When we had formed park in the grey market-square, ridden our horses off to water at the river and to their quarters, cleaned kit and harness, and at last were free—­that is, when it was already evening—­Matthieu, a friend of mine who had come by another road with his battery, met me strolling on the bridge.  Matthieu was of my kind, he had such a lineage as I had and such an education.  We were glad to meet.  He told me of his last halting-place—­Pagny—­hidden on the upper river.  It is the place where the houses of Luxembourg were buried, and some also of the great men who fell when Henry V of England was fighting in the North, and when on this flank the Eastern dukes were waging the Burgundian wars.  It was not the first time that the tumult of men in arms had made echoes along the valley.  Matthieu and I went off together to dine.  He lent me a pin of his, a pin with a worked head, to pin my tunic with where it was torn, and he begged me to give it back to him.  But I have it still, for I have never seen him since; nor shall I see him, nor he me, till the Great Day.

THE LOOE STREAM

Of the complexity of the sea, and of how it is manifold, and of how it mixes up with a man, and may broaden or perfect him, it would be very tempting to write; but if one once began on this, one would be immeshed and drowned in the metaphysic, which never yet did good to man nor beast.  For no one can eat or drink the metaphysic, or take any sustenance out of it, and it has no movement or colour, and it does not give one joy or sorrow; one cannot paint it or hear it, and it is too thin to swim about in.  Leaving, then, all these general things, though they haunt me and tempt me, at least I can deal little by little and picture by picture with that sea which is perpetually in my mind, and let those who will draw what philosophies they choose.  And the first thing I would like to describe is that of a place called the Looe Stream, through which in a boat only the other day I sailed for the first time, noticing many things.  When St. Wilfrid went through those bare heaths and coppices, which were called the forest of Anderida, and which lay all along under the Surrey Downs, and through which there was a long, deserted Roman road, and on this road a number of little brutish farms and settlements (for this was twelve hundred years ago), he came out into the open under the South Downs, and crossed my hills and came to the sea plain, and there he found a kind of Englishman more savage than the rest, though Heaven knows there were none of them particularly refined or gay.  From these Englishmen the noble people of Sussex are descended.

Already the rest of England had been Christian a hundred years when St. Wilfrid came down into the sea plain, and found, to his astonishment, this sparse and ignorant tribe.  They were living in the ruins of the Roman palaces; they were too stupid to be able to use any one of the Roman things they had destroyed.  They had kept, perhaps, some few of the Roman women, certainly all the Roman slaves.  They had, therefore, vague memories of how the Romans tilled the land.