eager frankness, even impatience, with long, slim, straight limbs and close-curled hair.  I knew him to be the sort of being that painters and poets had been feeling after when they represented or spoke of angels.  And I could not help laughing outright at the thought of the meek, mild, statuesque draped figures, with absurd wings and depressing smiles, that encumbered pictures and churches, with whom no human communication would be possible, and whose grave and discomfiting glance would be fatal to all ease or merriment.  I recognised in Amroth a mirthful soul, full of humour and laughter, who could not be shocked by any truth, or hold anything uncomfortably sacred—­though indeed he held all things sacred with a kind of eagerness that charmed me.  Instead of meeting him in dolorous pietistic mood, I met him, I remember, as at school or college one suddenly met a frank, smiling, high-spirited youth or boy, who was ready at once to take comradeship for granted, and walked away with one from a gathering, with an outrush of talk and plans for further meetings.  It was all so utterly unlike the subdued and cautious and sensitive atmosphere of devotion that it stirred us both, I was aware, to a delicious kind of laughter.  And then came a swift interchange of thought, which I must try to represent by speech, though speech was none.

“I am glad to find you, Amroth,” I said.  “I was just beginning to wonder if I was not going to be lonely.”

“Ah,” he said, “one has what one desires here; you had too much to see and learn at first to want my company.  And yet I have been with you, pointing out a thousand things, ever since you came here.”

“Was it you,” I said, “that have been showing me all this?  I thought I was alone.”

At which Amroth laughed again, a laugh full of content.  “Yes,” he said, “the crags and the sunset—­do you not remember?  I came down with you, carrying you like a child in my arms, while you slept; and then I saw you awake.  You had to rest a long time at first; you had had much to bear—­uncertainty—­that is what tires one, even more than pain.  And I have been telling you things ever since, when you could listen.”

“Oh,” I said, “I have a hundred things to ask you; how strange it is to see so much and understand so little!”

“Ask away,” said Amroth, putting an arm through mine.

“I was afraid,” I said, “that it would all be so different—­like a catechism ‘Dost thou believe—­is this thy desire?’ But instead it seems so entirely natural and simple!”

“Ah,” he said, “that is how we bewilder ourselves on earth.  Why, it is hard to say!  But all the real things remain.  It is all just as surprising and interesting and amusing and curious as it ever was:  the only things that are gone—­for a time, that is—­are the things that are ugly and sad.  But they are useful too in their way, though you have no need to think of them now.  Those are just the discipline, the training.”