A few days prior to my departure the village worthies prepared a fish-supper in my honor. The Tamish fishermen cooked it in their traditional way over a wood fire burning under the open sky. The little supper-party reached the fishermen’s hut on the bank of the Tamish River just about sunset. The western sky was all aglow with the golden light of the parting day, and so was the surface of the tranquil Tamish River, made luminous by the image of the western sky. The rest of the landscape looked dark by contrast, excepting the glowing faces of the patient supper-party, who sat around the busy fires and watched the boiling kettles and the broiling pans. At some distance, and standing at the very end of a fisherman’s barge, was the dark silhouette of a tall young shepherd, who stood there lonely like some solitary dark spectre hovering over the golden surface of the Tamish River. It was just the spot for one who sought seclusion and longed for quiet meditation. No ripple in the water or in the air disturbed his dreams, if he had any, and I thought that he had. His sheep had been watered, and he had finished his frugal supper long ago, before the light of the day had retired below the distant horizon line of the Banat plains. The silence of the approaching night awakened emotions which only his tuneful flute could express, and suddenly he poured his soul into a melody which surely was not addressed to mere phantoms of the vacuous space. I felt that the quivering air was conveying through the evening silence a message of love to some maiden, who was perhaps just then spinning under some thatched roof of drowsy Idvor and thinking of him. The priest approached me to tell me that the fish was ready and that the feast would soon begin. I told him that my feast had already begun and called his attention to the heavenly melody. He said: “Oh, that’s Gabriel, the son of my neighbor Milutin. He entered the village school when you left Idvor, and he finished it long ago. He will be married on St. Michael’s day, and what you hear now is his sefdalia (song of sighs) for his future bride, who is over there in our drowsy village.” When he jokingly suggested that I might be looking forward to the enjoyment of the sweets of simple pastoral life which were in store for Gabriel, if I had not turned my back on Idvor eleven years before, I answered that perhaps it was not too late to correct the error. The priest looked astonished, and asked me whether I had crossed and recrossed the Atlantic in order to become a shepherd of Idvor. I said nothing, but I knew that Gabriel’s melody had disclosed to me another world in which the question “What is Light?” is by no means the most important question. There were other great questions of human life, the answers to which can perhaps be found in Idvor without a knowledge of Maxwell’s electrical theory. VI STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE