arrived when he expected some
visitors. He urgently invited Mr. Falconer to visit him in return. The
invitation was cordially accepted, and in the meantime considerable
progress had been made in the Aristophanic comedy. Mr. Falconer, after
the departure of his visitors, went up into his library. He took down
oner book after another, but they did not fix his attention as they used
to do; he turned over the leaves of Homer, and read some passages about
Circe; then took down Bojardo, and read of Morgana and Falerina and
Dragontina; then took down Tasso and read of Armida. He would not look
at Ariosto's Alcina, because her change into an old woman destroyed
all the charm of the previous picture. He dwelt on the enchantress who
remained in unaltered beauty. But even this he did only by fits and
starts, and found himself continually wandering away towards a more
enchanting reality.

He descended to his bedroom, and meditated on ideal beauty in the
portraits of Saint Catharine. But he could not help thinking that the
ideal might be real, at least in one instance, and he wandered down into
his drawing-room. There he sat absorbed in thought, till his two young
handmaids appeared with his luncheon. He smiled when he saw them, and
sat down to the table as if nothing had disturbed him. Then, taking his
stick and his dog, he walked out into the forest.

There was within moderate distance a deep dell, in the bottom of which
ran a rivulet, very small in dry weather, but in heavy rains becoming
a torrent, which had worn itself a high-banked channel, winding in
fantastic curves from side to side of its narrow boundaries. Above this
channel old forest trees rose to a great height on both sides of the
dell The slope every here and there was broken by promontories which
during centuries the fall of the softer portions of the soil had formed;
and on these promontories were natural platforms, covered, as they were
more or less accessible to the sun, with grass and moss and fern and
foxglove, and every variety of forest vegetation. These platforms were
favourite resorts of deer, which imparted to the wild scene its own
peculiar life.

This was a scene in which, but for the deeper and deeper wear of the
floods and the bolder falls of the promontories, time had made little
change. The eyes of the twelfth century had seen it much as it appeared
to those of the nineteenth. The ghosts of departed ages might seem
to pass through it in successio