Dawn was breaking, the pale, still hour that is often the hour of death;
and a cool breeze rippled in the date palms and in the flat green leaves
of the rubber plants, and the festoons of succulent green growths that
climbed up the houses of the Cantonments, and dawn found the Rev.
Francis Heath sleeping quietly. He was lying with one arm under his
head, and his worn face in almost child-like repose. Wherever he was,
sleep had carried him to a place of peace and refreshment. When he awoke
he would have forgotten his dream, but for the moment the dream
sufficed, and he rested in the circle of its charm.

All the time that we are young and careless and happy, we are building
retreats for memory that make harbours of rest in later years, when the
storms come with force. All the old things that did not count, come back
to calm and to restore. The school-room, where the light flickered on a
special corner of the ceiling, telling the children to come out and
play; the tapping of the laurels outside the church windows, and the
musty smell of red rep cushions along the pew where the hours were very
slow in passing; the white clover in the field behind the garden, got at
easily through a hole in the privet hedge. The play of light and shadow
over the hills of home, the dusk at nightfall, and the homely cawing of
rooks. All the delicious things that went with the smell of ripe
strawberries under nets, where thieving birds fluttered until the
gardener let them free again; and the mystery of sparks flying up the
chimney when the winter logs blazed. Every simple joy is stored away in
some lumber corner of the minds of men, and when sleep comes, sometimes
the old things are taken out again.

The Rev. Francis Heath, like the rest of the world, had his own secret
doorway that led back to wonderland, and it may have been that he was
far away from Mangadone in this child-world which is so hard to find