ill and sneak off at once
to the next town; but how pass through the grinning line of boots, and
waiter, and chambermaid, and ironically respectful landlord and
landlady, in the hall...

But while I thus deliberated, something soft pressed in at the door;
and, making a sudden dart, I had the little baggage who had brought
about my dilemma a prisoner in my arms.

I stayed some days at this charming old inn, for Amaryllis--oh, yes,
you may be sure her name was Amaryllis--had not betrayed me; and indeed
she may have some share in my retrospect of the inn as one of the most
delightful which I encountered anywhere in my journeying. Would you
like to know its name? Well, I know it as The Singing Stream. If you
can find it under that name, you are welcome. And should you chance to
be put into bedroom No. 26, you can think of me, and how I used to lie
awake, listening to the stream rippling beneath the window, with its
gentle harpsichord tinkle, and little by little letting slip the
multifarious world.

And if anything about this chapter should seem to contradict the high
ideals of the chapter preceding it, I can only say that, though the
episode should not rigidly fulfil the conditions of the transcendental,
nothing could have been more characteristic of that early youth to
which I had vowed myself. Indeed, I congratulated myself, as I looked
my last at the sign of The Singing Stream, that this had been quite in
my early manner.

CHAPTER III

IN WHICH I SAVE A USEFUL LIFE

Though I had said good-bye to the inn, the stream and I did not part
company at the inn-door, but continued for the best part of a morning
to be fellow-travellers. Indeed, having led me to one pleasant
adventure, its purpose, I afterwards realised, was to lead me to
another, and then to go about its own bright business.

I don't think either of us had much idea where we were or whither we
were bound. Our guiding principle seemed to be to get as much sunshine
as possible, and to find the easiest road. We avoided dull sandy
levels and hard rocky places, with the same instinctive dexterity. We
gloomed together through dark dingles, and came out on sunny reaches
with the same gilded magnificence. There are days when every stream is
Pactolus and every man is Croesus, and thanks to that first and
greatest of all alchemists, the sun, the morning I write of was a
morning when to breathe was gold and to see was silver. And to breathe
and see w