and hid his scars--
He little dreamed his fate could hold
The doom of dwarfish avatars
That Vega sent, when Stroom was old.

When you are talking things over with any one, you have to take some
precautions. If you have just come from a cathedral, and try to discuss
its stained glass, with the janitor of your apartment house, say,--why,
it won't be much use, because stained glass means to him bathroom
windows, and that's all his mind will run on. I am in exactly that
position at this moment. I don't mean bathroom windows, I mean what is
the use of my saying a word about Stroom and Graith, to any one who may
think they are a firm of provision dealers in Yonkers. Any woman who
began this essay thinking that Graith was a new perfume,--any man who
said to himself "Stroom? Oh, yes: that Bulgarian ferment,"--are readers
who would really do better to go and read something else.

Having settled that, I must now admit that until yesterday I knew
nothing about them myself. Yet, centuries ago, Stroom and Graith were on
every one's tongues. Then, I don't know what happened, but a strange
silence about them began. One by one, those who had spoken of them
freely in some way were hushed. The chronicles of the times became
silent, and named them no more.

We think when we open our histories, we open the past. We open only such
a small part of it! Great tracts disappear. Forgetfulness or secret
taboos draw the dim curtains down, and hide from our sight awful
thoughts, monstrous deeds, monstrous dooms....

Even now, in the bright lights and courage of the era we live in, there
has been only one writer who has ventured to name Stroom and Graith.

His name was Dixon; he was at Oxford, in the fifties, with that
undergraduate group which included Burne-Jones, William Morris, and on
the outside, Rossetti. Where he found what so long had been hidden, even
he does not say. But he wrote certain poems, in which Stroom and Graith,
and the Agraffe appear.

This fact is recorded in only one book that I know of, and that is in
the fifth volume of Mr. T. Humphry Ward's English Poets. When I opened
this book, I read for the first time about Dixon. I also read one of his
poems, which was wildish and weird:

"Go now from the shore,
Far ruined: the grey shingly floor
To thy crashing step answers, the doteril cries,
And on dipping wing flies:
'Tis their silence!"

Not knowing what a doteril