Mark shook his head.

"I used to play cup and ball when I was in the nursery; but I gave that up."

"It's good exercise, I believe," said Cass Dale.

"I expect that's what old Father Ape said when he started ball games by flinging a coconut at his friend."

"Well, the only thing I've got against golf," said Cass Dale, is that, from what I can see of it, it's a rich man's game. However, as I was going to say when we got on to golf, I hope that you and I will pull together for the Lord, Lidderdale. You won't find me a bitter adversary, especially as we're such old friends. I'd go as far as to offer you my pulpit occasionally, and perhaps you'd care to offer me yours. We hear a lot about there being no love lost between the churches, and perhaps that's true. But I'm not narrow-minded, and I don't forget that we're both fellow workers in the same vineyard."

Mark thanked him for his offer, but he did not say anything about accepting it.

"Well, I mustn't keep you up on your first night. I heard you'd come and I thought I'd look in and wish you well."

"It was very kind of you," Mark said. "I appreciate it very much."

"You'll come and see us? I live in one of those tasty little villas you may have noticed as being new."

"Yes, I noticed them," Mark replied gloomily.

"Well, come in and have a cup of tea any time. My wife will like to meet you."

"You're married?

"Yes," Cass said. "Married, and got a boy of three. A young Tartar."

"You were a bit of a Tartar yourself," Mark reminded him.

Cass laughed merrily.

"Yes, and I am still," he boasted, "if they rub me up the wrong way. But I can't complain. We're going ahead at our chapel. Yes, the Lord has blessed my labours."

They shook hands and Cass hurried away.

"There goes a blaring, flaring, thumping Radical," John William said, gazing after the active figure until it was lost to sight. Some do say he reckons to get into Parliament one day. I don't knaw what the country's coming to."

"William John!" Mrs. Evans cried from within. "I'm sure I don't knaw for why you keep Mr. Lidderdale standing out there in the cold. He'll be catching his death listening to you maundering on. Lev him come in and make himself comfortable, my dear man, for the love of goodness!"

Mark went up to bed very soon after this; but sleep kept far away from him. There is a strange hostility in Cornwall, which often affects the least imaginative stranger and eludes any attempt to explain or to define it, or even to describe it. Perhaps it is that Cornwall shares with a few other spots on earth the ability to strip from man the accumulation of his experience and to give him the mind of a child or a savage that is still susceptible to the secret hostility of Nature. Gradually he once more succeeds in overlaying or blunting his perceptions by summoning to his aid the faculties of reason and judgment, the resources of education and the experience of civilization, until he is able to scoff at such an irrational panic; but for a little while he knows again the terrors that he thought had fled for ever when he left childhood behind him.

Mark fell a victim to this terror of place. He lay in bed oppressed by a kind of insurgence of the land through the windows of his room. He was appalled by such a sense of insecurity as an earthquake might have given him. Once he got out of bed and looked out at the night; but there was nothing terrible to be seen. The stars held to their courses; they were not wandering in the blackness of darkness for ever. Forty miles out beyond St. Levan's Bay the Stag Light was occulting and shining with perfect regularity. But as soon as Mark left the window and got back into bed again he felt the invading presence of this land; and when dawn broke he was as utterly tired as if he had been hag-ridden all night.

CHAPTER XXIII

EARTH

In spite of his bad night, Mark did not stay in bed a moment after sunrise, but dressed himself and set out to walk to the Vicarage. Here was another well-remembered path. Not a gate had been added or taken away from that cart-track along the bottom of the valley, in the middle of which the Vicarage stood rather nearer to Church Cove than to Nancepean. The slopes of the low hills on either side were not blazing with gorse at this season; but there were a few bushes in bloom to catch the sun shining behind the tower of Chypie church and to remind Mark of the heavenly glow with which these hills had warmed his childish fancy. It was strange how utterly that menace of the land's hostility had vanished with the rising of the sun.

