these lines wish to see:
I seek no further, it is She.'
--R. CRASHAW.

1. I. A SUPPOSITITIOUS PRESENTMENT OF HER

A person who differed from the local wayfarers was climbing the steep
road which leads through the sea-skirted townlet definable as the Street
of Wells, and forms a pass into that Gibraltar of Wessex, the singular
peninsula once an island, and still called such, that stretches out like
the head of a bird into the English Channel. It is connected with the
mainland by a long thin neck of pebbles 'cast up by rages of the se,'
and unparalleled in its kind in Europe.

The pedestrian was what he looked like--a young man from London and the
cities of the Continent. Nobody could see at present that his urbanism
sat upon him only as a garment. He was just recollecting with something
of self-reproach that a whole three years and eight months had flown
since he paid his last visit to his father at this lonely rock of his
birthplace, the intervening time having been spent amid many contrasting
societies, peoples, manners, and scenes.

What had seemed usual in the isle when he lived there always looked
quaint and odd after his later impressions. More than ever the spot
seemed what it was said once to have been, the ancient Vindilia Island,
and the Home of the Slingers. The towering rock, the houses above
houses, one man's doorstep rising behind his neighbour's chimney,
the gardens hung up by one edge to the sky, the vegetables growing on
apparently almost vertical planes, the unity of the whole island as
a solid and single block of limestone four miles long, were no longer
familiar and commonplace ideas. All now stood dazzlingly unique
and white against the tinted sea, and the sun flashed on infinitely
stratified walls of oolite,

The melancholy ruins
Of cancelled cycles,...

with a distinctiveness that called the eyes to it as strongly as any
spectacle he had beheld afar.

After a laborious clamber he reached the top, and walked along the
plateau towards the eastern village. The time being about two o'clock,
in the middle of the summer season, the road was glaring and dusty, and
drawing near to his father's house he sat down in the sun.

He stretched out his hand upon the rock beside him. It felt warm. That
was the island's personal temperature when in its afternoon sleep as
now. He listened, and heard sounds: whirr-whirr, saw-saw-saw. Those we