Everything in that house was old or smooth and bright with use, and the hollowed threshold of the doorway in the sun put me in mind of a hundred old things and of their goodliness to mortal eyes--the wrecked ship’s ribs, their bolt-holes rusty, that stand among nettles as gate-posts--the worn dark stones that rock to the tread among the ripples of an umbrageous ford--many a polished stile and gate--the group of rigid but still gracious bowery thorns dotted with crimson haws in the middle of a meadow, their holes and lower branches rubbed hard and smooth and ruddy like iron by the cows--the ash staff beginning to bend like its master, the old man upon the roads who once wore scarlet and wound the horn for Mr. ----’s hounds. Odd it is how old use sanctifies a little thing. There was once a hut where a good man, but a poor and a weak and unwise, stayed all one fair summer and talked of English roads--he was a lord of the roads, at least of South Country roads--and of ships, which he knew. Now on the first night of his stay, needing a candlestick he kicked off the top of a pointed wooden paling, so as to make a five-angled piece on which he stuck the candle in its own grease. All through his stay he used the candlestick, when he read the _Divina Commedia_ and _Pantagruel_ and _Henry Brocken_ and recollected airs of Italy and Spain, amidst the sound of nightjars and two leafy streams: the light flickered out as he mused about the open sea, calm but boundless and without known harbour, on which he was drifting cheerfully, regardless of Time, pied with nights and days. The hut was burnt and the man went--to drown a little afterwards with a hundred unlike himself in the sea--but among nettle and dock the candlestick was picked up safe. It had broken off straight and the simple shape was pleasant; it was dark with age; along with the mound and little pillar of wax remaining it had the shape of a natural thing; and it was his.