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 overpowered. He had learned how to take dead reckonings and read portents in the sky.

It was an engrossing study, but there had been hours when the monotony oppressed him. He had grown mortally weary of twenty-odd circumscribed minds, the unending yarns which, if not lacking in picturesqueness and variety of detail, were hopelessly similar in tone, being confined to some aspect of sea life or the deeds of seamen on land. His mates had few ideas left with which to surprise him, and Paul had discovered that the element of surprise was as necessary to mental progress as salt was necessary in food.

It was consequently with a very fever of elation that he strained his eyes through the velvety blackness. Fair winds had been blowing for days, following a series of storms encountered south of the Cape of Good Hope. The pencil record in the chart-room showed only a short's pace between the position at noon and the port of Fremantle. And now a propitious breeze was bearing them straight towards the promised land.

"Birds of varigated plumage abound, but their cries are for the most part raucous. The songsters of European groves are practically unknown in the Commonwealth," Paul had read, and he wondered if he would see wild parrots perching on telegraph wires. He disliked parrots. But for them the boys of Hale's Turning would never have lurked around corners waiting to scream out at his approach, "Polly want a cracker, Polly want a cracker!"

He wondered if Australians ate pancakes and cornmeal muffins and frosted walnut cakes. He wondered what Australian candy was like, and marbles and tops. Did they play Nobbies and Lacrosse and Duck on the Rock? Almost any strange custom might prevail in a country where even the seasons were upside down. Fancy being hot and sticky in January! While he was

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 clad in a cotton shirt, duck trousers and a pair of slippers, Walter Dreer and Gritty Kestrell were coasting down the snowy hill past Miss Todd's, or skating figure eights on the marsh ponds under the railway trestle!

On and on—east of the sun and west of the moon. A man stumbled aft to relieve his mate at the wheel. At intervals came the ghostly call from the bows, "All's well," followed by a gruff acknowledgment.

At midnight the watch changed, but Paul merely snuggled to a more comfortable position on a thwart of the lifeboat. Despite his subdued excitement he was drowsy and thought of curling up in the hanging folds of a lowered staysail, when he was electrified by the cry, "Light ahead."

Feeling that circumstances justified a breach of the regulations, he scrambled down from the house and ran to see for himself. "Blimey!" exclaimed the lookout in a cautious whisper. "It's Gentleman Jim out of 'is bed. Smell the steak and kidney puddin', did 'e?"

"Where is it?" demanded Paul.

"First turnin' on the roight. Sign o' the crown and anchor. Wut you gunna 'ave?"

"Oh shut up, Shorty. Show me the light."

As a protest against the nickname, the lookout snatched Paul up, bore him to the rail, and pointed ahead. "Watch," he directed. In a few moments Paul detected a tiny point lower than the stars and more golden in lustre, which disappeared like some stealthy signal. After long seconds it flashed again—and again.

"At last!" he sighed, as the seaman put him down.

"Oho! Y'ain't old enough to 'ave a woman, you know."

"Is that so? And what could a little shorty like you do with one?"

The reply was entrusted to the toe of an agile boot, but Paul ducked, and from the safety of the iron ladder

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 thumbed his nose. He found the mate pacing the poop, but didn't dare ask all the questions in his mind, lest he be thought childish.

The next few hours passed slowly, but with dawn came the sight so eagerly awaited—a low, slate-black shadow dividing the sky from an ocean all mother-of-pearl. At six o'clock Paul took tea to the captain's room, and two hours later, when he went forward with the basket, the sun had dispelled the shadows, the water had become a yellowish jade, and the coast was revealed in a sand-coloured stretch, patched with green hollows. White clouds hovered over the hills, and everything was bathed in gold. The Clytemnestra had ceased to represent the boundaries of the world, and was now a mere insect crawling painfully over a wrinkled pool. The captain peered through his telescope at a blob of smoke.

"It's a tug already," remarked the mate as he came down to breakfast. "We'll be alongside by noon."

Paul contrived to be on deck when the tow-boat approached within hailing distance. He had never seen a sight more exhilarating than this sturdy tug as she reared and coughed and wallowed in the green waves, belching forth smoke. She was intensely alive, and her personality was not unlike that of an officious sheepdog.

Thanks to the fair wind, which would have enabled him to sail to the very mouth of the Swan river, the old man drove a sharp bargain with the captain of the tow-boat. To Paul's astonishment his first question, when terms had been settled by the aid of a megaphone, was as to the outcome of "the war." The old man seemed unaccountably pleased that somebody had licked somebody else. Paul had not even known they were fighting; but he was tremendously interested in the discovery that Australians—judging from the captain of the tow-boat—said "sile" for sail.

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 At the old man's command, Paul ran up to the poop and threw out a sounding line to which one of the deckhands, amiably—and a little patronizingly—smiling, attached a bundle of newspapers. Paul drew the packet aboard, with professional gestures, and the tug, with a clang of bells and a churning of the propeller, plunged forward, preparing to let out her thick hawser.

Paul spread the newspaper on the chart-room desk. Such strange-looking sheets they were—not a bit like the Halifax Herald! The captain's form loomed in the companion-way, and Paul ran off to make the beds, debating the mighty, jubilant, breathless alternatives: should he go first to see Veronique, or Hamlet, or Miss Dolly Castles in Pinafore?

Never had trees been so green, roofs so red, nor life itself so promising. Even the bare island that lay off the coast had a personality, for "There," said the pilot, "is where the Orizaba went down."

The sails were furled. The tow-boat had dropped back and made fast at the side to guide the helpless vessel through the channel of the river. Had water ever been as utterly flat as this? Paul wondered that it could float tall ships.

That vivid brick building on the bank, surmounted by a short mast on which was a time-ball—those vines with purple-blue flowers like the clematis that split down the walls of Gritty's brown house thousands and thousands of miles away—but of a blueness!

The gigantic black-funnelled liner moored to the quay—a P. and O. And ahead of her was a real battle cruiser! The only warship Paul had seen was a wheezy revenue cutter in Halifax. "That's the Euryalis," explained the pilot, most satisfactory of men, "the flagship of the Australian squadron."

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 Slowly past steamers, past warehouses, towards the innermost space of the quay, near the bridge which cut off the navigable portion of the river. It seemed hours before the ship was finally moored, a rat-guard placed on each hawser, the gangway adjusted. The captain had gone ashore with the quarantine officer. Stevedores, ship chandlers, butchers, and grocers were making their way aboard, and dinner was standing cold on the table. Men and horses, a thousand bewildering signs of the life lived on land! Paul was feeling the effect of his vigil, and chafed at the thought that he could not set foot on this enchanted soil until the day's tasks were done, perhaps not then. Moreover, it appeared that one's wages were not paid outright, but in driblets, at the captain's discretion. For the first time he realized the significance of having signed on for a full voyage, which meant that his discharge and pay-day were contingent upon his returning to the home port, Liverpool.

He was vaguely apprehensive. It would be just like old boy Wilcove to find out what ships had sailed from Halifax on the date of his disappearance. Paul was not sure whether or not Dr. Wilcove had any legal control over him, but the man who was always referred to as his guardian, whatever that implied, might be fussy enough to take some measures toward compelling him to return. What if an Australian policeman should come aboard and march him off to the big P. and O. boat flying the blue Peter! His imagination was fired at the thought of travelling by steam through the Red Sea and being transferred in England to another splendid liner bound for Halifax. But Halifax! And Hale's Turning! And school! Without seeing Australia!

He was tempted to bolt. In this little city—he now knew it was little, though from the mouth of the river

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 it had seemed boundless—he could find something to do, surely. But the old man!

Paul returned to his broom and dust-pan. He couldn't play the old man false, for somehow he was confident the old man wouldn't play him false. Contact with the fine sailorliness of his captain had instilled in him a sense of sportsmanship.

Not much chance of getting ashore to-night. But the stevedore had said they might be two months unloading. Then they would have to take on ballast before proceeding to Sydney for a cargo. There was plenty of time, and he was tired. It was strange to be motionless. His bunk would not seem natural without the lulling sea-saw and the creaking of beams. And the ship, made fast to a wharf, her yards projected against the walls of warehouses, seemed to have lost her very identity.

Such quantities of sand as there were in the place! Enough to make the walrus weep! When the wind blew it drove in dusty clouds along the roads. And the low opposite bank of the river was a long stretch of pure sand, broken only by a few scrubby trees and amorphous buildings.

The captain returned at supper time, followed by a man carrying bags of fruit for the cabin table. Paul could read nothing in the old man's countenance, and under the stress of issuing orders the captain seemed oblivious of his existence. Piqued, Paul rang the supper bell with needless vigour. Then, on returning to the pantry, he heard a voice sharply calling, "Steward!"

In his bedroom the captain was sorting out letters for members of the crew. "Take these forward," he ordered, "And these are for you."

Paul picked up two envelopes addressed "Master Paul W. Minas, care Captain Caxton, Br. Barque Clytemnestra, Fremantle, W.A."

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 A few minutes later, in the pantry, with a sinking heart and tremulous curiosity, he opened them. One was from Dr. Wilcove!

",

"Whatever possessed you to play such a prank? However, by the time this reaches you, you will have regretted your impulse as much as we have all regretted it, so I needn't rub it in."

Regret it, forsooth!

"I trust this will find you none the worse for your voyage."

None the worse!

"Margaret Kestrell came to see me on receiving your letter. I'm bound to say I'm surprised that you chose to confide in a little girl rather than your guardian. I had had no hint of your difficulties at school until I hurried up to Halifax. It seems that there was misunderstanding on both sides, yet none, I feel sure, that could not have been adjusted."

"So?" This was an echo of Otto's dialect.

