exodus--after sound of cannon and sight of blood--from Spain, the fierce
and pious country of his birth. Since then, while his mother lived--
namely, till he was a man of over forty--always and only the house in the
Kensington side street, with its crooked creaking stairways, its high
wainscots--behind which mice squeaked and scampered--its clinging odour
of ancient woodwork, its low ceilings, and uneven floors. At the back of
it was a narrow strip of garden, glorious for one brief week in early
summer, with the gold of a big laburnum; and fragrant later thanks to
faithful effort on the part of the white jasmine clothing its enclosing
walls. In fair weather the morning sun lay warm there; while the sky
showed all the bluer overhead for the dark lines of the adjacent
housetops, and upstanding deformities in the matter of zinc cowls and
chimney-pots. Frequented by cats, boasting in the centre a rockery of gas
clinkers and chalk flints surmounted by a stumpy fluted column bearing a
stone basin--in which, after rain, sparrows disported themselves with
much conversation and fluttering of sooty wings--the garden was, to
little Dominic, a place of wonder and delight. He peopled it with beings
of his own fancy, lovely or terrific, according to his passing humour.
Granted a measure of imagination, the solitary child is often the
happiest child, since the social element, with its inevitable
materialism, is absent, and the dear spirit of romance is unquenched by
vulgar comment.

His father, grave and preoccupied, whose arrivals after long periods of
absence had in them an effect of secrecy and haste, was to the small boy
a being, august, but remote. During his brief sojourns at home the quiet
house awoke to greater fulness of life, with much coming and going of
other grave personages, strange of dress, and with a certain effect of
hardly restrained violence in their aspect. A spirit of fear seemed to
enter with them, demanding an unnatural darkening of windows and closing