ances to buy sheep were anxiously sniffing up the
smell of their purchases, so that no mistake might be made on the way
home. Over the line of pens a two-plank viaduct ran, and it was bent
continually by the weight of large shepherds balancing their way along
to take a bird's-eye view of possible bargains. A facetious auctioneer
with the village policeman's arm round his neck was sitting on the wall
at the end of the field, addressing everybody very frequently as
"Gentlemen." Sheep arrived and sheep departed constantly.

"Isn't it terribly slavish, somehow?" said Anonyma. "The sheep
never being consulted at all. Bought and sold and smelt and spat
upon as if they had no heart beating beneath that wool. No 'Me,' as
Jay used to say."

Mr. Russell heard and remembered. There were few doubts left in him as to
the truth of his too-funny miracle.

He had a little tune, the scaffolding of a poem, in his head, and to the
sound of it he lived that day, although I don't expect he ever got the
poem into words.

If you start your idea along an uncertain course, you have to stop and
start afresh to get it straight. You can never finish it when once it has
a crooked swing. I gather that motor cyclists occasionally have much the
same experience with their machines.

But Mr. Russell, with a mind steering a tangled course, asked for
nothing better. He was very nearly sure of romance for the first time
in his life.

I hope that the feeling of making poetry is not confined to the people
who write it down. There is no luxury like it, and I hope we all share
it. I think perhaps the same thrill that goes through Mr. Russell and me
when the ghost of a completed thing begins to be seen, also delights the
khaki coster who writes his first--and very likely last--love-letter from
France; and the little old country mother who lies awake composing the In
Memoriam of her son for a local paper; and the burglar "down 'Oxton" who
takes off his cap as a child's funeral goes by. The feeling is: "This is
a thing out of my heart that I am showing. This is my best confession,
and nobody knew there was this within me." I am sure that that great
glory of poetry in one's heart does not wait on achievement. If it did,
what centuries would die unglorified. It is just perfection appearing, to
your equal pride and shame, a perfection that never taunts you with your
limitations.

Mr. Russell and Christina knew well their road through the mist that
afternoon