all the question, and I know that nothing has ever since moved
me in the same way.

I was about nineteen years of age, I think, when I first awoke to the
fact that I had been born shortsighted. I bad had a year in the army,
and when we were at the targets, or were out at judging-distance drill,
I was aware that I did not see things at all as the musketry instructor
represented them. But it happened one starlight night, after I had
returned to civilian life, that a companion of little more than my own
age, who had always worn spectacles in my remembrance of him, began to
talk about the splendid brilliance of the heavens. I could discern a
certain milky radiance, with here and there a dim twinkle in it, but
no more. I borrowed my comrade's glasses, and I looked. The whole thing
sprang at me, but rather with a sense of awe and wonder than of beauty;
and even this much greater episode left the first impression of the
child unchanged.

There is, or used to be, a little pleasure-steamer which starts at
stated times for a voyage on Lake Wakatipu in New Zealand. For a while
it passes along a gloomy channel which is bounded on either side by dark
and lofty rocks of a forbidding aspect. This passage being cleared, the
steamer bears away to the left, across the lake, and, beyond the jutting
promontory near at hand, there lifts into sight on a fair day the first
mountain of the Glenorchy Range. When I first saw it, the sky at the
horizon was almost white; but the peaks of the distant mountains had, as
Shakespeare says, a whiter hue than white, and through field-glasses
its outlines could be perfectly distinguished. Then swung into sight a
second mountain, and a third, and a fourth, and so on, in a progression
which began to look endless. There is a form of delight which is very
painful to endure, and I do not know that I ever experienced it more
keenly than here. The huge snow-capped range gliding slowly up, "the
way of grand, dull, Odyssean ghosts," was impressive, and splendid, and
majestic beyond anything I have known in a life which has been rich in
travel; but if I want, at a fatigued or dispirited hour, to bathe my
spirit clear in the memory of beautiful things seen, I go back, because
I cannot help it, to that tender little fern-frond in a lane on the edge
of the Black Country, which brought to me, first of all, the message
that there is such a thing as beauty in the world.

CHAPTER II

My Father--The Murrays-