“It will give you ideas, Harding; you will write better.”

Harding shook his head, for it did not seem to him to be his destiny to relieve the tedium of a yachting excursion in the Mediterranean.

V

“One cannot yacht in the Baltic or in the Gulf of Mexico,” Owen said, and he went to the Mediterranean again to sail about the AEgean Islands, wondering if he should land, changing his mind, deciding suddenly that the celebrated site he was going to see would not interest him.  He would stand watching the rocky height dying down, his eyes fixed on the blue horizon, thinking of some Emperor’s palace amid the Illyrian hills, till, acting on a sudden impulse, he would call an order to the skipper, an order which he would countermand next day.  A few days after the yacht would sail towards the Acropolis as though Owen had intended to drop anchor in the Piraeeus.  But he was too immersed in his grief, he thought, to be able to give his attention to ruins, whether Roman or Greek.  All the same, he would have to decide if he would return to the islands.  He did not know them all; he had never been to Samos, famous for its wine and its women....  The wine cloyed the palate and no woman charmed him in the dance; and he sailed away wondering how he might relieve the tedium of life, until one day, after long voyaging, sufficiently recovered from his grief and himself, he leaned over the taffrail, this time lost in admiration of the rocks and summits above Syracuse, the Sicilian coasts carrying his thoughts out of the present into the past, to those valleys where Theocritus watched his “visionary flocks.”

“‘His visionary flocks,’” he repeated, wondering if the beautiful phrase had floated accidentally into his mind, hoping that it was his own, and then abandoning hope, for he had nearly succeeded in tracing the author of the phrase; but there was a vision in it more intense than Tennyson’s.  “Visionary flocks!” For while the shepherds watched Theocritus dreamed the immortal sheep and goats which tempt us for an instant to become shepherds; but Owen knew that the real flocks would seem unreal to him who knew the visionary ones, so he turned away from the coasts without a desire in his heart to trouble the shepherds in the valley with an offer of his services, and walked up and down the deck thinking how he might obtain a translation of the idyls.

“Sicily, Sicily!”

It was unendurable that his skipper should come at such a moment to ask him if he would like to land at Palermo; for why should he land in Sicily unless to meet the goatherd who in order to beguile Thyrsis to sing the song of Daphnis told him that “his song was sweeter than the music of yonder water that is poured from the high face of the rock”?  It was in Sicily that rugged Polyphemus, peering over some cliffs, sought to discern Galatea in the foam; but before Owen had time to recall the myth an indenture