sudden blaze and illumination as the fire was poked up so that it might be cheerful for father; these trivial and common things were acutely significant.  They brought back to him the image of a dead boy—­himself.  They recalled the shabby old “parlor” in the country, with its shabby old furniture and fading carpet, and renewed a whole atmosphere of affection and homely comfort.  His mother would walk to the end of the drive and look out for him when he was late (wandering then about the dark woodlands); on winter evenings she would make the fire blaze, and have his slippers warming by the hearth, and there was probably buttered toast “as a treat.”  He dwelt on all these insignificant petty circumstances, on the genial glow and light after the muddy winter lanes, on the relish of the buttered toast and the smell of the hot tea, on the two old cats curled fast asleep before the fender, and made them instruments of exquisite pain and regret.  Each of these strange houses that he passed was identified in his mind with his own vanished home; all was prepared and ready as in the old days, but he was shut out, judged and condemned to wander in the frozen mist, with weary feet, anguished and forlorn, and they that would pass from within to help him could not, neither could he pass to them.  Again, for the hundredth time, he came back to the sentence:  he could not gain the art of letters and he had lost the art of humanity.  He saw the vanity of all his thoughts; he was an ascetic caring nothing for warmth and cheerfulness and the small comforts of life, and yet he allowed his mind to dwell on such things.  If one of those passers-by, who walked briskly, eager for home, should have pitied him by some miracle and asked him to come in, it would have been worse than useless, yet he longed for pleasures that he could not have enjoyed.  It was as if he were come to a place of torment, where they who could not drink longed for water, where they who could feel no warmth shuddered in the eternal cold.  He was oppressed by the grim conceit that he himself still slept within the matted thicket, imprisoned by the green bastions of the Roman fort.  He had never come out, but a changeling had gone down the hill, and now stirred about the earth.

Beset by such ingenious terrors, it was not wonderful that outward events and common incidents should abet his fancies.  He had succeeded one day in escaping from the mesh of the streets, and fell on a rough and narrow lane that stole into a little valley.  For the moment he was in a somewhat happier mood; the afternoon sun glowed through the rolling mist, and the air grew clearer.  He saw quiet and peaceful fields, and a wood descending in a gentle slope from an old farmstead of warm red brick.  The farmer was driving the slow cattle home from the hill, and his loud halloo to his dog came across the land a cheerful mellow note.  From another side a cart was approaching the clustered barns, hesitating, pausing while the great horses rested, and then starting again