thout that gift of the Evil One--shame. Some attain
that freedom by hard striving, but some are born free, and of them was
Ishmael.

Now, as he lay upon the cliff, all the embarrassment he felt was at this
set of emotions that was expected to rack him and did not. He was not
yet old enough to have the courage of his lack of convictions, and he
feared he had failed in something a finer creature would have responded
to. He rolled over on to his elbows and stared at the pale faces of a
clump of wet primroses that stared back at him with an equal innocence
of emotion. Beyond them the wild violets gleamed like faint blue flames,
and the tightly-curled fronds of young bracken showed silvery grey
amongst the litter of last year's stalks that lay in patches of a dead
burnt-orange upon the grey-green turf. Ishmael spread his fingers wide
and plunged them in the primroses, in the grass, in the loose soil, for
the pleasure of their soft, clean textures. He rubbed his face in them
like a young animal, and drew in deep breaths of the best smell in the
world--the smell of damp, green growing things. He turned on to his back
again. The mist had begun to waver, a breath was stirring fitfully but
finely. It came cool upon him, and as it blew the world seemed very
gently to come to life again. He could see what he had come to look at
and overshot in the mist--the little harbour of Povah lying to his left.
He rolled over and stared curiously at its stone jetties and clustered
shipping. There were a couple of schooners used in the china-clay trade
lying at the quayside; at anchor was a barquentine, a big bluff-bellied
tramp of a creature, black with coaldust, and beyond her again what was
still a rare sight in those parts--a steamer. She was a side-wheeler,
with a thin raking funnel, and was square-rigged on her fore-mast,
fore-and-aft on her mizzen. A little crowd stood on the end of the quay
to stare at her, and it was on her that Ishmael too fixed his eyes; then
he scrambled up and made his way diagonally down the cliff to the
harbour.

It had occurred to him to run away to sea. He was of the land and knew
nothing about ships, but he had often read of boys who ran away to
sea--they shipped as cabin-boys and often were killed by the rough life
or never heard of again. A sick wave of self-pity flooded Ishmael as he
thought of it. He whose salvation was that he so seldom saw himself from
the outside--unlike Killigrew, the feeder on emotio