hour. I began, choosing the form of an old
French ballade; it is the easiest because it is the most restricted--

"Can Man to Mount Olympus rise,
And fancy Primrose Hill the scene?
Can a man walk in Paradise
And think he is in Turnham Green?
And could I take you for Malines,
Not knowing the nobler thing you were?
O Pearl of all the plain, and queen,
The lovely city of Lierre.

"Through memory's mist in glimmering guise
Shall shine your streets of sloppy sheen.
And wet shall grow my dreaming eyes,
To think how wet my boots have been
Now if I die or shoot a Dean----"

Here I broke off to ask my friend whether he thought it expressed a more
wild calamity to shoot a Dean or to be a Dean. But he only turned up his
coat collar, and I felt that for him the muse had folded her wings. I
rewrote--

"Now if I die a Rural Dean,
Or rob a bank I do not care,
Or turn a Tory. I have seen
The lovely city of Lierre."

"The next line," I resumed, warming to it; but my friend interrupted me.

"The next line," he said somewhat harshly, "will be a railway line.
We can get back to Mechlin from here, I find, though we have to change
twice. I dare say I should think this jolly romantic but for the
weather. Adventure is the champagne of life, but I prefer my champagne
and my adventures dry. Here is the station."

.....

We did not speak again until we had left Lierre, in its sacred cloud of
rain, and were coming to Mechlin, under a clearer sky, that even made
one think of stars. Then I leant forward and said to my friend in a low
voice--"I have found out everything. We have come to the wrong star."

He stared his query, and I went on eagerly: "That is what makes life
at once so splendid and so strange. We are in the wrong world. When I
thought that was the right town, it bored me; when I knew it was wrong,
I was happy. So the false optimism, the modern happiness, tires us
because it tells us we fit into this world. The true happiness is that
we don't fit. We come from somewhere else. We have lost our way."

He silently nodded, staring out of the window, but whether I had
impressed or only fatigued him I could not tell. "This," I added, "is
suggested in the last verse of a fine poem you have grossly neglected--

"'Happy is he and more than wise
Who sees with wondering eyes and clean
The world through all the grey disguise
Of sleep a