Not very long afterwards I got a letter from Malory, forwarded and re-forwarded, which, coming out of the, so far as he was concerned, silence of years, reminded me forcibly of the day he had broken silence at Sampiero. It gave me a queer turn of the heart to see that the envelope I held in my hand had gone first of all to Sampiero, to our little lodging house, had been handled, no doubt, by the hunch-backed postman I had known so well. I could see him, going down the street, with his bag over his shoulder, and my letter in his bag. I could see my old landlady with the letter in her hand, turning it over and over, till light broke on her, and she remembered the Englishman, and hunted up his unfamiliar address, and wondered, perhaps, whether he, too, had fallen in the war. I give Malory’s letter here. “... I read his name in the official list, and can only suppose that it is my Daphnis, as I know he was in a Kentish regiment. Oh, these yeomen of England, of whom I always thought as indigenous to the soil, born there, living there, dying there, buried there, with no knowledge beyond their counted acres, but knowing those so well and thoroughly, tree by tree, crop by crop, path by path through the woodland! They have been uprooted and borne to foreign shores, but they are England, and it is for their own bit of England, weald, marsh, or fell, that they die. “They have lived all their lives in security, and the security of centuries lies behind them, as the volume of ocean lies behind each wave that laps the shore. Now the mammoth of danger and unrest prowls round their homesteads, and a hand whose presence they did not suspect moves and removes them, pawns in the game. How can they understand? They do not. They only cling, for the sake of sanity, to what they know: their corner of England and their own individuality, rocks which have been with them since they were born, and which in the thunderstorm about their ears they can retain unaltered. “I live amongst them now, and I know. “I have been once in a great earthquake, and I know that the secret of its terror is that the earth, the steady immutable earth, betrays the confident footstep. So in this earthquake men cling to themselves and to their land, as they know it, as immutable things. “I am living now in a great peace; I do not hear the din around me; I am as one in the centre of those tropical winds, where all that is in the path of the hurricane is destroyed, but in the still and silent centre birds sing and leaves do not stir. Or I am as a totally deaf man, the drums of whose ears are burst. I am happy. “But the others, who are in the path of the wind, they are clouted and pushed and beaten, blinded and deafened by the cyclone. They are made to gyrate as the little mice were made to gyrate. What is it, oh God, that drives us, poor creatures?