Yet I cannot describe how loth I was to leave to night’s desolation the shapeless house of a child.  What fate was this that had set her to such profitless labour on the uttermost shores of “Tragedy”?  What history lay behind, past, or, as it were, never to come?  What gladness too high for earth had nearly once been hers?  Her sea-mound took strange shapes in the gloom—­light foliage of stone, dark heaviness of granite, wherein rumour played of all that restless rustling; small cries, vast murmurings from those green meadows, old as night.

I turned, even ran away, at last.  I found my boat in the gloaming where I had left her, safe and sound, except that all the doctor’s good things had been nosed and tumbled by some hungry beast in my absence.  I stood and thought vacantly of Crusoe, and pig, and guns.  But what use to delay?  I got in.

If it were true, as the excellent doctor had informed me, that seamen reported islands not far distant from these shores, chance might bear me blissfully to one of these.  And if not true ...  I turned a rather startled face to the water, and made haste not to think.  Fortune pierces deep, and baits her hooks with sceptics.  Away I went, bobbing mightily over the waves that leapt and wrestled where sea and river met.  These safely navigated, I rowed the great creature straight forward across the sea, my face towards dwindling land, my prow to Scorpio.

XVI

    Art thou pale for weariness.

    —­PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

The constellations of summer wheeled above me; and thus between water and starry sky I tossed solitary in my boat.  The faint lustre of the sultry night hung like a mist from heaven to earth.  Far away above the countries I had left perhaps for ever, the quiet lightnings played innocently in the heights.

I rowed steadily on, guiding myself by some much ruddier star on the horizon.  The pale phosphorescence on the wave, the simple sounds as of fish stirring in the water—­the beauty and wonder of Night’s dwelling-place seemed beyond content of mortality.

I leaned on my oars in the midst of the deep sea, and seemed to hear, as it were, the mighty shout of Space.  Faint and enormous beams of light trembled through the sky.  And once I surprised a shadow as of wings sweeping darkly across, star on to glittering star, shaking the air, stilling the sea with the cold dews of night.

So rowing, so resting, I passed the mark of midnight.  Weariness began to steal over me.  Between sleep and wake I heard strange cries across the deep.  The thin silver of the old moon ebbed into the east.  A chill mist welled out of the water and shrouded me in faintest gloom.  Wherefore, battling no more against such influences, I shipped my oars, made my prayer in the midst of this dark womb of Life, and screening myself as best I could from the airs that soon would be moving before dawn, I lay down in the bottom of the boat and fell asleep.