporting himself every month to a local committee, with the parson's wife up top, and to a politician's jobber, and to all such other authorities as may see fit, pursuant to the majesty of our Lord the King, his crown and dignity? I seem to have heard something of the kind."

"Yes, you are right enough," said I; "but when a man comes to lonely places, which are like islands and separate from this sea of tyranny, as, for instance, this road by Leonard's Lee, why a man can still sing."

The Sailor. "Yes, and in an inn."

"In a few inns," said I, "under some conditions and at certain times."

Grizzlebeard. "Very well, we will choose upon this march of ours such inns and such times. And is this one?" he added, pointing to the Crabtree.

"Not outside," I answered cautiously, "nor at this hour."

"However," said the Poet, "we will eat."

So we sat outside there upon the benches of the Crabtree Inn, eating bread and cheese.

Now when we had eaten our bread and cheese in that cold, still air, and overlooking so great a scene below us, and when we had drunk yet more of the ale, and also of a port called Jubilee (for the year of Jubilee was, at the time this walk was taken, not more than five years past), the Sailor said in a sort of challenging tone:

"You were saying, I think, that a man could only sing to-day in certain lonely places, such as all down that trim hedgerow, which is the roadside of Leonard's Lee, and when Grizzlebeard here asked whether a man might sing outside the Crabtree, you said no. But I will make the experiment; and by way of compromise, so that no one may be shocked, my song shall be of a religious sort, dealing with the great truths. And perhaps that will soften the heart of the torturers, if indeed they have orders, as you say, to persecute men for so simple a thing as a song."

Grizzlebeard. "If your song is one upon the divinities, it will not go with ale and with wine, nor with the character of an inn."

The Sailor. "Do not be so sure. Wait until you have heard it. For this song that I am proposing to sing is of a good loud roaring sort, but none the less it deals with the ultimate things, and you must know that it is far more than one thousand years old. Now it cannot be properly sung unless the semi-chorus (which I will indicate by raising my hands) is sung loudly by all of you together, nor unless the chorus is bellowed by the lot of you for dear life's sake, until the windows rattle and the populace rise. Such is the nature of the song."

Having said so much then, the Sailor, leaning back, began in a very full and decisive manner to sing this

SONG OF THE PELAGIAN HERESY FOR THE STRENGTHENING OF MEN'S BACKS AND THE VERY ROBUST OUT-THRUSTING OF DOUBTFUL DOCTRINE AND THE UNCERTAIN INTELLECTUAL.

Pelagius lived in Kardanoel,

And taught a doctrine there,

How whether you went to Heaven or Hell,

It was your own affair.

How, whether you found eternal joy

Or sank forever to burn,

It had nothing to do with the Church, my boy,

But was your own concern.

Grizzlebeard. "This song is blasphemous."

The Sailor. "Not at all--the exact contrary, it is orthodox. But now I beg of you do not interrupt, for this is the semi-chorus."

[Semi-chorus.]

Oh, he didn't believe

In Adam and Eve,

He put no faith therein!

His doubts began

With the fall of man,

And he laughed at original sin!

In this semi-chorus we all joined, catching it up as he went along, and then the Sailor, begging us to put all our manhood into it, launched upon the chorus itself, which was both strong and simple.

[Chorus.]

With my row-ti-tow, ti-oodly-ow,

He laughed at original sin!

When we had got as far as this, which was the end of the first verse, and defines the matter in hand, the very extravagant noise of it all brought out from their dens not a few of the neighbourhood, who listened and waited to see what would come. But the Sailor, not at all abashed, continued, approaching the second verse.

Whereat the Bishop of old Auxerre

(Germanus was his name),

He tore great handfuls out of his hair,

And he called Pelagius Shame:

And then with his stout Episcopal staff

So thoroughly thwacked and banged

The heretics all, both short and tall,

They rather had been hanged.

[Semi-chorus]

Oh, he thwacked them hard, and he banged them long,

Upon each and all occasions,

Till they bellowed in chorus, loud and strong,

Their orthodox persuasions!

[Chorus.]

With my row-ti-tow, ti-oodly-ow,

Their orthodox persu-a-a-sions

At the end of this second verse the crowd had grown greater, and not a few of them had dropped their lower jaws and stood with their mouths wide open, never having heard a song of this kind before. But the Sailor, looking kindly upon them, and nodding at them, as much as to say, "You will understand it all in a minute," took on the third verse, with still greater gusto, and sang:

Now the Faith is old and the Devil is bold,

Exceedingly bold indeed;

And the masses of doubt that are floating about

Would smother a mortal creed.

