nt, their limbs
slack, like the ropes above them, entangled as they are in those
inextricable meshes about the patched knots and heaps of ill-reefed
sable sail. What a majestic sense of service in all that languor! the
rest of human limbs and hearts, at utter need, not in sweet meadows or
soft air, but in harbour slime and biting fog; so drawing their breath
once more, to go out again, without lament, from between the two
skeletons of pier-heads, vocal with wash of under wave, into the grey
troughs of tumbling brine; there, as they can, with slacked rope, and
patched sail, and leaky hull, again to roll and stagger far away amidst
the wind and salt sleet, from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, winning
day by day their daily bread; and for last reward, when their old
hands, on some winter night, lose feeling along the frozen ropes, and
their old eyes miss mark of the lighthouse quenched in foam, the
so-long impossible Rest, that shall hunger no more, neither thirst any
more,--their eyes and mouths filled with the brown sea-sand.

(_Harbours of England_.)

{168}

WALTER PATER 1839-1894

THE CHILD IN THE HOUSE

As Florian Deleal walked, one hot afternoon, he overtook by the wayside
a poor aged man, and, as he seemed weary with the road, helped him on
with the burden which he carried, a certain distance. And as the man
told his story, it chanced that he named the place, a little place in
the neighbourhood of a great city, where Florian had passed his
earliest years, but which he had never since seen, and, the story told,
went forward on his journey comforted. And that night, like a reward
for his pity, a dream of that place came to Florian, a dream which did
for him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing its object to
mind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams,
raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true
aspect of the place, especially of the house there in which he had
lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows,
the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season;
only, with tints more musically blent on wall and floor, and some finer
light and shadow running in and out along its curves and angles, and
with all its little carvings daintier. He awoke with a sigh at the
thought of almost thirty years which lay between him and that place,
yet with a flutter of pleasure still within him at the fair light, as
if i