"However, that's a closed chapter. What I now propose, and indeed insist on, is that you return to consult with me concerning your education. You may not realize that as executor of your father's will and that of Miss Windell, I am responsible for properties being administered in your interest until you come of age. So long as we here are responsible for your welfare, the least you can do is to render our task possible. Perhaps you can understand our anxiety, and our wish to regain

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 the confidence which, perhaps owing to our own negligence, we seem to have forfeited."

Paul felt guilty.

"I am writing to Captain Caxton, who, as you doubtless know, was with your father at the time of his death on the Brandywine."

Julius Priest! And the old man hadn't let on!

"I am also sending him a draft for £150"

Five times fifteen—$750—Gee-rusalem!

"He will arrange passage home for you. I expect you to write me on receipt of this, and please believe me, my dear Paul, "Your affectionate guardian."

Paul replaced the letter in its envelope. On returning from the supper table with the remains of the first course—how they had pitched into the fresh beef!—he broke open the other letter:

",

"three cheersmy I wisht I was with youThe doctor near fainted when I told him he went to halifax and when he come back I made him tell me your address to write to do you have to wear a sailor suit paul when you are comeing backI'm going to run away when I save enough money from my sunday school collection moneyI hate herepapa spanked me for catching me smokeing a pine coneI wunt forget you paul never nor the secrets nor nothing PaulGoodbye X X X O O O from Gritty."

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When Paul was lighting the lamps that evening the captain looked up from his papers. "They seem to have been worried about you back in Nova Scotia," he commented.

"Yes, sir." The match trembled in Paul's fingers.

"Your cock and bull story put rather a different face on matters, didn't it?"

Paul bristled and drew himself up with a tinge of theatricality. "I hope I've proved how much in earnest I was," he said.

The captain smiled and puffed at his cigar. "You've earned your wages all right. But I'm afraid you'll have to go back."

Paul's eyes smarted, and he had to remind himself that in a day or two he would be wearing long trousers.

"I'd jump overboard rather than go back to Hale's Turning," he retorted.

The captain tapped his cigar ash into a tray, and Paul could no longer control himself.

"Oh, why are you on their side?" he cried. "If you were a friend of my father's, like Dr. Wilcove said, why do you want to send me back to a hateful, rotten, stuffy school? If you do, I'll only run away again where nobody can find me, so you might as well not!"

"Do you think your father and mother would have approved of your running away?"

Paul glanced up at the old man with a new interest. "Did you know my mother too, sir?"

"For the matter of that," replied the captain, "I knew you, as well. I was mate with Captain Andrew when he took your mother and you on a voyage to Durban. You were pretty young then. From about one to one and a half."

Paul shrank weakly to a settee, forgetful of his stew-

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 ardship. His mouth was open, but he had nothing to say. Finally he exclaimed:

"And you knew all the time!"

"Since the day when I saw your father's watch lying on the table—the watch you forgot to pawn."

Paul winced at the needless thrust. If the old man only knew how he treasured the keepsake!

"Do you think your mother would have been pleased at the thought of your leaving school so young?"

"How do I know? I don't think she would have objected if she knew how stupid it was!" His only clue to his mother was through Aunt Verona, and Aunt Verona had always seemed to be on his side. "Do you think she would have objected? "he inquired diffidently.

"She was a rare one for books and music. That old piano there used to belong to her."

So that was why the old man had suggested his playing it in the dog-watches! His own mother's piano! Verily, life was almost too painfully miraculous. Music was the weak spot in his armour. There had been moments during the long voyage when he had yearned for the big piano in the playroom. But if it must come to a choice between music and the sea, between a life of practising and a life of seeing hundreds of new countries, he could only decide in favour of the latter. In his mind, for months and months, had been running the phrase: "Qui n'oubliera jamais ces soirées de Munich et de Vienne." He, too, must see places that he would never be able to forget. What education could compare with a visit to cities steeped in music and romance, cities which had fostered rare spirits! Besides, education was largely a matter of books. He had learned ten times as much in Aunt Verona's kitchen as he had learned from Miss Ranston and Miss Hornby.

"I don't see why I can't read at sea as well as at school," he argued.

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 The captain was non-committal. "Well," he concluded, "it don't do to decide rashly."

Paul felt that this remark might refer to his rashness in having run away. Tears threatened to break through his defences, as he got up from the settee. He was unwilling to leave the matter on such a dubious footing. He was wretched and craved some crumb of encouragement.

"If you were my father, instead of you, sir," he ventured, in husky tones, "would you think me awful for acting the way I have?"

The captain rose from his chair and placed a hand on Paul's shoulder. "Oh, I don't know as I'd go that far," he said. "At any rate, if I was your father, instead of me, I'd be a damn sight better man than I am . . . He'd a been pleased at the way you've kept the slop-chest accounts and done the brass. And, if he'd a gone for to blame you, you could a reminded him that he run away himself when he was a lad."

"Oh, did he?" Paul's throat ached. He wanted to thank the old man for something, but didn't know what, nor how.

"Better turn in now," advised the captain.

The dread that he might be sent home, tinging all his moods during the ensuing days, added a strange poignancy to Paul's impressions. The little town with its narrow streets and low brick buildings was full of marvels. The commonest objects wore an aspect so different from corresponding objects at home that they acquired an abnormal intrinsic interest. Instead of asking for candy you asked for lollies; instead of buying chocolate dudes you bought little cardboard boxes labelled "Fry's" or "Cadbury's." You had to be

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 wary of half-crowns, for they were deceitfully like florins.

Then the speech of these people! They said "thruppnse" for threepence, "frock" for dress, and "gaing" for going. They called ice-cream "hokey-pokey" and served it in little cups made of biscuit. The newsvenders sold queer papers like Ally Sloper's Half Holiday and Tid-Bits and when they spoke of "home" they meant England! And such an odd way of pronouncing "home"—as though there were at least two vowels in the middle and no h to speak of!

And Miss Green, who arranged entertainments at the Seamen's Institute, Miss Green who was about thirty and rather thin, Miss Green with whom he might quite easily have fallen in love, had he not already fallen in love with Miss Dolly Castles, the star of that quite too delicious Pinafore—to say nothing of Phœbe Meddar, whose image he kept "polishing up so faithfully"infaithfully" in [sic] his heart—Miss Green lived in what she called an "upstairs 'ouse!" Most houses here hadn't any upstairs! And Miss Green had never seen snow! But she had been in a part of the north-west where it was so hot you couldn't put your hand on a cat's back—and Paul had asked if the cat burnt her tongue when she tried to lick herself!

There was something quaint about it all, and something heart-catching. Probably it was merely the thought that you might have to turn your back on everything and go home, just when you had set foot on the edge of experience!

The evening at the theatre had been dazzling and faultless. Hazel Kirke was tame compared with Dick Deadeye and Hebe and Josephine and the sisters and cousins and aunts in their pink dresses—no, frocks. "And I polished up the handles so faithfully, that now I'm the Ruler of the Queen's Navee—" That was him, Paul Minas! And the lilt of it! If Gritty could only have been along!

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 He pictured Gritty, with her snub nose and saucy eyes, singing "I'm called little Buttercup, de-ah little Buttercup"

Veronique and Hamlet, alas, were being played in Perth. Perth was an elegant city, compared with the grubby seaport. But his heart was none the less in the grubby seaport, for it represented his first glimpse and taste of exoticism. Nothing in life could ever eclipse his first walk along the shopping streets of Freemantle, nothing could ever be as sweet as the first "lolly" he had put into his mouth, nothing quite so thrilling in its way as the first order he had ever given a waitress, in a funny tea-shop where there were only three tables!

One of the sharpest thrills of all had come during his first walk through the streets of Perth. In a baker's window he had seen a placard advertising a recital to be given by Madame Melba. For a moment the material world fell away, he was transported straight into a world of tangible dreams, and he realized that the great life of adventure had begun in earnest. For Melba was one of the immortal figures portrayed in Aunt Verona's big blue volume of musical celebrities. How well he recalled the portrait—the long plaits of hair, the eyes lifted toward heaven, the hands clasping a prayer book. In the same volume were portraits of Max Alvary, and Frances Saville, Jean de Reszke, Paderewski, Patti, Rubinstein and a dozen others. He had thought of them as creatures who had had their being in a world quite remote from any he would ever be likely to know. True, Aunt Verona had once breathed the atmosphere of that faery world, but that only enhanced the glamour. It had never occurred to him that those creatures might still be alive; the mere fact that their photographs were in a book seemed to throw them into some dim past. And now, here in Perth, was an announcement that the fabulous

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 Melba was going to sing! And he, Paul Minas of Hale's Turning, was actually in a corner of the globe where such miracles came to pass!

Unhappily, when he had examined the placard more closely he had found that it was many months old. It was a lazy baker. She had come and gone. Even so, he was breathing air into which glorious notes had been poured—notes as much more enthralling than Miss Todd's as heaven was more enthralling than earth—if there "would have been" a heaven! He had nearly seen a dream come true—had been "hot," as they said in the game of "search the button." And Dr. Wilcove and the old man coolly expected him to go back to Hale's Turning to be educated!

