sands and millions of
ascendants: Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly
preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the legions
of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on Chaldaean
plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this that fancy can see
peering through the disparted branches? What sleeper in green tree-tops,
what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree? Probably arboreal in his
habits....

And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about with
me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as he sat in
his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an
aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; tree-top memories,
like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; tree-top instincts
awoke and were trod down; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be
distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and chattered in the brain of the
old divine.

VIII

MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET

Those who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of their
recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories of men and
scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in the attire of a
buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or murder to be done, on
the playground of their youth. But the memories are a fairy gift which
cannot be worn out in using. After a dozen services in various tales,
the little sun-bright pictures of the past still shine in the mind's eye
with not a lineament defaced, not a tint impaired. _Glueck und unglueck
wird gesang_, if Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the
original re-embodying after each. So that a writer, in time, begins to
wonder at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps, to
fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and
looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last,
substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.

One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid. I used one
but the other day: a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand, where I once
waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song of the river on
both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed and at last upon an
island. Two of my puppets lay there a summer's day, hearkening to the
shearers at work in riverside fields and to the drums of the grey old
garrison upon the neighbouring hill. And this was, I think, done
rightly