Here was the Vicarage gate at last. The holm-oaks on either side of the drive had grown so thick that the blue hydrangeas had been darkened out of existence; but they had always been scraggy and unhappy in the old days. When Mark walked past the house and stood on the undulating unsheared lawn, he was astonished at the wonderland of sub-tropical vegetation. He had been ready to be disappointed by the size of the garden and to find the vegetation less extravagant than the picture of it that had stayed in his mind ever since. But when thus he came back to it, he found it not less but more unusual than he had imagined. The sub-tropical trees planted by his grandfather had become specimens; and Mark wandered beneath immense leaves and gazed upon exotic flowers like a man set down in a new Eden. He felt like one who has wandered into the enchanted gardens of the Arabian Nights, like one of those fabled princes

to whom the speech of birds is made known and who at the bidding of some topaz-throated songster penetrates more deeply into the perfumed labyrinth to save a princess languishing in solitude and captivity. The familiar colours and contours of the English woodland were not recognizable in these fans and cupolas and parasols of fervid and refulgent green.

The late Vicar had not attempted to cope with the jungle in which the house was now buried. He must have spent his whole life among the dust and worms of ancient commentaries in that ceaseless endeavour to establish the identity of the British nation with the lost tribes of Israel. No patriarch he, with tight paunch and flowing beard and moist uxorious eye, but a withered, anxious, crabbed wight, not more substantial than a colophon at the tail of one of his own chronicles. He had paid no heed to the lush growth without; but, deep in the shadows or the lamplight of his study, he had pored upon the plants of the Bible, on galbanum and gopher and teil, on camphire and cummin, and on the shittahtree in the wilderness. He had not cared for the living palms; but he had sat for hours in faded woodcuts beneath their fronds, watching the camels at the drinkingpool and the porters of the caravan resting in the cool of the evening. Mark could not discover that the Reverend John Jacob Morse had taken the least interest in his active duties as a priest. He had apparently considered that the dissenting ministers and local preachers were better suited to the spiritual needs of his parish; and even his active co-operation with them did not extend beyond nibbling some bread and butter at a Band of Hope tea in the chapel, or shutting up the church on some political festival. Yet in spite of his negative qualities as a parish priest, the natural conservatism of the Cornish (expressed politically in acute radicalism) had already begun to glorify their late Vicar. He was by now a fine old chap, who had disturbed neither man nor beast in the whole of his twenty years at Nancepean. He already belonged to that legendary caste of mind, the like of which is not seen nowadays. This grubby, selfish, and solitary old man without any interest except an exploded

ethnical superstition was to be held up to the new parson as an example of clerical worth, dignity, and merit. Better a dead ass than a live lion was the Cornish paradox. The very clothes-moths that crawled in and out of the pockets of his rusty black suits achieved in retrospect a kind of magical importance as if they were the symbols or personifications of his own moth-eaten brain and of the maggots of eccentric opinions that devoured it.

Mark went into the house and explored the endless empty rooms, deciding to furnish the dining-room and to take for his study his grandfather's old study where he had learnt Latin and watched the green windows winking with the flight of birds. He could furnish two bedrooms, and one should be the little bedroom in which he used to sleep as a child. The other should be his mother's old room, which he would invite friends to use next summer, a genial company.

Suddenly in this abode of silence and hollowness Mark began to feel a return of that enmity of place. These empty rooms were terrifying, because they seemed unable to oppose any barrier to the investment of the house by that hostile country without. Deprived of their own individuality when they ceased to be furnished and used by human beings, they had lost their relationship with humanity and were haunted by the spirits of place. The granite of which they were built had been wrested from the earth, and now the earth was wresting back that which man had robbed from it. This impression of the interior was cut so sharply on Mark's imagination that he turned to escape from it into the garden. Here in the sunlight the scent of the first acacias, the blossoms of a white clematis pouring in a shimmering torrent of foam over the high wall, the defiant torches of tall kniphofias, and the kindly music of the bamboo groves gave him an assurance that man had triumphed over this hostile country.

The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing: the glory of Lebanon shall be given unto