rew dry, his eyes grew dim. He was like a man who sails for
a voyage on unknown seas, and neither he nor any other can tell whether
he will ever return.

He might come back in a day; he might come back never.

Multitudes, well used to wander, would have laughed at him. But to him
it was as though he set forth on the journey which men call death.

In the grey lowering evening he kissed the beasts on their white brows.
There was no one there to see his weakness, and year on year he had
decked them with their garlands of hedge flowers and led them up on
God's day to have their strength blessed by the priest--their strength
that laboured with his own from dawn to dark over the bare brown fields.

Then he turned his back on his old home, and went down the green sides
of the hill, and lost sight of his birthplace as the night fell.

All through the night he was borne away by the edge of the sea, along
the wild windy shores, through the stagnant marshes and the black pools
where the buffalo and the wild boar herded, past the deserted cities of
the coast, and beyond the forsaken harbours of AEneas and of Nero.

The west wind blew strong; the clouds were heavy; now and then the moon
shone on a sullen sea; now and then the darkness broke over rank maremma
vapours; at times he heard the distant bellowing of the herds, at times
he heard the moaning of the water; mighty cities, lost armies,
slaughtered hosts, foundered fleets, were underneath that soil and sea;
whole nations had their sepulchres on that low, wind-blown shore. But of
these he knew nothing.

It only seemed to him, that day would never come.

Once or twice he fell asleep for a few moments, and waking in that
confused noise of the stormy night and the wild water and the frightened
herds, thought that he was dead, and that this sound was the passing of
the feet of all the living multitude going for ever to and fro,
unthinking, over the depths of the dark earth where he lay.

* * *

To behold the dominion of evil; the victory of the liar; the empire of
that which is base; to be powerless to resist, impotent to strip it
bare; to watch it suck under a beloved life as the whirlpool the
gold-freighted vessel; to know that the soul for which we would give our
own to everlasting ruin is daily, hourly, momentarily subjugated,
emasculated, possessed, devoured by those alien powers of violence and
fraud which have fastened upon it as their prey; to sta