Of all the sensations that had stirred him, the most profound, the most haunting had been the sound of the chimes—in the tower of the Fremantle town hall. The second evening in port he had hurried through his tasks and come ashore alone, unwilling to have his first impressions clouded by the inept remarks of a companion. After ferreting his way through side-streets, he had walked to a sandy hill behind the town from which he could see the ocean. The hill was covered with tufts of wiry grass, and here and there were eucalyptus trees, their long smooth, bark-patched trunks showing pink and lavender and palest lemon in the glow of the dying day. Far away, on one side, was an Oval dotted with cricketers, and a fife and drum band was playing "Cock o' the North." The brick and stone villas, so quaint after the wooden houses of Nova Scotia, clustering beneath him and stretching along the river bank, seemed ineffably cosy. Each was a home, replete with mother, father and children: the three essential factors of the game called "House" which was a favourite with the little girls of Hale's Turning. Here he was on the opposite side of the world, alone on a bare hill-top, with mere fancies to

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 serve him as brothers and sisters, while at his feet nestled the homes of aliens who, for all their odd ways, were quite similar to Nova Scotians. Yet on this whole continent there was no creature who had heard of Paul Minas. Here he stood, like the son of a god on some sacred mount, watching Australians at their sports, philosophizing about them in a brand new pair of long trousers, infinitely well-disposed toward them, yet for all they knew of it he might just as well be on the top side of the world. If he were to go back the very next day, it would be to them as though he had never been here, yet for him the whole world would henceforth seem quite different than it would have seemed had he not been here. When the sun had sunk into the sea, he made his way down the hill and walked towards the centre of town along a residential street bordered by scorched gardens in which dusty red and yellow flowers struggled for existence. At the juncture of two deserted streets he came to the town hall, and as he was crossing the triangular space in front of it, his thoughts in a cloud, the bells began to chime.

At home there was the school bell, and every church had a single bell which on the Sabbath summoned the faithful monotonously to its doors, but until this evening Paul had never heard chimes. The four deep-voiced bells, solemnly intoning their formula of sixteen notes, enthralled him, and he stood spellbound as a still deeper voice tolled the hour. But the musical formula of the chimes did more than enthral him: it engendered a nameless mood compounded of wistfulness, yearning, loneliness, disillusionment, regret, confidence, and iridescent hope. The chimes were beautiful but infinitely sombre; they were a little weary, a little sad, resigned, but at the same time unflinching. Above all, they were wise. Their message was a proverb, a simple chord which yet expressed the essence of all truth. There was a hint of

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 eternity in the chimes, and a hint of fortitude. For Paul they were even prophetic.

"You, boy," they seemed to say, "you will go from this town to other towns, from this land to other lands, always exploring, always an alien. You will seek knowledge and happiness, but you will find them only in oddments, like apples fallen from a barrow; the barrow will always be beyond the brow of the hill. It is your destiny to be sad when you wish to be glad, and most sad of all when you learn that life is only a brief solo, and that your solo, in the ears of God, is, like a million others, merged into the blurred, harmonious hum of the cosmos. So much for vanity, boy. So much for your long trousers. Our chime is a marching-song and an epitaph. Let it for ever echo in your heart, and you will be neither too improvidently hopeful nor too cruelly deceived:

Paul had been unconsciously holding a bruised leaf of eucalyptus to his face. Its odour, bitter-sweet and pungent, seemed an integral part of the oracle.

Miss Green's invitation to attend the concert at the Seamen's Institute Paul regarded as a tribute to his personal distinction, and he made a careful toilet. On arriving at the hall he was discountenanced to find not only that the whole crew had been invited, but that one of them, Dismal Jimmy, was to contribute a song to the programme. Paul's vanity was punctured, and as he took a seat beside Otto he chided himself for having been a prig.

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 Otto had received his discharge and was to sail next day as on a German liner, the Barbarossa. Paul regretted the prospective loss of his burly chum and was envious of Otto's opportunity to return to such a romantic land—though he still disapproved of Otto's reason for returning.

The hall was soon filled, for there were several ships in port and apart from the pubs and the beguilements of Perth—some miles distant—rival attractions were few. The fact that Dismal Jimmy was on the programme while he, Paul Minas, was merely a member of the audience, offended his sense of proportion. Furthermore, his long musical abstention, while it had brought surcease from practice, had ended by inducing an acute desire to make music. As he sat looking up at the piano his shoulders and arms and finger-ends yearned. The antiquated piano on the ship was feeble and unresponsive. Here was a piano which looked as though it might wail and exult. Through his mind coursed grandiose passages from the Schumann "Carnival," and from the querulous, clamorous Chopin étude in C minor which gave off flashes of lightning in the treble while thundering in the base. And no one had even asked if he could "do" anything! The curse of being only thirteen.

A sailor with a rasping baritone sang about "the brave, the brave hussars," and another, with erratic notions of pitch and tempo, sang a ballad which was largely a matter of "Dairy down, dairy ah, dairy dairy oh!" Miss Green doggedly accompanied, whilst necklaces danced about her thin dry neck. There were two daubs of pink on her cheek-bones; her nose was whiter than her elbows; and she wore a yellow muslin dress that made her hair look dusty. But Miss Green was nice. In her presence one felt pleasantly masculine and protective, and jealous of all other males. And Paul had a loyal desire not to be captious about her appearance or her musicianship. Perhaps

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 some day a thoroughly chivalrous first-mate would lead her to the altar, then her necklaces might cease rattling.

When Dismal Jimmy's turn came, there was an awkward consultation in whispers. The Cornishman had no music, and Miss Green couldn't play by ear. Paul's pulses throbbed. He was sure Dismal Jimmy planned to sing "The Vicar of Bray" or "Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep." Paul could improvise accompaniments, provided he knew the tune. Consequently when the curate, who was chairman, called for a volunteer Paul timidly responded. Otto gave him a friendly clap on the shoulder and shoved him into the aisle. When Dismal Jimmy had settled the matter of key, Paul played a flourishing entrée, and the song proceeded.

At its conclusion Miss Green waylaid Paul. On her homely face was an expression he knew quite well: fond, indulgent, adoring. If, after the manner of Miss Todd, she had linked her arm in his and said, "You're a wonder, Paul—dear," he would not have been surprised. What she did say was more to the point: "After that, you can't get out of giving us a solo! I'll tell Mr. Simpkins."

The next few numbers were a blur in Paul's mind. He was trying to select an appropriate piece from his old répertoire. The "Davidsbündler" march and the "Revolution" étude would sound grotesque on a programme that included such ditties as "We all went into the shop, to see what we could see!" He thought of salon pieces that would be sure of provoking applause. But he restlessly rejected them, for as the programme went on he became less anxious to show off than to convey to this roomful of seamen, stokers, engineers and stewards some superfine message. The simple wisdom of the bells had penetrated into his heart. His appetite for exotic sensations, appeased for the moment, had given place to a sense of well-being which became diffused in a new tenderness. Dimly, gropingly, he felt that if he could imbue his neigh-

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 bours with a similar sense of well-being, some priceless blessing would grow out of it. He recalled Mr. Silva's old sayings, and longed to place these men under a spell they could never forget, to weld them together so that, as one, they should share the benefit of his recent meditations. He had it at heart to evoke in them some counterpart of the awe and humility, melancholy and exaltation, pity and fortitude he had felt upon hearing the symbolic chimes. He was still undecided when the curate announced that the next "item" would be a "piano selection by Master Laval of the Clytemnestra."

The jolt of being thus classified brought before Paul's eyes a vision of the good old Clytemnestra, trudging on, carrying him like the faithful white bear east of the sun and west of the moon. Moon! Those blue velvet nights when his thoughts had walked down its yellow carpet to the very edge of the world, when out of the silence he had conjured up the strains of the composition which Aunt Verona said was miscalled the "Moonlight Sonata." Assuredly it was out of place in this reeking hall—well, he must simply make it in place!

With a new sort of confidence but with none of the swagger of school-concert days, he mounted to the platform. In his mind he was reviewing whole pages to be's ure he remembered the intricate passages.

Instead of compelling his audience to warm his heart with their flattery, he would warm their hearts with the message of Beethoven, a message which he understood to-night infinitely better than in the days when he had glibly performed the sonata with uncalloused hands.

These men, he felt, expected something flashy, for preference: "Hunky-dory" or "Coon, Coon, Coon, I wish my colour would fade!" They were still humming the refrain of "Old Bull and Bush." A long dormant theatrical instinct seized him in its grip. For the moment he was on his old pedestal, his organ-bench, his sail locker,

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 his forecastle-head nook, his cloud-top—King of the Castle. Nothing should detract from the illusion he meant to create—the illusion of warm velvety blackness, tropical seas, a carpet of moonlight, meditations reaching out toward infinite knowledge and informed by whisperings of the voice of God. They might think him silly, but silly or not he would exercise his kingly prerogative.

"Will some one please turn out the lights," he requested.

Mr. Simpkins raised his eyebrows; Miss Green fidgeted; the audience gaped. There was some fussing in the small room behind the platform, the curate cleared his throat and made faces, but Paul held his ground, and finally the lights went out with a resentful snap. A street lamp shed a bluish glow through the windows, but the platform was in obscurity. To dispel the awkwardness Paul played preparatory chords and arpeggios, and waited. Then with all the will power at his command, he submerged himself in the mood of the sonata.

With the opening bars a solemn elation possessed him, and his surroundings fell away. It was as though some divine soothsayer were using him to convey to mortals a beneficent augury. Often enough he had played this first movement literally. To-night he was contributing to its literal truth a fervid "Verily I say unto you." For to-night he felt the music not only as sound but as the epitome of wisdom.

In his was the image of himself, lulled by the sea, his soul borne like a melody over rhythmical waves. The theme of the movement was as noble as a ship; it was carried forward on waves of sound as unbroken as the waves of the ocean, with a momentum as irresistible as theirs, instinct with a like gentleness and sadness.

On and on—towards what? From the utter stillness Paul knew that his audience were asking the question.

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 Towards what? First of all towards dawn, and as he broke into the tenderly playful and speculative mood of the second movement he was imbued with a sense of omnipotence. For, by abandoning his soul to the task, he had been able to make a hundred men forget the world of beer and ribaldry and show them, perhaps for the first time in their lives, their kinship with the sublime "wisdom and spirit of the universe." Otto was going home to learn the technique of slaughter, whilst he, Paul Minas, alias Laval the cabin-boy, could bewitch men into becoming as little children.

