ave imagined Pan carrying the
gentleman's luggage from the coach to the hotel. It suffers teetotal
picnic-parties to encamp amid its savage hollows, and it humbly allows
itself to be painted by the worst artists. Like a lion in a menagerie,
it is a survival of the extinct chaos entrapped and exhibited amid the
smug parks and well-rolled downs of England.

I came upon it by a winding ledge of road, which clung to the bare side
of the hill like the battlements of some huge castle. Some two hundred
feet below, a brawling upland stream stood for the moat, and for the
enemy there was on the opposite side of the valley a great green
company of trees, settled like a cloud slope upon slope, making all
haste to cross the river and ascend the heights where I stood. Some
intrepid larches waved green pennons in the very midst of the turbulent
water, here and there a veteran lay with his many-summered head abased
in the rocky course of the stream, and here was a young foolhardy beech
that had climbed within a dozen yards of the rampart. All was wild and
solitary, and one might have declared it a scene untrodden by the foot
of man, but for the telegraph posts and small piles of broken "macadam"
at punctual intervals, and the ginger-beer bottles and paper bags of
local confectioners that lent an air of civilisation to the road.

It was a place to quote Alastor in, and nothing but a bad memory
prevented my affrighting the oaks and rills with declamation. As it
was, I could only recall the lines

"The Poet wandering on, through Arabie
And Persia, and the wild Carmanian waste,
And o'er the aerial mountains which pour down
Indus and Oxus from their icy caves--"

and that other passage beginning

"At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused--"

This last I mouthed, loving the taste of its thunder; mouthed thrice,
as though it were an incantation,--and, indeed, from what immediately
followed, it might reasonably have seemed so.

"At length upon the lone Chorasmian shore
He paused--"

I mouthed for the fourth time. And lo! advancing to me eagerly along
the causeway seemed the very sprite of Alastor himself! There was a
star upon his forehead, and around his young face there glowed an
aureole of gold and roses--to speak figuratively, for the star upon his
brow was hope, and the gold and roses encircling his head, a miniature
rainbow, were youth and health. His longish golden hair had no doubt
its shar