It was in Oxford Street and upon the top of an omnibus during one of those despairing winter days, the light just gone, and an air rising which was neither vigorous nor cold, but sodden like the hearts of all around, that I fell wondering whether there were some ultimate goal for men, and whether these adventures of ours, which grow tamer and so much tamer as the years proceed, are lost at last in a blank nothingness, or whether there are revelations and discoveries to come. This debate in the mind is very old; every man revolves it, none has affirmed a solution, though all the wisest of men have accepted a received answer from authority external to themselves. I was not on that murky evening concerned with authority, but with the old problem or rather mood of wonder upon the fate of the soul. As I so mused to the jolting of the bus I began unconsciously to compare the keenness of early living with the satiety or weariness of later years; and so from one thing to another, I know not how, I thought of horses first, and then of summer rivers, and then of a harbour, and then of the open sea, and then of the sea at night, till this vague train took on the form of an exact picture, and my mind lived in an unforgotten day. * * * * * In my little boat, with my companion asleep in the bows, I steered at the end of darkness eastward over a warm and easy sea. It was August: the roll was lazy, and the stars were few and distant all around, because the sky, though clear, was softened by the pleasant air of summer at its close; moreover, an arch of the sky before me was paling and the sea-breeze smelt of dawn. My little boat went easy, as the sea was easy. There was just enough of a following wind dead west to keep her steady and to keep the boom square in its place right out a-lee, nor did she shake or swing (as boats so often will before a following wind), but went on with a purpose gently, like a young woman just grown used to her husband and her home. So she sailed, and aft we left a little, bubbling wake, which in the darkness had glimmered with evanescent and magic fires, but now, as the morning broadened, could be seen to be white foam. The stars paled for an hour and then soon vanished; although the sun had not yet risen, it was day. The line of the horizon before me was fresh and sharp, clear tops of swell showed hard against the faint blue of the lowest sky, and for some time we were thus alone together in the united and living immensity of the sea: my sleeping companion, my boat, and I. Then it was that I perceived a little northward and to the left of the rising glow a fixed appearance very far away beyond the edge of the world; it was grey and watery like a smoke, yet fixed in outline and unchanging; it did not waver but stood, and so standing confirmed its presence. It was land; and this dim but certain vision which now fixed my gaze was one of the mighty headlands of holy Ireland.