Succeeding days and nights provided enough matches and sulphur of this sort to enable him to fashion a sufficiently effective purgatory, in which his mind revolved round its hurt like a cockchafer on a pin. When a man depends for the efficient performance of his duties upon getting his just amount of sleep (Selby was a watch-keeping Lieutenant in a battleship of the line), affairs of this sort are apt to end in disaster. But his ship went into Dockyard hands to refit, and Selby, who was really a sensible enough sort of fellow, though an idealist, realised that for his own welfare and that of the Service it were "better to forget and smile than remember and be sad." Accordingly he applied for and obtained a week’s leave, bought a map of the surrounding district, packed a few necessaries into a light knapsack, and set off to walk away his troubles. For a day he followed the coast—it was high summer—along a path that skirted the cliffs. The breeze blew softly off the level _lapis-lazuli_ of the Channel, sea-gulls wheeled overhead for company, and following the curve of each ragged headland in succession, the creamy edge of the breakers lured him on towards the West. He walked thirty miles that day and slept dreamlessly in a fishing village hung about with nets and populated by philosophers with patched breeches. He struck inland the second day, to plunge into a confusion of lanes that led him blindfold for a while between ten-foot hedges. These opened later into red coombes, steeped to their sunny depths with the scent of fern and may, and all along the road bees held high carnival above the hedgerows. Then green tunnels of foliage, murmurous with wood-pigeon, dappled him at each step with alternate sunlight and shadow, and passed him on to villages whose inns had cool, flagged parlours, and cider in blue-and-white mugs. An ambient trout-stream held him company most of the long afternoon, with at times a kingfisher darting along its tortuous course like a streak from the rainbow that each tiny waterfall had caught and held. He supped early in a farm kitchen off new-made pasties, apple tart and yellow-crusted cream, and walked on till the bats began wheeling overhead in the violet dusk. His ship was sixty miles away when he crept into the shelter of a hayrick and laid his tired head on his knapsack.