The onrush of the third movement transformed the tranquil scene in his to one of elemental clamour and menace. As on the distant night of the hurricane, so now he caught himself "rooting" for the elements, inciting them to violence, that he might demonstrate the triumph of human resistance—his resistance, for throughout this final movement he became identified with the melody. This was the very theme of his life, and he made it exultantly sing, all the while assaulting it with the full fury of the world's opposition. He would not deceive himself by minimizing the strength of his assailants. Hostile voices should scream, roar, rumble, plead, wail and sigh as they had done on the memorable afternoon when Aunt Verona had broken silence. Her inspired domination of the piano was his precedent for to-night's performance. Above the inimical chorus he sounded forth the dauntless theme—his theme. At all costs he must keep it pure, soaring, triumphant. His fear of making slips with work-coarsened fingers vanished like a mist in the sun. The music was playing itself. So should his very life.

If Aunt Verona could only hear—oh, to be able to explain to Aunt Verona that he was vindicating their "method," that he was proving to hundreds of men, to the whole crude and hapless world, that truth and love

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 were indestructible, that hate and violence, for all their sardonic power, were futile! Aunt Verona had known. In the village, fools had whispered that she was mad, and she had disdained to explain. But to him she had explained—not in words, but in terms as subtle as those in which he was now exhorting a chance congregation. Aunt Verona had known; she had lived long enough to give him a hint; and now he was beginning to know. And he would go on learning, and some day the winds of knowledge would sweep him to the very shores of heaven. Meanwhile he was on the right course; he was catching glimpses of his soul, illuminating glimpses.

A long pause for the two deep octaves. Then a short recapitulation of the theme and a swift, exultant flourish, by way of proclaiming his final vindication.

His arms dropped, his nerves and muscles relaxed, and a great weariness came over him. He knew he had succeeded, but he no longer cared. He even forgot what he had been doing, and was surprised when the lights went up. He was mechanically bowing before a blur of heads. Thick-skinned hands and tough sea-lungs were acclaiming him. If he had begun by chastening his audience into a breathless entity, he had ended by inciting it to riotous approbation. Infinitely more decorous applause in the town hall of Hale's Turning had intoxicated him, but this noisy demonstration merely assailed his ears. What was hand-applause after that long pregnant silence! Even the pride in Otto's face moved him only to a momentary glow of pleasure. With a pang he realized that he had outgrown Otto and the Clytemnestra, as he had outgrown Hale's Turning.

For the sake of peace he played additional solos, then the concert was at an end, and he knew that Miss Green was waiting to invite him to have coffee and cake in the small inner room. At any other time he would have accepted gladly, but now he was too deeply buried in

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 himself to be reached by promiscuous amenities. Something had been conceived in his soul, and he wished the process of gestation to go on unhindered. For all that he had spent himself without stint, he felt there was no one among his hearers who could have understood what it meant to him.

He found his way out unnoticed, and walked slowly towards the town by a roundabout route. The air was warm, soft and strong. The sky was alive with stars. Dusty gardens gave forth faint aromatic odours. Far off, the ocean sighed and licked the beach. Once a group of tipsy loiterers bawled impotently into the welkin. As he was making his way to the high street, the bells of the town hall, a few squares farther on, broke into their chime: fuller and deeper for the darkness and hush of night. His emotions raced to his throat and eyes fighting for an outlet, then surged back, leaving him in a warm flood. With the bells one wasn't alone; with the memory of their deep tones one could never be alone. La-fa-so-do—sixteen notes, slow, even, majestic. A magic formula. And each note went singing forth in a circle of sound which infinitely widened, like the circles in a pool. The circles would follow him to the very ends of the earth, always. God was subtle.

To-night their message was less grim, more comforting. "Courage, mon petit!" Aunt Verona's words! "Have faith in yourself, and nothing on earth can prevail against you." Beethoven had known it. The fifth bell tolled the hour of eleven.

He wandered on till he came to a bridge over the railway tracks. The sound of echoing footsteps drew him from his abstraction and he walked more quickly. He had by no means outgrown his distrust for shadows, and was consumed with a desire to turn and see who was following. To do so would be a sure proof of timidity, yet in the end he couldn't resist.

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 He recognized the advancing figure as that of an officer who had been present at the concert. He was reassured, but surprised. Why should the officer have left his companions. Besides, there was a much shorter route to the end of the quay where the big liners moored.

As the stranger was overtaking him, Paul turned again and met a propitiatory smile. "Excuse me," began the with a German accent, "I tried to catch you and thank you for your playing."

Paul smiled diffidently. "Danke sehr."

The stranger puffed out his cheeks, opened wide his little eyes, and raised his arms in kindly protest against the boy's modesty. "Aber, es war schön, wunderbar—fabelhaft!"

Paul was flattered in spite of himself. "I felt like playing," he deprecated. "That makes all the difference. I couldn't do it again, as well!"

The big officer, chuckling, linked his arm in Paul's and fell into step with him. The gesture was instinctive and Paul didn't in the least resent it, though usually he shrank from the contact of any but his most privileged friends. One afternoon in the paint locker Shorty had touched him and looked at him in a strange manner, and Paul had wriggled quickly away. In a flash his knowledge of the world had taken a long leap forward and endowed him with self-protective caution.

Along deserted ways they walked, speaking alternately English and German. The officer was curious, and asked paternal questions. He was thirty-five or forty years old, stout, blond, sunburnt to the colour of a saddle.

Fact by fact Paul related his history. Never had he been called on to give a chronological account of himself, and the necessity of reducing his past to a well-proportioned narrative pleasantly exercised his ingenuity, and also helped him towards an understanding of himself. Moreover, the stranger not only understood the motives

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 which had prompted his rebellious acts, but seemed to accept them as inevitable and normal. Paul felt all the freer to talk, inasmuch as his companion, in a few hours, would be on the high seas, bound for Germany, in the ship that was to carry Otto home. He took the occasion to put in a word for Otto, asked his new friend to be kind to his old one.

When they reached the Clytemnestra's berth, it was Paul who suggested that they should sit on a stack of lumber and prolong the interview. He talked of Aunt Verona, of the Bechstein piano, of the Sundays in Hale's Turning. He talked of his escape from school and his sea experiences, of his impressions of the new country, of its mysterious smells and sounds and sights, of his longing to smell all the exotic odours in the world, hear and see all the marvels, and know everything! He told of his conversations with the captain, of the letter from Dr. Wilcove, of his mood at the concert, his sudden feeling that the lights must be turned out, his yearning to convey some fine message to the assembly, his spiritual exaltation whilst playing, and his plunge into a bitter void when he had risen from the piano.

He had seen his mates straggling back to the ship. The cabin and forecastle lights had long been extinguished, and only the figure of the night watchman was moving. Faintly, from the direction of the town, came the ghostly sound of the chimes and the stroke of two. He couldn't tell his companion about the bells—their message was incommunicable. He shivered. He had got to the very end.

"And when do you go back to Canada?"

The question gave Paul a shock. It was so specific. His world stood still, as it had done one night on Mrs. Kestrell's back stairs. Again there came a blinding flash to point out his course. And in the blackness which ensued, as the world again became grey and cold and palpa-

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 ble, his gaze resting on the sharp crease of his long trousers, he announced in deliberate, almost scared tones:

"I'm not going back, ever."

Without warning, a few days later, Captain Caxton presented Paul with a steamship ticket, a book of traveller's cheques, and a certificate of honourable discharge made out in his real name. Taken aback by the completeness of these arrangements, Paul feigned acquiescence, but before embarking on the coastal steamer he had the foresight to bribe one of his casual acquaintances—an employé in a bookshop—to send a forged telegram timed to reach him on his arrival in Sydney. With this telegram he would counter any officiousness on the part of well-meaning gentlemen who had been invited to see him safely on his homeward way.

He had not the faintest intention of continuing on the prescribed route to Vancouver and thence overland to Halifax, but of his intentions, which were vague, he said nothing to the captain, who came to see him off. Paul, while grateful to the captain for his goodwill, was hurt at not having been consulted. That, he felt, absolved him of all obligation to confide his plans. The old man had put money—Paul's own, as it now appeared—into his hands and shipped him off, had done his duty, according to his lights—for which he would find his reward in heaven! Henceforth Paul was answerable only to himself, and as he stood on the towering promenade deck of the Kalgoorlie looking over the roofs of warehouses and down at the figures on the quay—the "sisters and cousins and aunts" of his fellow-passengers—the boy smiled with a timorous exultation at the enormity of his plot. The great adventure was beginning with a vengeance.

The steamer drew slowly away from the dock and for a few moments rested in mid-stream. As the last hawser

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 was heaved aboard, the steam-winches ceased clanking and a silence ensued, broken only by farewell "coo-ees." Then, faint but clear, over the patchwork of hot tiles, came the sound of bells. Paul's eyes sought out the tower of the town hall and a mist blurred his vision. The chimes—the magic formula. It was a final message in a code unknown to the old man and all the others, a message for him alone, a message of warning and comfort. "Have faith in yourself." Aunt Verona's words: "Du courage, mon petit—ça ira!" Yes, but it was going to be a lonely progress—bitterlich! For all their wisdom and fortitude, the bells were sad.

Poor red, sandy hot, bare little town! Up the river, beyond the bridge, he could descry the dingy "upstairs house" in which Miss Green lived. It was all but obscured by the branches of a fig tree. On the hill behind the town, near a clump of jarrahs, he made out the spot where he had stood on his first evening ashore—godlike on a sacred mount. He conjured up the smell of eucalyptus, and the shrill strains of "Cock o' the North."

