So we passed out beneath the archway.  Grey Sultan stood outside, and as I mounted him the gate clashed behind. . . .

IV

I turned as it clashed.  And the gate was just the lodge-gate of Sevenhays.  And Grey Sultan was trampling the gravel of our own drive.  The morning sun slanted over the laurels on my right, and while I wondered, the stable clock struck eight.

The rest I leave to you; nor shall try to explain.  I only know that, vision or no vision, my soul from that hour has gained a calm it never knew before.  The sufferings of my fellows still afflict me; but always, if I stand still and listen, in my own room, or in a crowded street, or in a waste spot among the moors, I can hear those waters moving round the world—­moving on their “priest-like task “—­those lustral divine tears which are Oceanus.

THE SEVENTH MAN.

In a one-roomed hut, high within the Arctic Circle, and only a little south of the eightieth parallel, six men were sitting—­much as they had sat, evening after evening, for months.  They had a clock, and by it they divided the hours into day and night.  As a matter of fact, it was always night.  But the clock said half-past eight, and they called the time evening.

The hut was built of logs, with an inner skin of rough match-boarding, daubed with pitch.  It measured seventeen feet by fourteen; but opposite the door four bunks—­two above and two below—­took a yard off the length, and this made the interior exactly square.  Each of these bunks had two doors, with brass latches on the inner side; so that the owner, if he chose, could shut himself up and go to sleep in a sort of cupboard.  But as a rule, he closed one of them only—­that by his feet.  The other swung back, with its brass latch showing.  The men kept these latches in a high state of polish.

Across the angle of the wall, to the left of the door, and behind it when it opened, three hammocks were slung, one above another.  No one slept in the uppermost.

But the feature of the hut was its fireplace; and this was merely a square hearth-stone, raised slightly above the floor, in the middle of the room.  Upon it, and upon a growing mountain of soft grey ash, the fire burned always.  It had no chimney, and so the men lost none of its warmth.  The smoke ascended steadily and spread itself under the blackened beams and roof-boards in dense blue layers.  But about eighteen inches beneath the spring of the roof there ran a line of small trap-doors with sliding panels, to admit the cold air, and below these the room was almost clear of smoke.  A newcomer’s eyes might have smarted, but these men stitched their clothes and read in comfort.  To keep the up-draught steady they had plugged every chink and crevice in the match-boarding below the trap-doors with moss, and payed the seams with pitch.  The fire they fed from a stack of drift and wreck wood piled to the right of the door, and fuel for the fetching strewed the frozen beach outside—­whole trees notched into lengths by lumberers’ axes and washed thither from they knew not what continent.  But the wreck-wood came from their own ship, the J.  R. MacNeill, which had brought them from Dundee.