strange land, and the day is far off when we shall forget the friendly, gentle people whose name is the memorial of a great ill escaped, of much good enjoyed, in the days that are over, and the landmark of who knows what greater good in the days that are to be.
CONCLUSION.
Perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world, except for those phlegmatic natures, who, I suspect, would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope, and even in railway carriages: what banishes them is the vacuum in gentleman and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that has no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?
George Eliot.
αλλα θεος τοι και θεοyεννης,
ημεις δε βροτοι και θνητοyενεις.
καιτοι φθιμενω τοις ισοθεοις
εyκληρα λαχειν yεy’ ακουσαι.Antigone.
All is over now; April was just a twelfth-night old when the school departed. Some of our company have lingered on for business, a few from reluctance to have done with it. But to-day
the last group has taken wing for the Midlands. Old “Borth,” the colley dog, followed them to the station, and poked his nose into the carriage to take his leave. Old Borth—we had almost forgotten him, and that had been deep ingratitude for he was not the least warm-hearted of our friends in Wales. His master lived two miles away; but soon after our arrival, Borth had come down from the hills to attach himself to our fortunes, and henceforth became, as it were, our familiar, the pet of the regiment, like the goat of the “23rd.” He knew his position, and was a stickler for formalities; he had a wag of the tail for every boy who wore the image of the venerable schoolmaster upon his cap; but if he met him bare-headed, or, by any chance, in an indistinctive head-gear, he would cut that boy dead, were he never so much the same urchin from whose hand he had yesterday eaten a cheese-cake. That was his official rebuke for the irregularity. By day, Borth would bask in some sunny corner of our quarters; at night, he has been known to venture on a nearer intimacy where doors were left open. We found you once ourselves, Borth, curled up and asleep upon our own bed. You woke up, shook yourself with a modest, but not startled
manner, and walked quietly away, like a gentleman.
Ah! kind friend, you showed us the sincerest of flatteries, that of imitation. You left a comfortable home for chance quarters and uncertain fare, that you might be one of us, an outcast among outcasts. Now we must part, for our home will spare us no longer, as neither will yours spare you. And so the last good-bye is said, and you are limping away to your hills again, with dejection expressed in every fibre of your frame, from the drooping ears to the last hair on your tail.
All is over, and the place is very silent, except for the clink of hammers where they are breaking down our wooden walls, and, seaward, the cry and splash of gull and tern dipping for their prey in the shoal of herring-fry which is wandering about the bay. Close inshore a porpoise is wallowing, like the jolly sea-pig that he is, in his berth of glistening water. The wild creatures seem to have grown tamer since there are no strollers to keep them aloof. This morning, as we passed his pool, the stately heron let us come within twenty yards of him before he got leisurely upon the wing. The village seems even quieter; the people at their doors betray, to our fancy, a certain lassitude
as if, like merrymakers on the morrow of a revel, they felt somewhat sleepy and sorry, now that the stirring social year is over, and the little fishing town has returned to its “old solitary nothingness.”
Yes, the silence has come down again; but it is a silence full of voices. For, as it often happens that, when things without are stillest, men hear most audibly the tumult of their own brains, so is it now with us. Action is ended, and memory begins to work. Into the vacuum which the silence makes, the stream of our little history pours in a long backwater. Our thoughts go back to the beginning of it, the hour when, as we were sailing prosperously under press of canvas, the blast struck us suddenly out of a sunny sky. We live again the slow months of enforced vacation, and the brief spell of apparent security, broken by the second stroke. We recall the slow and painful sickening of hope, amid the frustration of attempted remedies; the watchings and communings by late firesides; the morning questionings and bulletins; the deepening of fears, until the moment when the sharp pressure of calamity became the liberating touch, and made a hazardous adventure seem a welcome alternative. Not less