lodious buzzing of nightjars in
hot mid-summer evenings, as they swept softly along the heather, lived
constantly in his memory. In the moorland, half a mile away, stood
some brick-kilns, strange plastered cones, with blackened tops, from
which oozed a pungent smoke; those were too terrible to be visited
alone; but as he walked past with his nurse, it was delightful and yet
appalling to look into the door of the kiln, and see its fiery, glowing
heart. Two things in particular the boy grew to love; one was the
sight of water in all its forms; a streamlet near the house trickled
out of a bog, full of cotton-grass; there were curious plants to be
found here, a low pink marsh-bugle, and the sundew, with its strange,
viscid red hands extended; the stream passed by clear dark pools to a
lake among the pines, and fell at the further end down a steep cascade;
the dark gliding water, the mysterious things that grew beneath, the
fish that paused for an instant and were gone, had all a deep
fascination for the boy, speaking, as they seemed to do, of a world
near and yet how far removed from his own!

And then still more wonderingly, with a kind of interfusion of terror
and mystery, did he love the woodlands of that forest country. To
steal along the edge of the covert, with the trees knee-deep in fern,
to hear the flies hum angrily within, to find the glade in spring
carpeted with blue-bells--all these sights and sounds took hold of his
childish heart with a deep passion that never left him.

All this life was, in memory, as I have said, a series of vignettes and
pictures; the little dramas of the nursery, the fire that glowed in the
grate, the savour of the fresh-cut bread at meal-times, the games on
wet afternoons, with a tent made out of shawls and chairs, or a fort
built of bricks; these were the pictures that visited Hugh in after
days, small concrete things and sensations; he could trace, he often
thought, in later years, that his early life had been one more of
perception than of anything else; sights and sounds and scents had
filled his mind, to the exclusion of almost all beside. He could
remember little of his relations with those about him; the figures of
the family and servants were accepted as all part of the environment.
The only very real figure was the old nurse, whose rare displeasure he
had sorrowed over more than anything else in the world, and whose
chance words, uttered to another servant and overheard by