ard,
I knew they were saying--those opened lips which could speak no more!
"Mother! Mother Canada! Home! Home!..."

And then away down the wharf some one chanted: "Me and my girl!" And,
silent as she had come, the muffled ship vanished in all her length,
with those grey forms and those mute faces; and I was standing again in
the bows beside a huge hawser; below me the golden gleam bobbing deep in
the oily water, and above me the cold start in beauty shining.

XIV

HERITAGE

(AN IMPRESSION)

From that garden seat one could see the old low house of pinkish brick,
with a path of queer-shaped flagstones running its length, and the tall
grey chapel from which came the humming and chanting and organ drone of
the Confirmation Service. But for that, and the voices of two gardeners
working below us among the fruits and flowers, the July hush was
complete. And suddenly one became aware of being watched.

That thin white windmill on the hill!

Away past the house, perhaps six hundred yards, it stood, ghostly, with
a face like that of a dark-eyed white owl, made by the crossing of its
narrow sails. With a black companion--a yew-tree cut to pyramid form, on
the central point of Sussex--it was watching us, for though one must
presume it built of old time by man, it looked up there against the sky,
with its owl's face and its cross, like a Christo-Pagan presence.

What exactly Paganism was we shall never know; what exactly Christianism
is, we are as little likely to discover; but here and there the two
principles seem to dwell together in amity. For Paganism believed in the
healthy and joyful body; and Christianism in the soul superior thereto.
And, where we were sitting that summer day, was the home of bodies
wrecked yet learning to be joyful, and of souls not above the process.

We moved from the grey-wood seat, and came on tiptoe to where house and
chapel formed a courtyard. The doors were open, and we stood unseen,
listening. From the centre of a square stone fountain a little bubble of
water came up, and niched along one high wall a number of white pigeons
were preening their feathers, silent, and almost motionless, as though
attending to the Service.

The sheer emotion of church sounds will now and then steal away reason
from the unbeliever, and take him drugged and dreaming. "Defend, O Lord,
this Thy child!...." So it came out to us in the dream and drowse of
summer, which the little bubble of water cooled.