But we that sit in a sturdy youth,

And still can drink strong ale,

Oh let us put it away to infallible truth,

Which always shall prevail!

[Semi-chorus. ]

And thank the Lord

For the temporal sword,

And howling heretics too;

And whatever good things

Our Christendom brings,

But especially barley brew!

[Chorus.]

With my row-ti-tow, ti-oodly-ow,

Especially barley brew!

When we had finished this last chorus in a louder mode than all the rest, you may say that half the inhabitants of that hill were standing round. But the Sailor, rising smartly and putting money down upon the table to pay for our fare and somewhat over, bade us all rise with him, which we did, and then he spoke thus to the assembly:

"Good people! I trust you clearly heard every word of what we have just delivered to you, for it is Government business, and we were sent to give it to you just as we had ourselves received it of the Cabinet, whose envoys we are. And let me add for your comfort that this same Government of our Lord the King (his crown and dignity), ever solicitous for the welfare of poorer folk, has given us monies wherewith to refresh all the people of Sussex all our way along. On which account I have left here upon the table, in the name of the aforesaid Right Honourables, a sum of five shillings, against which you may order ale to the breaking point, and so goodday to you. But you are strictly charged that you do not follow us or molest us in any fashion, to the offence of those good Ministers who lie awake at night, considering the good of the people, and the service of our Lord the King (his crown and dignity). Oyez! Le Roi le veult!"

And having said this he beckoned us to follow him, and as we strode down the road we heard them all cheering loudly, for they thought that time had come which is spoken of by the Prophet Habakkuk, "When the poor shall be filled and the rich shall be merry." A thing that never yet was since the beginning of the world.

As we swung down the road which leads at last to Little Cowfold, Grizzlebeard, thinking about that song, said:

"I cannot believe, Sailor, that your song is either old or true; for there is no such place as Kardanoel, and Pelagius never lived there, and his doctrine was very different from what you say, and the blessed Germanus would not have hurt a fly. As witness that battle of his somewhere in Flint, where he discomforted the Scotch, of all people, by talking Hebrew too loud, although he only knew one word of the tongue. Then, also, what you say of ale is not ecclesiastical, nor is it right doctrine to thank the Lord for heresy."

The Sailor. "Anything you will! But every church must have its customs within reason, and this song, or rather hymn, is of Breviary, and very properly used in the diocese of Theleme upon certain feast days. Yes, notably that of Saints Comus and Hilarius, who, having nothing else to do, would have been cruelly martyred for the faith had they not contrariwise, as befits Christian men, be-martyred and banged to death their very persecutors in turn. It is a prose of the church militant, and is ascribed to Dun-Scotus, but is more probably of traditional origin. Compare the ' Hymn to the Ass,' which all good Christian men should know."

Grizzlebeard. "Nevertheless I doubt if it be for the strengthening of souls, but rather a bit of ribaldry, more worthy of the Martyrs' Mount which you may know, than of holy Sussex."

When we had come to Little Cowfold, which we did very shortly, it was already past three in the afternoon, and therefore in such early weather (more wintry than autumn) the air had a touch of evening, and looking at the church there and admiring it, we debated whether we should stop in that place a little while and pick a quarrel with any one, or lacking that, sing another song, or lacking that, drink silently. For Virgil says, "Propria quae Cowfold Carmen Cervisia Ludus."

But as it was so late we thought we would not do any of these things, but take the way along to Henfield and get us near to the Downs, though how far we should go that night we none of us could tell. Only we were settled on this, that by the next day, which would be All-Hallows, we must come upon the river Arun and the western part of the County, and all the things we knew.

So we went on southward towards Henfield, and as we went, Grizzlebeard, who was striding strongly, reminded us that it was All Halloween. On this night of all nights in the year there is most stir and business among the things that are not seen by men, and there is a rumour in all the woods; and very late, when men are sleeping, all those who may not come to earth at any other time, come and hold their revels. The Little People who are good for the most part, dance this night in the meadows and undergrowth, and move in and out of the reeds along the river bank, and twine round and round in rings holding hands upon the flat pastures, the water meadows, and the heaths that are nearer the sea. It is this dancing of theirs that leaves upon the grass its track in a brighter green, and marks the fields with those wheels and circles which convince unbelieving men.

The Poet said that he had seen the Little People, but we knew that what he said was false.

Grizzlebeard said that though he had not seen them he believed, in reward for which the Little People had blest him all his life. And that was why (he told us) he was so rich, for though his father had left him plenty, the Little People had increased it, because he had neither doubted them nor ever wished them ill.

