er, and he on deck
beside the weather-rail. But the mood began to pass as soon as he
bolted the front door behind his guests, and Ann the cook poured him
out his last cup of mulled ale and withdrew with the saucepan.
And another noon would find him seated under his leaning house-front,
his eyes half-closed, his attention divided between the whisper of
the tide and the murmur in the pigeon-cotes overhead, his body at
ease and his soul content. His was a happy life--or had been, but
for two crumpled rose-leaves.

To begin with, there were those confounded pot-boys. It puzzled
Master Simon almost as much as it annoyed him; he paid fair wages and
passed for a good employer; but he could not keep a pot-boy for
twelve months. As a matter of fact, I know the river to have been
the bottom of the mischief--the river, and perhaps the talk of the
ship-captains. It might satisfy Master Simon to sit and watch the
salmon passing up in autumn towards their spawning beds, and rubbing,
as they went, their scales against his landing-stage to clear them of
the sea-lice; to watch them and their young passing seaward in the
early spring; to watch and wait and spread his nets in the due
season. But for the youngsters this running water was a constant
lure--the song of it and the dimple on it. It coaxed them, as it
coaxed the old galleon, to lean over and listen. And the moment that
listening became intolerable, they were off. Only one of them--the
poet before mentioned--had ever expressed any desire to return and
revisit--

The shining levels and the dazzled wave
Emerging from his covert, errant long,
In solitude descending by a vale
Lost between uplands, where the harvesters
Pause in the swathe, shading their eyes to watch
Some barge or schooner stealing up from sea;
Themselves in sunset, she a twilit ghost
Parting the twilit woods . .

Ah, loving God!
Grant, in the end, this world may slip away
With whisper of that water by the bows
Of such a bark, bearing me home--thy stars
Breaking the gloom like kingfishers, thy heights
Golden with wheat, thy waiting angels there
Wearing the dear rough faces of my kin!

I doubt if he meant it, any more than Virgil meant his "_flumina amem
silvasque inglorius_." At any rate, the public knew what was due to
itself, and when the time came, gave the man a handsome funeral in
Westminste