the murmur of the sea gathers power over all other sounds, until the noon of night arrives and the last merry voices are heard no more.  Poor harmless revellers, so condemned by men whose round of life is a search for pleasure!  Many of you do not understand or care for quiet refinements of dress and demeanour; you lack restraint; but I have felt much gladness while demurely watching your abandonment.  I could draw rest for my soul from the magnetic night long after you were aweary and asleep; but much of my pleasure came as a reflection from yours.

As my memories of sweetness—­yes, and of purifying sadness—­gather more thickly, I am minded to wonder that so much has been vouchsafed me rather than to mourn over shadowy might-have-beens.  The summer day by the deep lovely lake—­the lake within sound of the sea!  All round the steep walls that shut in the dark glossy water there hung rank festoons and bosses of brilliant green, and the clear reflections of the weeds and flowers hung so far down in the mysterious deeps that the height of the rocky wall seemed stupendous.  Far over in one tremendously deep pool the lazy great fish wallowed and lunged; they would not show their speckled sides very much until the evening; but they kept sleepily moving all day, and sometimes a mighty back would show like a log for an instant.  In the morning the modest ground-larks cheeped softly among the rough grasses on the low hills, while the proud heaven-scaler—­the lordly kinsman of the ground-lark—­filled the sky with his lovely clamour.  Sometimes a water-rail would come out from the sedges and walk on the surface of the lake as a tiny ostrich might on the shifting sand; pretty creatures of all sorts seemed to find their homes near the deep wonderful water, and the whole morning might be passed in silently watching the birds and beasts that came around.  The gay sun made streams of silver fire shoot from the polished brackens and sorrel, the purple geraniums gleamed like scattered jewels, and the birds seemed to be joyful in presence of that manifold beauty—­joyful as the quiet human being who watched them all.  And the little fishes in the shallows would have their fun as well.  They darted hither and thither; the spiny creatures which the schoolboy loves built their queer nests among the waterweeds; and sometimes a silly adventurer—­alarmed by the majestic approach of a large fish—­would rush on to the loamy bank at the shallow end of the lake and wriggle piteously in hopeless failure.  The afternoons were divinely restful by the varied shores of the limpid lake.  Sometimes as the sun sloped there might come hollow blasts of wind that had careered for a brief space over the woods; but the brooding heat, the mastering silence, the feeling that multifarious quiescent living things were ready to start into action, all took the senses with somnolence.  That drowsy joy, that soothing silence which seemed only intensified by the murmur of bees and the faint gurgle of water, were like medicine to the soul; and it seemed that the conception of Nirvana became easily understood as the delicious open-air reverie grew more and more involved and vague.  Then the last look of the sun, the creeping shadows that made the sea gray and turned the little lake to an inky hue, and then the slow fall of the quiet-coloured evening, and, last, the fall of the mystic night!