The prosperous steamship was gliding towards the breakwater that extended beyond the mouth of the river. Somewhere a signal was clanging. Paul pictured the brass indicators. "And I polished up the handles so faithfully!" That unforgettable night at the theatre! Some day, somewhere, he would go to vast theatres, hear famous orchestras and operas: Faust, Carmen, Parsifal!

Beyond the steamers, far away at the end of the quay, were the tall masts and disordered yards of the Clytemnestra. Lightened of her burden, she stood high, her sides garishly daubed with vermilion. No more séances in the old sail locker, with its smell of manilla. No more smuggled tins of cherries and peaches; no more chocolate-coated biscuits; no more yarns in the galley and carpenter-shop. They had all seemed sorry when he said good-bye, and sheepishly affectionate. Strange how one could grow

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 to love a ship quite as though it were a person, yet also a home. Good old Clytemnestra! This great steamship was tearing him away from something he cherished more than he had known. He thought of a sentence he had read in a wise French book: "Life is a series of partial deaths." But, as he mourned the death of the precocious cabin-boy, he reflected that life was, by the same token, a series of creations. "Laval est mort," he philosophized. "Vive Minas!" The mantle of the cabin-boy, complete with honourable discharge, had descended upon Master Paul Minas, first-class passenger. Gentleman Jim, to be sure. Shorty's taunts were only the vesture of envy. Poor Shorty didn't suspect the self-belittling effect of envy, and would go on taunting people till he had shrunk into nothing. Above all else, Paul wished to avoid such a fate. Mark Laval had taught him a lifelong lesson by showing up his narrow-mindedness. He had a morbid fear of setting out on any path that seemed easy. He even distrusted the magical book of cheques which he was carrying under his belt. By merely signing his name twenty times he could have as much money as Mr. Silva had paid for his little house in Hale's Turning, and that didn't seem right. He was sure Mr. Silva's personal worth had something to do with the fact that Mr. Silva had had to toil for his possessions.

Despite these moralistic reflections, Paul could not be indifferent to the luck that was making it possible for him to see cities bigger than Halifax: Adelaide, named after a queen; Melbourne, where Melba was born; Sydney, whose harbour, according to Miss Hornby, was one of the most beautiful in the world, and, according to Miss Green, full of sharks which gobbled up boys and girls who fell off ferry-boats.

And at Sydney? Well, anything rather than go aboard the liner waiting to take him to Vancouver. He would have to write a letter to Dr. Wilcove, exonerating the

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 old man. And he would tell Dr. Wilcove not to hold himself responsible for anything, if it was such a bother. After all, the trustees couldn't keep the moss from growing over the shipyard at Hale's Turning; besides, he didn't want it.

There was the island where the Orizaba had sunk. Deep under the green water were skeletons shut up in cabins and engine-rooms. An enormous propeller lay abandoned on the bronze rocks, and the sun beat scorchingly down.

A gong sounded and passengers precipitated themselves below deck. Paul was filled with curiosity as to the food. With an overwhelming shyness he made his way toward the dining-saloon. A steward in a white jacket would serve him!

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ship to ship, from ocean to ocean, from land to land, waiting for ballast, tides, charters, and crews, wandering through jungles, loafing in bars, rubbing shoulders with beach-combers, drinking tea with muslin-frocked ladies, inspecting temples and volcanoes, museums and graveyards, ambling through bazaars, riding donkeys and elephants, tossing pennies to naked beggar-boys from fragile jinrickshas, patronizingly interested in the monuments of bygone dynasties, abnormally condescending to lemon-squashes and mangoes, exploring, sampling, summing up—the cheek of it all!

For five years Paul had watched the world expand. New civilizations revealed themselves; swarms of aliens paraded for him, while he stored his mind with impressions. Then, days or weeks later, as his ship headed for the sea, the civilization last under inspection would dwindle into a grey shore-line, and only his own mind be left to bear witness that it even existed. The more he saw of the globe, the more he felt its unreality and his own incontrovertible existence in time and space. The one stable phenomenon in the universe was his ego, and that had merely the stability of a moon-drawn, wind-agitated ocean.

In the long periods of isolation he had read hundreds of books and spent hours in meditation. Year by year, he saw himself changing from a boy whom he intimately Rh

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 knew into a stalwart man whom he was at a loss to understand. When the daily routine was accomplished, when he sat apart or walked in unexplored directions, he was conscious of crossing a threshold that no one but himself ever crossed, and entering into the chambers of his own identity. Having done this he would sigh, but not merely in relief at having eluded the world; the sigh breathed a hint of despair, for, as the shelves of his mind grew heavy with impressions he was aghast at the chaos.

Each book, each acquaintance, each glimpse of the world added its quota to the store-house; hence each introspective interval had to be devoted to the task of overhauling and re-sorting. He could find no comprehensive system in accordance with which to group his opinions, tastes, and bundles of information, for, no matter how carefully he tucked and patted and squeezed, there were stray ends and overlappings and bulges; the interior was colourful beyond description, but far from. It was a library without a catalogue.

Blindly he attributed the confusion to lack of schooling, and in weak moments rued lost opportunities. Then, in some casual encounter ashore, he would find himself able to correct school or even university-taught men who had little but skeletonic theories with which to match his full-blooded facts. In the hope of reducing the facts to tabulation he would plunge again into text-books. These had their uses, but gave him no clue to the mental and emotional transformation going on within him.

Unhappily there was no one of his own age with whom he could talk upon any but the most elementary topics. When books failed, he could only resort to physical diversions, and at sea these were limited in kind. There had been a few friends, notably an apprentice from an English barque whom he had met in Hong Kong, and a young officer on a French steamer he had joined at Saigon. Their companionship had been precious; but he

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 seemed fated to outgrow his friends, and in retrospect saw that what he had taken for common ground was in reality no more than his friends' willingness to humour his excesses of imagination and idealism. In a sense this enhanced their worth, but it also added a drop of sadness to his cup, for he longed, at this period, to be interpreted rather than tolerated.

He was under no delusion that his mind was too great a thing to be understood; simply, it was too multifarious, too specialized. Most men presented a traceable pattern whereas he saw himself as a patchwork that defied analysis. Yet he felt there must be some principle of homogeneity running through it, some stevedoring technique at work in the loading of his inner chambers. In books he was continually reading of youths who found it difficult to weather the period of "storm and stress" but who came through all right. He supposed, he earnestly hoped, he was in their case.

In Sydney Paul had shipped on a Blue Funnel boat bound for Chinese and Japanese ports. At Nagasaki he had been left in the hospital with an attack of fever. During convalescence a pretty Englishwoman, the wife of an exporter, had brought him books and fruit, and, when he was well, invited him to her house, where he spent blissful days playing on a grand piano. Then the lady's husband rather determinedly found him a berth on a trans-Pacific passenger ship. Tickled at having aroused the jealousy of a middle-aged man, Paul eluded his benefactor and shipped on a dirty tramp trading with the Malay States, whence he wrote a most sentimental twenty-page letter to the pretty Englishwoman.

Thereafter he wandered from ship to ship, loathing his squalid surroundings, waging campaigns against animalculæ—what quantities of Keating's powder!—and ward-

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 ing off the coarse encroachments of his mates, thirsting for new experiences, ever erecting new air castles upon the ruins of the old. Ordinary seaman, able seaman, steward, bugle boy, quartermaster, assistant purser, boatswain: he had acted in these and other capacities, and at the end of each voyage converted his pay-day into English gold and added his savings to the fund with which he had set out from Fremantle. The secreting and safeguarding of this hoard had been a precarious business. More than once he had done battle for it. But association with ruffians had taught him arts of self-protection.

For three or four years he roved the Southern Seas in steamers of varying nationality, touching at ports in Africa, India, South America. In none of his ships did he find the freedom, comfort and kindliness that had prevailed on the Clytemnestra. None of his shipmates spoiled him as Captain Caxton and Otto and the Danish carpenter had done. Kicks replaced friendly pats, jibes were more common than endearments. The clean smell of tar and white sheen of canvas were exchanged for oily cotton-waste and showers of soot from smutty funnels. Everything was ugly, cramped and prosaic. Aboard the Clytemnestra one had made the world to suit oneself; wars might rage throughout Europe and Asia and nobody be the wiser. On wireless ships distracting rumours came to the ears. In retrospection his first voyage seemed like a story he might have read in Chums.

Often, when carrying out the orders of some weedy fourth officer, Paul had mutinous fits that got him into trouble. After conflicts of this kind he would stare into—the sea and curse the folly that had taken him from home. He pictured radiant careers he had forfeited, then reminded himself that nothing rooted in Hale's Turning could ever be radiant. True, in Hale's Turning, for all its provincialism, he might have had the solace of music; and the deprivation of music had done more than any-

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 thing to feed his discontent. Month by month he kept promising himself a vacation which he would devote with all his heart and soul to reparation. In spare moments he exercised his hands—hands grown out of recognition—and whenever he went ashore he sought out the local "Bethel" in order to test his fingers and memory on the piano. But the piano was usually beyond hope, likewise his performance.

The moods of depression never endured, and he ended by resolving to see the whole squalid job through, complete his collection of discharge certificates, and then, when the right day came, go up for his Master's papers. With this objective in view he was planning to join a British tramp in Melbourne when a French skipper offered him a post as second mate on a four-masted barque bound for California. The lure of sails and the fun of talking French decided him, and he signed the articles of the Général Fronchard at the office of the French consul.

On this ship there was red wine to drink, and a good cook. The galley smelt of olive oil, and Paul idly wondered whether national characteristics had anything to do with diet. The crew were lazy, but competent and jolly. There were cats and dogs to make friends with, and the homeliness he had missed on steam-driven ships. The captain was an indifferent navigator and trusted his subordinates to keep the vessel afloat whilst he played the gramophone and waltzed with a lady he called his wife. Occasionally the lady danced with Paul, and one hot night, somewhere in the latitude of New Caledonia, she stole out on deck during the second watch. "On étouffe là-bas," she said, then, glancing over her shoulder in the direction of the quarters set apart for the captain, added, "Il est saoul ce soir."

