It was June and wind was in the tree-tops. All the world was rustling and birds were calling.

For the past seven months, since the winning of my fellowship, I had been over-working and making myself brain-sick with thought. I was twenty-three, and had arrived at “the broken-toy age” when a young man, having pulled this plaything of a universe to pieces, begins to doubt his own omniscience—his capacity to put it together. The more I sought help from philosophies, the more I came to see that they were all imperfect. No one had yet evolved a theory which had not at some point to be bridged by faith—that beautiful optimism which is nothing less than the hearsay of the heart. I was all for logic these days.

So, when I heard the June wind laughing in the trees, I tossed my books aside. I left my doubts all disorderly upon the shelves to grow dusty, and ran away. I would seek for the garden without walls. Having failed to find it in libraries, I would search for it through the open country. I had only two certainties to guide me—that I was young, and that the world was growing lovelier every day.

I came down to quaint little Ransby, perched high and red above the old sea-wall. Life was taken so much for granted there. No one inquired into its why or wherefore. Everything that happened was accepted with a quiet stoicism, as “sent from God.” When the waves rumbled on the shore, they said the sea was talking to itself. When a crew sailed out and never returned, they said “God took them.” When times were bad, they looked back and remembered how times were worse before. No one ever really died there, for in the small interests of a quiet community nothing was forgotten—all the characteristic differences and shades of personality were treasured in memory, and so the dead lived on. Life for them was an affair of compensations. “If there weren’t no partin’s, there’d be no meetin’s,” my grandmother used to say. And death was explained after the same simple fashion. Every pious Ransbyite believed that heaven would be another Ransby, with no more storms and an empty churchyard.

I traveled down from London by an afternoon train. Shortly after six we struck the Broads, or inland waterways, which now narrow into rivers, now widen into lakes, flowing sluggishly through fat marshes to the sea. On the left hand as we flashed by, one caught glimpses of the spread arms of windmills slowly turning, pumping meadows dry, or jutting above gray sedges the ochre-colored sails of wherries plodding like cart-horses from Ransby up to Norwich. Startled by the clamor of our passage, a lonely heron would spring up and float indignantly away into the distant quiet. Now we would come to a field of wheat faintly yellowing in the summer sunshine. Between green-gold stalks would flash the scarlet of the Suffolk poppy. Across the desecrated silence we hurled the grime and commotion of cities, leaving an ugly blur of gradually thinning smoke behind.

The evening glow was beginning. Picked out in gold, windows of thatched cottages and steeples of sleeping hamlets burnt for an instant splendid in the landscape. A child, warned of our approach, clambered on a stile, and waved; laborers, plodding homeward with scythes across their shoulders, halted to watch us go by. We burst as a disturbing element into the midst of these rustic lives; in our sullen hurry, they had hardly noticed us before we had vanished.

With the country fragrance of newly-mown hay there began to mingle the tar and salt of a seaport. We swayed across the tresseled bridge, where the Broads met the harbor. Ozone, smell of fish and sea-weed assailed our nostrils. Houses grew up about us. Blunt red chimneys, like misshapen thumbs, jabbed the blue of the horizon; above them tall masts of ships speared the sky. With rush and roar we invaded the ancient town, defiling its Dutch appearance of neatness, and affronting with our gadabout swagger its peaceful sense of home-abiding. We came to a standstill in the station; all was clatter and excitement.

The visitors’ season was just commencing. The platform was crowded with Londoners greeting one another. Drawn up on the other side of the platform, parallel with the train, was a line of cabbies, most of whom were standing up in their seats, shouting and gesticulating. They had a touch of the sea about them—a weatherbeaten look of jolliness.

As I got out, my eye was attracted to a little girl who was climbing down from a neighboring compartment. She was unlike any English child—she lacked the sturdy robustness. My attention was caught by the dainty faeriness of her appearance. She wore a foamy white muslin dress, cut very short, with spreading flounces of lace about it. It was caught up here and there with pink baby-bows of ribbon. Her delicate arms were bare from the elbow. She was small-boned and slender. Her skirt scarcely reached to her knees, so that nearly half her tiny height seemed to consist of legs. She had the slightness and moved with the grace of a child-dancer escaped from a ballet. But what completed her baby perfection was the profusion of flaxen curls, which streamed down from her shoulders to her waist. She saw me looking at her and laughed up with roguish frankness.

Having secured my luggage, I was pushing my way out of the station through the long line of visitors and porters, when I saw the child standing bewildered by herself. In the crowd she had become separated from whoever was taking care of her. I spoke to her, but she was crying too bitterly to answer. Setting down my bags, I tried to comfort her, saying that I would stay with her till she was found. Suddenly her face lit up and she darted from my side. I had a hurried vision of a lady pushing her way towards her. While she was stooping to take the little girl in her arms, I made off as quickly as I was able. Like my father, I detested a scene, and had a morbid horror of being thanked.

