s shirt, save for a blue welt or two and some ugly red scratches;
and his gaunt eyes were full of hunger and yearning, and his lips
happily babbling the curses that the ships' captains had taught him.

He reeled down the hill to the cottage. The tenant was a newcomer to
the town, and had lately been appointed musketry-instructor to the
battery above. He was in the garden pruning the rose-tree, but did
not particularly notice the boy. And the boy passed without turning
his head.

The tide on the beach was far out and just beginning to flow.
There was the same dull plash on the pebbles, the same twinkle as the
sun struck across the ripples. The sun was sinking; in ten minutes
it would be behind the hill.

No one knows what the waves said to Kit. But he flung himself among
them with a choking cry, and drank the brine and tossed it over his
head, and shoulders and chest, and lay down and let the small waves
play over him, and cried and laughed aloud till the sun went down.

Then he clambered on to a rock, some way above them, and lay down to
watch the water rise; and watching it, fell asleep; and sleeping, had
his wish, and went out to the wide seas.

OLD AESON.

Judge between me and my guest, the stranger within my gates, the man
whom in his extremity I clothed and fed.

I remember well the time of his coming, for it happened at the end of
five days and nights during which the year passed from strength to
age; in the interval between the swallow's departure and the
redwing's coming; when the tortoise in my garden crept into his
winter quarters, and the equinox was on us, with an east wind that
parched the blood in the trees, so that their leaves for once knew no
gradations of red and yellow, but turned at a stroke to brown, and
crackled like tin-foil.

At five o'clock in the morning of the sixth day I looked out.
The wind still whistled across the sky, but now without the
obstruction of any cloud. Full in front of my window Sirius flashed
with a whiteness that pierced the eye. A little to the right, the
whole constellation of Orion was suspended clear over a wedge-like
gap in the coast, wherein the sea could be guessed rather than seen.
And, travelling yet further, the eye fell on two brilliant lights,
the one set high above the other--the one steady and a fiery red, the
other yellow and blazing intermittently--the one Aldebaran, the other
revolving on the lighthouse top, fifteen miles away.

Half-