in
every direction, lest his successor should spring upon him unawares.

In the opening chapter, which states the central problem, still slowly
being worked out in the great series of _The Golden Bough_, Dr. Frazer
has drawn the well-known picture of that haunted man. "The dreamy blue,"
he writes:

"The dreamy blue of Italian skies, the dappled shade of
summer woods, and the sparkle of waves in the sun, can have
accorded but ill with that stern and sinister figure. Rather
we picture to ourselves the scene as it may have been witnessed
by a belated wayfarer on one of those wild autumn nights
when the dead leaves are falling thick, and the winds seem to
sing the dirge of the dying year. It is a sombre picture, set to
melancholy music--the background of forest showing black and
jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the
wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under
foot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and, in the
foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in
gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder
whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers
down at him through the matted boughs."

For the priest himself it can hardly have been a happy life. Thanks to
Dr. Frazer, we now partly know how much of man's religious hope and fear
that sinister figure represented. But he himself had no conception of
all this, nor can we suppose that even if he had possessed Dr. Frazer's
own wealth of knowledge, it would have cheered him much. When violent
death impends on every moment and lurks in every shade, it is small
consolation to reflect that you stand as a holy emblem, protector of a
symbolic tree, the mystic mate both of the tree itself and of the
goddess of fertility in man and beast and plant. There is no comfort in
the knowledge that the slave who waits to kill you, as you killed your
predecessor in the office, only obeys the widespread injunction of
primitive religion whereby the divine powers incarnate in the priest are
maintained active and wholesome with all the fervour and sprightliness
of youth. Such knowledge would not relax the perpetual strain of terror,
nor could the priest have displayed an intelligent and scientific
interest in all the queer mythologies forcibly dragged in and combined
to explain his presence there--Orestes fleeing like a runaway from the
blood-stained Euxine shore; or Hippolytu