And then if Hugh spent such a day alone, his thoughts seemed to have the same enlightening and invigorating quality. He did not fumble among dreary details, but saw swiftly into the essence of things, so that he smiled as he sate. A book would, on such occasions, touch into life a whole train of pretty thoughts, as a spark leaps along a scattered line of gunpowder. A few remembered lines of poetry, a few notes played by unseen hands on a musical instrument, from a window that he passed in the street, would give a sense of completed happiness; so that one said, "Yes, it is like that!" The palings of gardens, the screen of shrubs through which the pleasaunce could be dimly discerned within, the high trees holding up their branches to the air, all half guarded, half revealed the same jocund secret. Here, by a hedgerow, in a lane, Hugh would discern the beady eye of a fat thrush which hopped in the tall grass, or plied some tiny business among the stems, lifting his head at intervals to look briskly round. "I see you!" said Hugh, as he used to say long ago to the birds in the Rectory garden, and the bird seemed almost to nod his head in reply. And then, too, the houses that he passed all breathed the same air of romance. There, perhaps, behind the wall or at the open window, sat or moved the one friend of whom he was ever in search; but on these days it mattered little that he had not found him; he could wait, he could be faithful, and Hugh could wait too, until the day when all things should be made new. If he walked on days like these through some college court, the thought of the happy, careless, cheerful lives, lived there in strength and brightness, by generation after generation of merry young men, filled Hugh's heart with content; he liked to think that all the world over, in busy offices, in grave parlours, in pleasant parsonages, there were serious, commonplace, well-occupied men, who perhaps, in a tiny flash of memory, sent back a wistful thought to the old walls and gables, the towns with their chiming bells, and remembered tenderly the days of their blithe youth, the old companions, the lively hours. The whole world seemed knit together by sweet and gentle ties: labour and strife mattered little; it was but a cloud upon the path, and would melt into the sunlit air at last.