Who is that Artificer who has subtly and diversely hidden the secret of rhythm in the lichen of the rock and in the rock’s heart itself; in the frost-flower, so perfect in beauty that a sunbeam breathes it away; in the falling star, a snowflake in the abyss, yet with the miraculous curve in flight which the wave has had, which the bent poplar has had, which the rainbow has had, since the world began? The grey immemorial stone and the vanishing meteor are one. Both are the offspring of the Eternal Passion, and it may be that between the æon of the one and the less than a minute of the other there shall not, in the divine reckoning, be more than the throb of a pulse. For who of us can measure even Time, that the gnat measures as well as we, or the eagle, or the ancient yew, or the mountain whose granite brows are white with ages--much less Eternity, wherein Time is but a vanishing pulse? THE TIDES I remember that one of the most strange and perturbing pleasures of my childhood was in watching, from a grassy height, the stealthy motions of the tides. The fascination never waned, nor has it yet waned: to-day, as then, I know at times the old thrill, almost the old fear, when through a white calm or up some sea-loch I watch those dark involutions, in sudden twists and long serpentine curves, as the eddies of the tide force their mysterious way. For one thing my childish imagination was profoundly impressed by the words of an old islander whom I had asked where the tides came from and what they were and had they names. We were on the steep slope of a small grassy hill, and overlooked the eastern end of an island where the troubled waters of a _caoileas_ or strait to the south met the vast placid reach of ocean on the north. Through the lustrous green of the Sound, fleckt with long mauve shadows or clouded here and there with great splatches of purple-brown; and, again, to the left through the near calm heave of deep water so blue that as a child I could not understand why the shells which were washed up from it were not blue also: to right and to left I saw the sudden furtive motions of the flowing tide. I had often watched the blind-worm move thus through the coarse sea-grasses, and again and again had seen the adder dart through the bracken like one of those terrible living arrows of Faerie of which I had heard: often, too, I had followed the shadow-swift underwave glide of the hunting seal: and once, in a deep brown pool in Morven, when I was looking with trembling hope for the floating hair or dim white face of a kelpie, I had seen an otter rise from the depths ... rise like a fantastic elfin face and half-human figure in a dream ... make a soundless sinuous plunge and in less than a moment vanish utterly, still without sound or the least ruffling of the brown depths. So, it was natural that I should associate those mysterious gliding things of the sea with these