The Sailor. "Then you were lucky! For it is well known that those who come upon the Little People dancing round and round are caught by them in the middle of the ring. And the Little People laugh at them with a noise like very small silver bells. And then, as though to make amends for their laughter, they lead the mortal away to a place where one can go underground. And when they get there, in a fine hall where the Queen sits with Oberon, it is ordered that the man shall be given gold. They bring him a sack, and he stuffs it full of the gold pieces, full to the neck, and he shoulders it and makes to thank them, when, quite suddenly, he finds he is no longer in that hall, but on the open heath at early morning with no one about, and in an air quite miserably cold. Then that man, shivering and wondering whether ever he saw the Little People or no, says to himself, ' At least I have my gold.' But when he goes to take the sack up again he finds it very light, and pouring out from it upon the ground he gets, instead of the gold they gave him, nothing but dead leaves; the round dead leaves and brown of the beech, and of the hornbeam, for it is of this sort that they mint the fairy gold. They say that as he leaves it there, disappointed and angry at his adventure, he seems to hear again, though it is daylight, far down beneath the ground, the slight tinkle of many tin)' silver bells, and knows that it is the Little People laughing."

Grizzlebeard. "So it may be for those who have the great misfortune to see the Little People, but, as I told you, I have never seen them, and with me it has been the other way about. Year after year have I picked up the dead leaves, until all the leaves of my life were dead, and year after year I have found between my hands gold and more gold."

The Poet. "I tell you again I have seen them, and when I was a younger man I saw them often, and I would be with them for hours in that good place of theirs where nothing matters very much and no one goes away."

The Sailor. "And what did they give you beyond that loon look which is the mark of all your tribe?"

The Poet. "Why, they gave me the power to conceive good verse, and this I still retain."

The Sailor. "Now indeed, Poet, I believe, which I did not at first, that you have seen the Little People. For what you have just said proves it to me. You also have handled fairy gold and there are many like you. For the Little People gave you verse that seemed well minted, sterling and sound, and you put it into your sack and you bore it away. But when you came out into man's- world and tasted the upper air, then, as all your hearers and your readers know, this verse turned out to be the light and worthless matter of dead leaves. Oh, do not shake your head! We know that verse of youth which the fairies give us in mockery; only we, when we grow up, are too wise to cherish the bag-full. We leave it for the wind to scatter, for it is all dead leaves. Only you poets hang on to your bag and clutch it and carry it with you, making fools of yourselves all your lives long, while we sturdy fellows in a manly fashion turn to the proper things of men in man's -world, and take to lawyering and building, and the lending of money and horse-doping, and every other work that befits a man."

Grizzlebeard. "And you, Myself, have you ever seen the Fairies?"

Myself. "I do not think so. I do not think I have ever seen them: alas for me! But I think I have heard them once or twice, murmuring and chattering, and pattering and clattering, and flattering and mocking at me, and alluring me onwards towards the perilous edges and the water-ledges where the torrent tumbles and cascades in the high hills."

The Sailor. "What did they say to you?"

Myself. "They told me I should never get home, and I never have."

As we so talked the darkness began to gather, for we had waited once or twice by the way, and especially at that little lift in the road where one passes through a glen of oaks and sees before one great flat water meadows, and beyond them the high Downs quite near.

The sky was already of an apple green to the westward, and in the eastern blue there were stars. There also shone what had not yet appeared upon that windless day, a few small wintry clouds, neat and defined in heaven. Above them the moon, past her first quarter but not yet full, was no longer pale, but began to make a cold glory; and all that valley of Adur was a great and solemn sight to see as we went forward upon our adventure that led nowhere and away. To us four men, no one of whom could know the other, and who had met by I could not tell what chance, and would part very soon for ever, these things were given. All four of us together received the sacrament of that wide and silent beauty, and we ourselves went in silence to receive it.

And so when it was full dark we came to Henfield, and determined that it was time for bread, and for bacon, and for ale a night meal inspired by the road and by the tang of the cold. For you must know that once again, though it was yet so early in the year, a very slight frost had nipped the ground.

We made therefore for an inn in that place, and asked the mistress of it to fry us bacon, and with it to give us bread and as much ale as four men could drink by her judgment and our own; and while we sat there, waiting for this meal, the Sailor said to me:

"Come now, Myself, since you say that you know the County so well, can you tell us how Hog is made so suitable to Man?"

