waves and slowly climbing the air.  What did it mean?  Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawk-like man flying sunward above the sea, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impalpable imperishable being?

His heart trembled; his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he was soaring sunward.  His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight.  His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit.  An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs.

—­One!  Two!...  Look out!

—­Oh, Cripes, I’m drownded!

—­One!  Two!  Three and away!

—­The next!  The next!

—­One!...  Uk!

—­Stephaneforos!

His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds.  This was the call of life to his soul not the dull gross voice of the world of duties and despair, not the inhuman voice that had called him to the pale service of the altar.  An instant of wild flight had delivered him and the cry of triumph which his lips withheld cleft his brain.

—­Stephaneforos!

What were they now but cerements shaken from the body of death—­the fear he had walked in night and day, the incertitude that had ringed him round, the shame that had abased him within and without—­ cerements, the linens of the grave?

His soul had arisen from the grave of boyhood, spurning her grave-clothes.  Yes!  Yes!  Yes!  He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable.

He started up nervously from the stone-block for he could no longer quench the flame in his blood.  He felt his cheeks aflame and his throat throbbing with song.  There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth.  On!  On! his heart seemed to cry.  Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces.  Where?

He looked northward towards Howth.  The sea had fallen below the line of seawrack on the shallow side of the breakwater and already the tide was running out fast along the foreshore.  Already one long oval bank of sand lay warm and dry amid the wavelets.  Here and there warm isles of sand gleamed above the shallow tide and about the isles and around the long bank and amid the shallow currents of the beach were lightclad figures, wading and delving.