“––For faith, that, when my need is sore, Gleams from a partly-open door, And shows the firelight on the floor––” _A Canticle of Common Things._ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Over the Gateway WE were sitting together one morning in the common sitting-room in the centre of the house. There had been a fall of rain during the night, and it was thought better that the old man should not sit in the garden until the sun had dried the earth––so we sat indoors instead, but with the great door wide open, that looked on to a rectangle of lawn that lay before the house. Once a drive had led to this door through a gate with pedestals and stone balls, that stood exactly opposite, about fifteen yards away, but the drive had long been grassed over; although even now it showed faintly under two slight ridges in the grass that ran from the gate to the door. Otherwise the lawn was enclosed by a low old brick wall, almost hidden by a wealth of ivy, against which showed in rich masses of colour the heads of purple and yellow irises and tawny wallflowers. The old man had been silent at breakfast. He had offered the Holy Sacrifice as usual that morning in the little chapel upstairs, and I had noticed at the time even that he seemed pre-occupied: and at breakfast he had talked very little, letting every subject drop as I suggested it; and I had understood at last that his thoughts were far away in the past; and I did not wish to trouble him. We were sitting in two tall carved chairs at the doorway, his feet were wrapped in a rug, and his eyes were looking steadily and mournfully out across towards the iron-work gate in the wall. Tall grasses of the patch of uncut meadow outside leaned against it or pushed their feathery heads through it; and I saw presently that the priest was looking at the gate, letting his eyes rove over every detail of climbing plant, iron-work and the old brickwork––and not, as I had at first thought, merely gazing into the dim distances of the years behind him. Suddenly he broke the long silence. “Did I ever tell you,” he asked, “about what I saw out there in the garden? It looks ordinary enough now: yet I saw there what I suppose I shall never see again on this side of death, or at least not until I am in the very gate of death itself.” I too looked out at the gate. The atmosphere was full of that “clear shining after rain” of which King David sang––it was air made visible and radiant by the union of light and water, those two most joyous creatures of God. A great chestnut tree blotted out all beyond the gate. “Tell me if you can,” I said. “You know how I love to hear those stories.”