"Let me go on now I have begun," said Searell. "I am leaving here, and my words will not live after me. I am a man who has tested life, who has been through every experience, and I have discovered that what morality calls bad is often good, and that which we call virtue sometimes springs from vice. The purest water runs upon mud, only you must not rake it up. In my youth I served as a soldier, and upon leaving the army I sought the Church, partly to find a rest, chiefly, perhaps, because my mind was mystical. But nothing was revealed, and nothing could be, for the mystic must be free; and the priest is a soul in prison, and the book of his captivity is always before him. Here he must join his hands; there he must lift his eyes to Heaven, prostrate himself, kiss the altar, until the time comes when he feels alone, cut off from the Creator of his dreams by these mechanics, horribly alone among images; and he seems to hear a voice asking sorrowfully, 'What is this rule you are following? Who told you to do this? Go out upon the hills and into the woods, for I am there.' But he cannot move, for the time has come to join his hands again, and the revelation passes unseen, because he has to keep his eyes shut. It is written so, and he must obey." "I cannot answer you," muttered Damon; and it was true, for these words took him outside the well-worn groove and dropped him useless. "If I found the man who could, I would follow him," came the answer, and the white-headed priest passed a hand across his eyes, as if trying to brush the fog away. "I have been longing to escape for years. The iron of the little mission-church has eaten into my soul. I ought to have resigned? Why so, when I performed all my duties? Without means I could not have faced the world, for the mystic is not a practical man, and these hands," he said, frowning, "they are hands to be despised, for they have done nothing. No, do not answer me, you cannot, you are bound. I am free. A year ago I was left money--" "A curse." "If you will, a curse to buy a pathway to my Heaven. There was a place I pined for, up on the heights of Dartmoor, a valley among mountains. I have bought it. They call it Pixyland." "Paganism," cried the peasant-priest hoarsely, and crossed himself.