THE FOUR MEN
A FARRAGO

By Hilaire Belloc

The Southern Hills and the South Sea
They blow such gladness into me,
That when I get to Burton Sands
And smell the smell ofHome Lands,
My heart is all renewed and fills
With the Southern Sea and the South Hills.

3 teiu

toUttT

TO

Mrs. WRIGHT BIDDULPH
OF BURTON IN THE COUNTY OF SUSSEX, UNDER
WHOSE ROOF SO MUCH OF THIS

BOOK WAS WRITTEN

PREFACE
My county, it has been proved in the life of every man that though his loves are human, and therefore
changeable, yet in proportion as he attaches them to tilings unchangeable, so they mature and broaden.

On this account. Dear Sussex, are those women chiefly dear to men who. as the seasons pass, do but

continue to be more and more themselves, attain balance, and abandon or forget vicissitude. And on this
account. Sussex, does a man love an old house, which was his father’s, and on this account does a man
come to love with all his heart, that part of earth which nourished his boy-hood. For it does not change, or
if it changes, it changes very little, and he finds in it the character of enduring things.
In this love he remains content until, perhaps, some sort of warning reaches him, that even his own

county is approaching its doom. Then, believe me Sussex, he is anxious in a very different way; he would,
if he could, preserve his land in the flesh, and keep it there as it is. forever. But since he knows he camiot
do that, “at least.” he says. “I will keep her image, and that shall remain.” And as a man will paint with a

peculiar passion a face which he is only permitted to see for a little time, so will one passionately set down
one’s own horizon and one’s fields before they are forgotten and have become a different thing. Therefore
it is that I have put down in writing what happened to me now so many years ago. when I met first one man

and then another, and we four bound ourselves together and walked through all your land. Sussex, from end

to end. For many years I have meant to write it down and have not; nor would I write it down now. or issue
tlris book at all. Sussex, did I not know that you. who must like all created tilings decay, might with the rest

of us be very near your ending. For I know very well in my mind that a day will come when the holy place
shall perish and all the people of it and never more be what they were. But before that day comes, Sussex,
may your earth cover me. and may some loud-voiced priest from Arundel, or Grinstead, or Crawley, or

Storrington. but best of all from home, have sung Do Mi Fa Sol above my bones.

THE FOUR MEN
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 cam. 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 tilings that

are of moment to men you do not heed at all.”
As I thought this kind of tiling 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 Anin 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 even body 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 (fori 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; Iris 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 that 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 tilings 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 liis 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 Iris 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 aie 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 liis 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.”
Grrizzlebeard. “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 count}, 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 lied 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 in 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 bom. 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 Fuller
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 Brightling, 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 lus 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 lus 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 lus

great fortune upon the poor of Sussex and of Iris 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 bom, 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 h~ 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 arc 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 paving

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 tmsted 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 tme 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.
Grizzleheard. “Well, take mine and write down quickly what you had to write, for such tilings 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 Iris 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,

oughly 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 quany 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 tire 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 T 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.
Ί 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 Holdemess. 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 May-field 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 cormpt. distorted, and very unworthily changed from its tme original, and as it is a
matter which every child should know and every' grown man remember for the gloiy 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 bom 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 lookout, 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 country of Iris 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 bam. And this memorable tiling 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 veiy 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
tiring, 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 over­
seers 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 min
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 Cabum, and some of them upon
Rackham Hill, and some here and some there, but most of them upon Cissbury, and that is 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 bewildennent. and striking his spade into

the ground He hopped up on to the crest of the hiH 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 omamentry,

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 liis native speech,
and all the while St. Dunstan said:

“Argue, brother! Argue, learned counsel! Plead! 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 vety tongs wherewith the tiring 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 left for it but to go by the little lanes to Irkfreld, particularly remembering “The Black Boy” where

these little lanes began, and then, not sleeping at Irkfleld, 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 imr 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 Airdingly, 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 die 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, wc 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 mgs, but that we three were to stretch ourselves before the
fire, when it should be lit; and, talking so and still wideawake, we strack 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 Grizzlebcard. 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 1.1 lost a friend in
Lima once, but he lumed 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 Grizzlebcard 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 tiling 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 differences 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 money-dealers think of war in terms of justice).
Or the one man bits 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 bills; 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 tiling. 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 veiy 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 w as a doctor man whom the
ow ners shipped w ith us for a run to the Plate and back again. But I have never let it weigh upon my mind.’'

Grizzleheard. "The reason that the great poets have touched so little upon this thing is precisely
because it is the w orst 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 tme poets, w hether they w ill or no. are bound to emend the mind;

they are constrained to concern themselves with noble tilings. 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 w ho w as crossing a heath in a wild country not far from the
noise of the sea. The w ind 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
w here 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 w ith their colours, and all the stone w as carved; the altar w as all alight, and the place was

full of singing, for the tw enty 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 w ho served the Mass both had their faces from him, and

all in that congregation w ere hooded, and their faces w ere turned away from him also, but their singing was
loud, and he joined in it. He thought he w as in fairy land. And so he was. For as that Mass ended he fell
asleep, suffused with wannth, and his ears still full of music; but w hen 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 blow n in upon the altar steps, and over the whole of it the
thin and miserable light of a winter dawn.

"This story which I read went on to say that the man w ent on his journey under that new and unhappy
light of a stormy winter dawn, on over the heath in the w ild 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 w ould have seemed the same. This advantage first,
and then that loss succeeding, had utterly impoverished him, and Iris 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 tiling in the
world than what is the worst. For in the midst of this wood, where even tiling is happy except man, and

where the night should teach us quiet, we ought to learn or discover what is the best tiling 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 Iris satisfaction. Judging by which measure I determine that the best tiling 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 tiling (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 tiling 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 throw s 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-devil-

huntedness. 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, 1 do not know. Our elders say to us. Boy, choose the Money-Devil, give that Lord Iris nin ’

Both kinds of sport have seemed to me most miserable, but then 1 speak only for myself, and 1 am eccentric
in the holidays 1 choose and the felicity' 1 discover for myself in the conduct of my years.
“For, so far as 1 am concerned, my pleasure is found rather in having a game with the Great Thrcc-tocd
Sloth, which is the most amiable of hell’s emissaries, and all my rife have 1 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 stonns and land-falls 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 I 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 that! 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 pmne 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, tic, 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 tilings 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 tme end of man and lais felicity.”
The Poet. “I think you must be wrong.”
Myself. “Well then, since you know, what is the best tiling 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!”
Grizzlebeard. “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 liis back along the bench, liis 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

comer 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 bom: worse luck! I never sleep.”
“Where did you get those tilings,” 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 Fain , upon that heath called Over-the-world. 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 tiling. 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 tilings orderly
in the hut, the Sailor and I. We folded the blankets and stood up the uribumt 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 tilings 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 lulls 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 bom 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
hennitage 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, hungiy 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 tree it is that in this very spot a man might set bis 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, Wolstonbuiy
above New Timber and High-den and Rackham beyond” (for these are the names of the high hills) "and far
away westward I see under Duncton the Garden of Eden, I think, to which we are bound. And sitting
crowned in the middle place I see Chanetonbury, 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 cella " (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. ft 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! ft 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

tliis 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 liigh 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 Southwater 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 lull 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 maimer 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 Iris 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 are spread out to

glorify men’s eyes. He sang that song, which is still native to tliis 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:—

I

“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!

Ill
“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 Iris 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

tliis 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 tiling 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 tilings, 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

Intellectual.

of

Doubtful Doctrine and the Uncertain

£d5SSfe^Î?J7W5i=^

ÿ^aga^Ë£^5f^

“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 bum,
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 t>c8 °f You do not interrupt, for

tliis 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
ven 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,
(Gennanus 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
(Iris 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 good-day 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 veut!”
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 tme; for there is no such place as Kardanoel.
and Pelagius never lived there, and his doctrine was veiy 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 veiy 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 Amn 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 Hallowe’en. On this night of all nights in the year there is most stir and business
among the tilings 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 ball 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, frill 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
tliis sort that they mbit 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 tiny 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 w ise to cherish the bag-full. We leave it for the w ind to scatter, for it is

all dead leaves. Only you poets hang on to your bag and clutch it and cany 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 veiy soon for ever, these tilings 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! ft 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 four-footed 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 Iris
curious ways, which betray in him the reflection of his Creator, and mark him for an artist. The curing of

Hog Flesh till it became 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 atube 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.”
Grizzlebeard. “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 veiy diligently rub it into the flesh, and, rubbing, have a care to mb 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 nibbed 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 tins 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 Iris 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 non tell you (in the fashion of Bumand) 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 potpoise is sleek and cool.
But you'll find, if you look at that gambolling fool.

That his hide is covered with hair.
"Oh. 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 Iris 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, as 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, sumamed
ιπποκέφαλος 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 aide 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 Carnivorae, 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 y ou 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 ren­
dered sacred. It is the most perilous of human endeavors, 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 Hitter-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 imr 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

Vai 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 re peat the praises of the
inn at the Sign of the Chain of Gold, under a large mined castle, by a broad and veiy 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 veiy ready to believe it. It is tme also of imrs. 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 veiy 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 ob­

session 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 wliich 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 wliich 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 Unicom 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 Ledhuiy? 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 imrs enough in the world among wliich 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 eveiy 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 know 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 anus 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 bam, 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 which 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 ht 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 mn since: nor the Bandusian Spring. No, nor Helicon, which has been
tapped so often that it gave out about thirty-five 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 tilings) he is also of the most acute intelligence and the most powerful in body of them all, it is he
that is made the dmdge 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, ft 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, “ft is not quite completed.”
The Sailor (sitting down near the fire and pouring out the ale), “ft is better so! Let us have no filling up

of gaps. Beware of perfection. It is a will-o’-the-wisp, ft 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 its 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 chum
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 can not have a threnody for something that is not dead.”
The Poet (continuing)—
“And you that since the weary world began,

Subject and dear to man,
Have made a living noise about our homes,
Y our 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 Y ear.

The year shall pass, and yet again the year
Shall on our reeds return
The tufted reeds to hunying 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 fide 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.

THE FIRST OF NOVEMBER
1902

NEXT morning when I woke it was because the Poet was timidly walking about the room, making as
much noise as he dared, but unwilling to be longer alone.
The fire was out. and the small place looked mournful under that grey dawn. I could see through the
window that the weather had changed and the air was wanner. All the sky was hurrying cloud, and there
would be rain I thought from one time to another on that day. But it would be a good day I thought, for it

was All-Hallows, which balances the year, and makes a counterweight, as it were, to All Fools' in her
earlier part, when she is light and young, and when she has forgotten winter and is glad that summer is
near, and has never heard the name of autumn at all. or of the fall of leaves.

Grizzlebeard also stirred and woke, and then, last, the Sailor, rather stupored. and all of them looked at
me as much as to say:
"Have you no breakfast here?’’ But I. seeing what was in their minds, met them at once determinedly,

and said:
"In this house we breakfast after the fashion of the heroes, our fathers, that is. upon last night’s beer,
and the bread and cheese of our suppers. So did they breakfast who fought with De Montfort up on Mount

Hany at the other end of the county six hundred years ago and more, when they had marched all the day
before as it was, and were marshalled against the king with the morning. Sorely against their will! For there

is no fight in a man until it is past nine o'clock, and even so he is the better for coffee or for soup. But to­
day there is no fighting, but only trudging, so let us make our breakfast thus and be off.”
They were none of them content, but since I would have it so and since there was no help for it, they

drank that stale beer, a mug each, with wry faces, and nibbled a little at the stale bread. Then we left the
rest of the loaf and the cheese for the mice, who keep house for me there when I am away, and frighten off

newcomers by pretending that they are the spirits of the dead.
So we went out through the door and across the little green to a wobble road that is there, and by a way
across the fields to Steyning, where we should find the high road to Washington and Storrington and

Amberley Bridge, and so over to the country beyond Arun and the things we knew.

As we went south over those fields, with the new warmth of the hunying clouds above us and the
Downs growing higher and higher, the Poet saying what the others had spared to say, began to grumble.

For he said that beer was no breakfast for a man, but give him rather tea.
The Sailor. “Poet, I think you must be a vegetarian, and very probably (like most men of your luxury)
you are yet afraid of your body—a lanky thing, I grant.”

Myself. “Bum me those men who are afraid of the Flesh! Water-drinkers also, and caterwauling outers,

and turnip mumblers, enemies of beef, treasonable to the immemorial ox and the tradition of our human
kind! Pifflers and snifflers, and servants of the meanest of the devils, tied fast to halting, knock-kneed
Baphomet, the coward’s god, and chained to the usurers as is a mangy dog to a blind man!”

The Sailor. “Come, let us take it up! Hunt me them over the bills with hom and with hound! Drive
them, harry them, pen them, drown them in the river, and rid me them from our offended soil! They are the
betrayers of Christendom! They are the traducers of those mighty men our fathers, who upon the woodwork

of the Table and the Bed, as upon twin pillars, founded the Commonweal.”
Myself. “Come, Poet, are you not convinced?”
The Poet. “Of what? That I should have a decent respect for my body?”
The Sailor. “Respect go hang itself by the heels until it gets some blood into its pale face, and then take
a basting to put life into it!”

Grizzlebeard. “Do you not know, Poet, that by all these anti-belly tricks of yours you would canalise

mankind into the trench that leads to hell? For there is nothing that cannot be made to serve the Master of
Evil by abuse, nor anything which cannot by a just and reasonable enjoyment be made to glorify God. Have
you any lack of pleasure in this rush of the clouds above us? Or does he seem to you a niggler, the fellow
that rides the south-west wind?”
The Poet. “What is all this flood of yours, you three? What have I said about or against the Body?”

Myself. "Nay, Poet, but we will tell you more than you care to hear! Consider that glorious great tube a

gun, whence shells may be lobbed at such as are worthy of the game. Your man that smirks his hatred of
war is he that potters into the dirty adventures against the very weak (but by God’s providence his aim is
damnable), and he is the man that fees lawyers to ruin the poor.”
The Sailor. “What all this may have to do with the Body I know not. But this I say: Give it due
honour—treat it well, keep it with care. It is a complicated thing—you could not have made it, and if you

hurt it it is hard to mend. . . . Oh, my succinct and honourable Body! I cherish you! you are my friend! I
cannot do without you! On the day I have to do without you I shall be all at sea! With the eyes in you do I
read books written by women with a grievance, and with the ears of you do I hear tire noise of the
vulgarians, and with the feet of you do I enter the houses of the rich but fly the presence of fools! Most

profitable, consistent, homogeneous, and worthy Body! I salute you; I take comfort in you; I am glad

indeed they gave you to me for this brief mortal while! Little Body! Little body! Believe me. were I
wealthy I would cram you with good things! Nor was I ever better pleased than when I heard from a
Franciscan in Crawley that when they hang me I shall not lose you altogether, but that you will return to me
some time or another;—but when exactly was never fully set down. Anyhow. I shall catch on to you again
and recover you very properly set up and serviceable, without bump or boss, a humpless, handsome tiring!”

The Poet. “All tliis is quite beside the mark, and you have vented upon me nothing but your temper for

lack of breakfast. Never in my life have I believed the things which you would have me believe, nor said a
word against this vessel which holds my soul as tight as a bottle does a cork, and of which I know so much,

but of my soul so little, though my soul is my only companion.
Grizzlebeard. “The Body is a business which we all know too well, but the Soul is another matter. For

I knew a man once (not of tliis county ) who said there was no soul, and would have proved it. He had once
long ago by an apparatus of Iris tried to prove there was a soul—but the proof was lacking. So next he
naturally thought there could be no soul, and he set out to prove that on his four fingers and his thumb,
without gimcracks. pragmatically and in a maimer convincing to the blind. And he set out with an apparatus
to find proof that there was no soul—but that proof was also lacking. So let us have done with all this, and

find our way through tliis tall screen of trees to Steyning. and to the good house that is there, and have
something Christian to prepare us for our road. For the Lord knows that Myself and Queen Elizabeth were
wrong in making small, stale beer and bread a proper breakfast for a man. Strong beer and beef are the

staple.”
The Sailor. “Besides which All-Hallows is a great feast, and feeding goes with feasting. We will knock
at Myself’s door when we are next worried by the duty of fasting for some great evil to be atoned, or when

ugly Lent conies round.”
When we had got into the town of Steyning, the Sailor, tlie Poet. Grizzlebeard, and I, we went into the
inn. hotel, guest-house, or hosteliv. and there very prettily asked as we passed the host that cold meat and
ale might he served us in tlie smoking-room.
But when we got into the smoking-room, the Sailor, the Poet. Grizzlebeard, and I, we were not a little
annoyed to see in a comer of the room, crouched up against the fire in a jolly old easy chair, which little

suited his vile and scraggy person, a being of an unpleasant sort. He had a hump which was not his fault,
and a sour look which was. He was smoking a long churchwarden pipe through his sneering lips. There was
very little hair upon his face, though he did not shave, and the ear turned towards us, the left ear, had been

so broken that it looked pointed, and made one shudder. The sneer on his lips was completed by the long

slyness of his eye. His legs were as thin as sticks, and he had one crossed over the other; his boots had
elastic sides to them, and horrible tags fore and aft, and above them were measly grey socks thin and
wrinkled. He did not him nor greet us as we appeared.
It was our fashion during this memorable walk to be courteous with all men and familiar with none—

unless you call that familiarity when the Poet threw beer at a philosopher to baptize him and wake him into
a new world, as you shall later read.
We therefore sat awkwardly round the edges of the table, the Poet at the end of it opposite to the
window that gives on the stable-yard, Myself next to him at the comer, next to me the Sailor, and beyond

him Grizzlebeard, who seemed the most contented of us all. and was in no way put out by the blasted being
near the fire, but rather steeped himself in memories of his own, and had eves that looked further than the

walls. We, the younger men. drummed our fingers a little upon the table till the beer was brought in. and
then began to wonder what wines were kept in so old a house, and the Poet and the Sailor alternately told

lies; the Poet telling of rare wines he had found in the houses of the rich, the Sailor talking of wines that
never were in ports far off beyond the wide peril of the seas. Grizzlebeard, hearing them confusedly, said
that his father had bought a Tokay in 1849 at 204s. the dozen. This also was a lie. And I, to please them,

spoke of true wines, notably of that wine which comes from the inside of a goat-skin in Vai d’ Aran,
Sobrarbe, and the roots of Aragon: the vilest and most tonic wine in the world, alive with the power of the

goat.
While we thus spoke (in a quiet way so as not to offend) the beer came in, and our talk drifted on to the
price of wines, and from that to those who could afford the price of wine, and from that to the rich, and

from that to the very rich. And at last the Poet said:
“I should like to be veiy rich.”
Whereupon, to the annoyance of us all, the nasty fellow next to the fire took his long, silly pipe out of
his mouth, blew a little blue wisp of smoke without body in it from his lips, and said:
“Ugh! What do you call very rich?”
The Poet was by nature a hesitating man, and he was frightened by one speaking to him
unexpectedly—and one so hideous! So he said vaguely:

“Oh! not to have to think of things; and not to be for ever in the jeopardy of honour; to be able to dip
when one liked into one's purse and to pay for what one wanted, and to succour the needy, and to travel or
rest at pleasure.” Then he added, as men will who are of infinite imagination and crammed with desires,
“My wants are few.”
He was thinking, perhaps, of a great house upon an eastern hill that should overlook the Mediterranean

Sea, and yet be easily in touch with London, and yet again be wholly isolated from the world, and have
round it just so many human beings as he might wish to have there, and all at his command.
I, sitting next to him, took up the conversation as in a game of cards, and began:

“That can’t be done! When you are wishing for wealth you are by the nature of things wishing for what
man allows and controls. You are wishing, therefore—”
“Don’t preach!” said the Person by the fire. The Sailor, to make tilings pleasanter, began hurriedly:

“If I were very rich I should want a number of definite tilings, as this gentleman said,” waving his
hands towards that gentleman to avoid all unpleasantness, which is a way they have in the foc’sle.
“He didn’t say it,” I murmured. "I said it.”
Whereat the Sailor kicked vigorously and wide under the table by way of hint, and caught the Poet,

who howled aloud. Then only was the Person by the fire moved to a single gesture. He looked round
sharply with his head and a twist of liis eyes, not changing a muscle of liis body, but glancing as an animal
glances, and moving as an animal moves.

