Part 11

The third, at least, that we had either seen or heard of. These varied records of the hero's last resting-place remind one of the three heads, said to be still extant, of Oliver Cromwell, one when he was a little boy, one as a young man, and the third as an old man.

But after all my last and vividest recollection of King Arthur's country is that wild sail--so wild that I wished I had taken it alone--in the solitary boat, up and down the tossing waves in face of Tintagel rock; the dark, iron-bound coast with its awful caves, the bright sunshiny land, and ever-threatening sea. Just the region, in short, which was likely to create a race like that which Arthurian legend describes, full of passionate love and deadly hate, capable of barbaric virtues, and equally barbaric crimes. An age in which the mere idea of such a hero as that ideal knight

"Who reverenced his conscience as his God: Whose glory was redressing human wrong: Who spake no slander, no, nor listened to it: Who loved one only, and who clave to her--"

rises over the blackness of darkness like a morning star.

If Arthur could "come again"--perhaps in the person of one of the descendants of a prince who was not unlike him, who lived and died among us in this very nineteenth century--

"Wearing the white flower of a blameless life--"

if this could be--what a blessing for Arthur's beloved England!

L'ENVOI

Written more than a year after. The "old hen" and her chickens have long been safe at home. A dense December fog creeps in everywhere, choking and blinding, as I finish the history of those fifteen innocent days, calm as autumn, and bright as spring, when we three took our Unsentimental Journey together through Cornwall. Many a clever critic, like Sir Charles Coldstream when he looked into the crater of Vesuvius, may see "nothing in it"--a few kindly readers looking a little further, may see a little more: probably the writer only sees the whole.

But such as it is, let it stay--simple memorial of what Americans would call "a good time," the sunshine of which may cast its brightness far forward, even into that quiet time "when travelling days are done."

THE END.

LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, BREAD STREET HILL, E.C.