yself. You know I was born in
London--the son of a doctor with a very considerable practice. I
received an excellent education, Rugby and Cambridge, and was trained
for the law. I was, I believe, a rather ordinary person with a rather
more than ordinary power of concentration, and I got on. I built up a
business and was extremely and very conventionally happy. I married
and we had a little girl. And then, one summer, we came down to
Cornwall for our holiday. It was St. Ives. I remember that first
morning as though it were yesterday. It was grey with the sea flinging
great breakers. There was a smell of clover and cornflowers in the
air, and great sheets of flaming poppies in the cornfields. But there
was more than that. It was Cornwall, something magical, and that
strange sense of old history and customs that you get nowhere else in
quite the same way. Ah! but why analyse it?--you know as well as I do
what I mean. A new man was born in me that day. I had been sociable
and fond of little quite ordinary pleasures that came my way, now I
wanted to be alone. Their conversation worried me; it seemed to be
pointless and concerned with things that did not matter at all. I had
done things like other men--now it was all to no purpose. I used to
lie for hours on the cliffs watching the sea. I was often out all day,
and I met all sorts of people, tramps, wasters, vagabonds, and they
seemed the only people worth talking to. I met some strange fellows
but excellent company--and they knew, all of them, the things that I
knew; they had been out all night and seen the moon and the stars
change and the first light of the dawn, and the little breeze that
comes in those early hours from the sea, bringing the winds of other
countries with it. And they were merry, they had a philosophy--they
knew Cornwall and believed in her.

"Well--the holiday came to an end, and I had to go back! London. My
God! After that I struggled--I went to my work every day with the
sound of that sea in my ears and the vision of those moors always there
with me. And the freedom! If you have tasted that once, if you have
ever got really close so that you can hear strange voices and see
beauties of which you had never dreamt, well, you will never get back
to your old routine again. I don't care how strong you are--you can't
do it, man. Once she's got hold of you, nothing counts. That was
eighteen years ago. I kept my work for a year, but