l of his
own--the gladness that comes from an illusion of permanence."

"For my part," I answered in turn, "I know very well, though I can
conjure up this feeling of security, that it is very flimsy stuff; and
I take it rather as men take symbols. For though these good people will
at last perish, and some brewer--a Colonel of Volunteers as like as
not--will buy this little field, and though for the port we are drinking
there will be imperial port, and for the beer we have just drunk
something as noisome as that port, and though thistles will grow up in
the good pasture ground, and though, in a word, this inn will become a
hotel and will perish, nevertheless I cannot but believe that England
remains, and I do not think it the taking of a drug or a deliberate
cheating of oneself to come and steep one's soul in what has already
endured so long because it was proper to our country."

"All that you say," he answered, "is but part of the attempt to escape
Necessity. Your very frame is of that substance for which permanence
means death; and every one of all the emotions that you know is of its
nature momentary, and must be so if it is to be alive."

"Yet there is a divine thirst," I said, "for something that will not so
perish. If there were no such thirst, why should you and I debate such
things, or come here to The Lion either of us, to taste antiquity? And
if that thirst is there, it is a proof that there is for us some End and
some such satisfaction. For my part, as I know of nothing else, I cannot
but seek it in this visible good world. I seek it in Sussex, in the
nature of my home, and in the tradition of my blood."

But he answered: "No; it is not thus to be attained, the end of which
you speak. And that thirst, which surely is divine, is to be quenched in
no stream that we can find by journeying, not even in the little rivers
that run here under the combes of home."

MYSELF: "Well, then, what is the End?"

HE: "I have sometimes seen it clearly, that when the disappointed quest
was over, all this journeying would turn out to be but the beginning of
a much greater adventure, and that I should set out towards another
place where every sense should be fulfilled, and where the fear of
mutation should be set at rest."

MYSELF: "No one denies that such a picture in the mind haunts men their
whole lives through, though, after they have once experienced loss and
incompletion, and especially when they have caught sight a