“Go on!” he commanded.
The Sailor was a combative man: but he mastered himself, and went on gradually:
“Oh! I should like to give big dinners pretty often and go to plays.”
Which was a silly sentence, but true enough. He corrected it, adding:
"And I should like to have a jolly little house, and five or ten or twenty or thirty, or perhaps a hundred

acres of land; and there would have to be wood upon it. And I should hate to be near a railway, so I would

have a motor; and I must have a telephone, but it must not bring people to the place, so I would have a
private telephone wire stretching for miles. And one must have water on one’s place. And I should like

electric light for the offices, but one wants candles for the rooms.”

When he had got thus far the man near the fire jerked his head over his shoulder at Grizzlebeard. The
Sailor stopped astonished, and Grizzlebeard, a little frightened I think, said rapidly:
“Really, I don’t know! I don’t think I want to be very rich. I suppose I am very rich by any good
standard. My house has twenty-three rooms in it, counting the old scullery, which is now a cellar. And I
have quite four acres of dug garden-land, and undug land not to be counted. I am a gentleman also, and I

can put up as many of my friends as care to come and see me. I have four horses, money in the bank, and
no debts. I bum my own wood, and build with my own timber; and I quarry my stone out of my own
ground. Really I need no more!”
He remembered something, however, and he said:
“It would be a good thing to help the nations. It would be a good thing to enfranchise the nations which
are caught in the usurer’s hellish web.”
He was silent. Many memories moved in him, but he was too old to think that much could be done

with the world; and how could money do much against the abominations of the world?
It was the Sailor who found courage enough to tackle the Johnnie in the chair.
“And what would you do,” he said aggressively, “if you were very rich?”
The Man in the Chair did not move. “I am talking to you, sir,” said the Sailor sharply.
“I know that,” snarled the Man in the Chair in an inhuman way. Then, just before the Sailor exploded,
he added,
“I should sit here in this chair smoking this pipe with this very tobacco in it and looking at this very
fire. That’s what I should do, and there would be you four men behind me.”
“Oh, you would, would you?” said the Sailor. “And how do you know that you would be just as you
are?”
“Because I am very rich already,” said the Man in the Chair in a low metallic voice, full of dirty

satisfaction. ... “I am exceedingly rich. I have more money than any other man in the large town of the
north where I was bom. Yes, I’m rich enough.”
He leaned forward towards the fire for a moment, then he took out a card and tossed it to the Sailor.

“That’s my name,” he said. And we bade him “Good day,” and all went out.
We took the road so as not to go through Wiston Park, for though the house there is as good a sight as
any in England, why, it was not ours, and we went past that field where the Saint wheeled his mother in a

wheelbarrow, and cursed the haymakers, so that it always rains there in mowing time.

For he was, as the phrase goes in those parts, a Holy Man, and had great power. But as he was very
poor, no one guessed it. And first, in following God, he sold his motor to buy a brougham, and then he sold
Iris brougham to buy a dog-cart, and then he sold his dog-cart to buy a broken down, paint-scratched, nasty

go-cart; and then, still serving God, not man, he sold Iris go-cart and his nag and bought a wheelbarrow. For
some thing he must have to take his old mother to church in. Now all this happened in the year of our Lord
713, just after Sussex got the Faith and hundreds of years before she lost it again, and a little before St.
Leonard cursed the nightingales.
So he was taking his mother to church in the wheelbarrow when the haymakers laughed at him as he

passed, and the Saint said: “Laugh men, weep heaven.” And immediately there fell on that field only two
inches of rain in half-an-hour, and that on the two-day swathes all ready for Tedding, and Lord! how they
did curse and swear! And from that day to this, whether hay time come in May month or in June, it rains in
the hay time on that one field.

Now when we had gone about a mile from Steyning and had so turned into the Washington Road, the
Sailor bethought him of the card, and pulled it out, and there was written—

Mr. Deusipsenotavit,
Brooks’s.

The Sailor looked at it right away up. and upside down, and sideways, and held it up to the light so as
to look through it as well, and then said:
“It is a foreign name."

Grizzlebeard took it from him, and after a close view of it said:
“It is a Basque name: it is agglutinative.”
And we all went on to Washington, talking of a thousand tilings.

As we so talked there came over the edge of the high hills that stood like a wall above us, and from the
burn ing clouds before the south-west wind, the first drops of rain, and the Poet said:
“What! Must we go forward on this road although it is raining?"
The Sailor. “Yes. Ninny-lad, most certainly! What else were roads made for but to give a man hard
going over wet land?”
The Poet. “Well. I say there is a time for everything, and rain-time is not the time for walking on a

road.”
The Sailor. “Why. then, you mean that autumn days, such as these, are not to be taken at their full
measure, nor to give us their full profit, but that we are to go down to diy death without knowing the taste

of Sussex air in the rain?”
The Poet. “No. I say it aloud, there are days for everything, although we do not know the reason why,
and that is why I never will be shaved on a Sunday, for I count it unlucky.
“You may have noticed up and down England some men with nasty little undergrowths upon their
upper lips alone, and others with great wild beards like Grizzlebeard here, and others with moth-eaten

beards as it were—the worst of all; depend upon it they shaved, each of them, at some time or another of a

Sunday.
“It is a day of rest, and there is no labour like shaving. It is a day of dignity, and there is no grimacing,
sour-faced, donnish occupation like that of shaving. So I say: ‘There is a day for everything, and everything
has its lucky time except burial. ’”
Myself. “There now! And that was the veiy tiling I was going to say had its most varying days! For

does not the old rhyme go:
‘Buried on Monday, buried for health,
Buried on Tuesday, buried for wealth;
Buried on Wednesday, buried at leisure;
Buried on Thursday, buried for pleasure;
Buried on Friday, buried for fun.
Buried on Saturday, buried at one.’”

The Sailor. “Why?”
Myself. “There you show yourself what you are, a man that follows the sea. For on land here we knock

off work at twelve on Saturday—that is parsons, gravediggers, coffin-carriers, mourners, and the rest, who

very willingly dispose of the dead between seven and five of a week day, but do claim their half-holiday.
But you sailors may claim your half till you are black in the face, another disposes of your time And even if

a law were passed that you should loll about from eight bells on Saturday noon to the dog watch of
Monday, as we do on land, that other would tickle you up with a snorter before you had lit your pipes.
Tumble up there the lot! Watch? Ill watch you, watch or no watch! Tumble up there and take it lively! Run
up and clew them in till your hands freeze! Pull you lubbers, pull! Squirm over the yard like a row of
tumblers at a fair, and make fast and be damned to you! Better for you than for me.

“Then the song goes on (for us jolly people on land; as for you at sea, you may die and drown as you
will):
‘Buried on Sunday after eleven,
You get the priest and you go to heaven.

Grizzlebeard. "This is rank folly, for absolution is for living men.”

Myself. “There you go, Grizzlebeard, verbalising and confumbling, and chopping logic like the Fiend!
exegetic and neo-scholastic, hypograstic. defibulating stuff! An end to true religion! Soft, old man, soft: the

blessing over a coffin does no man any harm, and is a great solace to uneasy spirits. You are for ever
running into the very gate of heresy with your determinations. It is a bad and a feverish state you have
fallen into. Make amends while you yet have time! Or perhaps when you come to die you shall have no

candles round your coffin and no large black cloth over it spangled with silver tears, and no bishop to

sprinkle it; nay, who knows, not even a monk nor a parish priest, nor so much as a humble little curate from
the castle.

“When death is on you. Grizzlebeard, I would have you write out in large black letters on a big white
board, ‘THIS MAN BELIEVED,’ and hang it round your neck and so die. In this way there will be no
error.
“For errors are made in this matter I assure you, and one man, though secretly devout (he came from
near my own farm), was by such an error buried anyhow and in common fashion with prayers only, so that

he had to haunt Normans (as they called the house) on the Dial Post Road. And a job it was, I can tell you!

For the people in that house feared ghosts, and when he walked, though he walked never so gently, they
would give great blood-curdling shrieks, such as threw him into a trembling and a sweat—poor spirit!—
until the ghost-masters who set the uncomforted dead such tasks had mercy on him, and let him go haunt
the Marine Parade at Worthing, where no man minded him.”

The Poet. “Then how was he rested at last?”
Myself. “Why, in the usual fashion; by the drawing of a pentagon upon the sand and the sacrificing in

its middle of a pure white hen. I have done.”
The Sailor. “It is as well, for it has stopped raining.”
And so it had. To our comfort and the changing of our minds.

So all along the road under Chanctonbury, that high hill, we went as the morning broadened: along a

way that is much older than anything in the world: a way that leads from old Pevensey Port through the

Vale of Glynde and across Cuckmere and across Ouse, and then up to the height of Lewes, and then round

the edge of the Combe, and then down on to the ledge below the Downs, making Court House and
Plumpton Comer, West Meston, Clinton, and Hollow Pie Combe (though between these two it branches

and meets again, making an island of Wolstonbmy Hill), and then on by Poynings and Fulking and
Edhurton, and so to the crossing of the water and the Fort of Bramber, and so along and along all under the
Downs until it passes Arun at Houghton iBridge. and so by Bury and Westburton, and Sutton and Duneton.
Graffham and Cocking, and Diddling and Harting—all Sussex names and all places where the pure water
having dripped through the chalk of the high hills, gushes out in fountains to feed that line of steadings and
of human homes. By that way we went, by walls and trees that seemed as old as the old road itself, talking

of all those tilings men talk of, because men were made for speech and for companionship, until we came to
the crossroads at Washington; and there, said I to my companions:
Myself. “Have you heard of Washington Inn?”

Grizzlebeard. "Why. yes, all the world has heard of it, and when Washington the Virginian, a general
overseas, was worritting his army together a long time ago, men hearing Iris name would say:
"Washington? ... Washington? ... I know that name. Then would they remember the inn at Washington,

and smile. For fame is of this character. It goes by the sound of names.”
The Poet. “For what, then, is the inn of Washington famous?”
The Sailor. “Not for a song, but for the breeder of songs. You shall soon learn.”
And when he had said that we all went in together, and. in the iim of Washington, we put it to the test

whether what so many men had sung of that ale were tme or no. But hardly had the Sailor put his tankard
down, when he cried out in a loud voice:
"It is true, and I believe!”

Then he went on further: “Without any doubt whatsoever this nectar was brewed in the waxing of the
moon and of that barley which Bmtus brought hither in the first founding of this land! And the water

wherein that barley-com was brewed was May-day dew. the dew upon the grass before sunrise of a May­
day morning. For it has all the seven qualities of ale, which are:—
K Aleph = Clarity,

□ Beth

= Savour,

Gimel = A lively hue,
*T Daleth = Lightness,
H He

= Profundity,

1

= Strength retained,

Van

and lastly, T Zayin, which is Perfection and The End.
“It was seeking this ale, I think, that Alexander fought his way to Indus, but perished miserably of the

colic in the flower of his age because he did not find it.
“Seeking this ale, I think it was, that moved Charlemagne to ride both North and South, and East and
West, all Iris life long in those so many wars of his whereof you may read in old books; for he lived to be

two hundred years and more, and Iris bramble beard became as white as sea-foam and as tangled, and his

eyes hollow with age. And yet he would not abandon the quest for Mitchell’s Ale which they sell at
Washington: but he could not find it. and so died at last of chagrin.
“And hearing of this ale from a Familiar. Aldabaran sought Saragossa in disguise, and filled ten years
full, planning and devising how to get it from the Emir of El Kazar, who was in league with the Evil One;

then, in the very moment of his triumph, and as he was unlocking that cellar door, a guardian slave slew
him with a sword, and his soul went forth, leaving the cask untasted.
“So also St. Offa, of Swinestead in Mercia, fainting at the thought of this ale which tempting demons

had let him smell in a dream, was near to missing his salvation. He left his cell and went out beyond Kent,
over the narrow seas into the Low Countries, and wandered up and down for seven years, until at last he

went distracted and raving for lack of the liquor. But at last he was absolved at Rome.
“Then you have that Orlando, whose fury was aroused by nothing else but a passionate need for this
same brew. For he had led a peaceful life as a cobbler in Upper Beeding until he heard by chance of this
ale, and immediately he set out to seek it, and in so doing was led to all his heroic deeds and also to wounds
and dissolution at last, and died without ever putting his lips to the tankard.
“Shall I make mention of Gastos or of Clemens? Of Artaxerxes, of Paulus or Ramon, who all expected
and desired this thing in vain? Or recall Praxiteles or Zeno his cousin, Periscopolos the Pirate. Basil of Cy­
rene, or Milo? They also wasted themselves upon that same endeavour. But to me who am nobler than
them all, it has been granted to drink it, and now I know that it resolves all doubts, and I shall go to my
great death smiling. It is the satisfaction of all yearnings, and the true end of all philosophies. Of the

Epicurean, for it is a final happiness. Of the Stoic, for it leaves me indifferent to every' earthly thing. Of the
Hegelian, for it is ft. And I see in the depths of it, the conclusion of desire and of regret, and of recollection

and of expectation, and of wonder. This is that of which the great poets sang when they said that time itself

should be dissolved, of which the chief of them has written;
‘Till one eternal moment stops his powers:
Time being past then all time past is ours. ’

ft is indeed good beer; and when we leave our valleys we will drink it altogether in Paradise.”
Grizzlebeard. “You are right.”

The Poet. “Yes, you are.
Myself. “We are all right together.”
Grizzlebeard, “ft is little wonder that for such as this or worse, the Sons of the Acheans fought ten long
years round Troy, or that, nourished by this royal thing, the men of Sussex in old time defeated all their

foes, and established themselves firmly upon this ancient land.”
Myself. “Yes, indeed! Cadwalla. who was the first King of Sussex to leam the tme Faith, and who

endeared himself for ever to St. Wilfrid and to the Pope, by giving to the one ten thousand, but to the

second twenty thousand barrels of this most admirable and impossible-to-be-too-much-praised Cervisian
nectar (you may find his tomb in Rome), was moved to extend our power right over sea, even to the Isle of
Wight. When he had subdued that land, he took the two princes that were the heirs to its throne, and put
them to death. And he conquered all Sussex and all Kent and was mighty' before his thirtieth year—all on
the ale of Washington, Mitchell’s Ale of the Washington Inn! Of such potency it was!”

I looked through the window as I so concluded, and there again had come the storms of rain.

“We will not start.” I said, “ft is raining.”
The Poet. “But just now .. .”
Myself. “Oh. Poet! will you also be teasing us with logic, or have you not learnt in your little life how
one man may drive off for a game a whole drove of horses, while another may not so much as glance over a
little new set maple hedge no higher than Iris knee? So it is! Let us hear no more of justice and the rest, but

sit here snug in the middle of the world, and make Grizzlebeard do the talking. He has lived longest and
knows most, yet has he given us neither a story nor a song.”

“You have told us,” said Grizzlebeard willingly enough, “the story of Cadwalla, who had that fine
imperial instinct in him which made him chafe even within the wide limits of his Sussex kingdom, and sail
over the sea with that great expedition of his to conquer and annex the Isle of Wight, the two princes, heirs

to which, he also very imperially murdered. Your story made me think of all those other times in history
when the armies and the banners of this immortal county have shown themselves in distant lands.”
The Sailor. “It is interesting that you should know so much, dear Grizzlebeard, but those are far-off
things, and we have no tme record of them.”

Myself. “Yet, Grizzlebeard, since you are upon this topic, I very often have much desired to know how
it is that this county of ours seems everywhere to exceed its natural boundaries, and to have planted a foot
north, east, and west in the territory of others; guarding itself, as it were, by bastions and belts of territory

not its own, and preserving them as symbols and guarantees of its great military power.”
The Poet. “Nay, doubtless, the county of Sussex would have expanded southward were it not that it
was there contained by the sea, which will brook no man’s foot.”
The Sailor. “Say rather that there was no annexation southward, because the salt sea, being
unharvested, there was nothing worth annexing; but, even as it is, the fishermen of Sussex will not have

foreigners prying about in their preserves, and from the Owers Bank right away to Dungeness, if you will
hail a fishing-boat at night he will answer you in the Sussex way. Nor are men of strange seaboards
tolerated in that sea.”
Myself. “I still desire to ask you. Grizzlebeard, since you are the oldest of us, and have in your house so
many papers and records, not to speak of in your mind so many ancient traditions of this inviolate land,
how is it that Sussex has sovereignty over and beyond the marsh of the Rother, and over and beyond the

ridge of hills wherein take their rise the Adur, the Amn, and the Ouse? For I have often looked at that flat
piece without any boundary of its own beyond Crawley, in which all the men seem to be Surrey men, and
which I yet notice to be marked Sussex upon the map. How comes it that we are the masters not only of our
own rivers, but also of the head waters of the Snouzling Mole, the Royal Medway, and other lesser

streams?”
"It so happens,” answered Grizzlebeard, with immense satisfaction, “that I can answer that question.
For this great thing was done at about the time when the tyrant Napoleon was pursuing Iris petty ambitions
among the beggarly nations of the Continent, and it had its origin and spring in that most beloved part of
this beloved county whence I also take my being, and where I also was bom—I mean the parts round about
Hail-sham, where the flats invite the sea. There has the fate of our country been twice decided. And since
also the full story of the Great Fight has been preserved in the diaries and records of my own family, I am
well fitted to tell it to you. For the next few hours I will retail it. Though the rain passes over and the sun

comes out, still shall I go on. for it is a favourite of mine. I will go on and on, and relate unendingly the

same while you yawn and stretch; nay, though you implore me to cease or attempt to coerce me. yet shall I
continue the stoiy until I have completed it.

