or,
living them so utterly, she became detached from the physical world. One
time, when a stormy golden sun went down behind black clouds, shining on
an ancient pile of grey stones that stood on a little spit of land near
the bar of the river, she was reminded of Tennyson's "Morte d'Arthur."
She heard the ripples lapping on the reeds and, with an imaginary Sir
Bedivere at her elbow, hurried back to the farm to dress herself as a
Scottish edition of King Arthur in kilts that had belonged to her
grandfather. She worshipped the shine of the moon on the great jewel at
her breast as she stepped into the little frail boat, very tired after a
long day's wandering on Ben Grief without food. To a Kelt death is a
thing so interpenetrating life that thought of it brought no fear;
there was a sort of adventurous anticipation about it. She cast a
stick--her sword Excalibur--into midstream and waited for the arm "clad
in white samite, mystic, wonderful." That it did not appear meant very
little to her. It certainly did not mean that it was not there. Rather
it meant that she could not see it. So she lay in the little boat and
quite certainly she saw the grave Queens at the head, leading her to the
Island Valley of Avilion. Watching the moonlight glittering on her jewel
she was hypnotized to sleep, rocked by the soft motion of the little
boat. The current of the stream took her out to sea, the turn of the
tide washed her back again, and she wakened at dawn famished with
hunger, drenched with the icy water the little boat had shipped. She was
too good a swimmer to drown and, after a valiant struggle, she came to
land two miles from home.

Her romance was never killed by misadventures. The very next day she
climbed Ben Grief and lighted a ring of fire round his wrinkled brow by
carrying up loads of dried heather and grass through which she fought
her way to the rescue of a dream Brunnhilde, sleeping within the fire.
She reached home that night with scorched clothes and hair, and
smoke-smarting eyes. But such mishaps were only part of the adventure,
as inevitable as storms in winter and wounds in battle. These dreams
were in the days before her father's Rationalism kept her chained
indoors: his evangelism sowed seeds that took root and flowered into a
desire that she might be a wild-eyed, flame-tongued John the Baptist,
making straight the way of the Lord. When this dream came to her it
transmuted all the other dreams; from so deep down