charmed thought away from all vain questionings; the fascination of outward things had for a while cooled the useless ardour of introspection. But it was inevitable that the bland ease of such a contemplative life should bring no enduring satisfaction to the mind; it was not an end in itself, but a mere means to serenity, a breathing-space useful to the recovery of a long-lost fortitude. The time was now come when the hunted deer, refreshed in the quiet of his inaccessible glen, was to awake to new thought of the herd, and of the duties of a common life; when the peace of successful flight was to appear in its true light as a momentary release, and no longer as the ultimate goal imagined in the anguish of pursuit.

It was during this last monsoon that doubts began to stir within, interrupting my studies of the systems of Hindu philosophy and my porings over sacred books. The vague insistence of these misgivings made me surely aware that even in this eastern paradise all was not well; but at first I refused to listen, and plunged deep into the maze of the Vedanta to escape the importunate voice. Yet anxiety came up around me like a heavy atmosphere; an indescribable sense of disillusion, clinging as a damp mist, brought its mildew to the soul, until my new heaven was overcast and my new earth dispeopled of all pleasures. Then one day the fever struck me down, and of a sudden my mind became an arena in which memories of earlier life chased one another unceasingly in the round of a delirious dance. Trivial events impressed themselves on consciousness with strange precision; objects long forgotten rose before me outlined in fire—one, a pane of stained glass in Fairford Church, with a lost soul peering in anguish through the red bars of hell. Each and every apparition was of the old life; all were emissaries from the forsaken West summoning me back to my renounced allegiance. When the fever left me, returning reason slowly brought order amid the welter of confused ideas, as the ants sorted the grain for distracted Psyche, and for the first time I considered in the detachment of reminiscence the nature of my action in leaving England. I sifted the evidence at length as I lay under the verandah slowly recovering strength; and when at last judgment was delivered, it took the necessary form of condemnation.

I saw now that unless a man is prepared to discard every western usage, to slough off his inherited cast of thought, to renounce his faith, wholly and finally to abandon his country and his father's house, his flight is but the blind expedient of cowardice or pride. Here and there may be born one who can so cut himself off from the parent stem as to endure a fruitful grafting upon an oriental stock, but I knew that I at least was none such. I was no more prepared for so uncompromising a renunciation than any other weakling who seeks prestige by parade of exotic wisdom, and deems himself a seer if he can but name the Triad, or tell the avatars of Vishnu, I had not the credulity which may justify the honest renegade, and the western blood still ran too warmly in my veins. I felt that were I to stay in the East for fifty years, I should never reach the supreme heights of metaphysical abstraction whence men really appear as specks and life as a play; therefore to remain was to avow myself a runaway and to live henceforth despicable in my own eyes. For over the unfathomable deep of oriental custom the torrent of our civilization flows unblending, as in the Druid's legend the twin streams of Dee flow clear through Bala lake, and never mingle with its waters. Not for our use is that intricate mind which in logic needs more than two premises to a conclusion, and in art is intolerant of all void space, entangling its figures in labyrinths of ornament which Maya herself might have devised to distract the sight from truth.

The Hindu has the true dignity of contemplation, and superbly removes himself from the sordid greeds of life. But in imagining and reviling an abstraction called Matter, he abides in the errors of the first Greek sages, and mines so far beneath the trodden earth that when he looks up into middle day he sees only the stars above him. Could I have shared the eremite's belief that his prayers help not merely his own solitary soul but all souls travailing through all the world, I might yet have remained where I was, an alien living indifferent to the common rule, like a monk of some shunned exotic order. But with convictions like mine, to do so would have brought the drear sense of derogation. All the miseries of the past were as nothing to that; there was but one manly course—to return and gird my loins for a new struggle with western life. Within a month from the time when this course was seen to be a duty, I was standing on the deck of a homeward-bound steamer, watching the harbour lights recede into the distance.

Back once more in England, I threw aside the clinging robe of meditation, and falling upon work ravenously, indulged what genius of energy was still alive within me. I made haste to adore all that I had so lately burned, making life objective, revering personal ideals, and in the ordinance of material things finding the truest satisfaction of all endeavour. I saw in civilization the world's sole hope; its brisk life and abounding force took sudden hold of a fancy enervated by dreams. Again I found a new heaven and a new earth, though earth was now no more than man's dinted anvil, and heaven his reservoir of useful light. I lived for action and movement; I mingled eagerly with my fellows, and cursed the folly which had driven me to waste three years in an intellectual swoon. Now the day was not long enough for work, Lebanon was not sufficient to burn. I saw the western man with race-dust on his cheeks, or throned in the power-houses of the world, moving upon iron platforms and straight ladders in the mid throb and tumult of encompassing engines. One false step, and he must fall a crushed and mutilated thing. Yet unconcerned as one strolling at large, he controlled the great wheels and plunging pistons, and brought them to a standstill with a touch of his finger. The confidence and strenuous ease of such life compelled me to marvel and admire, and I who had so lately lain at the feet of eastern sages, set up this mechanician as my god. If I looked back at all to the land of dreams, the placid figure beneath the Tree of Enlightenment took on the aspect of a fool's idol, ignobly self-manacled, pitiful and irksome in remembrance.

But if once more I dreamed of finality in change I deceived myself, forgetting that God Himself cannot unmake the past or undo what is done. A year had hardly gone by in this new apprenticeship to life, when at moments of weariness or overstrain sharp doubts shot through me and were gone again, like twinges of sudden pain recalling old disease to one who has lulled himself with dreams of cure. The feeling of fellowship with men grew weaker, and as it waned I began to shrink once more from my kind. I still believed myself happy, but happiness seemed to need constant affirmation, as though it could make no way in my favour without display of token or credential to confirm its truth. There were pauses in the clatter and jangle of life; the revolutions of the great wheels sometimes slowed into silence; and as these interludes grew more frequent, I caught myself repeating that I really was content. The faint assurance given, I flung myself with devouring industry upon my allotted task, trying to stifle the forebodings which prophesied against my peace.

In one such pause my old self appeared before me again, like the face of an ancient enemy looking