These are the gods, the gods who must endure for ever, or as long as man endures, the gods whom the perverse blood-lustful, torturing Oriental myths cannot kill. Poseidon, the sea-god, who rules his grey and white steeds, so gentle and playful in his rare moods of tranquillity, so savage and destructive in his rage. With a clutch of his hand he crumples the wooden beams or steel plates of the wave-wanderers, with a thrust of his elbow he hurls them to destruction on the hidden sand-bank or the ruthless sharp-toothed rocks. Selene, the moon-goddess, who flies so swiftly through the breaking clouds of the departing storm, or hangs so motionless white, so womanly waiting, in the cobalt night-sky among her attendant stars. Phœbus, who scorns these silvery-grey northern lands, but whose golden light is so welcome when it comes. Demeter, who ripens the wheat and plumps the juicy fruit and sets cordial bitterness in the hop and trails ragged flower and red hip and haw along the hedges. And then the lesser humbler gods—must there not be gods of sunrise and twilight, of bird-singing and midnight silence, of ploughing and harvesting, of the shorn fields and the young green springing grass, gods of lazy cattle and the uneasily bleating flocks and of the wild creatures—(hedgehogs and squirrels and rabbits, and their enemies the weasels)—tenuous Ariel demigods of the trembling poplars and the many-coloured flowers and the speckled fluttering butterflies? In ever increasing numbers the motor-cars clattered and hammered along the dusty roads; the devils of golf leaped on the acres and made them desolate; sport and journalism and gentility made barren men’s lives. The gods shrank away, hid shyly in forgotten nooks, lurked unsuspected behind bramble and thorn. Where were their worshippers? Where were their altars? Rattle of the motors, black smoke of the railways. One—perhaps only one—worshipper was left them. One only saw the fleet limbs glancing through the tree-trunks, saw the bright faun-eyes peering anxiously from behind the bushes. Hamadryads, fauns, do not fly from me! I am not one of “them,” one of the perverse life-torturers. I know you are there, come to me, and talk with me! Stay with me, stay with me! * * * * * Then the blow fell. [ V ] What can have happened? What can have happened? My God, what can have happened?