hauling happy travellers out of the snow. The only dog at the
settlement was an Irish terrier, and the good fellows who owned
him, and were owned by him, in common, wore clothes of the most
nondescript order, and mostly cultivated side-whiskers. I had
wandered up there one day, searching (as usual) for something I
never found, and had been taken in by them and treated as friend
and comrade. They had made me free of their ideal little rooms,
full of books and pictures, and clean of the antimacassar taint;
they had shown me their chapel, high, hushed; and faintly
scented, beautiful with a strange new beauty born both of what it
had and what it had not--that too familiar dowdiness of common
places of worship. They had also fed me in their dining-hall,
where a long table stood on trestles plain to view, and all the
woodwork was natural, unpainted, healthily scrubbed, and
redolent of the forest it came from. I brought away from that
visit, and kept by me for many days, a sense of cleanness, of the
freshness that pricks the senses--the freshness of cool spring
water; and the large swept spaces of the rooms, the red tiles,
and the oaken settles, suggested a comfort that had no connexion
with padded upholstery.

On this particular morning I was in much too unsociable a mind
for paying friendly calls. Still, something in the aspect of the
place harmonised with my humour, and I worked my way round to the
back, where the ground, after affording level enough for a
kitchen-garden, broke steeply away. Both the word Gothic and the
thing itself were still unknown to me; yet doubtless the
architecture of the place, consistent throughout, accounted for
its sense of comradeship in my hour of disheartenment. As I
mused there, with the low, grey, purposeful-looking building