nothing
happens except that the friend repeats again and again, "Oh, my God," and
when I ask him why he has said that, does not know that he has spoken; and
I feel that there is something very evil in the room.

* * * * *

We are sitting round the fire one night, and a member, a woman, tells a
dream that she has just had. She dreamed that she saw monks digging in a
garden. They dug down till they found a coffin, and when they took off the
lid she saw that in the coffin lay a beautiful young man in a dress of
gold brocade. The young man railed against the glory of the world, and
when he had finished, the monks closed the coffin reverently, and buried
it once more. They smoothed the ground, and then went on with their
gardening.

* * * * *

I have a young man with me, an official of the National Literary Society,
and I leave him in the reading-room with Russell, while I go upstairs to
see the young Scotchman. I return after some minutes to find that the
young man has become a Theosophist, but a month later, after an interview
with a friar, to whom he gives an incredible account of his new beliefs,
he goes to Mass again.

BOOK III

HODOS CAMELIONIS

_HODOS CAMELIONIS_

I

When staying with Hyde in Roscommon, I had driven over to Lough Kay,
hoping to find some local memory of the old story of Tumaus Costello,
which I was turning into a story now called _Proud Costello, Macdermot's
Daughter, and the Bitter Tongue_. I was rowed up the lake that I might
find the island where he died; I had to find it from Hyde's account in
_The Love-Songs of Connaught_, for when I asked the boatman, he told the
story of Hero and Leander, putting Hero's house on one island, and
Leander's on another. Presently we stopped to eat our sandwiches at the
"Castle Rock," an island all castle. It was not an old castle, being but
the invention of some romantic man, seventy or eighty years ago. The last
man who had lived there had been Dr. Hyde's father, and he had but stayed
a fortnight. The Gaelic-speaking men in the district were accustomed,
instead of calling some specially useless thing a "white elephant," to
call it "The Castle on the Rock." The roof was, however, still sound, and
the windows unbroken. The situation in the centre of the lake, that has
little wood-grown islands, and is surrounded by wood-grown hills, is
romantic, and at one end, and perhaps at the