'Do you remember that?' he said. 'It was the song that Oriel man used to sing.' Then I recognized 'Our Last Waltz,' and afterwards 'In Sweet September.' I remembered both as the songs of a man whose wedding we both had attended, in the very year that we went down.
We shared a hut behind the mission homestead, and shared much converse before we slept.
'It's purple and gold,' Vine said. 'I came out to find a beastly ruin.'
'And you find the Victorian Sixth Decade mummified,' I said.
'Don't sneer!'
'Well, pressed in lavender,' I amended.
For early did'st thou leave the world, with powers
Fresh, undiverted to the world without,
Firm to their mark, not spent on other things;
Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt,
Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings.
'That describes Kent's Hegira, doesn't it? He's stopped where we two were, when we went down, in ever so many ways.'
'Hurray!' cried Vine, tossing his boot up, 'I came out to find a beastly ruin, and I've found my lost youth, nothing more nor less! Bless you!'
But his ecstasy was to culminate on the following morning. Kent had mounted him on one of his two mules, and piloted him on the other to see some Bush paintings three miles away.