efrained, but I, although I was
perfectly aware what the taste would be, insisted on sipping a
few drops from the palm of my hand. This was a slight recurrence
of what I have called my 'natural magic' practices, which had
passed into the background of my mind, but had not quite
disappeared. I recollect that I thought I might secure some power
of walking on the sea, if I drank of it--a perfectly irrational
movement of mind, like those of savages.

My great desire was to walk out over the sea as far as I could,
and then lie flat on it, face downwards, and peer into the
depths. I was tormented with this ambition, and, like many grown-
up people, was so fully occupied by these vain and ridiculous
desires that I neglected the actual natural pleasures around me.
The idea was not quite so demented as it may seem, because we
were in the habit of singing, as well as reading, of those
enraptured beings who spend their days in 'flinging down their
golden crowns upon the jasper sea'. Why, I argued, should I not
be able to fling down my straw hat upon the tides of Oddicombe?
And, without question, a majestic scene upon the Lake of
Gennesaret had also inflamed my fancy. Of all these things, of
course, I was careful to speak to no one.

It was not with Miss Marks, however, but with my Father, that I
became accustomed to make the laborious and exquisite journeys
down to the sea and back again. His work as a naturalist
eventually took him, laden with implements, to the rock-pools on
the shore, and I was in attendance as an acolyte. But our
earliest winter in South Devon was darkened for us both by
disappointments, the cause of which lay, at the time, far out of
my reach. In the spirit of my Father were then running, with
furious velocity, two hostile streams of influence. I was
standing, just now, thinking of these things, where the Cascine
ends in the wooded point which is carved out sharply by the lion-
coloured swirl of the Arno on the one side and by the pure flow
of the Mugnone on the other. The rivers meet, and run parallel,
but there comes a moment when the one or the other must conquer,
and it is the yellow vehemence that drowns the purer tide.

So, through my Father's brain, in that year of scientific crisis,
1857, there rushed two kinds of thought, each absorbing, each
convincing, yet totally irreconcilable. There is a peculiar agony
in the paradox that truth has two forms, each of them
indisputable, yet each antagonisti