I walked as within sight of a goal.  In my imagination I saw ahead of me the winter stretches of country that I should come to, all white with snow, the trees all hoar, the people all frosted.  I had literally become aware of the fact that I was travelling not only over land but over time.  In the far horizon of the imagination I looked to the snowy landscapes of winter, and they lay across the road, hiding it, so that it seemed I should go no further.

Old age, old age; I was an old, bearded, heavy-going, wrinkled tramp, leaning on a stout stick; my grey hairs blew about my old red ears in wisps.  I stopped all passers-by upon the road, and chuckled over old jokes or detained them with garrulity.

But no, not old; nor will the tramp ever be old, for he has in his bosom that by virtue of which, even in old age, he remains a boy.  There is in him, like the spring buds among the withered leaves of autumn, one never-dying fountain of youth.  He is the boy who never grows old.

Father Time, when he comes and takes some of us along his ways into middle-age, will have to pull.  Time is a dotard, an aged parent; some boys that are very strong and young are almost too much for him; when he comes to take them from the garden of boyhood they kick and punch; when Time tries to coax them, pointing out the advantages of middle-age, they turn their heads from him and refuse to listen.  If at last they are taken away by main force, it is with their backs to the future, and their faces all angry, twisted, agonised, looking back at the garden in which they want to stay.

II

THE STORY OF ZENOBIA

I have known her in summer and in winter—­in summer flushed and gorgeous like the wild rose, in winter lily-pale, or grey and haggard as the town she lived in.  She was a beautiful daughter of the Earth, a wondrous flower.  The summer night was in her dark hair, the south wind in her eyes.  Whoever looked upon her in silence knew himself in the presence of the mystery of beauty, of the mystery of an imperious inner beauty.  It was because of this, because of some majestic spirit manifest in her, shining through her in soul’s colours, that I called her Zenobia, naming her after that Blythedale Zenobia who always wore the rich hot-house flower in her bosom.  And it was to me as if my Zenobia wore that flower there also, and in silence, a new flower each day, wondrous and rich.  Never could she be seen without that flower there, and it was as if on that flower depended her very life.  Should the flower at any time be wanting, then all were wanting.