d Mrs. Simple, a widow. She enjoys my company and my old fables,
and we keep the blinds down against these mountains, and candles
burning against the brighter lightnings."

So saying, Superstition bade us good-night and passed down a little
by-lane on our left towards a country cottage, like a dreaming bower
of roses beneath the moon.

But Reverie and I continued on as if the moon herself as patiently
pursued us. And by-and-by we came to a house called Gloom, whose
gardens slope down with plashing fountains and glimmering banks of
flowers into the shadow and stillness of a broad valley, named beneath
the hills of Silence, Peace.

XI

_His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung._

--JOHN KEATS.

Even as we entered the gates of Mr. Reverie's house beneath embowering
chestnuts, there advanced across the moonlit spaces to meet us a
figure on foot like ourselves, leading his horse. He was in armour,
yet unarmed. His steel glittered cold and blue; his fingers hung
ungauntleted; and on his pale face dwelt a look never happy warrior
wore yet. He seemed a man Mars lends to Venus out of war to unhappy
idleness. The disillusionment of age was in his face: yet he was
youthful, I suppose; scarce older than Mercutio, and once, perhaps, as
light of wit.

He took my hand in a grasp cold and listless, and smiled from
mirthless eyes.

Yet there was something strangely taking in this solitary
knight-at-arms. She for whom he does not fight, I thought, must have
somewhat of the immortals to grace her warrior with. And if it were
only shadows that beset him and obscured his finer heart, shadows they
were of myrtle and rhododendron, with voices shrill and small as the
sparrows', and eyes of the next-to-morning stars.

Indeed, these gardens whispered, and the wind at play in the air
seemed to bear far-away music, dying and falling.

We entered the house and sat down to supper in a low room open to the
night. Reverie recounted our evening's talk. "I wish," he said,
turning to his friend, "you would accompany Mr. Brocken and me one
night to the 'World's End' to hear these fellows talk. Such arrogance,
such assurance, such bigotry and blindness and foxiness!--yet, on my
word, a kind of gravity with it all, as if the scarecrows had some
real interest in the devil's tares they guard. Come now, let it be a
bargain between us, and leave this endless search awhile."

But the