tax, and to punish us, and that their police patrol the tropical forests.
But consider the legends on a chart even of the North Sea, of the world
beneath the fathoms--the _Silver Pits_, the _Dowsing Ground_, the _Leman
Bank_, the _Great Fisher Ground_, the _Horn Reef_, the _Witch Ground_,
and the _Great Dogger Bank_! Strange, that indefinable implication of a
word! I remember that, when a child, I was awake one night listening to
a grandfather's clock talking quietly to itself in its long box, and a
brother sat up in bed and whispered: "Look, the Star in the East." I
turned, and one bright eye of the night was staring through the window.
Heaven knows into what profundity of ancestral darkness my brothers
whisper had fallen, nor what it stirred there, but an awe, or a fear, was
wakened in me which was not mine, for I remember I could not explain it,
even though, at the time, the anxious direct question was put to me. Nor
can I now. It would puzzle a psycho-analyst most assured of the right
system for indexing secret human motives to disengage one shadow from
another in an ancestral darkness. That is why I merely put down here the
names to be found on a chart of the North Sea, and say no more about it,
being sure they will mean nothing except to those to whom they mean
something. Those words, like certain moonbeams, which stir in us that
not ourselves which makes for righteousness, or lunacy, combine only by
chance. The combination which unlocks the secret cannot be stated, or it
would not work. When there is a fortuitous coincidence of the magic
factors, the result is as remarkable to us as it is to those who think
they know us. When I used to stand on London's foreshore, gazing to what
was beyond our street lamps, the names on the chart had a meaning for me
which is outside the usual methods of human communication. The Dogger
Bank!

Here then it was, yet still to be seen only by faith. It was like Mrs.
Harris. I had the luck to discover that I should lose nothing through my