Two of the clock one autumn afternoon found me free. I had hoped to have lost no time in beginning to put enormous stretches of space between me and my desk. Not that this desk had not its pleasures, and many of them; but one craves a change of mental atmosphere, however salubrious that usually respired. The temptation, however, of calmly and in self-righteously indolent manner enjoying the sweets of freedom was too strong, so I lounged a whole afternoon, and not till daybreak on the following morning was I booted, knapsacked, and afoot. The task of putting space between me and my desk was not one as easy as I had anticipated. It was hours before the dust of the city was shaken off, and the mud of the country allowed to take its place; the tedium of the streets at that unfrequented hour of the day made them seem interminable. For was I not craving and in search of country sights and sounds? And yet for miles not one met the eye or ear. Yes, I am forgetting: there was one which made up for much monotony. On a humble cottage wall facing the south, far out in the suburbs, was a wealth of flowering convolvulus such as I had rarely or only in India seen before. The sight was entrancing. The various-hued blossoms seemed blatantly to trumpet forth their beauty to the sun, to borrow the terms of sound and to apply them to colour. And what colour was there! That deep, soft, velvet purple, powdered with snowy pollen--what a profound, what an acute sense it produced of something altogether beyond the limitations of time and space, of something mysterious, beneficent, divine. Never before did I see so deep a meaning in those words: "Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these." How paltry, how tainted, seemed all human greatness beside those simple petals; how marred, how deformed! And why? Why should Nature alone be able to smile openly before her Maker's eyes, and man be ever hiding himself from the presence of the Lord God? Ah! there is more than one interpretation of the text, "All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God." ... Those brilliant blossoms aroused many a thought. How earnestly have all poets of Nature striven to find expression for the emotions that natural beauty evokes! And yet none has completely succeeded, and none will succeed till the hidden links are discovered between the beautiful thing, the mind that perceives it, and the Hand that fashions it. How is it that a sunset, a landscape, a green field even, or a growing fern, will sometimes in a moment of time cause to blaze up in a man a thrill, a joy, so intense that under its influence one feels dazed and dumb? A great power is, as it were, suddenly let loose; beauty incarnated momentarily reveals its divine presence, and one feels an all but overwhelming impulse to yield oneself to it and be rapt away whithersoever it leads.