She talked of the Southern Cross and admired Paul's knowledge of astronomy. How, par exemple, could he tell the difference between Venus and Jupiter? It wasn't

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 as if there were some sign to indicate their sex. Now, if God had made one green and the other red, like starboard and port! She lurched slightly and Paul took her arm. She spoke of his strength, of his voice. He was, she affirmed, with a little emphasizing gesture of her head, "extraordinarily old for his age." Why didn't he let his moustache grow? It would be so mignonne. She liked to see him smile. She was going to give him a nickname: "le sourire."

A few minutes later she was in Paul's arms, where she had fully planned to be. In the darkness he was laughing cynically to himself, for she had imagined she was the first!

There followed indolent days during which Paul recaptured some of the romance that had tinged the long-outgrown moods of the Clytemnestra. Apart from books, there were few mental events to break the pleasant monotony. Madame's books were thin, and rather warm, fare; tales by Gyp, Pierre Weber, Willy and Colette. She came from Port Saïd, and the fact that she adored that pestilential haunt was sufficient commentary on her calibre.

Paul sat placidly among the objects in his mental stores, indifferent for once to the lack of order. It sufficed that a glint of colour here or a sinuous outline there beguiled his attention, while the external world slumbered on. Again the sails collapsed heavily against steel rigging, then swelled towards the blue like a small boy puffing out his cheeks. The sheets snapped taut or slackened with the clink of iron blocks, and Paul gave idle instructions in a newly perfected jargon to Italianate French sailors who made witty, if indecorous, conversation over their half-spliced manilla and their tubs of caustic soda.

Then after weeks of doldrums there rose up out of a lapis lazuli sea a quaint little island five or six hundred

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 miles from the nearest Fiji group—a coral affair that reminded the young second of a hat, with palm trees for feathers; an exotic dot on the ocean. Over it hovered birds, and he heard Madame from the break of the poop, shrilly wondering how they had ever got there. She passed down a telescope to him. Under stilted, coco-nut-thatched dwellings lounged a dozen natives. They tried to launch a boat, but the breeze was fresh and the surf too heavy—surf which burst and sent licking pools of translucent emerald over a mile of deep pink seaweed.

To test the chronometers, the captain sailed as close as he dared, and, without warning, Paul yearned, as he had never yearned in his life, to be set ashore, that he might for ever remain on this spot of land "in which it seemèd always afternoon."

Most weary of all seemed the effort to live, the effort to project oneself into a troublesome future, the effort to go on exploring, the effort of knowing, of making decisions, of growing up. Once again his world stood still, and for an eternity he gazed on this little gem of creation. There one might retire, as into some cosy tomb, and the remainder of one's allotted span would be a siesta.

But the captain ordered him to swerve off towards a thousand miles of blankness, and as the wheel spun to the command of "La barre dessous, toute!" he dutifully wore ship, in the grip of a fearful nostalgia. To an old he confided his mood, only to be argued down by rampant tales of the "Barbary Coast" in San Francisco—tales which filled him with laughing disgust and threw him back more passionately than ever on his hopeless longings.

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 He confided in Madame, who was lolling in a deckchair. On her lap was a guide-book, in which she had been gleaning facts about the island. Indulgently she listened, smiled archly when Paul—with belated, cynical gallantry—included her in his scheme of exile, then informed him that his island was infested with snakes.

In despair at the incomprehension of everybody, nerveless and dispirited, he went below. That poor little island, so low that an hour's smart sailing had sunk its highest tree-top below the horizon! And the sandpiper that had been blown off-shore to die of fright on a foreign, heaving deck!

That night he came to a decision. The life of the sea was not to be his life. His destiny lay ashore—on some quiet acre remote from the teeming life of the universe. The diminutive island had marked the beginning of a new variation of the endless theme.

After unloading at the mouth of the Sacramento River, Paul's ship was towed into San Francisco bay and thence up the coast to the port of Eureka, where she was to take on a cargo of redwood. Paul had decided to return in her to Toulon, whence he would make his way into Germany and recast his life in a more fitting mould. The prospect of this adventure reawakened a dozen enthusiasms, and stilled the unrest that had been growing for two or three years. His imagination leaped ahead and pictured him at some vast organ. Music might bring into his life the missing elements of direction and meaning.

His picture was clouded by an uneasy wonder: had the interval of silence and growth rendered him incapable of resuming musical studies where he had left off? It seemed half a lifetime since he had played Beethoven in

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 the bare hall at Fremantle, and a century since he had played voluntaries in the Baptist church at Hale's Turning. Was it possible that he, weather-beaten young giant, could ever have been that rather girlish lad who had reached so cock-surely down to built-up-pedals, overweeningly satisfied with being able to play "Praise God" by heart? He laughed, with a trace of embarrassment and of wistfulness, at the thought, and sang out an order concerning a refractory filin. Just as he had once been an organist up to the hilt, he was now up to the hilt at being a sailor—a sailor, so to speak, in French.

In the thoroughness of his adaptation he had even seemed to take on the appearance, as well as the character, of his present rôle; for with his brown throat and arms he might have passed for a Marseillais. His accent, owing to daily contact with the Southerners, was reminiscent of the Midi. Only the fineness of his skin under its tan, the precious contours of cheek and lips, the elegance of waist and hip, and a literary turn of phrase, set him apart.

And having exhausted the possibilities of his present rôle, he characteristically projected himself into the next: the rôle of musical disciple—ces soirées de Munich et de Vienne. He rehearsed it in warm June afternoons as he kept his men employed on deck, whilst the enormous saws of the mill screamed and purred their way through twenty-foot logs. In the evening twilight he wandered alone through the woods skirting the village of Samoa, picking berries in the bushes, or mowing off the heads of yellow poppies with a switch. Often he crossed the low strip which separated the bay from the sea, and seated on a dune amid tufts of reed, let his thoughts roam down the track of the moon, as they had done a thousand times in a thousand corners of the world.

Eureka, the up-to-date little city across the harbour, had no attraction for him. He had explored its park,

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 spent an hour in its library, bought some necessities in its shops, walked in First, Second and Third Streets, likewise in A, B and C, and in its leading theatre witnessed an appalling melodrama called The Algerian Princess. His mates had found their way by instinct to a street whose houses flaunted red lights at their portals.

On the Fourteenth of July, the captain declared a fête in honour of the taking of the Bastille. Paul obtained extra leave and boarded a jaunty little train which ran through forests of gigantic redwoods carpeted with fern, past gorges and gulches, to the village of Trinidad, perched on a precipice and serving as a centre of the logging industry. There he hired a buggy and drove along a superb coast, in the direction of Crescent City, over a narrow road which in places was merely a ledge on the cliffs. Above him stretched walls of rock; below, steep grassy slopes, riotous with bushes of mountain laurel, while far beneath lay the green sea, streaked blue in a manner that recalled the "blueing" he had once employed to "whiten" his duck jackets.

In the early afternoon he arrived at a cove about which clustered a few farms. Roses and geraniums spilt over unpainted fences. Before the prettiest cottage he stopped and called out to a girl who was feeding chickens. She shaded her eyes with one hand, held up her apron with the other, and advanced wonderingly. She was uncouth but comely, with silky yellow hair, strong teeth and sculpturesque limbs. Her figure was revealed by a tight blue cotton blouse; and stout, iron-toed boots could not entirely disguise the neatness of her feet.

"Is there any place near here where I might get something to eat?" Paul inquired.

There was not. "At least no regular place—like," the girl amended.

"What would you be wanting?" she asked, at a loss

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 to understand the requirements, much less the motives, of outlandish venturers into these unfrequented regions.

Paul laughed. "Well, when you haven't had anything to eat for hours and hours, it doesn't much matter what, does it? I half hoped I'd find some sort of inn."

"Inn?" she echoed, as though she found the word "affected." Perhaps it struck her as biblical, Paul reflected, for she must have heard the famous sentence, "There was no room for them in the inn." He remembered now that the word was not current in North America; his own vocabulary comprised the currency of twenty countries.

In the end she invited him to take pot-luck with her. The men-folk were in the fields. "There ain't much," she concluded, "but you're right welcome."

Paul thanked her and got out of the carriage.

"Not much used to horses, are you?" she commented, as he looked doubtfully from the reins to the fence.

"No. My first impulse was to anchor the beast, but I suppose the thing to do is moor him with this bit of line."

Blushing and giggling, the girl came through the gate to take over the hitching operation, and Paul thoroughly enjoyed his sense of dependence.

"Come in," she commanded, in a tone which added, "Mere man that you are."

"If you want to wash, there's a pump round at the back, with a basin and soap."

On entering the kitchen a few minutes later he was greeted by the odour of frying meat. "Fee-fo-fi-fum!" he exclaimed.

"It's a bear steak," she informed him, "But you're not to tell anybody. Bear's out of season. Pa killed him for stealing our honey."

She ran into the garden and came back with a handful of roses, which she arranged, diffidently, in a heavy

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 white pitcher. Paul crossed the room to smell them, and she returned to the stove.

Something in the form and colour of the flowers, something in the smooth yellow sheen of her hair, had awakened an old memory. The fragrance of the flowers identified it. He was a boy again, poaching on the Ashmill grounds, with the image of a little fair-haired girl in his mind. The darkness of the night, the air of excitement, mystery, danger and love-sickness came back to him. What odd trifles one remembered!

"These are tea-roses, aren't they?" he asked.

"No! Marshal Neys. I grew 'em from a slip a lady gave me in Arcata."

