pt on, a great rough limb
of driftwood. It struck him as he rose; struck him across the brow. The
wave rushed on; the tide came in; the black wood floated to the shore;
he never rose again.

And scarcely that span of the length of a spar had parted us from him
when he sank!

All the day through they searched, and searched with all the skill of
men sea-born and sea-bred. The fisher, whose little child he had saved
in the winter night, would not leave him to the things of the deep. And
at sunset they found him, floating westward, in the calm water where the
rays of the sun made it golden and warm. He was quite dead; but in his
teeth there still was clenched the osier kreel, washed empty of its
freight.

They buried him there; on the shore underneath the cliff, where a great
wild knot of myrtle grows, and the honeysuckle blooms all over the sand.
And when Lord Beltran in that autumn came, and heard how he had died in
the fulfilling of a trust, he had a stone shapen and carved; and set it
against the cliff, amongst the leafage and flowers, high up where the
highest winter tide will not come. And by his will the name of Bronze
was cut on it in deep letters that will not wear out, and on which the
sun will strike with every evening that it shall pass westward above the
sea; and beneath the name he bade three lines be chiselled likewise, and
they are these:

"HE CHOSE DEATH RATHER THAN UNFAITHFULNESS.
HE KNEW NO BETTER.
HE WAS A DOG."

"They are all words. Creatures that take out their grief in crape and
mortuary tablets can't feel very much."

"There are many lamentations, from Lycidas to Lesbia, which prove that
whether for a hero or a sparrow--" I began timidly to suggest.

"That's only a commonplace," snapped my lady. "They chatter and
scribble; they don't feel. They write stanzas of 'gush' on Maternity;
and tear the little bleating calf from its mother to bleed to death in
a long, slow agony. They maunder twaddle about Infancy over some ugly
red lump of human flesh, in whose creation their vanity happens to be
involved; and then go out and send the springtide lamb to the slaughter,
and shoot the parent birds as they fly to the nest where their
fledglings are screaming in hunger! Pooh! Did you never find out the
value of their words? Some one of them has said that speech was given
them to conceal their thoughts. It is true that they use it for that
end; but it was given them for th