. . . . A thought had been germinating in my mind ever since the moment of my near-madness on the lawn, when the iniquity of Parson Lolly had so taken hold of me. When we were alone:
“Crofts, I want to prove I’m not crazy. Show me where you want me to sleep, and give me a book to write in. And keep it quiet, for heaven’s sake.”
“A book to write in?”
“I have many words within me craving to be penned. Give me a book to write in, and show me my room.”
Well, this is the room, and these some of the words.
Now to tell of the many things that happened to me to-day before these many things.
II.
The Bull
Yesterday at one o’clock in the afternoon.
About this time I was sitting on a damp sharp stone, looking about me and seeing nothing. I had walked for a long while and gotten nowhere. For there was persistent mist still in the uplands, and I had strayed into the thick of it and was hopelessly befogged, hungry, and a trifle anxious about the probable duration of my helplessness.
My thoughts just then were largely retrospect. I had set out from—well, I have forgotten the spelling of the place, but it’s no matter.[¹] The names in Wales have fascinating orthography and, to one not adept, rather unobvious pronunciations. I had set out from this place which must be anonymous in order to search for something that had not been seen for several centuries, the private oratory or shrine or cell of St. Tarw, a rather unbelievable name, or, in the American idiom, a bully one, whichever way you look at it, for a Welsh saint. It’s one that anybody can say without arduous practice. The saint himself was a rather incredible individual. It happens that I know something of saints, they being a particular hobby of mine, and yet I was uncertain at that moment whether St. Tarw was a man or was a whisper on the faëry breeze of legend. But as it happened, in the course of researches in London, I found hints that, man or whisper, he had left or there had been left for him in what to-day is Radnorshire, a monument of stone in which he did his devotions, or had been believed to do them.