for him, and the adventure achieved, all three bolted, bellowing yahoo laughter.  Then a bell began, tang, tang, tang, and here and there children appeared on their way to Sunday-school, and the chapel “teachers” went by with verjuice eyes and lips, scowling at the little boy who cried “Piper, piper!” On the main road many respectable people, the men shining and ill-fitted, the women hideously bedizened, passed in the direction of the Independent nightmare, the stuccoed thing with Doric columns, but on the whole life was stagnant.  Presently Lucian smelt the horrid fumes of roast beef and cabbage; the early risers were preparing the one-o’clock meal, but many lay in bed and put off dinner till three, with the effect of prolonging the cabbage atmosphere into the late afternoon.  A drizzly rain began as the people were coming out of church, and the mothers of little boys in velvet and little girls in foolishness of every kind were impelled to slap their offspring, and to threaten them with father.  Then the torpor of beef and beer and cabbage settled down on the street; in some houses they snorted and read the Parish Magazine, in some they snored and read the murders and collected filth of the week; but the only movement of the afternoon was a second procession of children, now bloated and distended with food, again answering the summons of tang, tang, tang.  On the main road the trams, laden with impossible people, went humming to and fro, and young men who wore bright blue ties cheerfully haw-hawed and smoked penny cigars.  They annoyed the shiny and respectable and verjuice-lipped, not by the frightful stench of the cigars, but because they were cheerful on Sunday.  By and by the children, having heard about Moses in the Bulrushes and Daniel in the Lion’s Den, came straggling home in an evil humor.  And all the day it was as if one a grey sheet grey shadows flickered, passing by.

And in the rose-garden every flower was a flame!  He thought in symbols, using the Persian imagery of a dusky court, surrounded by white cloisters, gilded by gates of bronze.  The stars came out, the sky glowed a darker violet, but the cloistered wall, the fantastic trellises in stone, shone whiter.  It was like a hedge of may-blossom, like a lily within a cup of lapis-lazuli, like sea-foam tossed on the heaving sea at dawn.  Always those white cloisters trembled with the lute music, always the garden sang with the clear fountain, rising and falling in the mysterious dusk.  And there was a singing voice stealing through the white lattices and the bronze gates, a soft voice chanting of the Lover and the Beloved, of the Vineyard, of the Gate and the Way.  Oh! the language was unknown; but the music of the refrain returned again and again, swelling and trembling through the white nets of the latticed cloisters.  And every rose in the dusky air was a flame.