time and harvest, loving and begetting, births and deaths, walks
in the summer sunlight and tales by the winter fireside, the ancient
sequence of hope and acts and age perennially renewed, eddying on for
ever and ever, save that now the impious hand of research was raised to
overthrow this drowsy, gently humming, habitual, sunlit spinning-top of
man's existence....

For a time he forgot wars and crimes and hates and persecutions, famine
and pestilence, the cruelties of beasts, weariness and the bitter wind,
failure and insufficiency and retrocession. He saw all mankind in terms
of the humble Sunday couple upon the seat beside him, who schemed their
inglorious outlook and improbable contentments. 'I had a sense of all
this globe as that.'

His intelligence struggled against this mood and struggled for a time
in vain. He reassured himself against the invasion of this disconcerting
idea that he was something strange and inhuman, a loose wanderer
from the flock returning with evil gifts from his sustained unnatural
excursions amidst the darknesses and phosphorescences beneath the
fair surfaces of life. Man had not been always thus; the instincts and
desires of the little home, the little plot, was not all his nature;
also he was an adventurer, an experimenter, an unresting curiosity, an
insatiable desire. For a few thousand generations indeed he had tilled
the earth and followed the seasons, saying his prayers, grinding his
corn and trampling the October winepress, yet not for so long but that
he was still full of restless stirrings.

'If there have been home and routine and the field,' thought Holsten,
'there have also been wonder and the sea.'

He turned his head and looked up over the back of the seat at the great
hotels above him, full of softly shaded lights and the glow and colour
and stir of feasting. Might his gift to mankind mean simply more of
that? . . .

He got up and walked out of the garden, surveyed a passing tram-car,
laden with warm light, against the deep blues of evening, dripping and
trailing long skirts of shining reflection; he crossed the Embankment
and stood for a time watching the dark river and turning ever and again
to the lit buildings and bridges. His mind began to scheme conceivable
replacements of all those clustering arrangements. . . .

'It has begun,' he writes in the diary in which these things are
recorded. 'It is not for me to reach out to consequences I cannot
foresee. I am a par