aid, sitting down to
the table; "what you want is change."

"Do you think, Harding, I shall find any interest again in anything?"

"Of course you will, my dear friend, of course you will." And he
spoke to his friend of ruined palaces and bas-reliefs; Owen listened
vaguely, begging of him at last to come with him.

"It will give you ideas, Harding; you will write better."

Harding shook his head, for it did not seem to him to be his destiny
to relieve the tedium of a yachting excursion in the Mediterranean.

V

"One cannot yacht in the Baltic or in the Gulf of Mexico," Owen said,
and he went to the Mediterranean again to sail about the _AEgean_
Islands, wondering if he should land, changing his mind, deciding
suddenly that the celebrated site he was going to see would not
interest him. He would stand watching the rocky height dying down,
his eyes fixed on the blue horizon, thinking of some Emperor's
palace amid the Illyrian hills, till, acting on a sudden impulse, he
would call an order to the skipper, an order which he would
countermand next day. A few days after the yacht would sail towards
the Acropolis as though Owen had intended to drop anchor in the
Piraeeus. But he was too immersed in his grief, he thought, to be
able to give his attention to ruins, whether Roman or Greek. All the
same, he would have to decide if he would return to the islands. He
did not know them all; he had never been to Samos, famous for its
wine and its women.... The wine cloyed the palate and no woman
charmed him in the dance; and he sailed away wondering how he might
relieve the tedium of life, until one day, after long voyaging,
sufficiently recovered from his grief and himself, he leaned over
the taffrail, this time lost in admiration of the rocks and summits
above Syracuse, the Sicilian coasts carrying his thoughts out of the
present into the past, to those valleys where Theocritus watched his
"visionary flocks."

"'His visionary flocks,'" he repeated, wondering if the beautiful
phrase had floated accidentally into his mind, hoping that it was
his own, and then abandoning hope, for he had nearly succeeded in
tracing the author of the phrase; but there was a vision in it more
intense than Tennyson's. "Visionary flocks!" For while the shepherds
watched Theocritus dreamed the immortal sheep and goats which tempt
us for an instant to become shepherds; but Owen knew that the real
flocks would seem unreal to him who knew the visio