“You must know, then, that the king who was over Sussex at that time being then in the fortieth year of
Iris age and the twenty-second of his reign, a man not only august but universally loved, and one veiy
tender to the consumers of malt liquor, but a strict governor of brewers (God rest his soul!), a song arose in
those parts concerning the tyrant Napoleon and his empty boasting, that when he had conquered Pmssia,

Russia, Bomesia. Holland, all Italy and Spain, he would challenge the power of Sussex itself before he had
done with warfare; and this song, let me tell you, ran as follows.”

With this Grizzlebeard, clearing his aged throat, tunefully carolled out the following manly verse in the
tune to which all Sussex songs have been set. without exception, since the beginning of time—the tune
which is called “Golier.”

“If Bonaparte
Shud zummon d'Eart
To land on Pevensey Level.
I have two sons
With our three guns
To blarst un to the de-e-vil.”
“It is.” continued Grizzlebeard, when the long drawn notes of the challenge had died away, “a very
noble and inspiring song, compared with which ‘To the North. Merry Boys.’ is but music-hall blare, and
the ‘Marseillaise’ a shrieking on a penny whistle.
“Now this song.” he continued, “being of its right virtue and gloiy a hymn that could not but spread far
among men, travelled all over our county, being known and commented on in Lewes in the king’s own
castle, and eastward all along the beach to Hastings, and beyond that to the banks of Brede and over Brede

to Rother. which was in those days the boundary of this land; for we had not then begun to give laws to
East Guildford, on the left bank of the river mouth.
“As luck would have it. it travelled, perhaps in the speech of pedlars, or printed as a broadside and sold

from their packs, all up the valley of Rother and up among the Kentish men, and was soon known in Apple­
dore. Small Hydre, and so on, right up to Goudhurst itself, which stands upon a hill. And here it was that
ill-fortune lay in wait for the Kentish men, who had always been a proud lot and headstrong, though relying
upon St. Thomas of Canterbury and other worthies, and furiously denying that they had tails. For they had

no more humour about them than you will find in a cathedral verger, and so much for Kent.
“Well, then, by the time this great song had come up on to Goudhurst, where it stands upon its hill, the
Kentish men in their pride and folly, or perhaps only in their ignorance (for I would not do them wrong),

turned it to suit their own purpose and vanity and had begun to sing it thus:
‘If Bonaparte
Shud zummon d’Eart
To land on Pevensey Level.
There are three men
In Horsemonden
Will blarst unto the de-e-vil.’

“Which corruption and degradation of so great a strain they very frequently repeated over their cups at
evening in the security of their inland homes.
"Now, when news of this came into Sussex and reached the king, where he sat in his castle of Lewes,
considering Iris own greatness and the immensity of the world he could scarcely believe Iris ears. For that

the Kentish men should sing songs of their own and even put on airs when it so suited them. nay.
timorously raid over Rother to pinch a pig when the good-man was from home, he thought tolerable

enough; but that they should take the song which was. as it were, the very' heart of Sussex, and turn it to
their own uses, was. he thought, quite past bearing, and. indeed, as I have said, he could hardly credit it.
“So he very courteously sent a herald mounted upon a little brown donkey and beautifully apparelled,
who came to the King of Kent, where he sat or rather sprawled at meat in Canterbury . And this herald,
blowing his trumpet loudly in the King of Kent’s ear, delivered him the letter of the King of Sussex, and
spurring round his steed, very' gallantly capered away.

“The King of Kent, as you may well believe, was quite unable to read, but there is no lack of clerks in
Canterbury, so he had one brought, who trembling broke open the seal whereon were stamped the arms of
Sussex, and read to Iris master as follows:
‘“Brother Kent: We hear, though we will not believe it. that certain of your subjects (without your
knowing it, we will swear) have taken to their own use our private anthem, and are singing it wantonly
enough in Goudhurst and sundry other of your worthy hamlets; and that, not content with this usurpation of
our sovereign right and of the just possessions of our dear people (we are even told, though our soul refuses

to entertain it), they have so murdered, changed, and debased this Royal Hymn as to use it in praise of their
own selves, and in particular of a steading and sties called Horsemonden. of which neither we nor we think
any other man has ever heard.

“'We do you. therefore, to wit, by these presents, brother Kent, that you do instantly command and
proclaim by heralds throughout your dominions that under pain of horrible torture and death this practice
shall immediately cease, if. indeed, we are rightly informed that it has arisen.
"‘Greetings and fraternal benedictions.— Given by us in our castle of Lewes on the first day of the
October brewing, in the year 3010 since Brutus landed from Troy and laid the foundations of our house.—

(Signed) SUSSEX.’

“The King of Kent when this message was read to him ordered the unhappy priest to immediate
execution (as is the custom in that county when they deal with clerics, but no sooner had he done so than he
regretted the act, for not knowing how to write he must needs dictate another letter. So he sent for another
priest, who was a long tune coming, but when he came bade him write as follows:
“‘Brother Sussex, a word in your ear: We may not be book-lamed, but we will stand no nonsense, and
so sure as hops are hops we will, with some small fragment of our forces, but sufficient to the purpose,

come up into your land and hany it. and bum down the steadings and the ricks and cany away all the pigs
and cattle; and we will stonn your castle, and we will put a new Bishop in Chichester in the place of your
Bishop, and we will put our reeves into Midhurst, Horsham, Amndel. and other places, and as for your
Royal seat there we will put our own nephew upon it. But as for you we will keep you in chains.— KENT. ‘
“This letter he despatched to the King of Sussex, who when he received it conceived it impossible to
avoid war.
“Yet he hoped in his honourable and gentle heart that this last extremity should be avoided, and he sent
yet another letter, putting it in words even more fair and mannerly than the first, saying that he desired no

more than peace with his due rights and honour; and this letter he sent by a herald as he ha.d sent the first.
But this second herald the King of Kent put to death, so that now there was no choice but to take arms. So
the King of Sussex summoned his army to meet him within fourteen days in the courtyard of the best inn of

Lewes, which was in those days called the Turk’s Head, but has since been destroyed by those wicked men
who hate inns and all other good and lovable things. Marshalling his army there, and seeing to their

accoutrements and putting them in good heart, he took the road for Brede. and posted himself upon the
height of that hill which has ever since been called BATTLE, facing towards the rising sun.
“The day was the 14th of October, the hearts of all were merry and high, and every man was prepared

to do most dreadful tilings. But how the fight was joined, and how it went, and of the wonderful deeds done
in it and of its imperishable effects I must next tell you.”
The Poet. “I should like to hear the Kentish version of this tale.”

“You must know. then, that the King of Sussex, being thus posted a little before sunrise upon the hill
now called Battle, and looking eastward over Brede, he first harangued all his men in proper fashion, and

drew them up with skill into a line, urging them whatever they did not to break their rank until they should
have defeated the enemy, which, when they had accomplished it. they were free to pursue. And having so
spoken he observed coming across the valley the forces of Iris enemy, the King of Kent, armed with long

hop-poles, and carrying themselves in very fierce demeanour. Nay. as they marched they most insolently

sang the song which was the cause of all this quarrel; and the Horsemonden contingent in particular, which
was in the van, or place of honour, gave forth with peculiar violence the new lines they had composed to
their own glory.

“Though this sight, as you may imagine, was malt vinegar and pickles to the men of Sussex, they
stirred not a foot, and they said not a word, but in a grim and determined maimer did they turn up the
sleeves of their right arms, spit into their palms, and very manfully clench their ash-plants, wherewith they

did thoroughly determine to belabour and bang the invaders of their happy homes. And there should be
mentioned, in particular, the men of Hailsham, my dear native place, who on that day carried ash-plants so
heavy and huge that ten men of our time could hardly carry one. though they should stagger under it as
builders do under a scaffolding pole.
“Now the men of Kent began to climb the hill, the men of Sussex watching them silently

5k ML « JC.
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from above, and being most careful in their order to preserve all due regard, and not to walk upon the

ornamental beds, or to disturb the shrubberies of the kind gentleman who had permitted them to draw up
their line in the grounds of Battle Abbey. For in those gardens, note you. is the position which all the great

generals of Ins staff had pointed out to the King of Sussex, saying that it was ‘a key.’ and though he could
make no sort of guess what that might mean, there had he drawn up Iris array.
“When the men of Kent felt the steepness of the lull, their song died away; they began to puff and to

blow; and their line, which they had ordered like so many cattle drovers, was all to pieces, so that while the
first of their men. and the leanest, were already approaching the men of Sussex, the last were still tying up

their shoe-laces at the bridge, or arguing with the little old man in green corduroy who kept the level crossing over the railway. So he was assuring them that a train was signalled, and that their advance was
most dangerous; but they were protesting that if he would but let them through the wicket gate, which

stands by the side of the great railway gates, they could pop across before it came.

“This disarray and grievous lack of generalship in the ranks of Kent was the min of that force, seeing
that it is laid down in all books of military art that if a line be broken it has lost its strength. But, as you may
guess, the art was all on our side, the folly and misfortune upon that of our enemies, whom the God of
Battles had already devoted to a complete discomfiture.
"For when the first arrivals of them came to the crest of the hill, all puffed and blown with their
climbing, some were banged in the face, others swiped upon the sides, others heavily pushed in the chest,

and others more painfully caught upon the point of the chin. Others again were blinded by stout blows in
the eye. or turned silly by clever cuts upon the comer of the jaw, whangs upon the noddle, and other tactical
feats too numerous to mention. For our king, and yet more his staff, and generals and quartermasters too,
were great masters of the art of war. In this skilful manner, then, were the foremost men of Kent
sophistically handled, until at last the whole score of them (for the vanguard were at least of that number)
broke and ran for cover, and by that action threw into a confusion and stampede the other hundred or so

who were still straggling up the hill. Nor was there any heart left in the men of Kent save in the mouths of a
few (and their king was one of them), who, having taken refuge in an upper room of the inn that stands by

Brede, shouted out mingled encouragement and menace, and bade the fighters in the road below play the
man. But these men. considering rather the banging they were getting than the words of their commanders
up there in safety, altogether and at one moment fled, bunched into one lump, very frightened and speedy,
and spreading rumours that their pursuers were not men but devils. And as they ran they threw their hop­
poles down to give them greater speed, and some cast off their coats, and many more lost their hats as they
ran. and in general they fell into a rout and confusion.

"As you may imagine, the men of Sussex had by this time the word of command to fall upon them and
spare them not at all. Which order they obeyed, belabouring the men of Kent vilely with their ash-plants,
and herding and harrying and shepherding them together into the narrow pass of the level-crossing, where
they all pushed and screamed, and, especially those on the outermost part who were the recipients of the
ash-plant blessing, showed an immoderate eagerness to be off.

“At last the train of which I spoke having passed, and the little man in green corduroy who kept the
level-crossing having consented to open the gates, they all poured through in a great stream, tearing for
their lives with one half of the men of Sussex after them, pursuing and scattering the foe in every direction,
while the other half remained behind in Brede, for a purpose I will presently tell you.

“The men of Kent then being broken and dispersed all over the countryside, some took refuge in Egham
Wood, and others fled to Inkpin, and the more stalwart but not the more brave worked round as best they
could to Robertsbridge, while a dozen or more ran to earth in Staplecross. So all that countryside was
strewn with hiding and crouching men, some of whom got away and some of whom were taken prisoners,
but none of whom re-formed nor showed themselves able to rally.
“Meanwhile their king and his staff, being surrounded in that inn, surrendered upon terms which the
King of Sussex in his high and generous heart would not make too hard.

“The first article, then, of this treaty was that for every prisoner released the Treasury of Kent should

pay the sum of one shilling.

s>i
unless he were a Kentish gentleman, and for him the ransom was half-a-crown. And until the money should
be paid the prisoners should be held.

“Then the second article was that the men of Kent should pay to the King of Sussex 100 pockets of
hops a year by way of tribute, which custom was continued even to our own time, nor did it cease until

hops became so cheap that no one would be at the pains of carrying them to Lewes from the Sussex border.
“But the tliird article, which more concerns us, was that the right bank of Rother from over against
Wittersham, so over the canal and then down the wall of Wallingsmarsh, and so right to the sea coast,
should pass from the Crown of Kent to the Crown of Sussex, and be held by the King of Sussex and his

heirs for ever. And so it stands to this day. And to this new frontier land the King of Sussex gave the name
of Guildford Level, because it was indeed level, and in honour of the town of Guildford in Surrey, which

was Iris mother's dower. And be built there East Guildford, and founded it and endowed it. But it never
throve; so that when men talk of Guildford they commonly mean Guildford in Surrey as being the larger of
the two towns. And the King of Sussex built a lighthouse in this new province for mariners, and having

now both sides of Rye harbour, he deepened it and dredged it so that it became the royal place you know,

and far out at sea, where the Fairway begins, he set an old broom fast in the sand by the broomstick, with
the besom end of it above the waters, so that no man might miss the Fairway, and there it still stands, a
blessing to mariners.

“When the King of Sussex had done all these things he went back home to his castle of Lewes, but not
before he had most royally dined and entertained his army in the inn at Battle, and caused to be broached

for them 1732 barrels of that exceedingly old ale. called Audit Ale, the memory of which is preserved in
those parts most wonderfully.
“This is the story of how the men of Kent were conquered by the men of Sussex and Guildford Level
and the marsh were annexed and made a bastion, as it were, of our kingdom. And on account of this great
fight it is that Battle is called Battle, and not at all on account of that other skirmish with the Normans, in
which we so thoroughly defeated them also, that they turned their backs to the Weald, and ran off as best

they could to Dover and the mean places of tire East. For we would never have William for our king, and
we never did. But he is Duke William for us. and Duke William only now and for ever. Amen!”
The Poet. “It is possible the men of Kent would tell a different story!”
Myself. “But that docs not tell us the way in which we got hold in this county of all the parts about
Crawley, and the belt of land which is very manifestly that of Surrey men.”

Grizzlebeard. "Why, that was what they call strategical. When the barons of Surrey, the chief of whom
lived in a hole under Reigate Hill, heard of the Battle and knew of what stuff the King of Sussex was and

all his men, they came of their own accord and asked him to hold that belt of land in which their rivers rise,
so as to have the better protection. To this he very willingly agreed, and in this fashion was the northern
boundary of Sussex drawn.”

Myself. “And it has stopped raining.”
The Sailor. "And may it never rain again, for while it rains we sit here in inns and hear nothing but
interminable stories.”

When he had said that, we all got up and took the road again, desiring to be in Stonington for lunch,
for the weather had a good deal delayed us.
So we went on along that same old road, always westward, until we came to Storrington, and there we

went into the inn called "The White Horse.” and when we got in there fatigue came upon us and a sort of
gloom, and a quarrelling temper, such as men will get up between them when they have been penned
together for too long, even if they have been out upon a broad high road, and have played the part of
companions.

As we sat thus together, the Sailor, the Poet, Grizzlebeard and I, gloomily considering the workednessout of all things, and the staleness of experience, there came in quite suddenly a very tall young gentleman,
less than thirty years of age, lean, and having a thinnish light moustache, more turned up on one side than
on the other. His eyes were kindly and wild, and from beneath his hat, which was tilted on the back of his
head, appeared over his high forehead wisps of grey-brown hair. He had on white leather breeches; he was

booted and spurred; his tail coat was grey, with metal buttons upon it, and round his throat instead of a

collar was a soft piece of cloth, which had once been carefully arranged, but which was now draggled. It
was fastened by a safety-pin made of gold. A little mud was splashed on his hat, a little less upon his face,
much more upon Iris boots and breeches.
This Being held himself back as he walked into the room, shut the door behind him with a great deal of
noise, and said “Evening!” genially. Then he sat down on one of the Windsor chairs, sighing deeply.

He jumped up again, rang the bell, didn’t wait for it to be answered, put his head through the door, and
said, “Some of the same!” shut the door, sat down again, and laughed.
We were pleased to see him with us, and we suggested that even so early he had been hunting the fox,
which was indeed the case. I asked him (though I knew nothing of these things) whether he had a good run,

to which he answered, shaking his head rapidly and biting one of his moustachios:
“No! No! C’r’inly not! . . . Nearly lost me life!”
“I am sony to hear that.” said Grizzlebeard, who had often hunted the fox, but now did so no longer.

The Poet, the Sailor, and I sat silent to hear what the newcomer might have to say. He heaved a deep and
contented breath as of a man in port from stormy seas, leant forward with his lean body, swung his brown
gloved hands slowly between his white leather legs and said:

“Wasn’t my horse. . . . Haven’t got a horse. . . Never had one. . . .”
Then turning to Grizzlebeard, whom he rightly imagined to be the wealthiest of our group, he said.
“Like riding?”
“Yes,” said Grizzlebeard, thinking carefully, “I have always liked to ride horses. I like it still in
moderation.”

“Ah!” said the stranger wisely, with his head on one side. “That’s it. Now the way you ride ’em
doesn’t really matter much; it’s the kind of horse!”

“Played cup and ball with you?” said I, kindly.
“Contrariwise, he went quite smooth and easy; but oh. my Lord, his courage! . . .
“You know.” he went on, tapping his left palm with his right forefinger, “there’s a kind of courage

that’s useful and another kind that’s foolhardy. Now this horse (which was old Benjamin’s of Petworth)
didn’t mind danger and he didn’t know danger; so there was no merit as you may say; but I’m not denying a
good tiring when I see it, and I tell you he was a hero!”
He sat down again and thought considerably about the horse. There was a sort of lyricism or
inspiration in him. He looked up at the ceiling and said. “Lord! What a brute!” Then he spread liis hands

outwards, staring at us with his eyes, and said. "He was red all over, and his eyes were red as well, and he
chucked liis head up in the air like a big lizard, and he tried to bite his bit in two with his great teeth, and he
snarled and spat defiance, and he could never stand on more than two feet at a time, and he changed them
ten times a second. It was what they call ‘dancing.’ That’s how he went on while all the other people were

sitting quietly on their beastly great well-fed animals, looking silly. I didn't say anything to him; I didn’t
feel it was my place; but an ass of an ironmonger man who’s been buying land out Graffham way said.

