s, adventurously taking
hands with swirling, impulsive floods, fragrant with water-flowers and
laden with old forests, and at length, through the strange, starlit
hills, sweeping out into some moonlit estuary of the all-enfolding sea.

"Aren't you glad we walked, Colin?" I said, a mile or two after. "You
are, of course, a great artist; but I don't remember you ever having a
thought quite so fine and romantic as that, do you?"

"How strange it must be," said Colin, after a while, "to have
beauty--beautiful thoughts, beautiful pictures--merely as a recreation;
not as one's business, I mean. And the world is full of people who have
no need to sell their beautiful thoughts!"

CHAPTER XVI

IN WHICH WE CATCH UP WITH SUMMER

Some eminent wayfarers--one peculiarly beloved--have discoursed on the
romantic charm of maps. But they have dwelt chiefly on the suggestiveness
of them before the journey: these unknown names of unknown places, in
types of mysteriously graduated importance--what do they stand for? These
mazy lines, some faint and wayward as a hair, and some straight and
decided as a steel track--whence and whither do they lead? I love the map
best when the journey is done--when I can pore on its lines as into the
lined face of some dear friend with whom I have travelled the years, and
say--here this happened, here that befell! This almost invisible dot is
made of magic rocks and is filled with the song of rapids; this
infinitesimal fraction of "Scale five miles to the inch" is a haunted
valley of purple pine-woods, and the moon rising, and the lonely cry of a
sheep that has lost her little one somewhere in the folds of the hills.
Here, where is no name, stands an old white church with a gilded cross,
among little white houses huddled together under a bluff. In yonder
garden the priest's cassock and trousers are hanging sacrilegiously on a
clothes-line, and you can just see a tiny graveyard away up on the
hillside almost hidden in the trees.

Even sacred vestments must be laundered by earthly laundresses, yet
somehow it gives one a shock to see sacred vestments out of the
sanctuary, profanely displayed on a clothes-line. It is as though one
should turn the sacred chalice into a tea-pot. A priest's trousers on a
clothes-line might well be the beginning of atheism. But I hope there
were no such fanciful deductive minds in that peaceful hamlet, and that
the faithful there can withstand even so profound a trial o