"Oh, really!" Noting that the girl wished not to be thought provincial, he conceded that Arcata was a charming town.

She turned over the sizzling steak. "I take butter down there every week. I dessay you think Arcata's little," she said half defiantly. "I dessay you've seen a mort of big cities."

"A good few," he admitted. She gave him a glance which was meant to be disapproving—to cover all contingencies—then smiled in spite of herself, and brought the frying-pan across the room, transferring its contents to his plate.

"It's all there is—except berries and cream, and bread and butter and cheese and milk and honey."

"It's nectar and ambrosia," he protested. "Though perhaps you don't know what they are."

"We don't have much time for schooling out here," she retorted. She seated herself on a window sill, folded her arms, and turned her eyes from his face, to the golden-green fields.

The food, the shady room, the glimpse of sun-bathed flowers out of doors, the distant hum of bees, the girl's fresh colouring and clean apron, the sound of her voice,

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 the shrewdness of her instinct and naïveté of her opinions, all conspired to charm Paul. He sat back in his chair and smoked, utterly free from care.

Through talking about school they reached the subject of music.

"Do you play?" asked Paul.

She nodded her head.

"Have you a piano?"

"Only an organ."

He rose. "Then come in the other room and play for me."

She required coaxing, but ended by sitting on a horsehair stool and pumping out a monotonous version of a waltz called "Myosotis." Every now and then she remembered to change the bass. Paul concentrated his attention on the line which undulated from the nape of her neck to her round elbow, then thanked her and asked permission to play.

She relinquished the stool, and in a few moments he had forgotten his surroundings, as he strayed from one composition to another, improvising where memory failed, adjusting his performance to the crying limitations of the instrument.

The smell of roses came in through an open window. In a corner of a mirror on which daisies had been painted and half washed off he could see a glint of golden hair. Before he realized it, he was in the midst of a Bach prelude—in church, playing with an exalted faith in the music, and Phœbe Meddar was his audience. Wistfully he recalled his old conception of music as a universal language that should enlighten and unify the world. What a disparate thing the world had become since those naïve days! Yet there was a unity; his present mood and setting were strangely reminiscent of others. Out of a long submerged set of associations came the memory of afternoons when he had posed as a grown-up virtuoso

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 performing for the edification of Mademoiselle Meddar. He was now grown-up, but the virtuosity, alas, was missing, and for audience he had a farm-girl who fidgeted with impatience—all of which was about as near the mark as anything one could hope to realize.

When finally, with a deep sigh, he turned from the organ, it was to see an astonished pair of men staring at him through the window. The setting sun gave a halo to their silhouettes, which were set off by a gay garden hedged with sun-flowers. Far in the background was a luminous sea. The stupid rusticity of the men projected against the unparalleled splendour of nature made Paul burst out laughing. The girl, from the doorway, echoed his laugh, believing it to be merely his reaction to the wonderment manifested in the faces of her father and brother—a reaction she could share. She explained as they entered the house, and the elder man, somewhat distrustfully, pronounced a hospitable formula, whilst the brother gaped.

Paul spoke of returning, but was told that he could not reach Trinidad until a late hour, and it was more than foolhardy to drive over the ledges at night. In the end he accepted their offer to put him up, and went to superintend the stabling of his horse.

After supper he invited the girl to accompany him on a walk toward the cove, where a lagoon was separated from the sea by a narrow strip of sand formerly used by stage-coaches, but abandoned since a storm, many years since, when the surf had pounded away the road and engulfed a party of gold prospectors.

They sat on a high knoll whilst shadows crept along the coast and a faint breeze ushered in the night. Paul, strangely tranquil, yet with senses alert, was living in the past. In all his wandering he had come across nothing quite so familiarly homely as this little Pacific coast farm. It was exotic, yet it brought back long

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 forgotten scenes in Nova Scotia. Another decision was taken: he must one day revisit Hale's Turning.

The girl seemed to be fascinated by his abstracted air, all the while resenting it. She repeatedly tried to draw his attention towards herself, and it repeatedly strayed. Mechanically, yet with a definitely tender instinct, he had placed his arm about her waist. She had at once pushed it away, but seemed complacently to expect his insistence, and when his arm was at last installed, a similar game of protest and acquiescence was gone through apropos of his kisses. In the end they returned silently, hand in hand, arms swinging. Just before reaching the gate, the girl stopped, peered up at him and waited. He took her in his arms, whilst she pretended to struggle. She broke away, ran a few steps, then stood facing him, her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling. In a flash she was back again, hugging him and kissing his neck—then like a frightened, mischievous child she fled up the garden path.

Paul was suddenly aflame. He found it impossible to make conversation with the old man, and soon all three retired. In his room Paul listened to the others. The old man slept downstairs, the boy in the attic, and the girl occupied a room on the same floor as himself. Long after the men had settled for the night he could hear discreet sounds. His door was ajar, and he stood, holding his breath, whilst a fury of erotic desires possessed him. So far no woman who had thrown herself into his arms had escaped unscathed, but so far only women who were not immaculate had overtly challenged him. He had only to take a few steps, tap on her door, turn the handle—she would not cry out, for she was subtle, for all her uncouthness—and the rest he would know how to manage—but!

He closed the door swiftly and went to sit on the edge of his bed. He hated to be faced by a choice between

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 strong desire and a sense of fair play. But above all things he hated vacillation. The girl was his for the taking—why hesitate? The risk for her? There were ways of obviating that.

He put the odious consideration out of his mind and began to undress.

But in a moment he found himself at the door again, listening. Flinging the last scruple to the winds, he left the room, tiptoed along the passage, listened at her door, then gently opened it.

The moon had risen and its beams made a pool of light on the carpet. He saw walls decked with magazine-cover girls, and a heap of garments strewn on a chair. Her face, turned slightly away from him, looked plump, like a baby's, and one hand was thrown out. She was fast asleep, and the room smelt—rather too much like a bedroom.

Silently as he had come, he regained his room, and sat on the window-sill to laugh. As if by magic his ardour had vanished, leaving him comfortable, yet out of sorts. Gradually the spell of the night wrapped itself round him. For a long while he sat gazing towards the silvered sea, drinking in the fragrance of unseen flowers and dew-sprinkled earth, a fragrance that made him home-sick for a home that didn't exist. Early in the morning he would set out for the ship. To his shipmates he would say nothing of the adventure. How should any sailor understand his anomalous blend of depravity and squeamishness? To think that virtue could be suspended on such tenuous filaments!

A distant clock struck the hour, and an alien odour crept into his nostrils—the odour of eucalyptus. He scarcely noticed this phenomenon, and like a true sailor fell asleep as soon as his head was pillowed. In his dreams, however, he heard the old chimes which had gained such an uncanny hold on him. Their message

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 this time, put into words, might have been, "So you see, you're not as chaotic as you thought. You have a method, and it's no less wise for being instinctive. Fastidiousness is next to morality—it often serves you better."

Before putting to sea Paul laid in a supply of books. For some time past his reading had been haphazard, if voluminous, At Eureka he provided himself with the pick of what the leading bookshop had to offer, and at the last moment had the salesman include a little green paper-bound play by a certain G. B. Shaw, whose name he had often seen quoted, as though this writer were a "character" in the world of letters.

Not until he was nearing Toulon, after a fatiguing, storm-ridden voyage did he dip into Man and Superman. Then occurred a mental event of the first importance—an event more memorable than the mutinous day when he had longed to be set ashore on his coral island. After the first few répliques he felt the stirring of a mighty revival of heterodoxies. Issues he had in his first youthful rebelliousness dismissed wholesale trooped back retail for a rehearing. A sun of intellectual emancipation made a rift in the adolescent haze obscuring his vision.

He recalled his boyish struggle to keep his soul intact from the designs of the officiously pious, the fury and exasperation with which he had talked down zealots who had decoyed him to "Bethel" meetings in remote seaports, Since those days he had been a constant foe towards all forms of blind orthodoxy, but it had been difficult to find words for his iconoclasm. Well, here they were! Paul drank them in; felt them settling into him, stiffening his resolutions, giving him that rare gratification: the discovery, after the event, that there exist sound, assertable reasons for acts committed on

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 impulse. Shaw cut capers for him, and Paul laughed with the hysterical abandon of a child who has had to be violently diverted out of a long fit of moping. Shaw gleefully rattled the skeletons Paul had refused to reverence but had not known how to dispose of. Shaw cried his healthy, heathenish cause from the rooftops; championed him, and put him forward as a champion. And at the end seemed to say, "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" And Paul cordially agreed, in blissful forgetfulness of his own mortality.

"Your friends," said Don Juan to the Devil, "are the dullest dogs I know. They are not beautiful: they are only shaved and starched . . . not generous, only propitiatory; not disciplined, only cowed; and not truthful at all—liars every one of them, to the very backbone of their souls!"

At one stroke the adolescent cobwebs were swept away. In the store-house of his mind Paul had been trying to range parcels that had been delivered there labelled "virtue," "vice"—or whatever—but containing suspiciously incompatible lumps. Off with the wrappers! That was Shaw's way. And the process of classification went on apace, almost automatically.

From the dry deck to which Shaw had caught him up, Paul surveyed with an ineffable sense of safety a seaful of floundering limbs and debris where he had been desperately keeping his own ego afloat. At a bookshop in Marseilles he found little green copies of other plays, and put them into his handbag to read in the train which was to bear him towards Germany.

