laughter
and other musical accompaniments.

This revelation, however, was deferred some few years, till he became
acquainted with the merry family of which Mike Laflin was the
characteristic expression. Old Mr. Laflin was a little, jolly,
bald-headed gentleman, bubbling over with mirth, who liked to have young
people about him, and in his quips and cranks was as young as, and much
cleverer than, any of them. It almost startled Henry on his first
introduction to this family of two daughters and two brothers, where the
father was rather like a brother grown prematurely bald, and the
stepmother supplied with monumental dignity that element of solemnity
without which no properly regulated household is complete, to notice the
_camaraderie_ which prevailed amongst them all. Jokes were flying about
from one to another all the time, and the father made a point of capping
them all. This was home in a liberal sense which the word had never
meant to Henry. Doubtless, it had its own individual restrictions and
censorships; but its surface was at all events debonair, and it was
serviceable to Henry as revealing the existence of more genial social
climates than that in which he had been nurtured--though in making the
comparison with his own atmosphere, he realised that this _bonhomie_ was
nothing more important than a grace.

Perhaps, nay, very surely, the seriousness, even the severity of, his
own training, had been among the very conditions needed to make him what
he some day hoped to be, though they had seemed so purposely inimical.
Had James Mesurier's religion been more free and easy, a matter less
personally assured and momentous, his son's almost oppressive sense of
the spiritual significance of existence had been less radiant and
constantly supporting. Life might have gained in superficial
liveableness; but it would have lost in intensity, in real importance,
and with that loss would have gone too Henry's chance of being a poet."
The poet in a golden clime was born!"--once and again, maybe, but more
often he comes from a land of iron and tears.

It is in the nature of things that Henry should begin to appreciate the
services of his home to his development at the moment when he was
leaving it. And the mere pang of the parting from it, when one day the
hour for parting had surely come, was much more deep and complicated
than he could have dreamed. As in our bodies we become conscious of
certain vital centres, certain depend