ew on
a dressing-gown and walked to the window.

The sight that met his eyes was one of infinite beauty. The
delicacy--the poetry--the subtle, unnameable charm that lie in the
hollow of Nature's hand were over land and sky and sea; the warmth and
wealth of summer stretched before him, but summer mellowed and softened
by a golden autumnal haze.

There are more inspiring countries than Ireland--countries more richly
dowered in vegetation; countries more radiant in atmosphere and
brilliant in colouring: but there is no land where the Hand of the
Maker is more poignantly felt; where the mystic spirit of creation--the
wonderful, tender, pathetic sense of the Beginning--has been so
strangely preserved. As Milbanke stood at the open window, his eyes
travelled without interruption over the wide green fields--neither lawn
nor meadow--that spread from the house to the shore, owning no boundary
wall beyond the low, shelving rocks of red sandstone that rose a
natural barrier against the encroachments of the tide. And from the
fields his gaze wandered onward, drawn irresistibly and inevitably to
the sea itself--the watchful, tyrannical guardian of the silent land.

It lay before him like a tremendous glassy lake, stretching in one
untroubled sweep from Orristown to the point, three miles away, where
the purple headland of Carrigmore completed the semicircle of the bay.
The silence, the majesty of that sweep of water was indescribable. From
the rim of yellow sand, which the indolent waves were lapping, to the
misted horizon, not one sign of human life marred the smoothness of its
surface. Across the bay at Carrigmore a few spirals of smoke rose from
the cluster of pink and white cottages lying under the shadow of the
Round Tower; on the long, sandy strand a couple of bare-legged boys
were leisurely raking up the sea-weed that the waves had left, and
slowly piling it on a waiting donkey butt; but the sea itself was
undisturbed. It lay as it might have lain on the first day of completed
creation--mystical, sublime, untouched.

Milbanke was no poet, yet the scene impressed him. The extraordinary
sense of an inimitable and impenetrable peace before which man and
man's mere transitory concerns are dwarfed, if not entirely eliminated,
touched him vaguely. It was with a tinge of something bordering upon
reluctance that he at last drew his eyes from the picture and began to
dress.

But once freed from the spell of the ocean, his mind r