ith the wind behind. 'Which things are
a parable,' he said, his ugly sunburnt face twitching curiously,
his eyes quite handsome, nay, even splendid with honest scorn. He
was shaking his fist towards the prim little dorp that we had
left behind over the ridges. 'No doubt but ye are the people,' he
said, 'ye that have made the freedom of England and the franchise
of Jesus of no effect by your tradition your sacrosanct
tradition. What's the good of the frowsy old stuff? It must be
some good; what is it? It isn't very good pasture for sheep or
horses, not to speak of dairy cattle, but it's noble food for
fire, don't you think?

There it lies-up so snug and sheltered and screened the old dead
survival hidden in the prim little corrugated iron-roofed houses,
and the narrow gumtree avenues, and the whitewashed Dutch
tabernacle where they sing "Safe in the Arms of Jesus" (would you
believe it?) But the time will come, it mayn't come in my day or
in yours, but the time will come sure enough, when the Fire will
trek dead straight for this old dead-ripe stuff, the Fire with
the Wind behind. Then God have mercy on them whose work it was!
For their work shall be burnt, aren't we sure of that? But as to
they themselves being the sort to be saved so as by fire can we
be so very sanguine? Meanwhile. . . . . . .

The way he so humbly appealed to me for my opinion on that moot
point, did much to conciliate me. He had not carried me with him
all the while. He seemed to me a bit out of date, too like an
ante-Christian prophet. Yet how my heart went out to him as he
ended up so very abruptly with his 'meanwhile.' His voice broke
queerly, and his eyes shone. 'Meanwhile they may manage to give a
child or two a rough passage. They've got pluck enough for that,
the blighters, haven't they?' He turned away from me with a sort
of a sob. 'The time'll come sure enough, but it's their time now,
and they know it,' he said. 'God pity her!'

'LA BELLE DAME'

Inhabiting this country you inhabit the Middle Ages, you dwell in
the wild Marchlands without the pale of Christendom. Here a man
may take to the forest roads in the old spirit of errantry. How
darkly the shadow of witchcraft falls upon the path; we might be
in Lapland or Thessaly! What strange satyr voices the drums have
of nights! I suppose it is the reading about such things long ago
that gives me this sense of having been here before, of having
come back to this country!'

His