Tales, not poems, are written upon them now.  I hear the voices of “Them Ones,” as Irish folk impressively say of the Little People, telling me tales out of the Book Sealed, tales which in the very hearing make a man blush hotly and thrill with hopes mysterious.  Such stories as they are!  The romances of high young blood, of maidens’ winsome purity and frank disdain, of strong men who take their lives in hand and hurl themselves upon the push of pikes.  And though I cannot grasp more than a hint of the plot, yet as my feet swish through the dewy swathes of the hyacinths or crisp along the frost-bitten snow, a wild thought quickens within me into a belief, that one day I shall hear them all, and tell these tales for my very own so that the world must listen.

But as the rosy fingers of the morn melt and the broad day fares forth, the vision fades, and I who saw and heard must go and sit down to my plain saltless tale.  Once I wrote a book, every word of it, in the open air.  It was full of the sweet things of the country, so at least as they seemed to me.  I saw the hens nestle sleepily in the holes of the bank-side where the dry dust is, and so I wrote it down.  I heard the rain drum on the broad leaves over my head, and I wrote that down also.  Day after day I rose and wrote in the dawn, and sometimes I seemed to recapture a leaf or a passing glance of a chapter-heading out of the Book Sealed.  It came back to me how the girls were kissed and love was made in the days when the Book Sealed was the Book Open, and when I cared not a jot for anything that was written therein.  So as well as I could I wrote these things down in the red dawn.  And so till the book was done.

Then the day comes when the book is printed and bound, and when the critics write of it after their kind, things good and things evil.  But I that have gathered the fairy gold dare not for my life look again within, lest it should be even as they say, and I should find but withered leaves therein.  For the sake of the vision of the breaking day and the incommunicable hope, I shall look no more upon it.  But ever with the eternal human expectation, I rise and wait the morning and the final opening of the “Book Sealed.”

S.R.  Crockett.

NOTE.

I am deeply in the debt of my friend, Mr. Andrew Lang, for the ballad of ‘Kenmure’ which he has written to grace my bare boards and spice the plain fare here set out in honour of the ancient Free Province.

BOOK FIRST

ADVENTURES