Grizzlebeard. "Why, no man can tell that, for we only know that these things are so. But some men say that in the beginning the horse was made for man to ride, and the cow for man to milk, and the hog for man to eat; with wheat also, which was given him to sow in a field, just as those stars and that waxing moon were given him to lift his eyes towards heaven, and the sun to give him light and warmth by day. But others say that all things are a jumble, and that the stars care nothing for us, and that the moon, if only the truth were known, is a very long way off, and a useless beast (God forgive me! It is not I that speak thus, but they!), and that we just happened upon horses (which I can well believe when I see some men ride), and that even that most-perfectly-fitting creature and manifestly-adapted-to-man, that hale fourfooted one, the HOG, was but an accident, and is not an end in himself for us, but may, in the change of human affairs, be replaced by some other more suitable thing. All things are made for an end, but who shall say what end?"

Myself. "Those who talk thus, Grizzlebeard, have not carefully considered the works of man, nor his curious ways, which betray in him the reflection of his Creator, and mark him for an artist. The curing of Hog Flesh till it become bacon is a sure evidence of the creed. There are those, I know, who still pretend that the pin and the needle, the hammer and the saw, and even the violin, grew up and were fashioned bit by bit, man stumbling towards them from experiment to experiment. At these atheists I howl, believing verily and without doubt that in the beginning, when grandfather and grandmother were turned out of Eden, and were compelled by some Order in Council or other to leave this County (but we are now returned), they were very kindly presented by the authorities with the following:

"One tool-box.

A cock and six hens.

Some paint and brushes and a tube of sepia,

Six pencils, running from BB. to 4H.

Tobacco in a tin.

A Greek Grammar and Lexicon.

Half-hours with the best writers of English verse and prose, excluding thing-um-bob.

A little printing-press.

A Bible.

The Elements of Jurisprudence.

A compact travelling medicine chest.

A collection of seeds, with

A pamphlet that should accompany these, and

Two PIGS.

"These last also were saved in the Ark, as witness Holy Writ, and one of them later accompanied St. Anthony, and is his ritual beast on every monument."

"But all this," said the Sailor, as he began eating his bacon, "tells us nothing of the curing of pigs, which art, you say, is a proof of man's original instruction, and of the intentions of Providence.

Myself. "And I said it very truly, for how of himself could man have discovered such a thing? There is revelation about it, and the seeming contradiction which inhabits all mysterious gifts."

G?izzlebeard. "You mean that there is no curing a pig until the pig is dead? For though that is the very moment when our materialists would say that he was past all healing, yet (oh, marvel!) that is the very time most suitable for curing him."

The Poet. "Well, but beyond the theology of the matter, will you not tell us how a pig is cured, for I long to learn one useful thing in my life."

Myself. "You will not learn it in the mere telling for what says the Philosopher? * If you would be a Carpenter you must do Carpenter's work.' However, for the enduring affection I bear you, and also for my delight in the art, I will expound this thing.

"First, then, you cut your pig in two, and lay each half evenly and fairly upon a smooth well-washed board of deal, oak, ash, elm, walnut, teak, mahogany, ebony, rosewood, or any other kind of wood; and then, taking one such half you put by on one side a heap of saltpetre, and gathering a handful of this saltpetre you very diligently rub it into the flesh, and, rubbing, have a care to rub it rubbedly, as rub should, and show yourself a master rubber at rubbing. And all this you must do on the inside and not on the out, for that is all covered over with hair.

"When, therefore, you have so rubbed in a rubbard manner until your rubment is aglow with the rubbing, why then desist; hang up your half pig on a hook from a beam, and wash your hands and have done for that day.

"But next day you must begin again in the same manner (having first consecrated your work by a prayer), and so on for thirty days; but each day a little less than the last, until, before the curing is ended, you are taking but a tithe of the saltpetre you took at the beginning.

"When all this is over your half pig is as stiff as a prude, and as salt as sorrow, and as incorruptible as a lawyer, and as tough as Tacitus. Then may you lift it up all of one piece, like a log, and put it to smoke over a wood fire, as the giants did in old time, or you may pack it between clean layers of straw, as the Germans do to this day, or you may do whatever you will, and be damned to it; for no matter what you do, you will still have a pig of pigs, and a pork perfect, that has achieved its destiny and found the fruit of its birth: a scandal to Mahound, and food for Christian men."

The Sailor. "All that you say is true enough, but what of the bristles of the pig? What of his hair? Are not bristles better in brushes than in bacon?"

Myself. "You speak truth soundly, though perhaps a little sharply, when you ask, ' How about hair? ' For the pig, like all brutes, differs from man in this, that his hide is covered with hair. On which theme also the poet Wordsworth, or some such fellow, composed a poem which, as you have not previously heard it, let me now tell you (in the fashion of Burnand) I shall at once proceed to relate; and I shall sing it in that sort of voice called by Italians ' The Tenore Stridente,' but by us a Hearty Stave."

