t length, after months of hiding and anxious flitting, found them in the
shape of a doubtfully seaworthy, and undoubtedly filthy, fishing-smack
bound from Le Havre to whatever port it could make on the English south
coast. The two days' voyage was rough, the accommodation and company to
match. Mr. Verity spent a disgusting and disgusted forty-eight hours, to
be eventually put ashore, a woefully bedraggled and depleted figure, in
the primrose, carmine, and dove-grey of a tender April morning on the wet
sand just below the sea-wall of Tandy's Castle.

Never was Briton more thankful to salute his native land, or feel the
solid earth of it under his weary and very shaky feet. He, an epicure,
ate such coarse food, washed down by such coarse ale, as Tandy's could
offer with smiling relish. Later, mounted on a forest pony--an
ill-favoured animal with a wall-eye, pink muzzle, bristly upper and
hanging lower lip, more accustomed to carry a keg of smuggled spirits
strapped beneath its belly than a cosmopolitan savant and social reformer
on its back--he rode the three miles to Marychurch, proposing there to
take the coach to Southampton and, after a measure of rest and refitting,
a post-chaise to Canton Magna, his elder brother's fine place lying in a
fold of the chalk hills which face the Sussex border.

The pony moved slowly and sullenly; but its rider felt no impatience. His
humour was of the kindliest. His heart, indeed, came near singing for
joy, simply, spontaneously, even as the larks sang, climbing up and
upward from salt marsh and meadow, on either side the rutted road, into
the limpid purity of the spring sky. A light wind flapped the
travel-stained, high-collared blue cloth cloak which he wore; and brought
him both the haunting fetid-sweet reek of the mud flats--the tide being
low--and the invigorating tang of the forest and moorland, uprolling
there ahead, in purple and umber to the pale northern horizon. Against
that sombre background, fair and stately in the tender sunlight as a
church of vision or dream, Marychurch Abbey rose above the roofs and
chimneys of the little town.

During the latter half of the eighteenth century, not only were
religious systems very much at a discount among persons of intelligence,
but the Deity himself was relegated to the position of an exploded idea,
becoming an object of vituperation, witty or obscene according to the
humour of the individual critic. As one of the illuminated, Mr. Ve