‘Whoa then! Whoa there!’ . . . Silly gheezer! Made the beast perfectly mad. ... He did hate it! . . . and I
had no way of telling him it wasn’t my fault, though I longed to—from the bottom of my heart. Then old
Squire Powler, who married my aunt Eliza for her money, and butters up my father about his Dowser-man

and the wells, came up and asked me where I had got the beast from, and I said, ‘From Hell,' and he went

away looking like a fool.”
When this excitable young man had said all tins, he was afraid (as men of breeding arc when they have
got quite off the rails) that he had said too much. But Grizzlebeard, who has the kindest of hearts, said
genially, “Oh. there’s no harm in old Mr. Powler.” And even I. though I did not know Squire Powler. said I

believed that Dowsers were quite genuine, which was the truth and did no harm.
The tall lean man wanted to be silent after liis explosion, but Grizzlebeard drew him on, and the young
man’s own straightforwardness forbade him to be silent. He was bottling up the tale and it must out. so he
burst forth again.
"Well, there! The first thing all the other people did was to go after the little dogs across a field or two.
And this horse, which was to carry me about, he stood stock still and looked at them as though he thought
they were mad. Then he suddenly raced away in a half circle with his head down, and stopped short in front

of an oak tree. This annoyed me so much that I leant forward and slapped him on the side of his face. And
my word! Didn’t he snap round and try to bite my foot! And then he began hopping sideways in a manner
most horrible to see and to feel. Now by this time I was wondering what would become of me, and I could
fairly have cried, for if he didn’t go back into Petworth where somebody could catch him—and that was
what I hoped—the Only other thing would be to get off and give him a kick in the ribs and let him run, and
then I should have to buy him, and Lord knows who’d find the money for that! S’posin’ he went and
drowned his silly self in Timberley Brook or got hung up on a post? Eh! What?”

This tall, lean young man again thought that he had exceeded, but our sympathetic faces, nay, our
appealing eyes, prompted him to continue. He went on more slowly.

“All of a sudden, a long way off, all the little dogs began making those yelping noises of theirs which
they do when they get excited, and as I was right high up on this tall animal I could see their white tails
wagging out by Burton Rough, a little beyond the Jesuits. I got really interested. . . . What? Then I stopped

thinking of anything, because he, this horse I mean, began going as quickly as ever he could, quite straight,
and I knew that there was the Rother inbetween. Oh. Lord! You talk of a mouth! . ..

“Now, when you want to pull up a horse that’s got too Frenchy, if you take me,” he continued, looking
extremely intelligent, and prepared to detail the whole process, “there’re lots of dodges. Some men’ll give a

sharp jerk sideways, and tty to wrench his head off, and I knew a man (he’s dead now . . . kind o’ soldier)

who just pulled and pulled and then suddenly let go. He said that was the way. But what I do is to saw
backwards and forwards right and left ’til he’s reg'lar bored and can’t stand it. Then he’ll stop to see what's
the matter. Any horse will. Even if he’d a mouth like an old conscience. ‘Least I thought any horse would

’til to-day; but old Benjamin's horse didn’t. Never thought an animal could go so straight! Got quite close
to the turf and tucked his shins under him somehow, Tirri Pat, Tirri Pat, Tirri Pat, Tirri Pat, Tirri Pat, so
quick, you couldn’t tell hardly when he touched and when he didn't. I wasn’t able to turn round and look at
his tail ’cause I was so anxious, but it must have been standing straight out... his neck was. anyway; and I
knew the Rother was gettin’ closer all the time. He didn’t take a lep exactly when he got to the hedges, but

he just went on gallopin’ and they went by from under Irim. Thought I never saw the old roofs long way off
look so quiet! When I came to Mr. Churton’s field, the one where the cows are, I thought all of a sudden.
‘S’posin’ there’s wire?’ It’s a measly sort of crinkled hedge, but enough to hide wire. Well, long 'fore I’d
remembered, he was past it; and that was the only place you’d have known you were passin' anything. He

missed somethin’ with one of his hind feet, damn him. but he was off again. Then I saw the Rother, and I
thought to myself quite clearly. ‘Either he’ll jump right over tliis river, and then it'll be a sort o’ miracle
because it’s eight times as far as any horse has jumped before, and it’s just as easy to sit that as anything,
because it will be just sailing through the air; or else he’ll go into the water, and then he won't play the fool
any more.’ For I’d always heard that when a wild, common, mad horse got into cold water it cured him.

same as’t would anybody else. But there! That’s just what didn’t happen! Neither of ‘em! You’ll believe
me... when he got to the brink of that water—wow!—he swerved round like a swallow and made for the
high road and Petworth again! An’ when he got on the high road he began dancing slowly home and
puffing as though he’d done a day’s work, and every now and then he’d sneeze. . . My word, what a day!”

“ft can’t have taken you a day; it’s only lunch time yet,” said Grizzlebeard gently.
“No,” said the genial stranger, getting up towards the door and looking over his shoulder. “Not it!
Didn’t take twenty minutes!” Then he roared through the door: “’Nother the same!” shut the door again,

and went on: “Twenty minutes’t most! Over b’ ’leven! But it ifiled up the day all right. Haven’t been able
to think of anything else for hours. And he came back to old Benjamin’s as quiet as a lamb, only with that

hellish red glint in his eye. And the stable fellow said:
‘"You’ve beentakin’ it out of ’im!’
“I was so angry I didn’t know what to say; anyhow, I said: ‘Take your Beelzebub.’ And the stable boy
said quite fiercely: ‘Έ ain’t Beelzebub, and you’ve no right to call ’im so out of Iris name!' So there might

have been a scrap, but I was too tired, and I said I’d take something ladylike to ride home with, and I’ve got
it in the stable now. an’ I must be getting on. It’s late, and I’m very' tired.”
We told him one after the other, and then all in choms. that we were enchanted beyond measure with
the description of his day. Grizzlebeard asked him whether he had heard any tiling of the run, but he shook
his head, and the Poet, who had little imagined that such things were possible in English fields, watched

them both with some alann.
Then we all went out with him to the stables to see his beast. There was a half-light in the stables, a
gloom, and standing in the stall an extraordinary sheepish-looking thing, vety old and fat, with a cunning

face, standing hardly fifteen hands, and plainly determined to take easily the last of its pilgrimage upon this
earth. The tall, wildeyed gentleman went to it, patted it gently upon its obese neck, and as he did so he

sighed with a deep sigh of satisfaction and of content. We led it out and saw him get on. His legs looked
inordinately long. He very cheerily badc us "Good evenin’.” and as he rode out eastward down the road we

heard the slapping of lus mount’s shoes upon the wet surface, as though in spite of her lethargy (for she was
a mare) the weight of the rider was too much for her. It was a slow sort of sideling gait that the noise
betrayed as it fainted into tire distance. If he had suffered from horses that morning, that afternoon he was
having Iris revenge; it was the horse that suffered.
As we stood there in the stable yard talking, a very short ostler of a hard appearance, with the straw of
ages in his teeth, came up. and. believing us to he wealthy, hit his forehead hard with the forefinger of his

right hand. Grizzlebeard, who loved his country' like Iris soul and was always sincere, and never allowed
enough for the follies and vices of men. but believed them better or wiser than they were, said to the ostler
with great curiosity: "I ought to know that young man. He was a nephew of Sir John Powler’s. I believe?”
The ostler said as smartly as a serpent:

"Yessir! I don’t know about that. sir. He’s Master Battie. of The Kennels, sir, where Iris father ’lows
him to live. sir. He’s back from abroad, sir.”
Grizzlebeard looked down the road gently, thinking of the whole country side and fixing Iris man. Then

he said a little sadly: "Oh! that’s Batteson; that was the third one. the one Iris poor mother used to think so
much of. and wouldn’t send away.”
We all went into the house together, and when we got there Grizzlebeard, after deep thought, said:
"Now what an extraordinary tiring that a man brought up like that, as a boy anyhow, should have allowed
himself to get on to a horse like that! Who could ride a horse like that?”

The Sailor. "Why, no one. but let us be up and going. We must not waste this day. but soon we shall

get over that lift of land which lies between us and Arun. Let us take the road.”

So we went out and took the Amberley road, and we passed the heath that is there, leaving the pond
upon our right, and we passed the little wood of pine trees, and Grizzlebeard said:
"How much taller is this wood! I knew it when I was a boy!”
And I said. "Yes. and it is taller even for me.”

And the Poet said. "I know it.”
And the Sailor said. "I know it too.”
Myself. "Yes. we all know this landmark, and we all know these ups and downs, and Rackham Mount,
and the monastery behind us. and Parham, that great house. For we are on the fringe of the tilings we know

and in a border country as it were. Very soon we shall speak with our own people under our own hills.”
Grizzlebeard. “In this hour, then, we shall get over the height of land; and the first of us that sees the
river Arun must tell the others, and we will arrange for him some sort of prize, since you all three speak in
such terms of the valley.”

The Poet. “We do not speak of it so from any common affection, no, nor from any affection which is

merely deep, but because it is our own country, and because the sight of one’s own country after many
years is the one blessed thing of this world. There is nothing else blessed in this world, I think, and there is
nothing else that remains.”

Myself. “What the Sailor says is true. When we get over that lift of land upon the Amberley road
before us we shall see Arun a long way off between his reeds, and the tide tumbling in Arun down towards
the sea. We shall see Houghton and Westhurton Hill, and Duncton further along, and all the wall of them.

Graffham and Barlton, and so to Harting, which is the end where the county ceases and where you come to
shapeless things. All this is our own country, and it is to see it at last that we have travelled so steadfastly
during these long days.”
The Poet. “Whatever you read in all the writings of men, and whatever you hear in all the speech of

men, and whatever you notice in the eyes of men, of expression or reminiscence or desire, you will see
nothing in any man’s speech or writing or expression to match that which marks his hunger for home.

Those who seem to lack it are rather men satiated, who have never left their villages for a time long enough

to let them know the craving and the necessity. Those who have despaired of it are the exiles, and the curse
upon them is harder than any other curse that can fall upon men. It is said that the first murder done in this
world was punished so, by loss of bome; and it is said also that the greatest and the worst of the murders

men ever did has also been punished in the same way, by the general exile of its doers and all their
children. They say that you can see that exile in their gestures and in the tortured lines of their faces and in
the unlaughing sadness of their eyes.

Grizzlebeard. “Tell me, Sailor, when you say that thus, coming home, you will be satisfied, are you so
sure? For my part, I have travelled very widely, especially in Eastern places (which are the most different

from our own), and, one time and another—altogether forty times—I have come back to the flats of my
own countiy, eastward of the Vale of Glynde. I have seen once more the heavy clouds of home fresh before
the wind over the Level, and I have smelt, from the saltings and the innings behind Pevensey, the nearness

of the sea. Then indeed I have each time remembered my boyhood, and each time I have been glad to come
home. But I never found it to be a final gladness. After a little time I must be off again, and find new
places. And that is also why in this short journey of ours I came along with you all, westward into those
parts of the county which are not my own.”
The Sailor. “I cannot tell you, Grizzlebeard, whether a man can find completion in his home or no.
You are a rich man, and you have travelled as rich men do, for pleasure—which rich men never find.”
Grizzlebeard. “Nor poor men either!”
The Sailor. “Well, poor men do not seek it, so they are not saddened, but rich men, anyhow, travel to
find it and never find it; then if they return to find it in their homes, why of course they will not find it there
either, for a man must come back home very weary and after labour, or some journeying to which he was

compelled, if he is to taste home.”
Myself. “Nevertheless, Sailor, what Grizzlebeard has asked, or rather what he means by asking it. is
true. We none of us shall rest, not even in the Valley of Arun; we shall go past and onwards.”
The Poet. “I think we shall.”

Myself. “We shall go past and onwards; we shall not be content, we shall not be satisfied. The man
who wrote that he had not in all this world a native place knew his business very' well indeed, and it is the

business of all verse.”
The Poet. “Nevertheless we know it in dreams. There are dreams in which men do attain to a complete
satisfaction, reaching the home within the home and the place inside the mind. And such a man it was, re­
membering such dreams, who wrote that he had forgotten the name of his own country and could not find

liis way to it. But this man had in him a sense that soon the name of his own country would be revealed to
him, and he knew that when he heard the name he should find the place well enough; it would come back at
once to him, as the memory of his love and of the Dovrefjeld came to that man who had brought home the
master-maid in the story'. He had brought her home from over seas; but later he had forgotten her. from
eating human food.
“This man said he foresaw a fateful moment coming, and that he had it like a picture within. He would

be in a tavern sitting by himself and two others would be there talking low together, so that he should not
hear. Yet one of these talking low would speak the name of his own country, and when he heard the name

of liis own country (he said) then he knew that he would rise up, and take his staff and go.
‘I will go without companions,

And with nothing in my hand—

Myself. “That is a mistake. If he has a staff in his hand he will have something in his hand. I think he

put it in for the rhyme.”
The Sailor. “Do not. do not interrupt the Poet, or he will not be able to continue his poetry; besides
which, one is not bound to these things in poetry as one is in arithmetic; it has been proved a thousand

times by the human race in chorus.”
Grizzlebeard. “Go on. Poet.”
The Poet—
“T shall go without companions,
And with nothing in my' hand;
I shall pass through many places
That I cannot understand—
Until I come to my own country,
Which is a pleasant land!

“‘The trees that grow in my own country
Are the beech tree and the yew;
Many stand together,
And some stand few.
In the month of May in my own country
All the woods are new.’”

The Sailor. “I believe I know where this place is of which the Poet talks. It is the corner of the hill
above the Kennels, between Upwaltham and Gumber.”
The Poet (angrily).

“It is nothing of the sort. It is a place where no man ever has been or will be—at

least not such men as you!”
Grizzlebeard. "Do not be angry, Poet; but tell us if there is any more.
The Poet. “There is very little more, and it runs like this:—

‘When I get to my own country
I shall lie down and sleep;
I shall watch in the valleys
The long flocks of sheep.
.And then I shall dream, for ever and all.
A good dream and deep.’”

Grizzlebeard. “That is the point—that is the point. If a man could be certain that he would sleep and
dream for ever, then in coming back to his own country he would come to a complete content! But you

must mark you how in all the stories of the thing, even in the story of the homecoming of Ulysses, they do
not dare to tell you all the human things that followed and all the incompletion of its joys.”
Myself. "For my part I think you are very ungrateful or very mystical; or perhaps you have got religion.
But at any rate it is your business and not mine. I say for my part, if I can get back to that country which

lies between Lavant and Rother and Arun, I will live there as gratefully as though I were the fruit of it, and
die there as easily as a fruit falls, and be buried in it and mix with it for ever, and leave myself and all I had
to it for an inheritance.”
Grizzlebeard. “Well then, Myself, since you think so much of your own country. how shall we mark
the passage of Arun when we come to the bridge of it?”

Myself. “Let us draw lots who shall drown himself for a sacrifice to the river.”
The Poet. “Let us count our money—it must be getting low, and I have none.”
The Sailor. “No, let us tell (so many years after, no one cares) the story of the first love each of us
had—such of us as can remember.”
Each of us, lying in his heart, agreed. When we had given this promise each to the others (and each
lying in his heart) the rain began to fall again out of heaven, but we had come to such a height of land that

the rain and the veils of it did but add to the beauty of all we saw, and the sky and the earth together were

not like November, but like April, and filled us with wonder. At this place the flat water meadows, the
same that are flooded and turned to a lake in midwinter, stretch out a sort of scene or stage, whereupon can

he planted the grandeur of the Downs, and one looks athwart that flat from a high place upon the shoulder
of Rackham Mount to the broken land, the sand hills, and the pines, the ridge of Egdean side, the uplifted
heaths and commons which flank the last of the hills all the way until one comes to the Hampshire border,
beyond which there is nothing. This is the foreground of the gap of Arundel, a district of the Downs so
made that when one sees it one knows at once that here is a jewel for which the whole county of Sussex
was made, and the ornament worthy of so rare a setting. And beyond Arun, straight over the flat where the

line against the sky is highest, the hills I saw were the hills of home.
All we four stood upon that height in ‘the rain that did not hide the lights upon the fields below and
beyond us, and we saw white and glinting in the water meadows the river Arun, which we had come so

many miles to see; for that earlier happening of ours upon his rising place and his springs in the forest, did

not break our pilgrimage. Our business now was to see Arun in his strength, in that place where he is
already full of the salt sea tide, and where he rolls so powerful a water under the Bridge and by Houghton
Pit and all round by Stoke Woods and so to Arundel and to the sea.
Then we looked at that river a little while, and blessed it, and felt each of us within and deeply the
exaltation of return, the rain still falling on us as we went. We came at last past the great chalk pit to the

railway, and to the Bridge Inn which lies just on this side of the crossing of Arun.

When we had all four come in out of the rain into Mr. Duke’s parlour at the Bridge Inn, and when we

had ordered beer and had begun to dry ourselves at the fire, tire Sailor said:
"Come, Grizzlebeard, we promised to tell the stories of our first loves when we came to Arun: and as
you are much the oldest of us do you begin.”

"With all my heart,” said Grizzlebeard, "for, as you know, I am not one of those belated heretics who

hold such tilings sacred, believing as I do that that only is sacred which attaches directly to the Faith. ...
Nevertheless ... to remember that great time, and how securely I was held, and in what a port lay the vessel

of my soul. I do feel upon me something that should silence a man.”
"By what moorings were you held?” said I.
"By three.” he answered. "Her eyelids, her voice, and her name.” Then after a little pause he went on:

"She was past her youth. Her twenty-fifth year was upon her. Her father and her mother were dead.
She was of great wealth.
"She had one brother, who lived away in some great palace or other in the north, and one sister who
was married far off in Italy. She herself had inherited an ancient house of stone set in her own valley, which
was that of the river Brede. and most dear to her; for it was there that she had lived as a child, and there
would she pass her womanhood.
"Into this house I was received, for she was much older than I, and when I first knew her I was not yet

a man. Thither perpetually in the intervals of study I returned. Insensibly my visits grew most natural; I
passed the gates which are the beginning of a full life, and constantly I found myself, in spite of a more
active bearing and a now complete possession of my youth, alone in her companionship. Her many servants

knew me as a part of their household: her grooms who first had taught me to ride, her keepers with whom I
had first shot, her old nurse, a pensioner, who favoured this early friendship. The priest also called me by
my name.

