e you quite a
lot. Make yourself easy; you've a big credit balance to draw on.'

MAN'S AIRY NOTIONS

It is quaint how a catch of a song or a phrase of a lyric will
haunt one along the lonely miles of a walk, up hill and down dale
of one's pilgrimage. Hood found a phrase of a lyric dogging him
down the first stages of his home-road last year. He thought
little of the circumstance at the time, but afterwards he
remembered it, and wondered why the thing had befallen so. The
lines of the phrase had by that time gained meaning for him, more
meaning than he had suspected to be in them, when he said them
over to himself:

'In a wife's lap, as in a grave,
Man's airy notions mix with earth.' *

* From 'The Splendid Spur,' by Q.

He remembered saying them over and over to himself along one
long, sandy, thirsty stretch. Then again, when he sat down by the
drift in huge content waiting for his kettle to boil; then again
on a certain melodramatic night as he paddled in the rain a night
he is not likely to forget.

He had been a missionary in South-Eastern Africa for ten or
fifteen years, I forget which, and his leave that came every five
years was once more due. He started for the railhead, some forty
odd miles from his home, going by way of the post-town, and
calling there for his share of the last mail.

Yes, it was all right. Nothing near at hand in Africa, or far
overseas in England, barred his home-road as far as he could
learn. On the other hand, at least two Southern letters bade him
go back and prosper, and a new welcome had come forward to him
from the North in a writing that he remembered. It was posted in
an Upper River village not many miles from Oxford, and it was a
bidding to a meeting of Oxford contemporaries arranged for the
coming July. They had met on about that same day (the birthday of
the host) five years before.

Hood remembered that day of meeting, as he sat by the drift,
reading his letter, and waiting for the kettle to boil. He
remembered walking out from the city of the spires, and the way
the house looked as he came to it by a path through water-meadows.
What gardens and green shades and coolness of comfort, he
remembered, and linked with that time and that place. He
dreamed a dream with the smell of new-turned hay in it, then
awoke to find himself repeating that mellifluous tag of his about
man's airy notions. The kettle had boiled.

The letter of invitation was written in high spir