to the perch?  He could not remember, but what he did remember, and very well, was the moment when the bird fluttered towards the window; he could see it resting on the sill, hesitating a moment, doubting its power of flight.  But it had ventured out in the air and had reached a birch, on which it alighted.  There had been a rush downstairs and out of the house, but the hawk was no longer in the birch, and was never seen by him again, yet it persisted in his memory.

The sport of hawking is not quite extinct in England, and at various times he had caused inquiries to be made, and had arranged once to go to the New Forest and on another occasion to Wiltshire.  But something had happened to prevent him going, and he had continued to dream of hawking, of the mystery whereby the hawk could be called out of the sky by the lure—­some rags and worsted-work in the shape of a bird whirled in the air at the end of a string.  Why should the hawk leave its prey for such a mock?  Yet it did; and he had always read everything that came under his hand about hawking with a peculiar interest, and in exhibitions of pictures had always stood a long time before pictures of hawking, however bad they might be.

But Evelyn had turned his thoughts from sport to music, and gradually he had become reconciled to the idea that his destiny was never to see a hawk strike down a bird.  But the occasion long looked for had come at last, to-morrow morning the mystery of hawking would cease to be a mystery for him any longer; and as he lay in his tent, trying to get a few hours’ sleep before dawn, he asked himself if the realisation of his dream would profit him much, only the certain knowledge that hawks stooped at their prey and returned to the lure; another mystery would have been unravelled, and there were few left; he doubted if there was another; all the sights and shows with which life entices us were known to him, all but one, and the last would go the way the others had gone.  Or perhaps it were wiser to leave the last mystery unravelled.

Wrapping himself closer in his blanket he sought sleep again, striving to quiet his thoughts; but they would not be quieted.  All kinds of vain questions ran on, questions to which the wisest have never been able to find answers:  if it were good or ill-fortune to have been called out of the great void into life, if the gift of life were one worth accepting, and if it had come to him in an acceptable form.  That night in his tent it seemed clear that it would be better to range for ever, from oasis to oasis with the bedouins, who were on their way to meet him, than to return to civilisation.  Of civilisation it seemed to him that he had had enough, and he wondered if it were as valuable as many people thought; he had found more pleasure in speaking with his dragoman, learning Arabic from him, than in talking to educated men from the universities and such like.  Riches dry up the soul and are an obstacle to the development