cheerful, leisurely people
sitting smiling together on a lawn, like a scene out of a romance; and
then at last, on passing Baitsbite lock, we slipped into a merrier
world. Here we heard the beat of rowlocks, the horse-hoofs of a coach
thudded on the bank, and a crew of jolly young men went gliding past,
with a cox shouting directions, just as I might have been doing thirty
years ago! Thirty years ago! And it seems like yesterday, and I not a
scrap older or wiser, though, thank God, a good deal happier. Even so
we drift on to the unseen. Then we passed a village, the thatched
cottages with their white gables rising prettily from the blossoming
orchards. Ditton on its little hill; and the old iron bridge thundered
and clanked with a passing train; then came the rattle of the grinds;
and the mean houses of Barnwell; and soon we were gliding up among the
backs, under the bridge of St. John's, by the willow-hung walks of
Trinity, by the ivied walls and trim gardens of Clare, past the great
white palace-front of King's, and so by the brick gables and oriels of
Queens' into the Newnham mill-pool. It was somehow not like Cambridge,
but like some enchanted town of palaces; and I would not break the
spell; so we swung about, made no stay, and then slowly reversed the
whole panorama again, through the long, still afternoon.

The old life of Cambridge--it was all there, after the long years, just
the same, full of freshness and laughter; but I came into it as a
_revenant_, and yet with no sense of sadness, rather of joy that it
should all be so continuous and bright. I did not want it back; I did
not desire any part in it, but was merely glad to watch and remember. I
thought of myself as a fitful boy full of dreams and hopes, some
fulfilled, some unfulfilled; those that I have realised so strangely
unlike what I expected, those unrealised still beckoning with radiant
visage. I did not even desire any companionship, any interchange of
thought and mood. Was it selfish, dull, unenterprising to be so
content? I do not think so, for a stream of gentle emotion, which I
know was sweet and which I think was pure, lapsed softly through my
mind all day. It is not always thus with me, and I took the good day
from the hands of God as a perfect gift; and though it would be easy to
argue that I could have been better employed, a deeper instinct said to
me that I was meant to be thus, and that, after all, God sends us into
the world to live, tho