r it was impossible to guess how iron had ever been
beaten to such thinness or drawn so ductile. But unhappily-and
priceless as was the secret Young John Cara had chosen to let die
with him--the art of it was frail, frail as the titlark's song.
His masterpiece, indeed, had in it the corruption of Celtic art.
It could not endure its native weather, and rusted away almost to
nothingness. When the late Sir Gilbert Aubyn, the famous neo-Gothic
architect, was called in (1885) to restore Porthennis Church--or, as
we say in Cornwall, to "restroy" it--he swept the remnants away.
But the legend survives, _ferro perennius_.

NOT HERE, O APPOLLO!

A CHRISTMAS STORY HEARD AT MIDSUMMER.

We sat and talked in the Vicarage garden overlooking Mount's Bay.
The long summer day lingered out its departure, although the full
moon was up and already touching with a faint radiance the towers on
St. Michael's Mount--'the guarded Mount'--that rested as though at
anchor in the silver-grey offing. The land-breeze had died down
with sunset; the Atlantic lay smooth as a lake below us, and melted,
league upon league, without horizon into the grey of night.
Between the Vicar's fuchsia-bushes we looked down on it, we three--
the Vicar, the Senior Tutor and I.

I think the twilit hour exactly accorded with our mood, and it did
not need the scent of the Vicar's ten-week stocks, wafted across the
garden, to touch a nerve of memory. For it was twenty years since we
had last sat in this place and talked, and the summer night seemed to
be laden with tranquil thoughts, with friendship and old regard.
. . . Twenty years ago I had been an undergraduate, and had made one
of a reading-party under the Senior Tutor, who annually in the Long
Vacation brought down two or three fourth-year men to bathe and boat
and read Plato with him, for no pay but their friendship: and,
generation after generation, we young men had been made welcome in
this garden by the Vicar, who happened to be an old member of our
College and (as in time I came to see) delighted to renew his youth
in ours. There had been daughters, too, in the old days. . . .
But they had married, and the Vicarage nest was empty long since.

The Senior Tutor, too, had given up work and retired upon his
Fellowship. But every summer found him back at his old haunts; and
still every summer brought a reading-party to the Cove, in conduct
now of a brisk Junior Fellow, who had read with me in our t