bout the grey
foundations of St. Margaret's Island. Then he looked beyond and gazed
at the new white monastery on Caldy, and wondered who the architect
was, and how he had contrived to make the group of buildings look
exactly like the background of a mediaeval picture.

After about an hour of this and a couple of pipes, Smith confesses
that he began to feel extremely drowsy. He was just wondering whether
it would be pleasant to stretch himself out on the wild thyme that
scented the high place and go to sleep till breakfast, when the
mounting sun caught one of the monastery windows, and Smith stared
sleepily at the darting flashing light till it dazzled him. Then he
felt "queer." There was an odd sensation as if the top of his head
were dilating and contracting, and then he says he had a sort of
shock, something between a mild current of electricity and the
sensation of putting one's hand into the ripple of a swift brook.

Now, what happened next Smith cannot describe at all clearly. He knew
he was on Giltar, looking across the waves to Caldy; he heard all the
while the hollow, booming tide in the caverns of the rocks far below
him, And yet he saw, as if in a glass, a very different country--a
level fenland cut by slow streams, by long avenues of trimmed trees.

"It looked," he says, "as if it ought to have been a lonely country,
but it was swarming with men; they were thick as ants in an anthill.
And they were all dressed in armour; that was the strange thing about
it.

"I thought I was standing by what looked as if it had been a
farmhouse; but it was all battered to bits, just a heap of ruins and
rubbish. All that was left was one tall round chimney, shaped very
much like the fifteenth-century chimneys in Pembrokeshire. And
thousands and tens of thousands went marching by.

"They were all in armour, and in all sorts of armour. Some of them had
overlapping tongues of bright metal fastened on their clothes, others
were in chain mail from head to foot, others were in heavy plate
armour.

"They wore helmets of all shapes and sorts and sizes. One regiment had
steel caps with wide trims, something like the old barbers' basins.
Another lot had knights' tilting helmets on, closed up so that you
couldn't see their faces. Most of them wore metal gauntlets, either of
steel rings or plates, and they had steel over their boots. A great
many had things like battle-maces swinging by their sides, and all
these fellows carried