onship of heaven, if such a place there were, where one should
know even as one was known, and be able to enter in and possess, in a
flash of thought, the whole fabric of a fellow-creature's soul.

And then if Hugh spent such a day alone, his thoughts seemed to have
the same enlightening and invigorating quality. He did not fumble
among dreary details, but saw swiftly into the essence of things, so
that he smiled as he sate. A book would, on such occasions, touch into
life a whole train of pretty thoughts, as a spark leaps along a
scattered line of gunpowder. A few remembered lines of poetry, a few
notes played by unseen hands on a musical instrument, from a window
that he passed in the street, would give a sense of completed
happiness; so that one said, "Yes, it is like that!" The palings of
gardens, the screen of shrubs through which the pleasaunce could be
dimly discerned within, the high trees holding up their branches to the
air, all half guarded, half revealed the same jocund secret. Here, by
a hedgerow, in a lane, Hugh would discern the beady eye of a fat thrush
which hopped in the tall grass, or plied some tiny business among the
stems, lifting his head at intervals to look briskly round. "I see
you!" said Hugh, as he used to say long ago to the birds in the Rectory
garden, and the bird seemed almost to nod his head in reply.

And then, too, the houses that he passed all breathed the same air of
romance. There, perhaps, behind the wall or at the open window, sat or
moved the one friend of whom he was ever in search; but on these days
it mattered little that he had not found him; he could wait, he could
be faithful, and Hugh could wait too, until the day when all things
should be made new. If he walked on days like these through some
college court, the thought of the happy, careless, cheerful lives,
lived there in strength and brightness, by generation after generation
of merry young men, filled Hugh's heart with content; he liked to think
that all the world over, in busy offices, in grave parlours, in
pleasant parsonages, there were serious, commonplace, well-occupied
men, who perhaps, in a tiny flash of memory, sent back a wistful
thought to the old walls and gables, the towns with their chiming
bells, and remembered tenderly the days of their blithe youth, the old
companions, the lively hours. The whole world seemed knit together by
sweet and gentle ties: labour and strife mattered little; it was but