with a filmy distinctness on the fells in that pleasant light.

Sir Bale had been ill, and sent down the night before for Doctor Torvey.
He was away with a patient. Now, in the morning, he had arrived
inopportunely. He met Sir Bale as he issued from the house, and had a
word with him in the court, for he would not turn back.

"Well," said the Doctor, after his brief inspection, "you ought to be in
your bed; that's all I can say. You are perfectly mad to think of
knocking about like this. Your pulse is at a hundred and ten; and, if
you go across the lake and walk about Cloostedd, you'll be raving before
you come back."

Sir Bale told him, apologetically, as if his life were more to his
doctor than to himself, that he would take care not to fatigue himself,
and that the air would do him good, and that in any case he could not
avoid going; and so they parted.

Sir Bale took his seat beside Feltram in the boat, the sail was spread,
and, bending to the light breeze that blew from Golden Friars, she
glided from the jetty under Mardykes Hall, and the eventful voyage had
begun.

CHAPTER XIX

Mystagogus

The sail was loosed, the boat touched the stone step, and Feltram sprang
out and made her fast to the old iron ring. The Baronet followed. So! he
had ventured upon that water without being drowned. He looked round him
as if in a dream. He had not been there since his childhood. There were
no regrets, no sentiment, no remorse; only an odd return of the
associations and fresh feelings of boyhood, and a long reach of time
suddenly annihilated.

The little hollow in which he stood; the three hawthorn trees at his
right; every crease and undulation of the sward, every angle and crack
in the lichen-covered rock at his feet, recurred with a sharp and
instantaneous recognition to his memory.

"Many a time your brother and I fished for hours together from that bank
there, just where the bramble grows. That bramble has not grown an inch
ever since, not a leaf altered; we used to pick blackberries off it,
with our rods stuck in the bank--it was later in the year than now--till
we stript it quite bare after a day or two. The steward used to come
over--they were marking timber for cutting and we used to stay here
while they rambled through the wood, with an axe marking the trees that
were to come down. I wonder whether the big old boat is still anywhere.
I suppose she was broken up, or left to rot; I have not seen her sinc