"The dog is a faithful, intelligent friend,

But his hide is covered with hair;

The cat will inhabit the house to the end,

But her hide is covered with hair.

"The hide of the mammoth was covered with wool,

The hide of the porpoise is sleek and cool,

But you'll find, if you look at that gambolling fool,

That his hide is covered with hair.

"Ok, I thank my God for this at the least,

I was born in the West and not in the East,

And He made me a human instead of a beast,

Whose hide is covered with hair!"

Grizzlebeard (with interest). "This song is new to me, although I know most songs. Is it your own?"

Myself. "Why, no, it's a translation, but a free one I admit, from Anacreon or Theocritus, I forget which.... What am I saying? Is it not Wordsworth's, as we said just now? There is so much of his that is but little known! Would you have further verses? There are many..."

The Sailor. "No."

Myself. "Why, then, I will immediately continue.

"The cow in the pasture that chews the cud,

Her hide is covered with hair."

The Sailor. "Halt!"

"And even a horse of the Barbary blood,

His hide is covered with hair!

"The camel excels in a number of ways,

And travellers give him unlimited praise

He can go without drinking for several days

But his hide is covered with hair."

Grizzlebeard. "How many verses are there of this?"

Myself. "There are a great number. For all the beasts of the field, and creeping things, and furred creatures of the sea come into this song, and towards the end of it the Hairy Ainu himself. There are hundreds upon hundreds of verses.

"The bear of the forest that lives in a pit,

His hide is covered with hair;

The laughing hyena in spite of his wit,

His hide is covered with hair!

"The Barbary ape and the chimpanzee,

And the lion of Africa, verily he,

With his head like a wig, and the tuft on his knee,

His hide..."

Grizzlebeard (rising). "Enough! Enough! These songs, which rival the sea-serpent in length, are no part of the true poetic spirit, and I cannot believe that the conscientious Wordsworth, surnamed tVxo/ce'^aXo?, or Horse Face, wrote this, nor even that it is any true translation of Anacreon or the shining Theocritus. There is some error! This manner of imagining a theme, to which innumerable chapters may be added in a similar vein, is no part of poetry! It is rather a camp-habit, worthy only of a rude soldiery, to help them along the road and under the heavy pack. For I can understand that in long marches men should have to chant such endless things with a pad and a beat of the foot to them, but not we. I say enough, and enough!"

I answered him, getting up also as he had, and making ready for the road. "Why, Grizzlebeard, this is not very kind of you, for though you had allowed me but fifteen verses more I could have got through the Greater Carnivorse, and perhaps, before the closure, we could have brought in the Wart Hog, who loves not war, but is a Pacifist."

The Poet (rising also). "It may be so, good Myself, but remember that you bear them all in store. Nothing is really lost. You will rediscover these verses in eternity, and no doubt your time in hell will be long enough to exhaust, in series, all the animals that ever were."

The Sailor (rising last). "Grizzlebeard has saved us all!"

With this condemnation of a noble song they moved out of doors on to the road, a little aimlessly, gazing out towards the high Downs, under the now bright-burnished moon, and doubtful whither they should proceed. Grizzlebeard proposed in a gentle fashion that we should go on to an inn at Bramber and sleep there, but the Sailor suddenly said, "No!"

He said it with such violence and determination that we were all surprised, and looked at him with fear. Then he went on:

"No, we will not go to the inn at Bramber, nor breathe upon embers which are now so nearly extinguished; we will not go and walk in the woods whence all the laurels have been cut away, nor will we return to emotions which in their day were perhaps but vaguely divine, but which the lapse of time has rendered sacred. It is the most perilous of human endeavours, is this attempt to return to the past; should it fail, it breeds the most woeful of human woes. I know as well as you the gardens of Bramber, and I, too, have sat there eating and drinking upon summer evenings between the last light and the dark. I, too, have watched a large star that began to show above Buttolph Combe; and I, also, have seen the flitter-mice darting above me in an air like bronze. Believe me, I have heard the nightingale in Bramber, but I will not return."

The Poet. "But!"

The Sailor. "Be silent! ... I will not return. ... It was the best of inns!... You talk of the inn at Saint Girons, where the wine was good in the days of Arthur Young, and is still good to-day not the same wine, but the grandson of the same wine and you speak favourably of that inn under the pass coming in from Val Carlos. You talk justly of the famous inn at Urgel, known as the Universal Inn, from which a man can watch under a full moon the vast height of the Sierra del Cadi; and you perpetually repeat the praises of the inn at the Sign of the Chain of Gold, under a large ruined castle, by a broad and very peaceful river in Normandy. You do well to praise them, but all these inns together could not even stand at the knees of what was once the inn at Bramber."