“We walked together in long avenues: the lawns of four hundred years were a carpet for us. We paced
her woods slowly together and often watched together in the frosty season of the year the early setting of
the sun behind bare trees. At evening by her vast and regal fires we sat side by side, speaking in that light

alone to each other of dead poets and of the wars and of tilings seen and of small domestic memories grown
to be pictures clear and lovable.

“Then at last I knew what briar it was that had taken root within me.

“In her absence—during the long nights especially—there returned to me the drooping of her eyes:
their slow and generous glances. Waking and far off from her. when I saw in some stranger that same rare
lowering of the lids I was troubled.

“Her voice, because it was her very self, so moved me. that whenever I heard it upon my way to her
doors, whenever I heard it speaking even in the distance no matter what things to another, I trembled.
“Her name, which was not Mary nor Catherine, but was as common and simple a name, was set above
the world and was given power over my spirit. So that to hear it attached even to another or to see it written
or printed on a page everything within me stirred, and it was as though a lamp had been Ht suddenly in my
soul. Then, indeed, I understood how truly there are special words of witchcraft and how they bind and

loose material things.”
An enthusiasm came into Grizzlebeard’s eyes, something at once brilliant and distant like the light
which shines from the Owers miles out to sea. He opened his hand down on the table with a fine gesture of
vigour, and cried out:

“But what a vision is that! What a spring of Nature even for the poor memory of a man! I mean the

unrestricted converse with such a friend at the very launching of life! When we are still without laws and
without cares, and yet already free from guardians, and in the full ownership of our own selves, to find a
shrine which shall so sanctity7 our outset: to know, to accompany, and to adore!

“Do not ask me whether I contemplated this or that, union or marriage, or the mere continuance of
what I knew, for I was up in a world where no such tilings are considered. There was no time. No future
threatened me, no past could be remembered. I was high above all these tilings.
"By an accident of fortune I was called away, and in a distant town over seas had alien work put before

me. and I mixed with working men. I faithfully curry-combed lean horses, and very carefully greased the
axles of heavy wheels, till, after nineteen months, I could come home, and returning I made at once for the
Valley.

“As I approached the house I was conscious of no change. The interval had vanished, and I was once
again to see and to hear.
“The man that opened the door to me knew me well. I asked for her by her title and her name—for she

was noble. He answered me, using her title but not her name. He told me that she would be home that
evening late, and he gave me a note to read from her. The writing on that little square of paper renewed in
me with a power I knew too well the magic of a sacred place to which I had deliberately returned. As I held

it in my hand I breathed unsteadily, and I walked in a fever towards the great gates of iron; nor did I open
the letter till I had taken refuge for the next few hours of evening in the inn of her village, where also I was
known and had been loved by all in my boyhood.
“There, underneath a little lamp, alone and with food before me, I read the invitation from her hand.

“I learnt in it that she had married a man whose fame had long been familiar to me. a politician, a
patriot, and a most capable manufacturer. She told me (for I had warned her of my landing) that they would
be back at seven to pass two nights in this country house of theirs, and she begged me to be their guest, at
least for that short time.
"A veil was tom right off the face of the world and my own spirit, and I saw reality all bare, original,

evil and instinct with death. Nor would I eat and drink, but at last I cried out loud, mourning like a little
child; and when I was rested of this I stood by the window and gazed out into the darkness until I had
recovered my nature, and felt again that I was breathing common air.

“When spirits fall it is not as when bodies fall; they are not killed or broken; but I had fallen in those

moments from an immeasurable height, and the rest of my way so long as I might live was to be passed
under the burden to which we all are doomed. Then strong, and at last (at such a price) mature. I noted the
hour and went towards the doors through which she had entered perhaps an hour ago in the company of the
man with whose name she had mingled her own.”
Myself. “What did he manufacture?”

Grizzlebeard. “Rectified lard; and so well, let me tell you. that no one could compete with him.” Then

he resumed: “I entered and was received. Her voice gave me again for a moment some echoes of the
Divine: they faded; and meanwhile her face, her person, with even' moment took on before me a less
pleasing form.

"I have been assured by many who knew us both that what I saw was far from novel. To me it was as
strange as earthquake. Her skin. I could now see, though in the main of a sallow sort, was mottled with
patches of dead-white (for she disdained all artifice). Her teeth were various; I am no judge whether they
were false or true. Her eyes suffered from some affection which kept them half closed; her voice was set at
a pitch which was not musical; her gestures were sometimes vulgar; her conversation was inane. I thought

in the next quarter of an hour that I had never heard so many tilings quoted from the newspapers in so short
a time.
"But we chatted together merrily enough all three until she went to bed. Then I sat up for some hours
talking with the jolly master of the house of politics and of lard. For I had found in my travels and in my

new acquaintance with men that every man is most willing and most able to speak of his own trade. And let
me tell you that this man had even tiring in him which can make a good citizen and a worthy and useful

member of the State. His intelligence was clear and stable, lus range of knowledge sufficient, his temper
equable, and his heart so warm that one could not but desire him the best of fates. I have not met him for
many years, but I saw in the last honours list that he had purchased a title. I still count him for an older
friend.
“Next morning at a hearty breakfast I grew to like him better than ever, and I could see in the healthy
light of a new day what excellent qualities resided even in the wife whom he had chosen. The work to
which my poverty (for then I was poor) compelled me, called me by an early train to town, and since that

morning I have lived my life.
“But that first woman still sits upon her throne. Not even in death, I think, shall I lose her.”

“Grizzlebeard, Grizzlebeard,” said I, “these things are from Satan! Children and honest marriage
should long ago have broken the spell.”
“I am not married,” said he, “neither have I any children.”

“Then loves here and there should have restored you to yourself.”

He shook his head and answered: "It was not for lack of them, great or small. There have been
hundreds . . . but let us say no more! There was some foreigner who put it well when he said, ‘Things do
not come at all, or if they come, they come not at that moment when they would have given us the fullness

of delight.
There remained in his pewter a little less than half the beer it had held. He gazed at it and noted also at
his side, by the fire, a deal box full of sand, such as we use in my county for sanding of the floor.

Steadily, and with design, he poured out all the beer upon the sand, and put down his pewter with a

ring.
The beer did not defile the sand. It was soaked in cleanly, and an excellent aroma rose from it over the
room. But beer, as beer, beer meant for men, good beer and nourishing, beer fulfilling the Cervisian
Functions, beer drinkable, beer satisfying, beer meet-to-be-consumed: that beer it could never be again.

Then Grizzlebeard said: “You see what 1 have done. I did it chiefly for a sacrifice, since we should
always forego some part of every pleasure, offering it up to the Presiders over all pleasure and pouring it
out in a seeming waste before the gods to show' that we honour them duly. But I did it also for a symbol of
what befalls the chief experience in the life of every man.”

There was a long silence when Grizzlebeard had done. From where I sat I could look through the
window' and see the line of the Downs, and the great beech woods, and birds swinging in the rainy air; and I

remembered one pair of men and women, and another and another, and then I fell to thinking of a man

whom 1 had known in a foreign place, who at once loved and hated—a thing to me incomprehensible. But
he was southern. Then I heard the silence broken by the Poet, who was saying to the Sailor:

“Now' it is your turn.”
And the Sailor said, “By all means if you will,” and very rapidly began: “My first love lived in the
town of Lisbon, after the earthquake and before the Revolution, when I was a lad of seventeen, and already

very weary of the sea. She, upon her side, may have been thirty -six or a trifle more, but in that climate

women age quickly. Our romance was short; it lasted but five hours. Indeed, my leave on shore was not
much longer, for I was serving in the galley, shame be it said; but a boy must earn lus living, and rather

than be late on board I would have fled to the hills.”
“What was her name?” said the Poet.
“I do not know,” answered the Sailor, “I did not ask. . . . But one moment! ... I am not so sure that this
was my first love ... I fear the vividness of my recollection has misled me. Unless I am quite w rong,” he

went on, musing slowly, “it was in New'-haven, before we set sail upon that Lusitanian cruise, that I met my
first love, by name Belina ... or stay! . . . Wrong again, for that was my second ship. Now you ask me and
I begin to search my memory', my first love was not there at all, but at a place called Erith. in London
River. At least I think so.
“Bear with me a moment, gentlemen.” he said piteously. putting his hand to his forehead; “the years
have trampled up my young affection. . . . Yes, it was that woman at Erith. Joan they called her (did the
men). Joan! . . . Unless it was that curious and rather unpleasant woman who lived on the far side of
Foulness, with her father, and used to row' out w ith fruit and tilings when the tide was off the mud, and just
before the boats waiting to get through the Sw in had w ater enough to weigh anchor. ... It was one of the

two I am fairly sure. The younger woman in Goole (for when I was young, though few things of any size
w ent up river as far as that, we did) was. if I remember right, not a Love at all but a mere Consoler.”
The Poet. "I do not think you are serious; I don’t think you understand what you say.”

The Sailor. “Why. then, since you know better, you can give me your own list; I have no doubt it will
do as well as mine, for my memory is very confused upon these matters.”
The Poet. “I cannot tell you anything about your affairs, and it seems you cannot tell us either; but I

can very well describe my own, since I must do so by the terms of our agreement, though I would rather

keep silent.
“I was passing in a certain year, just at the end of my school days, by a path which led between the two
lakes at Bringhanger. It is about a mile from the house, and people do not often pass that way, though it is
one of the most beautiful places in the world. The first green was upon the trees, but their buds were still so
small that one could see the hills near by through their open branches, and the wind, though it was gentle,
looked cold upon the surface of the mere, for it was very early morning. Then it was that I saw upon the
further shore, mixed as it were with the foliage and half-veiled by reeds, a young woman whom I was not

to see again; who she was or by what accident she came there I have never known. I made at once to watch
her form as it passed into the boughs of that lakeside and made in the tracery of them a sort of cloud, as I
thought, so that I was not certain for a moment whether I had really seen a human thing or no. Immediately,

as though she had melted into the trees, she was gone, and I went on my way. But as I wandered, going
eastwards towards Arun, this vision grew and fixed itself within my mind, and then for the next days of
lonely travel in the County from inn to inn, it became my companion, until at last I took it for my fellowtraveller. I have kept it in my heart ever since.”
The Sailor. “Great heavens, what a lie!”
The Poet answered angrily that it was no lie, but the Sailor stood his ground.
"It is a lie,” said he, “and a literary lie. which is the most contemptible of all lies.”
"I cannot prove it,” answered the Poet sullenly. “I cannot even prove that what I saw was human.”
"No.” said the Sailor, "you cannot, for you got it in a book, or you mean to put it in a book; but all that

kind of talk has no more flesh and blood in it than the rot-talk of the literary men who write about huntin’
in Grub Street. Wow! I would not be seen dead in a field with such flimsy stuff.”
“ft was then I wrote." said the Poet dreamily, as though there were no one by. "five lines which

enshrine her memory."

And as he recited them the Sailor put up first his thumb and then one finger after another, to mark the
completion of each line and the rhymes.
“The colour of the morning sky
Was like a shield of bronze,
The something or other was something or other.”

“The what?” said the Sailor.
“I cannot remember the exact words,” said the Poet, “and I have never been able to complete that line
properly, but I have the rhythm of it in my head right enough,” and he went on—
“Her little feet came wandering by
The edges of the ponds.”

“Now I’ve got you,” shouted the Sailor triumphantly, ‘“ponds’ does not rhyme with ‘bronze.’”
“Yes it does!” said the Poet with excitement, “ft’s just one of those new rhymes one ought to use. One

does not pronounce the ‘d‘ in pond. At least,” he added hurriedly, “not in the plural.”

The Sailor appealed to Grizzlebeard.
“Grizzlebeard." he shouted, “the Poet is telling lies and making bad rhymes! Grizzlebeard!”
Then he looked closer and saw that Grizzlebeard was asleep.

But at the shouting of the Sailor. “Eh? What?” he said, waking with a start, “have I missed a story?”
“Two,” said I. "each duller and worse than the last.”
“Then I am glad I slept,” said Grizzlebeard.
Myself. “You do well to be glad! The Sailor lied about twenty wenches and the Poet lied about one, but
the Sailor’s lies were the more entertaining of the two, and also, what is not the same, the more possible.
They were lying about their first loves, as you may well believe.”

Grizzlebeard (muttering). “Well, well, small blame to them, we all do that more or less. And you,
Myself, have you told your stoiy?”
The Sailor (eagerly). “No, he has not, he has shirked it.”

The Poet. "He has led us on, and he himself has said nothing, which is not fair.”
Myself. “I was only waiting my turn, and I shall be very happy to tell you those entertaining things. I

make no secret of them. That is not my religion, thank Heaven.”

At this point I put on such gravity as the circumstance demanded, and looking at my companions in a
sober fashion, so that they might expect a worthy revelation, I took from the ticket-pocket of my coat a
sovereign, new minted, yellow red, stamped in the effigy of the King, full-weighted, excellently clean and

sound. And holding this up between my finger and my thumb, I said:
“Here is my first love! Whom I met when first I came out from the warmth of home into the deserts of
this world, and who has ever been absolutely sure and true, and has never changed in the minutest way, but

has ever been sterling and fixed and secure. And in the service of this first love of mine I, in my turn, have
been absolutely faithful, and from that loyalty I have never for one moment swerved. Gentlemen, to be
faithful in that sort is a rare and a worthy thing!”
Then I put back the sovereign in my pocket, gently and reverently, and taking up the pewter I drank
what was left in it, and said to them in more solemn tones:

“You see what I have done. I have quite drained this tankard. It is empty now. I did it chiefly because f

felt inclined; since it is commonsense that we should never forego any one of the few pleasures which we
may find to hand. But I did it also for a symbol of what jolly satisfaction a man may get if he will do what
every man should do; that is, take life and its ladies as he finds them during his little passage through the
daylight, and his limping across the stage of this world. So now you know.”
But Grizzlebeard shook his head and said:

“All these things are follies! But since the rain is over let us be off again, ft is November: the days are
brief; and the light will not last us long. Let us press forw ard over Arun, and pursue our westward way
beneath the hills.”

So we did as he bade us. crossing the long bridge and seeing the water swirling through on the strong
brown tide, and so along the causeway, and up the first ride into Houghton, where is that little inn. "St.

George and the Dragon.” at which King Charles the Second, the first King of England to take a salary and

be a servant, drank as be fled from Worcester many years ago. And we went on that ancient way. that
hollow way. which the generations and the generations rolling upon wheels and marching upon leather, all

on their way to death, have worn down so far below the level of the brown ploughed land. We went past
Bury to Westburton, and still onwards to the place where some dead Roman had his palace built, near the
soldiers' road, in a place that looks at a great hollow of the Downs and is haunted by the ruin of fifteen
hundred years. But we did not stop to look at the stone pictures there, nor at that sacred head of Winter

wherein this southern lord had bidden his slaves express the desolation of our cold and of our leafless trees.
We went on through the steep, tumbled land, down the sharp dip of Bignor. and up the sharp bank of
Sutton: always westward, following the road. And as we went, with the approach of evening the wind had

cleared the sky. There were no more clouds.
And as we went along the Sailor said:

"Poet, it is some time since you tried to give us verse, and I would not press you. for I know well

enough that it is hard labour to you with that nasty sense of failure all the time. None the less I will beg you
to try your hand, if only to amuse us, for there is nothing lightens a road like a song, and we have gone
already many, many miles.”

The Poet. "With all my heart, since we are now upon the edge of Burton and its ponds, which, with the
trees along them, and the heathy lands, and the way that the whole setting of them look at the wall of tire
Downs, is perhaps the most verse-producing mile in the world. Inspired by tliis let me give you the most
enchanting of songs:—
Oh gay! But this is the spring of the year!
The sun—’”

The Sailor. "Halt! Halt at once! You have gone mad. if indeed to such brains as yours such dignities
are reserved. Has it not yet sunk into that corked head of yours that it is All-Hallows? For though it is
notorious diat poets neither see what is before them, nor hear, nor smell, but work in the void (and hence
their flimsiness). yet. if you cannot see the bare branches and the dead leaves, nor smell autumn, nor catch
the quality of the evening, for the Lord’s sake write nothing. It would be far belter so.”

The Poet. “I am not writing but singing, and it is my pleasure to sing of spring time. Whether I sing
well or no you cannot tell until I have accomplished my little song. But you have put me out and I must be­

gin again.”
Whereupon with less merriment, but full of courage, he took up that strain once more.
“Oh gay! But this is the spring of the year!
The sun shall gladden me all the day.
And we’ll go gathering May, my dear.
And we’ll go gathering May;
For the skies are broad and the throstle is here . . .
And we’ll go gathering May.’"

When the Poet had sung this again (and lus voice flattened towards the end of the short thing), the
Sailor, clasping his hands behind lus back, began to move more slowly, and so compelled us to slacken
pace. He cast lus eyes upon the ground, and for a while was lost beneath the surface. He then quoted in a

deep tone, but to himself:

“0 God! O Montreal!”
The Poet. "I don’t understand."
The Sailor. "No, you would not."
Grizzlebeard (kindly). "It is a quotation. Poet. It is a quotation from the poem of an Englishman who
went to Montreal one day and found that they had put Discobolos into breeches. Whereupon this
Englishman, suffering such an adventure among such Colonials, wrote an ode to celebrate the event, and

mournfully repeated throughout that ode, time and again, Ό God! O Montreal!’”
Myself. "Yes. since that time it has passed into a proverb, and is used to emphasize those occasions on
which the mind of man has fallen short of its high mission in any department of art.”

The Poet. "Oh!”
The Sailor (looking up). "Tell me, Poet, did you write that yourself?”
The Poet (defiantly). "Yes.”
The Sailor (after a short pause). "Tell me, Poet, what is a throstle?”
The Poet. "I don’t know.”
The Sailor. "I thought so. And tell me, Poet, does he come out in the spring?”
The Poet. "I daresay. Most things do.”
The Sailor. "Well, well, we won’t quarrel: but if you have written much more like tins, publish it. and

we will have some fun.”

The Poet was now thoroughly annoyed, not being so companionable a man (by reason of his trade) as
he might be. For men become companionable by working with their bodies and not with their weary
noddles, and the spinning out of stuff from oneself is an inhuman tiling.
So I said to him to soothe him:
“I am no judge of verse, Poet, but I think it would go very well to real music. Will you not get some

one else to put music to it?”

The Poet answered angrily:
"No, I will not, and since the Sailor thinks it is so easy to write good verse on the spur of the moment,
let him try.”

