THE WINDOWNot knowing precisely why it was that he wantedto disparage Shakespeare and come to the rescueof the man who stands eternally in the door ofthelift, he picked a leaf sharply from the hedge. Allthis would have to be dished up for the young menat Cardiff next month, he thought; here, on histerrace, he was merely foraging and picnicking (hethrew away the leaf that he had picked so peevishly)like a man who reaches from his horse to pick abunch of roses, or stuffs his pockets with nuts ashe ambles at his ease through the lanes and fieldsofa country known to him from boyhood. It wasall familiar; this turning, that stile, that cut acrossthe fields. Hours he would spend thus, with hispipe, of an evening, thinking up and down and inand out of the old familiar lanes and commons,which were all stuck about with the history ofthatcampaign there, the life of this statesman here,with poems and with anecdotes, with figures too,this thinker, that soldier; all very brisk and clear;but at length the lane, the field, the common, thefruitful nut-tree and the flowering hedge led himon to that further turn of the road where he dismounted always, tied his horse to a tree, andproceeded on foot alone. He reached the edgeof the lawn and looked out on the bay beneath.

It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether hewished it or not, to come out thus on a spit ofland