Myself. "I have never mentioned one of these inns!"

The Sailor. "There is not upon earth so good a thing as an inn; but even among good things there must be hierarchy. The angels, they say, go by steps, and I am very ready to believe it. It is true also of inns. It is not for a wandering man to put them in their order; but in my youth the best inn of the inns of the world was an inn forgotten in the trees of Bramber. It is on this account that I will not return. The famous Tuscan inns have tempted many men to praise them, some (as I think) extravagantly. And of the lesser inns of seaports sailors (though they never praise in prose or verse) know and speak of the Star of Yarmouth I mean of Great Yarmouth and the County Inn of the other Yarmouth I mean of Little Yarmouth and especially in loud voices do they commend the Dolphin at Southampton, which is a very noble inn with bow windows, and second to no house in the world for the opportunity of composing admirable verse and fluent prose. Then also, lying inland one day's march from the sea, how many inns have not sailors known! Is there not the Bridge Inn of Amberley and the White Hart of Storrington, the Spread Eagle of Midhurst, that oldest and most revered of all the prime inns of this world, and the White Hart of Steyning and the White Horse of Storrington and the Swan of Petworth, all of which it may be our business to see? They were mortal inns, human inns, full of a common and a reasonable good; but round the inn at Bramber, my companions, there hangs a very different air. Memory bathes it and the drift of time, and the perpetual obsession of youth. So let us leave it there. I will put up the picture of an early love; I will hear with mixed sorrow and delight the songs that filled my childhood; but I will not deliberately view that which by a process of sanctification through time has come to be hardly of this world. I will not go sleep in the inn at Bramber the gods forbid me.

"Nay, apart from all of this which you three perhaps (and especially the Poet) are not of a stuff to comprehend, apart from these rare and mysterious considerations, I say, there is an evident and an easy reason for not stirring the leaves of memory. Who knows that we should find it the same? Who knows that the same voices would be heard in that garden, or that the green paint on the tables would still be dusty, blistered, and old? That the chairs would still be rickety, and that cucumber would still be the principal ornament of the feast? Have you not learnt in your lives, you two that are one young, one middle-aged, and you, the third, who are quite old, have you not learnt how everything is a function of motion; how all things only exist because they change? And what purpose would it serve to shock once more that craving of the soul for certitude and for repose? With what poignant and terrible grief should we not wrestle if the contrast of that which was once the inn at Bramber should rise a terrible ghost and challenge that which is the inn at Bramber now! Of what it was and what it has become might there not rise a dual picture before our minds a picture that should torture us with the doom of time? I will not play with passions that are too strong for men; I will not go sleep to-night at the inn of Bramber.

"Is not the world full of other inns wherein a man can sleep deeply and wake as it were in a new world? Has not heaven set for us, like stars in the sky, these points of isolation and repose all up and down the fields of Christendom? Is there not an inn at the Land's End where you can lie awake in a rest that is better than slumber, listening to the noise of the sea upon the Longships and to the Atlantic wind? And is there not another inn at John o' Groats to which you may bicycle if you choose (but so shall not I)? Is there not the nameless inn famous for its burgundy in Llanidloes? Is there no Unicorn in Machynlleth? Are there not in Dolgelly forty thousand curious inns and strong? And what of the Feathers at Ludlow, where men drink so often and so deeply after the extinguishing of fires, and of its sister inn at Ledbury? And what of the New Inn at Gloucester, which is older than the New College at Oxford or the New Bridge at Paris? And by the way, if Oxford itself have no true inns, are there not inns hanging like planets in a circle round the town? The inns of Eynsham, of Shillingford, of Dorchester, of Abingdon, the remarkable inn at Nuneham, and the detestable inn at Wheatley which fell from grace some sixty years ago, and now clearly stands for a mark of reprobation to show what inns may become, when, though possessed of free will and destined to eternal joy, they fail to fulfil their hostelarian destiny.

. . . Yes, indeed, there are inns enough in the world among which to choose without being forced by evil fate or still more evil curiosity to pull out in the organ of the soul the deep but oh! the fast and inviolable the forbidden stops of resurrection and of accomplished loving. For no man may re-live his youth, nor is love fruitful altogether to man."

Grizzlebeard (musing). "If it were not so far I should proceed this very night to the Station Hotel at York, which of all the houses I know is the largest and the most secure."

The Poet. "And I to the Fish, Dog, and Duck where the Ouse comes in to the Cam, or to the Grapes on the hills above Corbridge before you venture upon the loneliness of Northumberland; both excellent inns."

