vity of Zion, we were like them that
dream."

THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE*

[172] As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he overtook by the
wayside a poor aged man, and, as he seemed weary with the road, helped
him on with the burden which he carried, a certain distance. And as the
man told his story, it chanced that he named the place, a little place
in the neighbourhood of a great city, where Florian had passed his
earliest years, but which he had never since seen, and, the story told,
went forward on his journey comforted. And that night, like a reward
for his pity, a dream of that place came to Florian, a dream which did
for him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing its object to
mind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams,
raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true
aspect of the place, especially of the house there in which he had
lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows,
the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season;
only, with tints more musically blent on wall [173] and floor, and some
finer light and shadow running in and out along its curves and angles,
and with all its little carvings daintier. He awoke with a sigh at the
thought of almost thirty years which lay between him and that place,
yet with a flutter of pleasure still within him at the fair light, as
if it were a smile, upon it. And it happened that this accident of his
dream was just the thing needed for the beginning of a certain design
he then had in view, the noting, namely, of some things in the story of
his spirit--in that process of brain-building by which we are, each one
of us, what we are. With the image of the place so clear and
favourable upon him, he fell to thinking of himself therein, and how
his thoughts had grown up to him. In that half-spiritualised house he
could watch the better, over again, the gradual expansion of the soul
which had come to be there--of which indeed, through the law which
makes the material objects about them so large an element in children's
lives, it had actually become a part; inward and outward being woven
through and through each other into one inextricable texture--half,
tint and trace and accident of homely colour and form, from the wood
and the bricks; half, mere soul-stuff, floated thither from who knows
how far. In the house and garden of his dream he saw a child moving,
and could