, the one law truly graven on their
hearts, was the great and comforting statement that Queen Anne is dead.
This faith was as fundamental as his faith, that Our Lady was alive. Any
persons he had talked to since he had touched the fringe of our fashion
or civilization had been by a coincidence, sympathetic or hypocritical.
Or if they had spoken some established blasphemies, he had been unable
to understand them merely owing to the preoccupied satisfaction of his
mind.

On that fantastic fringe of the Gaelic land where he walked as a boy,
the cliffs were as fantastic as the clouds. Heaven seemed to humble
itself and come closer to the earth. The common paths of his little
village began to climb quite suddenly and seemed resolved to go to
heaven. The sky seemed to fall down towards the hills; the hills took
hold upon the sky. In the sumptuous sunset of gold and purple and
peacock green cloudlets and islets were the same. Evan lived like a man
walking on a borderland, the borderland between this world and another.
Like so many men and nations who grow up with nature and the common
things, he understood the supernatural before he understood the natural.
He had looked at dim angels standing knee-deep in the grass before he
had looked at the grass. He knew that Our Lady's robes were blue before
he knew the wild roses round her feet were red. The deeper his memory
plunged into the dark house of childhood the nearer and nearer he came
to the things that cannot be named. All through his life he thought of
the daylight world as a sort of divine debris, the broken remainder
of his first vision. The skies and mountains were the splendid
off-scourings of another place. The stars were lost jewels of the Queen.
Our Lady had gone and left the stars by accident.

His private tradition was equally wild and unworldly. His
great-grandfather had been cut down at Culloden, certain in his last
instant that God would restore the King. His grandfather, then a boy of
ten, had taken the terrible claymore from the hand of the dead and hung
it up in his house, burnishing it and sharpening it for sixty years, to
be ready for the next rebellion. His father, the youngest son and the
last left alive, had refused to attend on Queen Victoria in Scotland.
And Evan himself had been of one piece with his progenitors; and was not
dead with them, but alive in the twentieth century. He was not in the
least the pathetic Jacobite of whom we read, left behind by