had himself the accomplishments that he held needful in a
Christian, skill with the sword and a way with the mandolin; and
if there be some harder, better way to salvation than to follow
that which we believe to be good, then are we all damned. So he
was buried, and his eldest son fared forth with his legacy
dangling from his girdle in its long, straight, lovely scabbard,
blue velvet, with emeralds on it, fared forth on foot along a road
of Spain. And though the road turned left and right and sometimes
nearly ceased, as though to let the small wild flowers grow, out
of sheer good will such as some roads never have; though it ran
west and east and sometimes south, yet in the main it ran
northward, though wandered is a better word than ran, and the Lord
of the Valleys of Arguento Harez who owned no valleys, or anything
but a sword, kept company with it looking for the wars. Upon his
back he had slung his mandolin. Now the time of the year was
Spring, not Spring as we know it in England, for it was but early
March, but it was the time when Spring coming up out of Africa, or
unknown lands to the south, first touches Spain, and multitudes of
anemones come forth at her feet.

Thence she comes north to our islands, no less wonderful in our
woods than in Andalusian valleys, fresh as a new song, fabulous as
a rune, but a little pale through travel, so that our flowers do
not quite flare forth with all the myriad blaze of the flowers of
Spain.

And all the way as he went the young man looked at the flame of
those southern flowers, flashing on either side of him all the
way, as though the rainbow had been broken in Heaven and its
fragments fallen on Spain. All the way as he went he gazed at