me difficult)--We are very
near the end. . . . We did intend to finish ourselves
when things proved like this, but we have decided to die
naturally without.'

I think it may uplift you all to stand for a moment by that tent and
listen, as he says, to their songs and cheery conversation. When I
think of Scott I remember the strange Alpine story of the youth who
fell down a glacier and was lost, and of how a scientific companion,
one of several who accompanied him, all young, computed that the
body would again appear at a certain date and place many years
afterwards. When that time came round some of the survivors returned
to the glacier to see if the prediction would be fulfilled; all old
men now; and the body reappeared as young as on the day he left them.
So Scott and his comrades emerge out of the white immensities always
young.

How comely a thing is affliction borne cheerfully, which is not
beyond the reach of the humblest of us. What is beauty? It is
these hard-bitten men singing courage to you from their tent;
it is the waves of their island home crooning of their deeds to you
who are to follow them. Sometimes beauty boils over and them spirits
are abroad. Ages may pass as we look or listen, for time is
annihilated. There is a very old legend told to me by Nansen the
explorer--I like well to be in the company of explorers--the legend
of a monk who had wandered into the fields and a lark began to sing.
He had never heard a lark before, and he stood there entranced until
the bird and its song had become part of the heavens. Then he went
back to the monastery and found there a doorkeeper whom he did not
know and who did not know him. Other monks came, and they were all
strangers to him. He told them he was Father Anselm, but that was
no help. Finally they looked through the books of the monastery,
and these revealed that there had been a Father Anselm there a
hundred or more years before. Time had been blotted out while
he listened to the lark.

That, I suppose, was a case of beauty boiling over, or a soul boiling
over; perhaps the same thing. Then spirits walk.

They must sometimes walk St. Andrews. I do not mean the ghosts
of queens or prelates, but one that keeps step, as soft as snow,
with some poor student. He sometimes catches sight of it.
That is why his fellows can never quite touch him, their best
beloved; he half knows something of which they know nothing--the
secret that is hidd