There was, as I have said, a strong visionary tendency in Hugh, which had been to a certain extent restricted in the days of his professional life; but now that he was free, it began to recur with extraordinary frequency and force. It was when he was reading that this faculty visited him, as a rule, and more especially when he read, as he was accustomed to do, after he was awake in the morning, until the time came for him to rise. The mind, struggling to free itself from the dominion of sleep, had not yet put on the obedience of the day, but seemed to act with a whimsical independence of its own. His thoughts were then most apt to wear a melancholy tinge; a certain apprehensive shadow often lay upon him, a sense of being unequal to the claims of the day, a tendency to rehearse, without hopefulness or spring, the part he would have to play, to exaggerate difficulties and obstacles. Reading, as a rule, served to distract his thoughts; but it was hardly an intellectual so much as a meditative process; the thoughts and words of the writer, on such occasions, often seemed to him like beaters going through a covert, trampling the fern and rapping the tree trunks, starting from their lairs all kinds of hidden game. One morning he was lying thus, reading quietly, when there suddenly darted into his mind, for no particular reason, the thought of a summer day he had spent as a small boy at his public school. It had been a holiday; the day cloudless and bright, yet with a delicious coolness in the air; and the sunshine fell, he remembered, on the great trees of the place and the venerable buildings, gleaming through a golden haze, which made it seem as though he viewed everything, not through empty air, but through a tinted and tangible medium, as it were an aerial honey, which lent a liquid sweetness to all outlines and surfaces. He had wandered off with a friend, in that perfect afternoon, through the meadows, for a long vague ramble, ending up with a bathe in the river. The day was beautifully still, and he could almost smell the hot honied fragrance of the flowers, and hear the angry murmur of the busy flies, that sate basking on the leaves of the hedgerow. He seemed to himself to have been full of a vague and restless emotion, a sense of happiness that just missed its end, that would have been complete if there had not been something wanting, some satisfaction of an instinct that he could not put into words. His companion had been a boy of his own age, who, it had seemed to Hugh, was in the same wistful mood. But there had been no attempt to express in words any of these thoughts. They had walked for the most part in silence, interrupted by the vague, inconsequent, and rather gruff remarks, that are the symbols of equal friendship. They had rambled a long way beside the stream, with the thick water-plants growing deep at the edge. The river came brimming down, clear and cool, the tiny weeds swaying among the dark pools, the