But—tirala-tirala!—my little broken bar of music was a touchstone. At the sound of it, at the thought of it, the Present was spirited away; Saint-Graal and all our countryside were left a thousand miles behind; and the Future and the World opened their portals to me, and I wandered in them where I would. In a sort of trance, with wide eyes and bated breath, I wandered in them, through enraptured hours. Believe me, it was a Future, it was a World, of quite unstinted magnificence. My many-pinnacled Castle of Enchantment was built of gold and silver, ivory, alabaster, and mother-of-pearl; the fountains in its courts ran with perfumed waters; and its pleasaunce was an orchard of pomegranates—one had no need to spare one’s colours. I dare say, too, that it was rather vague, wrapped in a good deal of roseate haze, and of an architecture that could scarcely have been reduced to ground-plans and elevations; but what of that? And oh, the people, the people by whom the World and the Future were inhabited, the cavalcading knights, the beautiful princesses! And their virtues, and their graces, and their talents Î There were no ugly people, of course, no stupid people, no disagreeable people; everybody was young and handsome, gallant, generous, and splendidly dressed. And everybody was astonishingly nice to me, and it never seemed to occur to anybody that I wasn’t to have my own way in everything. And I had it. Love and wealth, glory, and all manner of romance—I had them for the wishing. The stars left their courses to fight for me. And the winds of heaven vied with each other to prosper my galleons. To be sure, it was nothing more nor other than the day-dream of every child. But it happened that that little accidental fragment of a phrase of music had a quite peculiar power to send me off dreaming it. I suppose it must be that we pass the Castle of Enchantment while we are asleep. For surely, at first, it is before us—we are moving towards it; we can see it shining in the distance; we shall reach it to-morrow, next week, next year. And then—and then, one morning, we wake up, and lo! it is behind us. We have passed it—we are sailing away from it—we can’t turn back. We have passed the Castle of Enchantment! And yet, it was only to reach it that we made our weary voyage, toiling through hardships and perils and discouragements, forcing our impatient hearts to wait; it was only the hope, the certain hope, of reaching it at last, that made our toiling and our waiting possible. And now—we have passed it. We are sailing away from it. We can’t turn back. We can only look back—with the bitterness that every heart knows. If we look forward, what is there to see, save grey waters, and then a darkness that we fear to enter?