the value of that conception, nor into, heaven knows, how
this conception came so successfully to be obscured.

So I began "the book about Manuel" that summer,--in 1919, upon the back
porch of our cottage at the Rockbridge Alum Springs, whence, as I recall
it, one could always, just as Manuel did upon Upper Morven, regard the
changing green and purple of the mountains and the tall clouds trailing
northward, and could observe that the things one viewed were all
gigantic and lovely and seemed not to be very greatly bothering about
humankind. I suppose, though, that, in point of fact, it occasionally
rained. In any case, upon that same porch, as it happened, this book was
finished in the summer of 1920.

And the notes made at this time as to "Figures of Earth" show much that
nowadays is wholly incomprehensible. There was once an Olrun in the
book; and I can recall clearly enough how her part in the story was
absorbed by two of the other characters,--by Suskind and by Alianora.
Freydis, it appears, was originally called Hlif. Miramon at one stage of
the book's being, I find with real surprise, was married _en secondes
noces_ to Math. Othmar has lost that prominence which once was his. And
it seems, too, there once figured in Manuel's heart affairs a
Bel-Imperia, who, so near as I can deduce from my notes, was a lady in a
tapestry. Someone unstitched her, to, I imagine, her destruction,
although I suspect that a few skeins of this quite forgotten Bel-Imperia
endure in the Radegonde of another tale.

Nor can I make anything whatever of my notes about Guivret (who seems to
have been in no way connected with Guivric the Sage), nor about Biduz,
nor about the Anti-Pope,--even though, to be sure, one mention of this
heresiarch yet survives in the present book. I am wholly baffled to
read, in my own penciling, such proposed chapter headings as "The
Jealousy of Niafer" and "How Sclaug Loosed the Dead,"--which latter is
with added incomprehensibility annotated "(?Phorgemon)." And "The Spirit
Who Had Half of Everything" seems to have been exorcised pretty
thoroughly.... No; I find the most of my old notes as to this book
merely bewildering; and I find, too, something of pathos in these
embryons of unborn dreams which, for one cause or another, were
obliterated and have been utterly forgotten by their creator, very much
as in this book vexed Miramon Lluagor twists off the head of a not quite
satisfactory, whimpering design, and dro