e cry of a hawk or eagle
on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds. This was
the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of
duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the
pale service of the altar. An instant of wild flight had delivered him
and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.

--Stephaneforos!

What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death--the
fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed
him round, the shame that had abased him within and without--cerements,
the linens of the grave?

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her
grave-clothes. Yes! Yes! Yes! He would create proudly out of the
freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he
bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable,
imperishable.

He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer
quench the flame in his blood. He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat
throbbing with song. There was a lust of wandering in his feet that
burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed
to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains,
dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills
and faces. Where?

He looked northward towards Howth. The sea had fallen below the line of
seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was
running out fast along the foreshore. Already one long oval bank of
sand lay warm and dry amid the wavelets. Here and there warm isles of
sand gleamed above the shallow tide and about the isles and around the
long bank and amid the shallow currents of the beach were lightclad
figures, wading and delving.

In a few moments he was barefoot, his stockings folded in his pockets
and his canvas shoes dangling by their knotted laces over his shoulders
and, picking a pointed salt-eaten stick out of the jetsam among the
rocks, he clambered down the slope of the breakwater.

There was a long rivulet in the strand and, as he waded slowly up its
course, he wondered at the endless drift of seaweed. Emerald and black
and russet and olive, it moved beneath the current, swaying and
turning. The water of the rivulet was dark with endless drift and
mirrored the high-drifting clouds. The clouds were drifting above him
silently and silently the seatangle was drifting below him and