Myself. "But I, to the sign of the Lion, up on Arun, which no man knows but me. There should I approach once more the ancient riddle, and hear, perhaps, at last, the voices of the dead, and know the dooms of the soul."

The Sailor. "You would all three do well. For inns are as men and women are, with character and fate infinitely diversified, and to one an old man goes for silence and repose, to another a younger man for adventure or for isolation, to a third a poet for no reason save to lay up a further store of peevish impotence, which is the food upon which these half-men commonly feed. So also there are inns coquettish, inns brutal, inns obvious, inns kindly, and inns strong each is for a mood. But as in every life there is one emotion which may not be touched and to which the common day is not sufficient, so with inns. For me one is thus sacred, which is that inn at Bramber. Thither therefore, as I think I have said before, I will not go."

Myself. "Now that all the affectation of your talk is spent, I may tell you that you might have saved your breath, for close at hand I kntiw of a little house, empty but well furnished and full of stores for winter. Sailor I say this to you the Trolls are not my friends. Yet of such little houses all up and down the County I alone possess the keys. We will go, then, to this little house of mine, for it is not a mile across the water-meadows." This we did, and as we passed the wooden bridge we saw below us my little river, the river Adur, slipping at low tide towards the sea.

So we went on over the water-meadows. It was very cold, and the moon rode over Chanctonbury in a clear heaven. We did not speak. We plodded on all four, in single file, myself leading, along the .narrow path by the bare hedge-side. The frost had touched the grass, and the twigs of quickset were sharp in the moonlight like things engraved upon metal. We came out upon the Ashurst road. The mill was all sound in those days, and the arms of it stood against the sky. We walked abreast, but still in silence: the Poet slouched and Grizzlebeard let his stick trail along the ground, and even the Sailor had a melancholy air, though his strong legs carried him well. As for me I still pressed onwards a little ahead of the line, for I knew my goal near at hand, while for my three companions it was but an aimless trudge through the darkness after a long day's journey. So did we near that little house which God knows I love as well as any six or seven little houses in the world.

We came to the foot of a short hill: tall elms stood out against the sky a short way back from the road and beyond a little green. Beneath them shone the thatch of a vast barn, and next it a sight which I knew very well... the roof and chimney. I turned from the road to cross the green, and I took from my pocket a great key, and when my companions saw this their merriment returned to them, for they knew that I had found the shelter.

Grizzlebeard said: "Look how all doors in the County open to you!"

"Not all," I answered, "but certainly four or five."

I turned the key in the lock, and there, within, when I had struck a match, appeared the familiar room. The beam of the ceiling was a friend to me and the great down- fireplace inhabited the room. There, in that recess, lay on the dogs and the good pile of ashes, a faggot and four or five huge logs of cord wood, of oak from the clay of the Weald: I lit beneath all these a sheaf of verse I had carried about for months, but which had disappointed me, and the flames leapt up, in shape like leaves of holly. It was a good sight to see.

With the fire humanity returned; we talked, we spread our hands; one pulled the curtains over the long low window of the room, another brought the benches near the blaze, benches with high backs and dark with age; another put the boards on the trestles before it; another lit two candles and stood them in their own grease upon the boards. We were in a new mood, being come out of the night and seeing the merriment of the fire.

Next we would send to the Fountain for drink. For the inn of Ashurst is called the Fountain Inn. It is not the Fountain called the "Fount of Gold" of which it is written

"This is that water from the Fount of Gold Water of youth and washer out of cares."

The Fountain of Ashurst runs, by God's grace, with better stuff than water.

Nor is it that other Fountain which is called

"Fountain of years and water of things done."

For though there are honourable years round the Fountain of Ashurst, yet most certainly there are no regrets. It is not done for yet. Binge! Fountain, binge!

Nor is it the Fountain of Vaucluse, nor that of Moulton Parva or Thames -head, which ran dry when George III. died and has never run since: nor the Bandusian Spring. No, nor Helicon, which has been tapped so often that it gave out about thirtyfive years ago, and has been muddy ever since.

Nor is it of those twin fountains, of hot water the one and of cold the other, where the women of Troy were wont to wash their linen in the old days of peace ere ever Greek came to the land.

No, it was none of these but the plain Fountain of Ashurst, and thither did we plan to send for bread and cheese and for ale with which this fountain flows.

As for whom we should send, it was a selection. Not Grizzlebeard, out of the respect for age, but one of the other three. Not I, because I alone knew the house, and was busy arranging all, but one of the other two. Not the Poet, because, all suddenly, the Muse had him by the gullet and was tearing him. Already he was writing hard, and had verse almost ready for us, and said that this sort of cooking should not be disturbed.