The Sailor (gaily). “Why, I can do these things in my sleep. I have written the loveliest things on my
shirt-cuff before now, listening to public men at dinners. As also alone in those cells to which the police

have sometimes confined me for the hours between reveliy and morning, I have adorned the walls with so

many little, charming little, pointed little, tender little, suggestive little, diaphanous little Stop-shorts or
There-you-are’s as would, were they published in a book, make me more famous than last year’s Lord

Mayor.”
Grizzlebeard. “Yes, but you have not taken up the challenge.”
The Sailor (easily). “I will do so at once.”
And he rattled out:
"When open skies renew the year,
And yaffle under Gumber calls,
It‘s because the days are near
When open skies renew the year,
That under Burton waterfalls
The little pools are amber clear.
And yaffle, yaffle, yaffle, yaffle,
yaffle under Gumber calls."

Then he went on very rapidly:
"Now that is verse if you like! There you have good verse, pinned and knowled: strong-set verse,
mitred and joined without glue! Lord! I could write such verse for ever and not feel it! But I care little for
fame, and am at this moment rather for bread and cheese, seeing that we are coming near the Cricketers'

Anns at Duncton, a house of call famous for this: that men sit there and eat to get strength for the climbing

of Duncton Hill or. if they are going the other way about, they sit there and eat after their descent thereof.”
The Poet. “It is all very' well, but that verse of yours is not yours at all. It is Elizabethan and water, and
let me tell you that the Elizabethan manner can be diluted about as successfully as beer. Mix your ale with
water half and half, and give me news of it. So with Elizabethan when you modems think that you have
tapped the barrel.”

The Sailor. "What you say is not true. This is my own verse, and if you tell me it is in the manner of

those who wrote at £40 the go under Queen Elizabeth, I am not ashamed. Many men lived in that reign who
wrote with dexterity.”
The Poet. "‘Well, then, what is a Yaffle?”
The Sailor. "Why, it is a real bird.”
The Poet (surlily). “Yes, like the Great Auk.”
The Sailor. "No, not like the Great Auk at all; for the Great Auk of whom it is written:
‘Here the Great Auk. a bird with hairy7 legs,
.Arrives in early spring and lays its eggs"

(and that was written of Beachy Head) is dead. But the Yaffle is alive and is a woodpecker, as you would
know if you poets had not all your senses corked, as I have said. For when the woodpecker cries ‘Yaffle' in
the woods, all the world of it. except poets, is aware.
“Moreover, in my song there are no women. One knows your bad poet by an excess thereof; but of this
sex in the sentimental manner I have also written, saying in majestic rhyme:—

’If all the harm that women do
Were put into a barrel
And taken out and drowned in Looe
Why, men would never quarrel ! ”’

Myself. "How any man can speak ill of women in the same breath with the Looe stream that races
through the sea. not far from tire Owers L ight is more than I can understand, seeing that no man hears the
name of the Owers Light without remembering that song which was sung to a woman, and which goes:—
‘The heavy wind, the steady wind that blows beyond the Owers,
It blows beyond the Owers for you and me! . .

The Poet. "It seems to me you are not of the trade; you are choppy in verse, very short-winded, halting;
spavined, I think.”
The Sailor. "Why! I have sung the longest songs of you all! And since you challenge me, I will howl
you one quite rotund and complete, but I warn you, your hair will stand on end!”

Grizzlebeard. "I dread the Sailor. He is blasphemous and lewd.”
The Sailor. "Judge when you have heard. It is a carol.”
The Poet. “But it is not Christmas,”
The Sailor. "Neither is it spring, yet by license we sang our songs of springtime—and for that. . . Well,

let me seize you all. It has a title—not my own. We call this song ‘Noël.’”
Myself (prettily). "And I congratulate you. Sailor, on your whimsical originality and pretty invention in

titles.”
The Sailor—

“Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!
A Catholic tale have I to tell!
.And a Christian song have I to sing
While all the bells in Arundel ring.
“I pray good beef and I pray good beer
Tliis holy night of all the year,

But I pray detestable drink for them
That give no honour to Bethlehem.

"May all good fellows that here agree
Drink Audit Ale in heaven with me.
And may all my enemies go to hell !
Noël! Noël! Noël! Noël!
May all my enemies go to hell !
Noël! Noël!”

Grizzlebeard. “Rank blasphemy as I said, and heresy, which is worse. For at Christmas we should in
particular forgive our enemies.
The Sailor. “I do. This song is about those that do not forgive me.”
The Poet. “And it is bad verse, like all the rest.”
The Sailor. “Go drown yourself in milk and water; it is great, hefty howl-verse, as strong and meaty as

that other of mine was lovely and be-winged.”
Grizzlebeard. “What neither the Poet nor you seem to know, Sailor, is that the quarrels of versifiers are
tedious to standers-by. so let us go into the Cricketers’ Arms and eat as you say, in God’s name, and
occupy ourselves with something pleasanter than the disputed lyric.”

Myself. “Very well then, let us go into the Cricketers’ Arms, where Mr. Justice Honeybubble went
when I was a boy, and there delivered his famous Opinion: his Considered Opinion, his Opinion of perma­
nent value, his Opinion which is the glory of the law.”
"What opinion was that?” said Grizzlebeard, going through the inn door, and we following him.
"I can tell you without much difficulty,” said I, “if you will listen, but I warn you it is a dull, dull thing.

Then, for that matter so was that historical lecture of yours upon the Sussex War. But I listened to that, so

now you shall listen to me.”
They sat down not very well pleased, but I assured them that when they had heard it they would

understand more law than most. “For the law." said I, “is not the dull subject some 1 Irink it, but a very
fascinating trade, full of pleasant whims and tricks for throwing an opponent. It is not all a routine of
thrusting poor men in prison, as is too commonly believed, and as I have notes here of what that great
Judge, Mr. Justice Honeybubble, said and did when he harangued the men of Duncton in the Cricketers’

Arms twenty years ago, when I was a boy, and as that feat of his is still famous throughout this part of the
County, you will do well to listen.”
They ordered their beer therefore, and I had mine free, as is the custom of the County for the one who

tells the story, and then taking certain notes from my pocket-book, and putting them in order as is necessary
when we are to follow technical matters, I gave it them broadside.
“Well, then, Mr. Justice Honeybubble was a man full of sane humour, my friends. He was of a healthy

habit of body. He was a man, as are many of the law, who preserved a vigorous gait into old age, and an
expression of alertness in his limbs and his eyes. His face was ruddy, his eyebrows were thick, his white
hair was close, and there was plenty of it.
“It was his pleasure to take long walks when his duties gave him leisure, and he especially chose these
grassy uplands; and once he came a-swinging down by what used to be, but is not, Glatting Beacon, and so
through the Combe and the leafless beeches of Burton Hanger to Duncton and the Cricketers’ Arms. It was

evening, the air was cold and pure. He strode steadily down the steep road, swinging that walking stick or
rather club which was his dearest companion. In such a mood and manner did he enter this inn where we
are now. He entered it with the object of eating and drinking something before going on to find the train at
Petworth; for in the days of which I speak public refreshment was permitted to all.
“He was delighted to find, in the main room, a gathering; it was of peasants who were discussing a
point of difficulty. They respectfully saluted him upon liis entrance, for he always dressed with care, and

the constant exercise of bullying men who could not reply had given him a commanding maimer.
“He stood before the fire surveying them in a kindly but authoritative way, and listened closely while

they discussed the matter before them; nor was it easy to discover in what precisely their difficulty lay, save

that it concerned two disputants, one George, another Roland, and that the matter of it was thus:—Two
pigs, ‘Maaster,’ ‘Masr’ Burt, the change of a sovereign, and Chichester market.

“Roland had put his case not without fire, and had appealed to right being right.

“George had replied in tones of indignation that he was not of that type of character which submits to
the imputation of folly.
“Each had reposed his case upon the known personalities and conditions of ‘Maaster.’ ‘Masr’ Burt,

Chichester market, current coin, and pigs. When, after a little silence, the assembly, deliberating over their
mugs, approached the problem, they did so by slowly reciting each in turn at intervals of about thirty
seconds the ritual phrases, ‘Ar!’ ‘That’s it.‘ and in the case of the eldest man at the end of the table the
declaration native to this holy valley, ‘Mubbe soa: mubbe noa.’
"Mr. Justice Honeybubble, who had himself been compelled upon one occasion to sum up for no less
than four hours and twenty-three minutes, took pity upon these his fellow-men, and said:
“‘Perhaps, gentlemen, I can be of some use to you: I am, chrm. chrm, accustomed to the weighing of,
er, evidence (in the fullest sense of that word), and I have had no little, chrm, experience in matters which
have been laid before me, chrm, in, er, another capacity.’

“The peasants, who took him for no less than a noble Justice of the Peace, landowner, and perhaps
colonel of some auxiliary force, respectfully acceded to his desire, and were not disappointed when the

humane jurist ordered fresh ale for the whole company, including himself. He then sat down in a brown

wooden chair with arms, which stood before the fire, crossed his legs, put the tips of his fingers together,
and faced his audience with an expression peculiarly solemn which partly awed and partly fascinated the

disputants and the areopagus at large.
“Roland and George had just begun to state their case again and to speak both at once and angrily, for
they were unaccustomed to forensic ways, when the Judge silenced them with a wave of his large white
right hand, and thus gave tongue:
“‘We have here,’ said he. ‘what lawyers call an issue; that is, a dispute in opinion, or, at any rate, in
statement, as to an objective truth. We eliminate all factors upon which the parties are agreed, and

especially, ’ here he leant forward and clenched his fist in an impressive manner, ‘all those subjective

impressions which, however important in themselves, can have no place,’ and here he waved his right arm
in a fine sweeping gesture, ‘before a civil tribunal. ’
“At this point George, who imagined from the tone of the Bench that things were going ill for him, put
on an expression of stubborn resolution; while Roland, who had come to a similar conclusion and thought

his cause in jeopardy, looked positively sullen. But the Assessors who sat around were as greatly moved as
they were impressed, and assumed attitudes of intelligent interest, concentrating every power of their minds
upon the expert’s exposition ofjudgment.
“‘So far, so good,’ said Mr. Justice Honeybubble, breathing a deep sigh and drinking somewhat from
the tankard at his side. ‘So far, so good. Now, from the evidence that has been laid before me it is clear that
Burt as a third party can neither concur nor enter any plea of Demurrer or Restraint. That, ’ he added
sharply, turning suddenly upon an old man at the end of the table, ‘would be Barattage. ’ The old man, who

was by profession a hedger and ditcher, nodded assent. ‘And Barattage,’ thundered the worthy Judge, ‘is

something so repugnant to the whole spirit of our English law, that I doubt if any would be found with the
presumption to defend it!’ His electrified audience held their breaths while he continued in somewhat
milder tones, T admit that it has been assimilated to Maintenance by no less an authority than Lord Eldon

in his decision of the matter in Crawford v. Croke. But in the Desuetude of Maintenance, and the very

proper repeal of Graham’s Act in 1848... or possibly 1849’ (frowning slightly) ‘I am not sure. . . . However,
the very proper repeal of Graham’s Act has left Barattage.’ and here his voice rose again and vibrated with
his fullest tones, ‘has left Barattage in all its native hideousness, an alien and therefore an iniquitous and a
malign accretion upon the majestic body of our English Common Law.’ At this point a slight cheer from
Roland, who saw things brightening, was suppressed by a glance like an angry searchlight from the eye of

the Judge, who concluded in full diapason. ‘Nor shall it have any mercy from me, so long as I have the
strength and authority to sit upon this Bench. ’

“Mr. Justice Honeybubble drank again, and as he was evidently reposing his voice for the moment, the

now terrified but fascinated agriculturists murmured profound applause. Their patriotism was moved, the

tradition of centuries rose in their blood, and had an appeal been made to them at that moment they would
have shed it willingly, however clumsily, in defence of that vast fabric of the Law. . . In a low, regular and
impressive voice which marked the change of subject, Mr. Justice Honeybubble continued:
“‘Now, gentlemen, consider the pigs. It often happens, nay, it must happen in the course of judicial
proceedings, that our decision relies not only on the balance of human testimony (and you are there,

remember, to judge fact not law), but upon the fitting together of circumstances as to which that testimony
relates, and in noting the actions or the situation of tilings or even of persons incapable in their nature of
entering that witness-box’ (and here he pointed to a large stuffed fish in a glass case, towards which all his

audience turned with one accord, looking round again in a somewhat blank manner) ‘and telling us upon
oath’ (the word oath in a deep bass) ‘what they themselves saw and heard in a manner that shall convey the
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. You cannot subpoena a pig—’

“‘Ar! zo you zay. Ar!' broke in the excited George, who was now confident that by some trick of
cunning he was being deprived of his pigs, ‘Ar! zo you . . . ’
“‘Silence!’ roared Mr. Justice Honeybubble. ‘Am I to be interrupted sitting here on this Bench, not

even by counsel, but by one of the parties to the ease? I trust I may never have to call attention again in the
course of my duties to so disgraceful a breach of the immemorial traditions of an English Court of Justice!
Sniff! ... I repeat, we cannot subpoena a pig’ (he repeated it with stem eyes fixed full on the unfortunate
George).

‘But what we can do, gentlemen, is to ask ourselves what in all reasonable probability would have
been the case if under those circumstances, neglecting for the moment what has been said relative to any
letters or affidavits put in. were it not what the plaintiff has supposed it to be. Chrm! ’

“Here, as the intricacy of detail was making the exposition somewhat difficult to follow, all leant
forward and summoned their very keenest attention to bear upon the problem.
“‘The decision would depend.’ went on Mr. Justice Honeybubble in a tone of finality and relief, ‘upon
the conclusion at which you would arrive in the former or in the latter concatenation of events. ’
“He leant back in lus chair, spread out lus hands amply towards them, as offering them well-weighed,

unbiassed, and unmoved by a tittle, the great body of evidence which he had sifted and arranged with such

marvellous skill.
‘“ft is for you, gentlemen,’ he concluded, rising, ‘to say which of the two conclusions in your
conscience after all that you have heard is the true one. Remember that if there is the faintest doubt in the

mind of any one of you it is his solemn duty to give the benefit of the doubt to that party in the suit who
would have most advantage from it. I believe I have not influenced you in that decision to the one side or to
the other. I hope I have not. Certainly I can speak from my heart and say that in this very grave and

important business I have tried to preserve and lay before you a general view which should be absolutely
impartial; and now I must leave you to your decision.’
‘“With this Sir Thingumbob Honeybubble nodded to all present, seized his staff, and, passing briskly
through the door, left them drowned in a tremendous silence. As he went out he had the kindly thought to
order the replenishment of their mugs, and so, glancing at his watch, he went at a smart pace down the road

past. Burton Rough to the station. But he went through the darkness smiling to himself all the way and
humming a little tune.
“Now was not that a fine full-fed judge and worthy of being remembered as he is throughout this

valley for that famous decision?”

When I had told them all this we took the road again, thinking about law yers and talking of them, and
from that the conversation came by an easy stage to moneylenders, and from them again to traitors, and so

we passed in review all the principal activities of mankind in the space of about one mile, until we had
exhausted every matter, and there was no more to be said.

After this we all fell silent and tailed off, Grizzlebeard going ahead and getting further and further from
us in great thoughtful strides, and the Poet about half-way between; but the Sailor and I taking it easy, for it
was agreed between us that we should all meet at the next Inn whatever it might be. That Inn we found no
more than two miles along the road.
And when we had picked up the Poet, who was waiting there for us. he told us that Grizzlebeard had
gone in about a quarter of an hour before, and that he feared that he must have got into some entertainment,
for all that time he had not come out or made a sign; so. said the Poet, we ought all to go in and find him.
So we turned into that little house as in duty bound, seeing that it was five miles since we had last
acknowledged the goodness of God in the drinking of ale. which is a kind of prayer, as it says in the motto:

“Laborare est orare sed potare clarior, "
which signifies tirât work is noble, and prayer its equal, but that drinking good ale is a more renowned and
glorious act than any other to which man can lend himself. And on this account it is that you have a God of

Wine, and of various liquors sundry other Gods, that is, Imaginations of men or Demons, but in the matter
of ale no need for a symbol, only that it is King.

But when we came up to the house, and turned into it, we found that Grizzlebeard, who had gone in
already before us, was in that short time deeply engaged with a Stranger who, maugre Heaven, was
drinking tea!
There they sat, hardly noticing our entry, and were at it hammer and tongs in an argument.

The Stranger was a measly sort of fellow in a cloak, tall, and with a high voice and words of a cultured
kind, and his eyes were like dead oysters, which are unpleasing things; and he and Grizzlebeard, though
they had so recently met, were already in the midst of as terrible a balderdash of argument as ever the good
angels have permitted on this sad earth.
We spoke to Grizzlebeard loudly, but the stranger paid no attention to us.
We were very much astonished and looked round-eyed at this, but Grizzlebeard only looked up and

nodded. He was too much caught by the discussion to do more.

“I should meet that,” he was saying, “by a dichotomy.”
“By a what? ” said the Sailor.
The Poet. “By something German I think.”
But Grizzlebeard, paying no heed to us at all, said to his earnest fellow: “Not teleological; you must
not think that; but, if you like, still less ateleological.”
Myself. “Good, nor ontological I hope, for that is the very Devil.”

The Stranger, purposely ignoring us, then replied to Grizzlebeard alone:
“The argument cannot be met thus, because though you will not postulate the reality of time as a

process, you must admit it as a dimension.”
“Not under compulsion!” said the Sailor fiercely.
But Grizzlebeard, as though we three were not there, replied to the Stranger:

“The word ‘dimension’ is a petitio elenchi. ”
The Stranger (eagerly). “There I pin you, that is sheer Monism!”
Grizzlebeard (more eagerly still). “Not at all! Not at all! On the contrary, Monism would be your

position”
The Sailor (to the Poet and Myself). “Let us go hence, my children, and drink in the bar with common
men, for the Devil will very soon come m by the window and fly away with these philosophers. Let us be
apart in some safe place when the struggle begins.”
With that we all went out and stayed about ten minutes, drinking with certain labouring men, and
paying for their drinks, because we were better off than they. And to these men we told such lies as we
thought might entertain them, and then, after about twenty minutes, the Sailor said to us:

The Sailor. “Those two hateful ones we have left must by this time have come to the foundations of the
world, and have thoroughly thrashed it out how it was that God laid down the roots of the hills, and why
millstones and the world are round, and even whether they have free will or no: a thing never yet
discovered save through the Bastonnade. But come, let us rout them out! I know this philosophy: when men
are at it they chain themselves down for hours.”
With that he led us back to the room, and sure enough we heard them still at it hammer and tongs, and

Grizzlebeard was saying, leaning forward, and half standing up in his excitement:
“Why then, there you are! With the content of reality expressed in contradictory terms!”
The Stranger. “There is no contradiction, but a variety of aspect, which is resolved in a higher unity.”

