With but two brief sojourns to England, for the consultation of certain authorities and of his publishers, the said near on thirty months were passed in wandering through Southern France, Central Italy, and, taking ship from Naples to Malaga, finally through Eastern and Northern Spain. Charles Verity was too practised a campaigner for his power of concentration to depend on the stability or familiarity of his surroundings. He could detach himself, go out into and be alone with his work, at will. But the last chapter, like the first, he elected to write in the study at The Hard. A pious offering of incense, this, to the pleasant memory of that excellent scholar and devoted amateur of letters, his great-uncle, Thomas Clarkson Verity, whose society and conversation awakened the literary sense in him as a schoolboy, on holiday from Harchester, now nearly five decades ago. He judged it a matter of good omen, moreover,--toying for the moment with kindly superstition--that the book should issue from a house redeemed by his kinsman from base and brutal uses and dedicated to the worship of knowledge and of the printed word. That fat, soft-bodied, mercurial-minded little gentleman--to whom no record of human endeavour, of human speculation, mental or moral experiment, came amiss--would surely relish the compliment, if his curious and genial ghost still, in any sort, had cognizance of this, his former, dwelling-place. The Hard, just now, showed a remarkably engaging countenance, the year standing on the threshold of May.--Mild softly bright weather made amends for a wet and windy April, with sunshine and high forget-me-not blue skies shading to silver along the sea-line. The flower-beds, before the garden house-front, were crowded with early tulips, scarlet, golden, and shell-pink. Shrubberies glowed with rhododendrons, flamed with azaleas. At the corner of the battery and sea-wall, misty grey-green plumes of tamarisk veiled the tender background of grey-blue water and yellow-grey sand. Birds peopled the scene. Gulls, in strong fierce flight, laughed overhead. Swallows darted back and forth, ceaselessly twittering, as they built their cup-shaped mud nests beneath the eaves. Upon the lawn companies of starlings ran, flapping glossy wings, squealing, whistling; to the annoyance of a song thrush, in spotted waistcoat and neatly fitting brown _surtout_, who, now tall, now flattened to the level of the turf, its head turned sideways, peered and listened, locating the presence of the victim worm.--Three or four vigorous pecks--the starlings running elsewhere--to loosen the surrounding soil, and the moist pink living string was steadily, mercilessly, drawn upward into the uncompromising light of day, to be devoured wriggling, bit by bit, with most unlovely gusto.--The chaff-chaff sharpened his tiny saw tipping about the branches of the fir trees in the Wilderness, along with the linnets, tits, and gold-finches.