longer European
visits, he had almost forgotten to call a gripsack.

Mr. Cyprian Paynter was an American who lived in Italy. There was a good
deal more to be said about him, for he was a very acute and cultivated
gentleman; but those two facts would, perhaps, cover most of the others.
Storing his mind like a museum with the wonder of the Old World, but all
lit up as by a window with the wonder of the New, he had fallen heir to
some thing of the unique critical position of Ruskin or Pater, and
was further famous as a discoverer of minor poets. He was a judicious
discoverer, and he did not turn all his minor poets into major prophets.
If his geese were swans, they were not all Swans of Avon. He had even
incurred the deadly suspicion of classicism by differing from his
young friends, the Punctuist Poets, when they produced versification
consisting exclusively of commas and colons. He had a more humane
sympathy with the modern flame kindled from the embers of Celtic
mythology, and it was in reality the recent appearance of a Cornish
poet, a sort of parallel to the new Irish poets, which had brought him
on this occasion to Cornwall. He was, indeed, far too well-mannered to
allow a host to guess that any pleasure was being sought outside his own
hospitality. He had a long standing invitation from Vane, whom he had
met in Cyprus in the latter's days of undiplomatic diplomacy; and Vane
was not aware that relations had only been thus renewed after the critic
had read Merlin and Other Verses, by a new writer named John Treherne.
Nor did the Squire even begin to realize the much more diplomatic
diplomacy by which he had been induced to invite the local bard to lunch
on the very day of the American critic's arrival.

Mr. Paynter was still standing with his gripsack, gazing in a trance
of true admiration at the hollowed crags, topped by the gray, grotesque
wood, and crested finally by the three fantastic trees.

"It is like being shipwrecked on the coast of fairyland," he said,

"I hope you haven't been shipwrecked much," replied his host, smiling.
"I fancy Jake here can look after you very well."

Mr. Paynter looked across at the boatman and smiled also. "I am afraid,"
he said, "our friend is not quite so enthusiastic for this landscape as
I am."

"Oh, the trees, I suppose!" said the Squire wearily.

The boatman was by normal trade a fisherman; but as his house, built of
black tarred timber, stood right on the foreshore a fe