hwith be undertaken in an entirely
serious and high-minded spirit. From this moment I am on the look-out
for a really transcendental attachment. No "bright-eyed bar-maids,"
however "refined," need apply. Ladies who are prodigal of their white
petticoats are no longer fit company for me. Indeed I shall no longer
look upon a petticoat, unless I am able first entirely to spiritualise
it. It must first be disinfected of every earthly thought.

Yes, I am once more a young man, sound in wind and limb, with not a
tooth or an illusion lost, my mind tabula rasa, my heart to be had for
the asking. Oh, come, ye merry, merry maidens! The fairy prince is on
the fairy road.

Incipit vita nuova!

So in the lovely rapture of a new-born resolution--and is there any
rapture like it?--nature has no more intoxicating illusion than that of
turning over a new leaf, or beginning a new life from to-day--I sprang
along the road with a carolling heart; quite forgetting that Apuleius
and Fielding and Boccaccio were still in my knapsack--not to speak of
the petticoat.

CHAPTER II

AT THE SIGN OF THE SINGING STREAM

Apuleius and Fielding and Boccaccio, bad companions for a petticoat,
I'm afraid, bad companions too for so young a man as I had now become.
However, as I say, I had for the time forgotten that pagan company, or,
in my puritanic zeal, I might have thrown them all to be washed clean
in the upland stream, whose pure waters one might fancy were fragrant
from their sunny day among the ferns and the heather, fragrant to the
eye, indeed, if one may so speak, with the shaken meal of the
meadowsweet. This stream had been the good angel of my thoughts all the
day, keeping them ever moving and ever fresh, cleansing and burnishing
them, quite an open-air laundry of the mind.

We were both making for the same little town, it appeared, and as the
sun was setting we reached it together. I entered the town over the
bridge, and the stream under it, washing the walls of the high-piled,
many-gabled old inn where I proposed to pass the night. I should hear
it still rippling on with its gentle harpsichord tinkle, as I stretched
myself down among the cool lavendered sheets, and little by little let
slip the multifarious world.

The inn windows beamed cheerily, a home of ruddy rest. Having ordered
my dinner and found my room, I threw down my knapsack and then came out
again to smoke an ante-prandial pipe, listen to the evensong of the
s