of our forgetful hand.

XXI

Leisure

It was a bright day in early spring; large, fleecy clouds floated in a
blue sky; the wind was cool, but the sun lay hot in sheltered places.

I was spending a few days with an old friend, at a little house he
calls his Hermitage, in a Western valley; we had walked out, had passed
the bridge, and had stood awhile to see the clear stream flowing, a
vein of reflected sapphire, among the green water-meadows; we had
climbed up among the beech-woods, through copses full of primroses, to
a large heathery hill, where a clump of old pines stood inside an
ancient earth-work. The forest lay at our feet, and the doves cooed
lazily among the tree-tops; beyond lay the plain, with a long range of
smooth downs behind, where the river broadened to the sea-pool, which
narrowed again to the little harbour; and, across the clustered
house-roofs and the lonely church tower of the port, we could see a
glint of the sea.

We sat awhile in silence; then "Come," I said, "I am going to be
impertinent! I am in a mood to ask questions, and to have full
answers."

"And I," said my host placidly, "am always in the mood to answer
questions."

I would call my friend a poet, because he is sealed of the tribe, if
ever man was; yet he has never written verses to my knowledge. He is a
big, burly, quiet man, gentle and meditative of aspect; shy before
company, voluble in private. Half-humorous, half melancholy. He has
been a man of affairs, prosperous, too, and shrewd. But nothing in his
life was ever so poetical as the way in which, to the surprise and even
consternation of all his friends, he announced one day, when he was
turned of forty, that he had had enough of work, and that he would do
no more. Well, he had no one to say him nay; he has but few relations,
none in any way dependent on him; he has a modest competence; and,
being fond of all leisurely things--books, music, the open air, the
country, flowers, and the like--he has no need to fear that his time
will be unoccupied.

He looked lazily at me, biting a straw. "Come," said I again, "here is
the time for a catechism. I have reason to think you are over forty?"

"Yes," said he, "the more's the pity!"

"And you have given up regular work," I said, "for over a year; and how
do you like that?"

"Like it?" he said. "Well, so much that I can never work again; and
what is stranger still is that I never knew what it was to be really