enrich the heart, on the still, clear, fresh mornings of St. Luke's
summer! that wise physician of souls has indeed had set aside for him
the most inspiriting, the most healing days of the year, days of tonic
coolness, of invigorating colour, of bracing sun; and then the winter
closes in, when light is short, and the sun is low and cold; when the
eye is grateful for the rich brown of naked fields, leafless woods, and
misty distances. Yet there is a solemn charm about the darkening day,
when the sun sets over the wide plain rolled in smoky vapours, and
gilded banks of cloud; and then there is the long firelit evening to
follow, when books give up their secrets and talk is easiest.

The summer, for all its enervating heat, its piercing light, was the
time, so Hugh thought, for reflection. In winter the mind is often
sunk in a sort of comfortable drowsiness, and hybernates within its
secure cell. Hugh found the activities of work very absorbing in those
darker days: his thoughts took on a more placid, more contented tinge.
Early in the year he walked alone along the Backs at Cambridge. He
passed the great romantic gateposts of St. John's, with the elms of the
high garden towering over them, his mind occupied with a hundred small
designs. It was with a shock of inexpressible surprise, as he passed
by the clear stream that runs over its sandy shallows, and feeds the
garden moats, to see that in the Wilderness the ground was bright with
the round heads of the yellow aconite, the first flower to hear the
message of spring. The appearance of that brave and hardy flower in
that particular place had a peculiar and moving association for Hugh.
More than twenty years before, in his undergraduate days, in a time of
deep perplexity of mind, he had walked that way on a bright Sunday
morning, his young heart burdened with sorrowful preoccupation. How
hard those youthful griefs had been to bear! they were so unfamiliar,
they seemed so irreparably overwhelming; one had not learned to look
over them or through them; they darkened the present, they hung like a
black cloud over the future. How fantastic, how exaggerated those woes
had been, and yet how unbearably real! He had stood, he remembered, to
watch the mild sunlight strike in soft shafts among the trees. The
hardy blossoms, cold and scentless, but so unmistakably alive, had
given him a deep message of hope, a thrill of expectation. He had gone
back, he remembered, and in