ime and
achieved a "first." In short, things at the Cove were pretty much
the same after twenty years, barring that a small colony of painters
had descended upon it and made it their home. With them the
undergraduates had naturally and quickly made friends, and the result
was a cricket match--a grand Two-days' Cricket Match. They were all
extremely serious about it, and the Oxford party--at their wits' end,
no doubt, to make up a team against the Artists--had bethought
themselves of me, who dwelt at the other end of the Duchy. They had
written--they had even sent a two-page telegram--to me, who had not
handled a bat for more years than I cared to count. It is delicious
to be flattered by youth, especially for gifts you never possessed or
possess no longer. I yielded and came. The season was Midsummer, or
a little after; the weather golden and glorious.

We had drawn stumps after the first day's play, and the evening was
to be wound up with a sing-song in the great tent erected--a marvel
to the "Covers," or native fishermen--on the cricket-field. But I no
longer take kindly to such entertainments; and so, after a bathe and
a quiet dinner at the inn, it came into my mind to take a stroll up
the hill and along the cliffs, and pay an evening call on the old
Vicar, wondering if he would remember me.

I found him in his garden. The Senior Tutor was there too--"the
grave man, nicknamed Adam"--and the Vicar's wife, seated in a
bee-hive straw chair, knitting. So we four talked happily for a
while, until she left us on pretence that the dew was falling; and
with that, as I have said, a wonderful silence possessed the garden
fragrant with memories and the night-scent of flowers. . .

Then I let fall the word that led to the Vicar's story. In old
rambles, after long mornings spent with Plato, my eyes (by mirage, no
doubt) had always found something Greek in the curves and colour of
this coast; or rather, had felt the want of it. What that something
was I could hardly have defined: but the feeling was always with me.
It was as if at each bend of the shore I expected to find a temple
with pillars, or a column crowning the next promontory; or, where the
coast-track wound down to the little haven, to happen on a votive
tablet erected to Poseidon or to "Helen's brothers, lucent stars";
nay, to meet with Odysseus' fisherman carrying an oar on his
shoulder, or even, in an amphitheatre of the cliffs, to surprise
Apollo hims