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as he had become with the process of disillusionment, Paul was not quite prepared for the stony reality of Munich, for the icy rain that soaked his hat and filled the gutters with despairing tears, nor for the blundering tram-way guard who forgot to set him down at Ohmstrasse and carried him to the outer rim of Schwabing. Neither was he prepared for the ironic Führ di' Gott with which an octogenarian Portier waved him into the world again after informing him that Frau Stiglmayr had been dead fifteen years—a certain Frau Stiglmayr whose name and address had somehow persisted in his head since childhood. Damp to the very soul he sought out a cheap hotel near the Hauptbahnhof, made his way to the Hoftheater to hear Fra Diavolo—of all operas the least meet and fitting—then tossed for hours in a narrow bed, under an absurd feather Decke, sleepless and disconsolate.

Romance, he had learned, was not a property of strange lands and situations, but a magical lens through which one viewed utterly unmagical objects—a spurious beautifier. Nevertheless it was disheartening to give the lie to certain beguiling fictions. However absurd it may have been for a small boy, on the strength of a doddering musician's inscription, to envisage Munich as enchanted ground, however absurd it may have been for him to Rh

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 count on culling from Frau Stiglmayr's lips secrets that had gone up in smoke through Aunt Verona's kitchen chimney, Paul passionately regretted the necessity of disabusing his mind of the small boy's gracious fallacies. If it were merely a question of setting the small boy to rights regarding specific facts, the matter would have been simple and painless. But the correction threatened the very structure of life, its melodic line, its rhythms, and the supporting harmonies. It implied that the boy, thanks to false romantic premises, had been directing his life towards untenable conclusions. Yet, despite his nineteen-year-old conviction that reality was one thing and romance an illegitimate other, he could not quite bring himself to admit that the boy had been wrong, that his engrossed pursuit of will-o'-the-wisps had been the misapplication of energy Reason now made it out to be. After all, Romance had made life appear to be worth exerting oneself for. But for the lens, would it not have seemed prosaic and uninviting? Perhaps not. Perhaps if one had envisaged life as prose instead of poetry, a truer sense of values would have been developed in accordance with which life would have held forth more substantial lures. As it was, he reflected with the morbidness of youth, lifelong addiction to romance had undermined his constitution; and his craving for chimères was none the less strong for his knowledge of their debilitating effect.

Among the frequenters of cafés and concert-halls he tried to pick out people who might, thirty years ago or more, have sat tense and eager at the feet of Aunt Verona. In carriages and motor-cars he scanned faces for some sign of the aristocracy that had petted her. But all he found was a collection of folk who resembled their kind the world over. To think of Aunt Verona in their midst—whether the weird, broken Aunt Verona or the admirable artiste of the old musician's inscription

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 —was a violation of all verisimilitude. Aunt Verona was merely the memory of a woman who had been seen through the magical lens by himself and a few choice spirits, while the cities which had been her glorious setting were memories even less tangible.

Munich, in short, and Vienna—to which he repaired—were dead, just as Aunt Verona was dead. Surrounded by students of divers nationalities, listening to subsidized performances, giving heed to masters who upheld the traditions of Brahms, Bruckner, and Mahler, he was as far from the fabulous soirées as he had been at the age of twelve—even farther, for he had lost the faith in their fabulousness which had inspired his boyhood. Another bitter drop in the cup was a guess that the poor old composer had been in the same leaky, romantic boat.

True, viewed as a mere example of reality, Vienna, like Munich, presented historical and artistic splendours. But these partook of the nature of shells. Again it was a question of his unbridled hopes. Music, he had persuaded himself, was a medium for the conveying of ineffable messages, a universal language designed to bring balm to the hearts of a humanity befuddled by words. Yet in Vienna, this most eclectic of shrines, where renowned masters and brilliant pupils foregathered, his notions were regarded as hallucinations, albeit of an amiable faddist whom it was easy enough to humour. The naïve wisdom of Mr. Silva counted for nothing among men who knew all there was to know on the subject of music. After Paul had aired his views the conversation fell back on an exchange of personalities. There was praise for so-and-so's manner of "rendering" a certain fugue; condemnation for so-and-so's "interpreting" of a certain étude; but no apparent comprehension of the spiritual influence exercised by Bach and Chopin. Certain factions maintained that the fingers

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 should be raised high and the keys struck; others heatedly advocated the production of all effects through the graduated weight of the arm. Even methods of pedalling were discussed with an earnestness that would have done credit to state legislators.

The students seemed to Paul a collection of precocious babies; their masters mere coaches whose picturesque senility was mistaken for a sort of godhead. Virtuosity was the game, music merely a ball for athletic virtuosi to kick. For five, six, seven hours a day one was expected to engage in digital acrobatics; each composition was examined, phrase by phrase, like a strange machine; its soul, vaguely indicated by such marks as espressivo, andante doloroso, was reduced to terms of metronomics and pedal pressures; the objective of the whole process being to come upon a platform and evoke thunderous commendation from auditors who would judge the performance not by its success or failure in conveying the composer's sooth—of which the great majority of them would be as egregiously ignorant as the performer—but by its approximation to or divergence from the performance of some current "genius," whose title had been bestowed in accordance with similar standards of judgment. True, among masters and pupils there was endless talk concerning interpretation, but the point, more often than not, was lost in a haystack of pedantic quibbling.

In the composition classes a like spirit prevailed. Students were not encouraged to express, in musical terms, some heartfelt conviction; they were required to compose a hymn on Monday, a minuet or a canon on Thursday, in conformity with grammar—a certain margin being allowed for breaches "in good usage," which was to say, solecisms made by robust rebels like Wagner and Berlioz. Between exercises of this sort the lecturer struck intervals on a concealed keyboard and

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 asked members of the class to name them, by ear. All which, while constituting a reality, of its kind most excellent, was not the pot of gold.

For weeks Paul went faithfully to classes and concerts at the Musikvereinsgebäude, in the hope that illumination would break through the fog of drudgery. Away from the studios, at a hired piano, his soul went on rare excursions, but these were in the nature of truancy. The rest was school all over again—school of the j' aij'ai [sic]-tu-as-il-a variety; and as he had once fled the droning chorus of verb-conjugators to vivify the verbs in books, so now he retired to make music that should tout simplement sound forth proclamations otherwise inexpressible. He was no longer the mutinous boy chafing at drill; he was the man realizing that his goal was not the goal of his neighbours. For him the prescribed exercises were a mockery. The faster his fingers flew, the more sardonic became the laughter of scales and arpeggios, the more maliciously they echoed the truth of his bitter discovery. Music had once been the channel for everything mystical in his nature. He could lose his soul in it and gloriously "find" it in the process. But in the long interval since he had "nearly been able to play the Liszt sonata" his soul had perforce sought other vehicles. It was too late to harness musical steeds for its journey. Musicians evinced an interest in his talent; he might, with application, become a virtuoso. Yet though he mastered every trick and played with a comprehension surpassing that of all his contemporaries, a deep importunate part of himself would still remain mute. Audiences might listen spellbound and applaud to the echo; yet at the end of his most exalted performance he would stand before them—as he had stood that night years ago in Fremantle—unhappy, almost ashamed, conscious that they had taken the shadow for the substance and mistaken the superficial message of a sonata

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 or a concerto for the message that lay far beneath it, writhing impotently and clamouring for expression.

All this came to him one hot summer's evening as he sat in the Volksgarten staring at the foam in his glass and hearing an orchestra wind its way through the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. The suave undulations lulled his mind, drove away all distracting thoughts, and left him a strange clairvoyance. With a numb heart he took stock of his latest disillusionment. Music, the last stronghold of his romanticism, must be abandoned. He must marshal his forces again and seek higher ground. His message, whatever it should prove to be, was not for the casual souls who imbibed music as their bodies imbibed beer. Whatever it was, it was serious—as serious as religion, and of the nature of religion. It might never be manifested to himself, much less to the world. In that case what a fatuous farce life would have been! Better never to have wondered and hoped and ventured. But dignified dumbness was preferable to cheap sound. Rather than turn himself into a public entertainer he would withdraw to some coral island—and live in seclusion.

Suddenly, and for the fourth or fifth time in his life, the world stood still. He had heard a rustling sound beside him and a familiar voice calling, "Paul, Paul!"

Only a fat man with a fat and foody family were near him. But for a moment he had been in the presence of Aunt Verona. The illusion of it was still with him as he rose and made his way between tables and miniature trees. He was thrilled, dazed, unnerved.

Once outside, he found himself in a bog of doubt. The city was a stony waste peopled by the living dead. Aunt Verona, thirty years before, had turned her back on it, and later, from the depths of her retreat, made

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 one more despairing attempt but ended by burning her record. "Futile" was the word she had used for it.

He walked on and on through the streets—afraid.

For two years Paul lived in Vienna, supplementing his savings by sums earned as accompanist for violinists and singers. His tardy discovery that music was an art rather than a philosophy was followed by the realization of his abysmal want of knowledge. Disappointed in the studios, he was arrested by the libraries. He was bewildered by the scope of human erudition and appalled by his own nescience.

Only when he reminded himself that, like differently prepared foodstuffs in a grocer's shop, all knowledge must be reducible to a comparatively small number of ingredients, did he have courage to take his education in hand. Then with feverish zeal he gave himself over to the task. Works on every subject, from sex to sunspots, in German, English and French—he tackled one by one. His most momentous finds were in the realm of speculative thought. Schopenhauer, Marx, Taussig, Bergson, and a dozen minor thinkers, he weighed in his balance. Each battered at the wall of truth from a different angle; each made breaches; none got through. Yet despite the accretions he was stuffing into his mental store-room, there was no longer a sense of chaos. A reliable principle of selection was quietly at work, ranging facts and opinions on shelves from which they could be readily reached down in case of discussion.

Of discussion there was plenty, for he inevitably came into contact with men who were artists and philosophers by virtue of their youth if not their talent. Their elders, weary of trying to know everything, had in most cases adopted some theory upon which, as upon string suspended in water, they could crystallize all the facts they

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