The Sailor (in a solemn tone). “Grizzlebeard! Darkness will soon fall upon the Weald, and before it

falls we must be beyond Graffham, nay, far beyond. So make up your mind, either to differ with this honest
gentleman, or to give way to him here and at once. And in any case you are to find your God” (and here he
took out his watch) “within exactly ten minutes from now, for if you do not we will find Him for you in a
sudden way. So in ten minutes find us also in the common bar, or perish in your sins !”

Then we all three went out again, and heard from the common bar a singing going on, the chorus of
which was Golier, which is indeed the true chorus of all songs, and the footing or underwork of every sort
of common chant and roar of fellowship. But when we came in again the poorer men from shyness stopped.

Only the Sailor said to them, “I think we must sing you a new song, wliich they are singing, out Horsham
way, of Duke William; but you must remember it, for I cannot write it down.” And with that he sang at
them this verse:
“Duke William was a wench’s son,
His grandferwas a tanner!

He drank his cider from the tun,
Which is the Norman manner:
His throne was made of oak and gold,
His brow-shaft of the yew—

That is the way the tale is told,
I doubt if it be true !
“But what care I for him?
My tankard is full to the brim,
And I’ll sing Elizabeth, Dorothy, Margaret,
Mary, Dorinda, Persephone, Miriam,
Pegotty taut and trim.

“The men that sailed to Normandy
Foul weather may they find;

For banging about in the waist of a ship
Was never to my mind.

They drink their rum in the glory-hole
In quaking and in fear;
But a better man was left behind,
And he sits drinking beer.
“But what care I for the swine?
They never were fellows of mine!
And I’ll sing Elizabeth, Dorothy, Margaret,
Mary, Dorinda, Persephone, Miriam, Pegotty, Jezebel, Topsy,
Andromeda.”

The Poet. “To your aid with She-dactyls—
“Magdalen, Emily, Charity, Agatha, Beatrice,
Anna, Cecelia, Maud, Cleopatra, Selene.

and Jessica. . .”

The Sailor (clinching it)—
"Barbara stout and fine.”

Myself (to the company). “Now is not that a good song, and does it not remind you of Duke William,
who so kindly came over here to this county many years ago, and rid us of north countrymen for ever?”
One man in the company said that he could not remember this song, but wished it written down, to

which the Sailor answered that this could not be because it was copyright, but that, God willing, he would
be passing that way again next year or the year after, and then would give it them once more, so that they
could have it by heart, and when he had said this, he put down money so that they all might drink again

when he had gone, and led us back to the room where the Stranger and Grizzlebeard were. But he took with
him a full tankard of beer, and that for reasons which will presently be seen.
For he stopped outside the door behind which we could hear the voices of the disputants still at it with
their realities and their contents, and their subjectivities and their objectivities, and their catch-it-as-it-flies,

and he said to us:
The Sailor. “Have you not seen two dogs wrangling in the street, and how they will Gna! Gna! and
Wurrer-Wurrer all to no purpose whatsoever, but solely because it is the nature of dogs thus dog-like to be-

dog the wholesome air with dogged and canicular noise of no purport, value, or conclusion? And when this
is on have you not seen how good housewives, running from their doors, best stop the noisome noise and
drown it altogether by slop, bang, douches of cold wet from a pail, which does dis-spirit the empty

disputants, and. causing them immediately to unclinch, humps them off to more useful things? So it is with
philosophers, who will snarl and yowl and worry the clean world to no purpose, not even intending a
solution of any sort or a discovery, but only the exercise of their vain clapper and clang. Also they have

made for this same game as infernal a set of barbaric words as ever were blathered and stumbled over by
Attila the king when the Emperor of Constantinople’s Court Dentist pulled out his great back teeth for the
enlargement of his jaw. Now this kind of man can be cured only by baptism, which is of four kinds, by

water, by blood, and by desire: and the fourth kind is of beer. So watch me and what I will do.”
Then he went in ahead of us, and we all came in behind, and when we came in neither Grizzlebeard
nor the Stranger looked up for one moment, but Grizzlebeard was saying, with vast scorn:
“You are simply denying cause and effect, or rather efficient causality."
To which the Stranger answered solemnly. “I do!”

On hearing this reply the Sailor, very quickly and suddenly, hurled over him all that was in the pint pot

of beer, saying hurriedly as he did so. “I baptize you in the name of the five senses,” and having done so,
ran out as hard as he could with us two at his heels, and pegged it up the road at top speed, and never drew
rein until he got to the edge of Jockey's Spinney half a mile away, and we following, running hard close

after, and there w e found him out of breath and laughing, gasping and catching, and gloiying in his great
deed.

“Now .” said he. “I warrant you, Grizzlebeard will come up in good time, and though he will be angry
he will be confused.”
Sure enough, Grizzlebeard came up after us, somewhat more than a quarter of an hour behind, and
though he w as angry, the hill had taken up some of his anger and had blown him, and when he had cursed
at the Sailor, and had told him that the Stranger was. in a sense, liis guest, the Sailor bade him be at ease,
saying that the Stranger was. in a sense, his boredom and intolerable drag, and had he not done violence we
should never have got on the road at all.

“But tell me,” he added, “did you not settle anything by the time we got away? You had been at it a
good hour, and one w ould think that men could find out in that time whether they had a Maker or no, and
what Dimension was and what Degree.”

But Grizzlebeard w as surly and would not answer him, and in the slow recoveiy of liis temper the road
seemed long enough: more particularly through the Poet, who, thinking to be genial, began to rattle off a
judgment of the world and to say that it w as a good tiling to agree, and also to bend oneself to practical
matters: and thence to talking of fanatics, and so to maundering on of authority', and saying that any man
could do w ell with his life if he only had the sense not to offend those who w ere his superiors on his way

upwards. and to pay decent attention to what those in control desired of him.

To this sort of balance Grizzlebeard, being the oldest of us. would have agreed; but in liis anger, which,
though it was declining, still smouldered, he chose to contradict, and he said in a gruff way:
Grizzlebeard. “What our fathers called ‘selling one’s soul.' Yes; it is the easiest and the worst tiling a
man can do.”
The Sailor. “The worst, perhaps, though I’m not so sure of it. but the easiest, oh, no! And I say I am

not so sure it is the worst. For one never sells anything unless one is hard up, and hard-up men are never
really wicked; it is the rich that are wicked. At least so I have always been told by the poor, who are not

only the great majority of men and therefore likely to be right, but also have no interest to sen e in saying
what they say. . . But easy, no! Do not tell me it is easy, so long as there stands for a dreadfid example the

story of Peter the Politician, which all the world should hear.”
Grizzlebeard. “And all the world has heard it.”
The Sailor (sweetly). "But not you, Grizzlebeard, so I must give it at due length to spin the road out

and to do you especial honour.
Grizzlebeard (milder). “Do so, then. Even your tale may be less dull than tramping the last hour of a
day in silence.”
The Sailor. “You must know, then, that Peter the Politician, after having sold even' public honour
which he could drag upon the counter and every public office and every kind of power except his own. and
after he had sold his country and Ids friends and his father and his mother and even his children, and his

self-respect of course, and all the rest of it, had nothing left to sell but Iris ven soul. But sell that he must,

for have money he must; without money no man can live the Great Life and go out to dine in the new
hotels that are built out of iron and plaster, and the Lord have mercy on us all!
“Well then. Peter the Politician did up Iris soul in a little brown paper parcel, all beautifully sealed with
sealing-wax and tied up with expensive string; for the public pay for these tilings where politicians are
concerned.
“He did up his soul, did I say, into this little parcel? I err! It was his secretary that did it up; not bis
unpaid secretary—his real secretary, a humble little man.
“For you must know that politicians have three kinds of secretaries: the first kind, who may be called

Secretarius Maximus, is a rich man’s son. and his place has been paid for: he is called secretary so that he
may be advanced to office, and he does nothing at all except ride about in a motor-car and come and sit by
when there is any jabbering to be done for Iris master. Then there is the second kind of secretary. who is

usually a friend’s son, and may be called Secretarius Minor; he expects no advancement to a politician’s
future, but only some little job or other in the Civil Service after Iris years of labour. And his labour is this:
to tell the third secretary what he has to do. Now this third secretary, who may be called Secretarius

Minimus, receives the sum of thirty shillings every Saturday, and for this he must sweat and toil and be at
beck and call, and go to bed late and get up early, and wear himself to a shadow, and then at forty go and be
a secretary at less wages if he can get the job. or else hang himself or stand in a row for soup on the

Embankment; and there is an end of him.

“Well, then, I say it was this third or working secretary who had done up Peter the Politician’s soul in a
pretty little parcel, in brown paper paid out of the taxes, with fine red seals paid out of the taxes, and with
strong, thin, and splendid string paid out of the taxes; and since the politician was very careful about Iris

soul and it did not weigh much, he took it with him himself and set off to the Devil’s office to sell it; and
where that office was he knew very well, for he had spent most of Iris time there while he was a young
man, and had served his apprenticeship in another part of the same building.

“When Peter the Politician sent in his card he was received with great courtesy by the Limbo-man who
kept the doors, and he was asked to sit down on a chair in a sort of little private outer room where
distinguished people await the pleasure of the Head Devil.
“In this little outer room there were one or two books to read about problems, especially marriage, and
there were some prints upon the wall which were not well done and which the Devil had taken as a bad
debt from a publisher; and there was also a calendar, but there were no Saints’ Days marked on it, as you

may well believe, but only the deaths of conspicuous people, and Peter the Politician did not study it.

“Now when he had been sitting there for about an hour without the need of a fire, there came in a neat
little tight tittle dressed-up-to-the-nines little Imp in buttons, who was very polite indeed, and told him how
sony' His Master was to keep Peter the Politician waiting, but tire fact was he was in the midst of a great

deal of business. Then the little Imp went out and left Peter the Politician alone—and he waited another two

hours.
“At the end of this time another taller and older Imp. dressed not in buttons, but in a fine tail-coat (for
he was a Tailed Imp), came in and apologised more than ever and said that His Master the Head Devil was
extremely sorry to keep Peter the Politician waiting, but would he kindly send in what his business was,

and he hoped it would immediately be attended to?
“Then Peter the Politician answered in his short, dignified way that he had come to sell his soul.
“Of course! Of course!’ said the tail-coated Imp. 'Dear me! You must excuse me; we have so much to

do to-day that we are really run off our hooves. Of course.’ he added, anxiously polite, 'there is a regular
office . . .’
‘“Yes, yes. I know.’ said Peter the Politician as impatiently as his dignity would allow. T know all
about that office, but under the circumstances and seeing that I am known here. ‘

‘“Yes, of course!’ said the big Imp again, and he went out hurriedly, and Peter the Politician was kept

waiting another two hours.
“He hummed a little and he shuffled his feet, and he drummed with his fingers, and he began very
seriously to think whether he would not go somewhere else, only he knew of no one out of Hell who
wanted his soul. So he sighed at last and continued to wait with as much resignation as he could.
“And after another two hours there came in a very' tall, gentlemanly. and deep-voiced Major Devil,
who told him how exceedingly sorry he was that His Master should have to keep him waiting, especially
now they knew the nature of his business, but the pressure of work that day was really aw ful! And would
Peter the Politician, for this once, be kind enough to send in his offer, because the Head Devil really could

not come out?
“So Peter the Politician said severely—‘Luckily I have brought the goods with me.’ And he handed the
Major Devil his nice little brown paper parcel, and the Major Devil went out apologising.

“Then Peter the Politician was kept waiting another two hours. At the end of it there came in a really
superior Devil with his hair parted in the middle and a standup-and-tumdown collar, and the accent, and
every thing. He sat down genially at the same table as Peter the Politician, and leant towards him and said

most affably and courteously—
“‘My dear sir, my Master is very sorry indeed, but there has been a terrible slump in this sort of thing
since August; the bottom is quite knocked out of the market, and — and — well, to tell you straight out,
what we want to know is how many you have to offer?’
“ ‘How many ! ’ said Peter the Politician, with a real annoyance unworthy of his rank.

“‘Yes,’ said the suave and really important Secretary Devil (for such he was), ‘the fact is, my Master
says he can’t quote for these singly in the present state of the market, but if you could bring a gross . . . ‘
“At this Peter the Politician got up swearing, and went out, forgetting to take his soul with him. and
leaving it there on the table all tied up.
“And that is why some people go about saying that he has lost his soul, for he certainly never sold it;
and this should teach you that it is not easy to sell one’s soul, though it is exceedingly easy to lose it or to

give it away.”
The Poet (with great interest). “This is the very first time I have heard this story!”

Myself. “It is not the fifteenth that I have heard it. The first time I heard it was from a Yankee, and he
told it much quicker and better than the Sailor.”
The Sailor (angrily). “Then you may go back to Yankeeland and hear it there!”

Myself. "Do not be angry, Sailor, you did your best, and I learned several things I did not know before.
For instance, about that calendar; I never knew why the deaths of great men were put down in calendars.
The Sailor (a little mollified). “Well, you know now. And you also know that when you want to sell
your soul you will have to make up a truck-load before you can get reasonable rates.”
Grizzlebeard. “I think the Sailor’s story is immoral.”

The Poet. “I think so too, for he talks in a flippant way about things which ought to be talked of
respectfully.”
Grizzlebeard. "No, not on that account; it is immoral because it makes out that souls are of different

sizes and values. Now it is well known that souls are exactly equal, and that when you weigh them one
against the other they do not differ by a grain of sand, and when you measure them there is not a hundredth
of an inch between two of them. And that in value they are all precisely the same. This has been laid down

at no less than 572 Synods, three Decisions of the Holy Office, and one Oecumenical Council.”
The Sailor. "Yes, but not in the four first Councils, and still less at Nicea, so that stumps you!”
Grizzlebeard (solemnly). "Nicea be damned!”

Myself. “Veiy well, by all means, but not Trent I hope, which is a very important one, and to be
quarrelled with only at a high risk.”
“No,” said Grizzlebeard, “not Trent, nor Constance for that matter, though it troubles me more.

Then we fell silent again. The grey evening had advanced as we listened to the Sailor’s story, and it

was growing cold. We went through the half light and the gloaming until it was upon the edge of darkness,
time for the evening meal. And we were so weary with the many, many miles of that day that we agreed
together to sleep if it were possible in the same place we might eat at, that is, in the next inn. For we were

now near the end of all the road we had to go, being but a mile or two from the County border. And as we
went we debated our last feast and our last conversation, our last songs, and our necessary farewells.
“My friends,” said I, “all men before death make a feast if they can. It is an ancient custom, and one

well approved by time. Feast before battle if you can, and before death which may come in battle. All such
death as comes to men in health, it is well to feast before it. Now, with to-morrow morning we shall come
to the end of this little journey of ours, all along the County, all the way from end to end. Thus we shall
attain, as you may say, the death of our good time. For it is agreed between us that when we come to the
Hampshire border we shall separate and see each other no more.”
The Sailor. “Yes, that is agreed.”

Myself. “Well, then, let us make a feast.”
The Poet. “By all means, and who shall pay?”
Grizzlebeard. “In general it is I that should pay, for I am the richest. We have made no feast in all these

days, but since this is to be a solemn sort of feast, and a kind of Passover (for we are soon to pass over the
boundary into Hampshire), every man must give his share.
Myself. “I am very willing, only if I do so, I must call the food and drink.”

The Sailor. “I am not willing at all, but unwilling as I am. most certainly will I eat nothing and drink
nothing to which I am not inclined.”
The Poet. “In the matter of eating and drinking I am with you all, but in the matter of paying I differ
with you altogether, for I have nothing.”
Myself. “How is this, Poet? It was only to-day that I saw you with my own eyes at the Bluebell paying

for a mug of beer with a labouring man.”
The Poet. “It was my last money, and I did it for charity.”
The Sailor. “Then now you may have the reward of charity and starve.”

Myself. “No, no, there is a way out of these matters which is quite unknown to children and to savages,

but open to men of intelligence and culture as are we. It is to do things by way of paper instead of metal. A
fund shall be formed, each one shall pay into the fund a piece of paper on which shall be written, 'I will
meet one-quarter of the bill.’ and each man shall sign. When this is done, one of us four shall be the

financier, and shall pay the bill. Then the paper will be called in, and I will pay, and Grizzlebeard will pay,
and the Sailor will pay, but you, the Poet, will not pay, and you will be adjudicated bankrupt.”
Grizzlebeard. “Yes, your principle is right in the main, but I demur to the simplicity of your last clause.

I will not allow the honest Poet to go bankrupt. I will buy up liis paper, and he shall be my slave for life,
and if I can so arrange it, his family for a good time after as well.”
The Poet. "I shall be delighted, Grizzlebeard, and I will pay you my debt in songs.

Grizzleheard. “Not if I know it. You will pay it in cash and at interest, and as to how you shall earn it,
that is your lookout.”

Myself. “Well, anyhow, it is determined that we make a feast, and I say for my part that there must be
in this feast bacon and eggs fried together in one pan. and making a great commonalty in one dish.”
The Sailor. "Excellent: and the drink shall be beer."

The Poet. "Besides this, what we need is two large cottage loaves of new bread, and butter, and some

kind of cheese.”
Myself. "Poet, did you not tell me that you w ere of this County and of this land?"
The Poet. "I did.”
Myself. "I think you lied. Who in Sussex ever heard of ‘some kind of cheese’? You might as w ell talk
in Hereford of 'some kind of cider.’ or in Kent of ‘some kind of foreigner’ coming overby their boats from
the foreign lands. I think you must have been out of Sussex, Poet, for many years of your life, and at the

wrong time.”
The Poet. "Why. that is true.”
Myself. "And. undoubtedly, Poet, you acquired in other counties a habit of eating that Gorgonzola

cheese, which is made of soap in Connecticut; and Stilton, which is not made at Stilton; and Camembert,
and other outlandish tilings. But in Sussex, let me tell you, we have but one cheese, the name of w hich is
CHEESE. It is One; and undivided, though divided into a thousand fragments, and unchanging, though
changing in place and consumption. There is in Sussex no Cheese but Cheese, and it is the same true
Cheese from the head of the Eastern Rother to Harting Hill, and from the sea-beach to tliat part of Surrey

which we gat from the Marches with sw ord and with bow. In colour it is yellow; which is the right colour
of Cheese. It is neither young nor old. Its taste is that of Cheese, and nothing more. A man may live upon it
all the days of his life.”
Grizzlebeard. "Well, then, there is to be bacon and eggs and bread and cheese and beer, and after that

Myself. "After that every man shall call for his own, and the Poet shall drink cold water. But I will

drink port, and if I taste in it the jolly currant wine of my county, black currants from the little bushes
which I know so well, then I shall give praise to God. For I would rather drink that kind of port which is all

Sussex from vine to vat, and brewed as the Sussex Men brew, than any of your concoctions of the
Portuguese, which are but elderberry, liquorice, and boiled wine.”

