; not with Bull's notion of the realism of the
butcher's shop and the pendent legs of mutton and blocks of beef painted
raw and glaring in their streaks, but with the realism of the active
brain and heart conjoined. The reasons for the division of Celt and
Saxon, what they think and say of one another, often without knowing that
they are divided, and the wherefore of our abusing of ourselves, brave
England, our England of the ancient fortitude and the future incarnation,
can afford to hear. Why not in a tale? It is he, your all for animal
pleasure in the holiday he devours and cannot enjoy, whose example
teaches you to shun the plaguey tale that carries fright: and so you find
him sour at business and sick of his relaxings, hating both because he
harnesses himself in turn bestially to each, growling at the smallest
admixture of them, when, if he would but chirp a little over his work,
and allow his pleasures to inspire a dose of thoughtfulness, he would be
happier, and--who knows?-become a brighter fellow, one to be rescued from
the pole-axe.

Now the rain is over, your carriage is at the door, the country smiles
and the wet highway waves a beckoning hand. We have worn through a cloud
with cloudy discourses, but we are in a land of shifting weathers,
'coelum crebris imbribus ac nebulis foedum,' not every chapter can be
sunshine.

CHAPTER XVII

CROSSING THE RUBICON

Rough weather on the Irish sea discharged a pallid file of passengers
from the boat at Holyhead just as the morning sun struck wave and
mountain with one of the sudden sparkling changes which our South-welters
have in their folds to tell us after a tumultuous night that we have only
been worried by Puck. The scene of frayed waters all rosy-golden, and
golden-banded heathery height, with the tinted sand, breaking to flights
of blue, was resplendent for those of our recent sea-farers who could
lift an eye to enjoy it. Freshness, illumination, then salt air, vivid
distances, were a bath for every sense of life. You could believe the
breast of the mountain to be heaving, the billows to be kissing fingers
to him, the rollers shattered up the cliff to have run to extinction to
scale him. He seemed in his clear-edged mass King of this brave new
boundless world built in a minute out of the wreck of the old.

An hour back the vessel was labouring through rueful chasms under
darkness, and then did the tricksy Southwest administer grisly slaps to
right and l