Therefore it was the Sailor who was sent, though he hated the thought of the cold.

He rose up and said: "When in any company one man is found more courageous and more merry, more manly, more just, and more considerate, stronger, wiser, and much more holy than his peers, very generous also, yet firm and fixed in purpose, of good counsel, kind, and with a wide, wide heart, then if (to mention smaller things) he is also of the most acute intelligence and the most powerful in body of them all, it is he that is made the drudge and the butt of the others."

With that he left us, carrying a great two gallon can, and soon returned with it full of Steyning ale, and as he put it down he said: "The Fountain runs, but not with common water. It shall become famous among Fountains, for I shall speak of it in rhyme." Then he struck the Poet a hearty blow, and asked after the health of his poem.

The Poet. "It is not quite completed."

The Sailor (sitting down near the fire and pouring out the ale). "It is better so! Let us have no filling up of gaps. Beware of perfection. It is a will-o'-the-wisp. It has been the ruin of many."

Grizzlebeard. "Is there a tune?"

The Poet. "There is a sort of dirge,"

Myself. "Begin to sing."

The Poet

"Attend, my gentle brethren of the Weald,

Whom now the frozen field

Does with his caking shell your labour spurn,

And turn your shares and turn

Your cattle homeward to their lazy byres;"

The Sailor. "Oh! Lord! It is a dirge! The man chaunts like old Despair on a fast day! Come let us--"

Myself. "No, the Poet must end; let him continue."

The Poet, when he had looked reproachfully at the Sailor, filled his lungs a little fuller than before, and went on:

"Your cattle homeward to their lazy byres;

Oh! gather round our fires

And point a stave or scald a cleanly churn

The while

With ritual strict and nice observance near,

We weave in decent rhyme

A Threnody for the Departing Year."

The Sailor. "'Decent' is bad; and you cannot have a threnody for something that is not dead."

The Poet (continuing)

"And you that since the Aveary world began,

Subject and dear to man,

Have made a living noise about our homes,

You cows and geese and pigs and sheep and all the crew

Of mice and coneys too

And hares and all that ever lurks and roams

From Harting all the way to Bodiam bend,

Attend'

It is a solemn time,

And we assembled here

Advance in honourable rhyme

With ritual strict and nice observance near

Our Threnody for the Departing Year.

The year shall pass, and yet again the year

Shall on our reeds return

The tufted reeds to hurrying Arun dear. . . ,"

Here the Poet stopped and looked at the fire.

"Have you made an end?" said the Sailor with a vast affectation of solicitude.

"I have stopped," said the Poet, "but I have not finished."

"Why, then," said the Sailor, "let me help you on," and he at once began impromptu:

"As I was passing up your landing towns

I heard how in the South a goddess lay."

Then he added: "I can't go on."

The Poet

"She ends our little cycle with a pall."

Grizzlebeard. "Who does?"

The Poet. "Why, that goddess of his; I shall put her in and make her wind it up. The Sailor is not the only man here who can compose off-hand. I promise you...

"She ends our little cycle with a pall:

The winter snow the winter snow shall reverently fall

On our beloved lands,

As on Marana dead a winding sheet

Was laid to hide the smallness of her hands,

And her lips virginal:

Her virginal white feet."

When that dirge had sunk and they, as they sat or lay before the fire, had nodded one by one, sleep came upon them all three, weary with the long day's going and the keenness of the air. They had in their minds, that All Hallowe'en as sleep took them, the Forest of the high -land and the great Weald all spread below and the road downward into it, and our arrival beneath the nightly majesty of the Downs. They took their rest before the fire.

But I was still wakeful, all alone, remembering All- Hallows and what dancing there was in the woods that night, though no man living might hear the music, or see the dancers go. I thought the fire- lit darkness was alive. So I slipped to the door very quietly, covering the latch with my fingers to dumb its noise, and I went out and watched the world.

The moon stood over Chanctonbury, so removed and cold in her silver that you might almost have thought her careless of the follies of men; little clouds, her attendants, shone beneath her worshipping, and they presided together over a general silence. Her light caught the edges of the Downs. There was no mist. She was still frosty-clear when I saw her set behind those hills. The stars were more brilliant after her setting, and deep quiet held the valley of Adur, my little river, slipping at low tide towards the sea.

When I had seen all this I went back within doors, as noiselessly as I had come out, and I picked through the sleepers to my own place, and I wrapped myself in my cloak before the fire. Sleep came at last to me also; but that night dead friends visited me in dreams.