and she would sail hopefully once again. It was inevitable that this present experience should recall these other happenings, evoking memories poignant enough. The first time the ship of his fate thus stranded was when, as a lad of seventeen, he left school. Living alone with his mother in a quaint little house in Holland Street, Kensington, eagerly ambitious to make his way in the world and to obtain, it had dawned on him that there was something strange, unhappy, and not as it was wont to be with that, to him, most beautiful and beloved of women. The mere suspicion was as a blasphemy against which his young loyalty revolted. For Dominic, with the inherent pieties of his Latin and Celtic blood, had none of that contemptuous superiority in regard of his near relations so common to male creatures of the Protestant persuasion and Anglo-Saxon race. He took his parents quite seriously; it never having occurred to him that fathers and mothers are given us merely for purposes of discipline, or as helot-like examples of what to avoid. He was simple-minded enough indeed to regard them as sacred, altogether beyond the bounds of legitimate criticism--and this, as destiny would have it, with intimate and life-long results. Vaguely, through the mists of infancy, he could remember a hurried exodus--after sound of cannon and sight of blood--from Spain, the fierce and pious country of his birth. Since then, while his mother lived--namely, till he was a man of over forty--always and only the house in the Kensington side street, with its crooked creaking stairways, its high wainscots--behind which mice squeaked and scampered--its clinging odour of ancient woodwork, its low ceilings, and uneven floors. At the back of it was a narrow strip of garden, glorious for one brief week in early summer, with the gold of a big laburnum; and fragrant later thanks to faithful effort on the part of the white jasmine clothing its enclosing walls. In fair weather the morning sun lay warm there; while the sky showed all the bluer overhead for the dark lines of the adjacent housetops, and upstanding deformities in the matter of zinc cowls and chimney-pots. Frequented by cats, boasting in the centre a rockery of gas clinkers and chalk flints surmounted by a stumpy fluted column bearing a stone basin--in which, after rain, sparrows disported themselves with much conversation and fluttering of sooty wings--the garden was, to little Dominic, a place of wonder and delight. He peopled it with beings of his own fancy, lovely or terrific, according to his passing humour. Granted a measure of imagination, the solitary child is often the happiest child, since the social element, with its inevitable materialism, is absent, and the dear spirit of romance is unquenched by vulgar comment.