, with all the sky-deep gravity of youth, a benediction
upon the man who was going to live there. I even remember that for the
convenience of meditation I called him James Harrogate.

As I reflected it crawled back into my memory that I had mildly played
the fool in that house on that distant day. I had some red chalk in
my pocket, I think, and I wrote things on the unpapered plaster walls;
things addressed to Mr. Harrogate. A dim memory told me that I had
written up in what I supposed to be the dining-room:

James Harrogate, thank God for meat,
Then eat and eat and eat and eat,

or something of that kind. I faintly feel that some longer lyric
was scrawled on the walls of what looked like a bedroom, something
beginning:

When laying what you call your head,
O Harrogate, upon your bed,

and there all my memory dislimns and decays. But I could still see quite
vividly the plain plastered walls and the rude, irregular writing,
and the places where the red chalk broke. I could see them, I mean, in
memory; for when I came down that road again after a sixth of a century
the house was very different.

I had seen it before at noon, and now I found it in the dusk. But its
windows glowed with lights of many artificial sorts; one of its low
square windows stood open; from this there escaped up the road a stream
of lamplight and a stream of singing. Some sort of girl, at least,
was standing at some sort of piano, and singing a song of healthy
sentimentalism in that house where long ago my blessing had died on the
wind and my poems been covered up by the wallpaper. I stood outside that
lamplit house at dusk full of those thoughts that I shall never express
if I live to be a million any better than I expressed them in red
chalk upon the wall. But after I had hovered a little, and was about to
withdraw, a mad impulse seized me. I rang the bell. I said in distinct
accents to a very smart suburban maid, "Does Mr. James Harrogate live
here?"

She said he didn't; but that she would inquire, in case I was looking
for him in the neighbourhood; but I excused her from such exertion. I
had one moment's impulse to look for him all over the world; and then
decided not to look for him at all.

THE PRIEST OF SPRING

The sun has strengthened and the air softened just before Easter Day.
But it is a troubled brightness which has a breath not only of novelty
but of revolution, There are two great armies of the huma