horrors, yet he was glad when he saw the church tower and the
lights in the cottage windows, even though this was not the home of
his birth, and his great-aunt did not care much about him.

Inside and round about that old woman's "shop" window, with its
twenty-four little panes set in lead-work, the glass of some of
them oxidized with age, so that you could hardly see the poor penny
articles exhibited within, and forming part of a stock which a strong
man could have carried, Jude had his outer being for some long
tideless time. But his dreams were as gigantic as his surroundings
were small.

Through the solid barrier of cold cretaceous upland to the northward
he was always beholding a gorgeous city--the fancied place he had
likened to the new Jerusalem, though there was perhaps more of the
painter's imagination and less of the diamond merchant's in his
dreams thereof than in those of the Apocalyptic writer. And the city
acquired a tangibility, a permanence, a hold on his life, mainly from
the one nucleus of fact that the man for whose knowledge and purposes
he had so much reverence was actually living there; not only so, but
living among the more thoughtful and mentally shining ones therein.

In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at Christminster too,
he could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there. Whenever
he could get away from the confines of the hamlet for an hour or two,
which was not often, he would steal off to the Brown House on the
hill and strain his eyes persistently; sometimes to be rewarded by
the sight of a dome or spire, at other times by a little smoke, which
in his estimate had some of the mysticism of incense.

Then the day came when it suddenly occurred to him that if he
ascended to the point of view after dark, or possibly went a mile or
two further, he would see the night lights of the city. It would be
necessary to come back alone, but even that consideration did not
deter him, for he could throw a little manliness into his mood, no
doubt.

The project was duly executed. It was not late when he arrived at
the place of outlook, only just after dusk, but a black north-east
sky, accompanied by a wind from the same quarter, made the occasion
dark enough. He was rewarded; but what he saw was not the lamps in
rows, as he had half expected. No individual light was visible, only
a halo or glow-fog over-arching the place against the black heavens
behind it, making the li