As we thus decided upon the nature of the feast, the last of the light, long declined, had faded upon the

horizon behind the lattice-work of bare branches. The air was pure and cold, as befitted All-Hallows, and
the far edges of the Downs toward the Hampshire border had level lines of light above them, deeply
coloured, full of departure and of rest. There was a little mist upon the meadows of the Rother. and a white

line of it in the growing darkness under the edges of the hills. It was not yet quite dark, but the first stars

had come into the sky. and the pleasant scent of the wood fires was already strong upon the evening air
when we found ourselves outside a large inn standing to the north of the road, behind a sort of green recess
or common. Here were several carts standing out in the open, and a man stood with a wagon and a
landaulette or two. and dogcarts as well, drawn up in die great courtyard.
The lower rooms of this old inn were brilliantly lighted. The small square panes of it were shaded with
red curtains, through which that light came to us on our cold evening way, and we heard the songs of men
within; for there had been some sort of sale. I think, which had drawn to this place many of the farmers
from around, and some of the dealers and other smaller men.

So we found it when we knocked at the door and were received. There was a pleasant bar, and opening

out of it a large room in which some fifteen or twenty men, all hearty', some of them old. were assembled,
and all these were drinking and singing.
Their meal was long done, but we ordered ours, which was of such excellence in the way of eggs and

bacon, as we had none of us until that moment thought possible upon this side of the grave. The cheese
also, of which I have spoken, was put before us, and the new cottage loaves, so that this feast, unlike any

other feast that yet was since the beginning of the world, exactly answered to all that the heart had expected

of it, and we were contented and were filled.
Then we lit our pipes, and called each for our own drink, I, for by black currant port, and Grizzlebeard
for brandy; the Poet, at the Sailor’s expense, for beer, and the Sailor himself for claret. Then, these before
us. we sat ourselves at the great table, and saluted the company. But we were not allowed to make more
conversation before an old man present there, sitting at the head of the table, one with a small grey beard

and half-shut considering eyes, struck the board very loudly with his fist, and cried “GOLIER”—which
appeared to be a sort of symbol, for on liis saying tins word, all the rest broke out in chorus:
“And I will sing Golier!
Golier, Golier, Golier, Golier,
And I will sing Golier!”

When this verse (which is the whole of the poem) had been repeated some six times. I knew myself

indeed to be still in my own County, and I was glad inside my heart, like a man who hears the storm upon
the windows, but is himself safe houseled by the fire. So did I know Hampshire to be stretching waste a
mile or two beyond, but here was I safe among my own people by the token that they were singing that

ancient song “Golier.”
When they had sung as many verses of this, our national anthem, as they saw fit, a young man called
for “Mas’r Charles.” and from an extreme comer of the table there came this answer:

“If so be as I do carl or be carled upon. . . .”

But he did not finish it. for they all took up very loudly the cry. “Mas’r Charles. Mas'r Charles.”
whereupon the very old man, rising to liis very old feet, put his very old hands upon the table, bending
forward, and looking upwards w ith a quizzical face full of years and expectation, said:

“Ari I can sing were that song o’ Califomy, that were sixty years ago.” and he chuckled. Then said
another old man near by:
“Ar. there you do talk right. Mas’r Charles. There were Hewlett’s Field, what some called Howlett’s
Field, which come to be called ‘Califomy’ in that same time when...” but the younger men who could not
hear him were calling out:

“Mas’r Charles, Mas’r Charles.” until silence was created again by the hammer of the chairman’s fist.

who very solemnly called upon Mas’r Charles, and Mas’r Charles in a quavering voice gave us the ancient
dirge:

“I am sailing for America

That far foreign strand,
And I whopes to set foot
In a fair fruitful land,
But in the midst of the ocean
May grow the green apple tree
Avoor I prove faalse
To the girl that loves me.
“Tire moon shall be in darkness.
And the stars give no light
But I’ll roll you in my arms
On a cold frosty night.
And in the midst of the ocean
May grow the green apple tree.”

Here the company, overcome by the melancholy of such tilings, joined altogether in a great moan:
“Avoor I prove faalse
To the girl that loves me.

Tins song so profoundly affected us all. and particularly the Poet, that for some moments we were not
for another, when the Sailor looking up in an abrupt fashion, said:

“Gentlemen, I will sing you a song, but it is on condition you can join in the chores.”
To which the chairman far off at the end of the table answered:
“Ar, Mister, if so be as we know it.”
Then a younger man protested:
“Nout but what we can arl on us sing it arter un,” and this was the general opinion. So when that fist at
the end of the table had performed its regular ritual, and when also more beer had been brought as the

occasion demanded, the Sailor began to shout at the top of his voice, and without undue melody, this noble
song, the chorus of which he particularly emphasized, so that it was readily repeated by all our friends:

■‘Thou ugly, lowering, treacherous Quean
I think thou are the Devil!
To pull them down the rich and mean.
And bring them to one level.
Of all my friends
That found their ends
By only following thee.
How many I tell

Already in Hell,
So shall it not be with me

On hearing this last line they all banged and roared heartly, and shouted in enormous voices:
“Zo zhall ee not be, Zo zhall ee not be
Zo zhall ee not be wi* me!*’

which, by zealous repetition they made a chorus, and one old fellow that had Iris chin very nearly upon the
table said, “Aye, marster! But who be she?”

“Why,” said the Sailor, “She whom we rail at in this song is that Spirit of getting-on-ed-ness and
making out our life at the expense of our fellow men and of our own souls.”
“We mun arl get on! If so be as can! ” said a young miller from down the valley.
“Yes,” said the Sailor shortly, “but let me tell you they overdo it in the towns. I do not blame your way
... and anyhow the song must go on,” whereat he began the second verse:
“I knew three fellows were in your thrall,
Got more than they could carry,

The first might drink no wine at all,
And the second he would not marry:
The third in seeking golden earth

Was drownded in the sea,
Which taught him what your wage is worth.
So shall it not be with me!”

And they all cried out as before:
“Zo zhall ee not be
Zo zhall ee not be
Zo zhall ee not be wi’ me.”

Then the Sailor began again:
“There was Peter Bell of North Chappel,
Was over hard and sparing,
He spent no penny of all his many,

And died of over caring;
He saved above two underd pound
But his widow spent it free,
And turned the town nigh upside down,
So shall it not be with me!”

And again, but more zealously than before, they gave him their chorus, for they all knew North
Chapel, and several wagged their heads and laughed, and one more aged liar said that he remembered the

widow.
But the Sailor concluding sang, with more voice than even he had given us in all those days:
“Then mannikins hang the table round,
For the younger son o’ the Squire,
Who never was blest of penny or pound,

But got his heart’s desire.
Oh, the Creditors’ curse
Might follow his hearse,
For all that it mattered to he!
They were easy to gammon
From worshipping Mammon,

So shall it not be with me!”

And in one mighty chorus they all applauded and befriended him, shouting:
“Zo zhall ec not be

Zo zhall ee not be
Zo zhall ee not be wi’ me.”

“Ar! but that be main right!” said the chief moneylender of that place, his eyes all beaming; and indeed

for the moment you would have thought that not one of them but had renounced the ambitions of this
world, while the Sailor hummed to himself in a murmur:
“And Absalom,

That was a King’s son,
Was hangéd on a tree,
When he the Kingdom would have won,

So shall it not be with me!”

The time had now come when the guests must be going save those who were to sleep in the house that
night, and whose cattle were stabled there. But when Grizzlebeard and I asked the host apart whether there
were room for us, he said there was not, not even in his bam where many would that night lie upon the
straw. But if we would pay our reckoning we might sleep (and he would give us blankets and mgs for it)
before that fire in that room.
We told him we would be off early, we paid our reckoning, and so for the third time in those three

nights we were to sleep once more as men sleep in wars, but by this time our bones were hardened to it.
And when the last man had gone his way to bed or bam we were left with one candle, and we made
our camp as best we could before the fire, and slept the last sleep of that good journeying.

THE SECOND OF NOVEMBER
1902
I woke sharply and suddenly from a dream in that empty room. It was Grizzlebeard that had put Iris
hand upon my shoulder. The late winter dawn was barely glimmering, and there was mist upon the heath

outside and rime upon the windows.
I woke and shuddered. For in my dream I had come to a good place, the place inside the mind, which is
all made up of remembrance and of peace. Here I had seemed to be in a high glade of beeches, standing on

soft, sweet grass on a slope very high above the sea; the air was warm and the sea was answering the
sunlight very far below me. It was such a place as my own Downs have made for me in my mind, but the
Downs transfigured, and the place was full of glory and of content, height and great measurement fit for the

beatitude of the soul. Nor had I in that dream any memory of loss, but rather a complete end of it. and I was
surrounded, though 1 could not see them, with the return of all those tilings that had ever been my own. But
this was in the dream only; and when I woke it was to the raw world and the sad uncertain beginnings of a

little winter day.
Grizzlebeard, who had woken me. said gravely:

"We must be up early. Let us waken the others also, and take the road, for we are near the end of our

journey. We have come to the term and boundary of this short passage of ours, and of our brief com­

panionship, for we must reach the County border in these early hours. So awake, and waken the others.”
Then I woke the other two. who also stirred and looked wearily at the thin, grey light, but rose in their
turn, and then I said to Grizzlebeard:
“Shall we not eat before we start to the place after which we shall not see each other any more
But he said. “No. we have but a little way to go. and when we have gone that little way together, we

will break a emst between us. and pledge each other if you will, and then we shall never see each other any

more.
The others also said that this was the way in which the matter should be accomplished.

Yielding to them, therefore (for I perceived that they were greater than I), we went out into the
morning mist and walked through it sturdily enough, but silent, the sounds of our footsteps coming close
into our ears, blanketed and curtained by the fog. For a mile and second mile and a third no one of us spoke

a word to another. But as I walked along I looked furtively first to one side and then to the other, judging
my companions, whom chance had given me for these few hours; and it seemed to me (whether from the
mist or what not) that they were taller than men; and their eyes avoided my eyes.
When we had come to Treyford, Grizzlebeard, who was by dumb assent at this moment our leader, or
at any rate certainly mine, took that lane northward which turns through Redlands and up to the hill of

Elstead and its inn. Then for the first time he spoke and said:
“Here we will break a loaf, and pledge each other for the last time.”
Which we did, all sitting quite silent, and then again we took the road, and went forward as we had

gone forward before, until we came to Harting. And when we came to Harting, just in the village street of

it, Grizzlebeard, going forward a little more quickly, drew with him his two companions, and they stood
before me, barring the road as it were, and looking at me kindly, but halting my advance.
I said to them, a little afraid, “Do you make for our parting now? We are not yet come to the county
border!”
But Grizzlebeard said (the others keeping silent):—

“Yes. As we met upon this side of the county border, so shall we part before we cross it. Nor shall you

cross it with us. But these my companions and I, when we have crossed it must go each to our own place:
but you are perhaps more fortunate, for you are not far from your home.”
When he had said this, I was confused to wonder from his voice and from the larger aspect of himself

and his companions, whether indeed they were men.
“ . . . And is there,” I said, “in all the county another such company of four; shall I find even one

companion like any of you? Now who is there to-day that can pour out songs as you can at every hour and
make up the tunes as well? And even if they could so sing, would any such man or men be of one faith with
me?
“Come back with me,” I said, “along the crest of the Downs; we will overlook together the groves at
Lavington and the steep at Bury Combe, and then we will turn south and reach a house I know of upon the
shingle, upon the tide, near where the Roman palaces are drowned beneath the Owers; and to-night once

more, and if you will for the last time, by another fire we will sing yet louder songs, and mix them with the
noise of the sea.”
But Grizzlebeard would not even linger. He looked at me with a dreadful solemnity and said:

“No; we are all three called to other things. But do you go back to your home, for the journey is done.”

Then he added (but in another voice): “There is nothing at all that remains: nor any house; nor any
castle, however strong; nor any love, however tender and sound; nor any comradeship among men,
however hardy. Nothing remains but the things of which I will not speak, because we have spoken enough

of them already during these four days. But I who am old will give you advice, which is this—to consider
chiefly from now onward those permanent things which are, as it were, the shores of this age and the
harbours of our glittering and pleasant but dangerous and wholly changeful sea.”
When he had said this (by which he meant Death), the other two, looking sadly at me, stood silent also
for about the time in which a man can say good-bye with reverence. Then they all three turned about and

went rapidly and with a purpose up the village street.

I watched them, straining my sad eyes, but in a moment the mist received them and they had
disappeared.

I went up in gloom, by the nearest spur, on to the grass and into the loneliness of the high Downs that
are my brothers and my repose; and, once upon their crest, setting my face eastward I walked on in a fever

for many hours back towards the places from which we had come, and below me as I went was that good
landscape in which I had passed such rare and memorable hours.
I still went on, through little spinnies here and there, and across the great wave tops and rolls of the
hills, and as the day proceeded and the light declined about me I still went on, now dipping into the gaps
where tracks and roads ran over the chain, now passing for a little space into tall and silent woods whereever these might stand. And all the while I came nearer and nearer to an appointed spot of which a memory
had been fixed for years in my mind. But as I strode, with such a goal in view, an increasing loneliness

oppressed me, and the air of loss and the echo of those profound thoughts which had filled the last words
we four had exchanged together.

It was in the grove above Lavington, near the mounds where they say old kings are buried, that I, still
following the crest of my hills, felt the full culmination of all the twenty tides of mutability which had thus
run together to make a skerry in my soul. I saw and apprehended, as a man sees or touches a physical thing,
that nothing of our sort remains, and that even before my county should cease to be itself I should have left

it. I recognised that I was (and I confessed) in that attitude of the mind wherein men admit mortality;
something had already passed from me—I mean that fresh and vigorous morning of the eyes wherein the
beauty of this land had been reflected as in a tiny mirror of burnished silver. Youth was gone out apart; it
was loved and regretted, and therefore no longer possessed.
Then, as I walked through this wood more slowly, pushing before me great billows of dead leaves, as
the bows of a ship push the dark water before them, this side and that, when the wind blows full on the
middle of the sail and the water answers loudly as the ship sails on, so I went till suddenly I remembered

with the pang that catches men at the clang of bells what this time was in November; it was the Day of the
Dead. All that day I had so moved and thought alone and fasting, and now the light was falling. I had
consumed the day in that deep wandering on the heights alone, and now it was evening. Just at that moment

of memory I looked up and saw that I was there. I had come upon that lawn which I had fixed for all these
hours to be my goal.
It is the great platform just over Barl’ton whence all the world lies out before one. Eastward into the
night for fifty miles stretched on the wall of the Downs, and it stretched westward towards the coloured sky
where a full but transfigured daylight still remained. Southward was the belt of the sea, very broad, as it is
from these bare heights, and absolutely still; nor did any animal move in the brush-wood near me to insult
the majesty of that silence. Northward before me and far below swept the Weald.
The haze had gone; the sky was faint and wintry. but pure throughout its circle, and above the Channel

hung largely the round of the moon, still pale, because the dark had not yet come.
But though she had been worshipped so often upon such evenings and from such a place, a greater
thing now moved and took me from her. and turning round I looked north from the ridge of the steep

escarpment over the plain to the rivers and the roofs of the Weald. I would have blessed them had I known

some form of word or spell which might convey an active benediction, but as I knew none such, I repeated
instead the list of their names to serve in place of a prayer.
The river Anin, a valley of sacred water; and Amberley Wild brook, which is lonely with reeds at
evening; and Burton Great House, where I had spent nights in November; and Lavington also and Hidden
Byworth; and Fittleworth next on. and Egdean Side, all heath and air; and the lake and the pine trees at the
mill; and Petworth, little town.

All the land which is knit in with our flesh, and yet in which a man cannot find an acre nor a wall of
his own.

I knew as this affection urged me that verse alone would satisfy something at least of that irremediable

desire. I lay down therefore at full length upon the short grass which the sheep also love, and taking out a
little stump of pencil that I had, and tearing off the back of a letter, I held my words prepared.
My metre, which at first eluded me (though it had been with me in a way for many hours) was given
me by these chance lines that came:
". . . and therefore even youth that dies
May leave of right its legacies.”

I put my pencil upon the paper, doubtfully, and drew little lines, considering my theme. But I would
not long hesitate in this manner, for I knew that all creation must be chaos first, and then gestures in the
void before it can cast out the completed thing. So I put down in fragments this Une and that; and thinking

first of how many children below me upon that large and fruitful floor were but entering what I must
perforce abandon, I wrote down:
“. . . and of mine opulence I leave
To every Sussex girl and boy
My lot in universal joy.”

Having written this down, I knew clearly what was in my mind.
The way in which our land and we mix up together and are part of the same thing sustained me, and
led on the separate parts of my growing poem towards me; introducing them one by one; till at last I wrote
down this further line:
“One with our random fields we grow.”

And since I could not for the moment fill in the middle of the verse, I wrote the end, which was already
fashioned:
“. . . because of lineage and because
The soil and memories out of mind
Embranch and broaden all mankind.”

Ah! but if a man is part of and is rooted in one steadfast piece of earth, which has nourished him and

given him his being, and if he can on his side lend it glory and do it service (I thought), it will be a friend to
him for ever, and he has outflanked Death in a way.

“And I shall pass” (I thought), “but this shall stand
Almost as long as No-Man’s Land.”

“No, certainly,” I answered to myself aloud, “he does not die!” Then from that phrase there ran the

fugue, and my last stanzas stood out clear at once, complete and full, and I wrote them down as rapidly as
writing can go.

wrote) “that can bequeath
Some influence to the land he knows,
Or dares, persistent, interwreath
“He does not die” (I

Love permanent with the wild hedgerows;
He does not die, but still remains
Substantiate with his darling plains.
“The spring’s superb adventure calls
His dust athwart the woods to flame;
His boundary river’s secret falls

Perpetuate and repeat his name.
He rides his loud October sky:
He does not die. He does not die.
“Tire beeches know the accustomed head
Which loved them, and a peopled air
Beneath their benediction spread
Comforts the silence everywhere;

For native ghosts return and these
Perfect the mystery in the trees.

“So, therefore, though myself be crosst
The shuddering of that dreadful day
When friend and fire and home are lost
.And even children drawn away—
The passer-by shall hear me still,
A boy that sings on Duncton Hill.”

Full of these thoughts and greatly relieved by their metrical expression, I went, through the gathering
darkness, southward across the Downs to my home.

FINIS