decline, through the outskirts of a bustling, seaport town.  It had all the interest and curiosity of life.  Crowded warehouses, swinging up straw-packed crates into projecting penthouses; steamers with red-stained funnels, open-mouthed tubes, gangways, staircase heads, dangling boats, were moored by bustling wharves.  One could not divine the use of half the strangely shaped objects with which the scene was furnished, or what the business could be of all the swarming and hurrying figures.  Deep sea-horns blew and whistles shrilled, orders were given, hands waved.  It was life at its fullest and busiest, but it was life demanding and enforcing its claim and concealing its further purposes.  It was just a glimpse of something full of urgent haste, but pleasanter to watch than to mix with; then we passed through a wilderness of little houses, street after street, yard after yard.  Presently we were rushing away from it all past a lonely sea-creek that ran far up into the low-lying land.  That had a more silent life of its own; old dusky hulks lay at anchor in the channel; the tide ebbed away from mudflats and oozy inlets, the skeletons of worn-out boats stood up out of the weltering clay.  Gradually, as the sun went down among orange stains and twisted cloud-wreaths, the creek narrowed and beyond lay a mysterious promontory with shadowy woods and low bare pasture-lands, with here and there a tower standing up or a solitary sea-mark, or a hamlet of clustered houses by the water’s edge, while the water between grew paler and stiller, reflecting the wan green of the sky.  It is not easy to describe the effect of this scene, thus magically transfigured, upon the mind; but it is a very real and distinct emotion, though its charm depends upon the fact that it shifts the reality of the world to a further point, away from the definite shapes and colours, the tangible and visible relations of things, which become for an instant like a translucent curtain through which one catches a glimpse of a larger and more beautiful reality.  The specific hopes, fears, schemes, designs, purposes of life, suddenly become an interlude and not an end.  They do not become phantasmal and unreal, but they are known for a brief moment as only temporary conditions, which by their hardness and sharpness obscure a further and larger life, existing before they existed, and extending itself beyond their momentary pact and influence.  All that one is engaged in busily saying and doing and enacting is seen in that instant to be only as a ripple on a deep pool.  It does not make the activities of life either futile or avoidable; it only gives the mystical sense, that however urgent and important they may seem, there is something further, larger, greater, beyond them, of which they are a real part, but only a part.