tioning, not knowing we had heard the
last gun and bomb of the affair, a little stunned by the maniacal
rapidity and violence of this attack, we found ourselves gazing at the
familiar and shadowy peace of our suburb as we have always known it. It
had returned to that aspect. But something had gone from it for ever. It
was not, and never could be again, as once we had known it. The security
of our own place had been based on the goodwill or indifference of our
fellow-creatures everywhere. To-night, over that obscure and unimportant
street, we had seen a celestial portent illuminate briefly a little of
the future of mankind.

III. Islands

JANUARY 5, 1918. The editor of the _Hibbert Journal_ betrays a secret and
lawless passion for islands. They must be small sanctuaries, of course,
far and isolated; for he shows quite rightly that places like the British
Isles are not islands in any just and poetic sense. Our kingdom is earth,
sour and worm-riddled earth, with all its aboriginal lustre trampled out.
By islands he means those surprising landfalls, Kerguelen, the Antarctic
Shetlands, Timor, Amboyna, the Carolines, the Marquesas, and the
Galapagos. An island with a splendid name, which I am sure he would have
mentioned had he thought of it, is Fernando de Noronha.

There must be a fair number of people to-day who cherish that ridiculous
dream of an oceanic solitude. We remember that whenever a storyteller
wishes to make enchantment seem thoroughly genuine, he begins upon an
island. One might say, if in a hurry, that Defoe began it, but in leisure
recall the fearful spell of islands in the Greek legends. It is easily
understood. If you have watched at sea an island shape, and pass,
forlorn in the waste, apparently lifeless, and with no movement to be
seen but the silent fountains of the combers, then you know where the
Sirens were born, and why awful shapes grew in the minds of the simple
Greeks out of the wonders in Crete devised by the wise and mysterious
Minoans, who took yearly the tribute of Greek youth--youth which never
returned to tell.

How easily the picture of one's first island in foreign seas comes back!
I had not expected mine, and was surprised one morning, when
eastward-bound in the Mediterranean, to see a pallid mass of rock two
miles to port, when I had imagined I knew the charts of that sea well
enough. It was a frail ghost of land on that hard blue plain, and had a
light of its own; but it loo