should be about three feet long, flexible and tapering to a point.
Unconsciously his inventive faculty began to work. When he had devised an
adequate instrument, made of fine steel wires ingeniously plaited, he
awoke, somewhat shame-facedly, to the commonplaces of the original problem.
What was to be done?

He pondered for some hours, then he sighed and sought consolation in his
bassoon; but after a few bars of "Annie Laurie" he put the unedifying
instrument back in its corner and went out for a walk. It was a starry
night of frost. Nunsmere lay silent as Bethlehem; and a star hung low in
the east. Far away across the common gleamed one solitary light in the
vicarage windows; the Vicar, good gentleman, finishing his unruffled sermon
while his parish slept. Otherwise darkness spread over everything save the
sky. Not a creature on the road, not a creature on the common, not even the
lame donkey. Incredibly distant the faint sound of a railway whistle
intensified the stillness. Septimus's own footsteps on the crisp grass rang
loud in his ears. Yet both stillness and darkness felt companionable, in
harmony with the starlit dimness of the man's mind. His soul was having its
adventure while mystery filled the outer air. He walked on, wrapped in the
nebulous fantasies which passed with him for thought, heedless, as he
always was, of the flight of time. Once he halted by the edge of the pond,
and, sitting on a bench, lit and smoked his pipe until the cold forced him
to rise. With an instinctive desire to hear some earthly sound, he picked
up a stone and threw it into the water. He shivered at the ghostly splash
and moved away, himself an ineffectual ghost wandering aimlessly in the
night.

The Vicar's lamp had been extinguished long ago. A faint breeze sprang up.
The star sank lower in the sky. Suddenly, as he turned back from the road
to cross the common for the hundredth time, he became aware that he was