How good it was to smell the salt of the sea again. I passed up the harbor where the fishing-fleet lay moored against the quay-side, and sailormen, with hands deep in trouser-flaps, leant against whatever came handiest, pulling meditatively at short clay pipes. The business of the day was over. Folk were tenacious of their leisure in Ransby; they had a knack, peculiarly their own, of filling the evening with an undercurrent sense of gaiety. Though townsmen, they were villagers at heart. When work was done, they polished themselves up and sat outside their houses or came into the streets to exchange the news of the day. I turned from the harbor and passed down the snug quiet street in which stood the house with CARDOVER painted above the doorway.

As I approached, the bake-house boy was putting the last shutter into place against the window. I entered the darkened shop on tiptoe, picking my way through anchors, sacks of ships’ biscuit, and coils of rope, till I could peer through the glass-panel of the door into the keeping-room. I loved to surprise the little old lady with the gray corkscrew curls and rosy cheeks, so that for once she might appear undignified. But, as I peered through, I met her eyes.

“Why, Dante, my boy,” she cried, reaching up to put her arms round me, “how you have grown!”

I was always a boy to her; she would never let herself think that I had ceased to grow, for then I should have ceased to be a child.

We sat down to a typically Ransby meal, which they call high-tea. There were Ransby shrimps and Ransby bloaters on the table; everything was of local flavor, and most of it was home-made. “You can’t get things like them in Lun’non,” Grandmother Cardover said, falling back into her Suffolk dialect.

That night we talked of Sir Charles Evrard. Rumor proclaimed that Lord Halloway had finally ruined his chances’ in that direction by his latest escapade. It concerned a pretty housemaid at Woadley Hall, and the affair had actually been carried on under Sir Charles’s very nose, as one might say. The girl was the daughter of a gamekeeper on the estate and——! Well there, my Grannie might as well tell me everything!—there was going to be a baby. All that was known for certain was that Mr. Thomas, the gamekeeper—a ‘ighly respectable man, my dear—had gone up to the Hall with a whip in his hand and had asked to see Master Denny. The old Squire, hearing him at the door, had gone out to give him some instructions about the pheasantry. Mr. Thomas had given him a piece of his mind. And Sir Charles, having more than he could conveniently do with, had made a present to Denny Halloway of a bit of his mind. After which Master Denny had left hurriedly for parts unknown. It was said that he had returned to Oxford, to read for Holy Orders as a sort of atonement. It was my grandmother’s opinion that the marriage-service wasn’t much in his line.

So we rambled on, and the underlying hint of it all was that I had come to Ransby in the nick of time to make hay while the sun was shining.

“Grannie, you’ll never get me worked up over that again,” I told her.

“Well but, if his Lordship don’t inherit, who’s goin’ to?” she persisted. “I tell you, Dante, he’s got to make you his heir—he can’t help it. The whole town’s talking about it. Sir Evrard’s bailiff hisself was in here to-day and I says to him, ‘Mr. Mobbs, who’s going to be master now at Woadley Hall when the dear old Squire dies?’ And he answers me respectful-like, ‘It don’t do to be previous about such matters, Mrs. Cardover; but if you and me was to speak out our minds, I daresay we should guess the same.’ ‘Is Sir Charles as wild with Lord Halloway as folks do say?’ I asks him. Like a prudent man he wouldn’t commit hisself to words; but he throws up his hands and rolls his eyes. Now what d’you think of that? If you knew Mobbs as I know him, you’d see it was a sign which way the wind is blowing.”

I was trying to think otherwise. I had banished this expectation from my mind and wasn’t anxious to court another disappointment.

“If it happens that way, it will happen that way,” said I.

But my grandmother wasn’t in favor of such indifferent fatalism. She loved to picture me in possession of Woad-ley. She commenced to describe to me all its farmlands and broad acres. She spoke so much as if they were already mine that at last I began to dream again. So we rambled on until at five minutes to midnight the grandfather clock cleared its throat, getting ready to strike.

“Lawks-a-daisy me,” she exclaimed, “there’s that clock crocking for twelve! How you do get your poor old Grannie on talking!”

We lit our candles and climbed the narrow stairs to bed. Outside my bedroom-door she halted. I wondered what else she had to tell me. Holding her candle high, so that its light fell down upon her laughing face, she made me a mocking courtesy, saying, “Good-night, Sir Dante Card-over.”

Next morning I was up early. As I dressed I could smell the bread being carried steaming out of the bakehouse. Looking out of my window into the red-brick courtyard I could see men’s figures, white with flour-dust, going to and fro. The morning was clear and sparkling, as though washed clean by rain. The sun was dazzling and the wind was blowing. From the harbor came the creaking of sails being hoisted, and the cheery bustle of vessels getting under way. Of all places this was home. My spirits rose. I laughed, remembering the cobwebs of theories which had tangled up my brain. Nothing seemed to matter here, save the wholesome fact of being alive.

After breakfast I stepped out into the street and wandered up toward the harbor. The townsmen knew me and greeted me as I went by. I caught them looking after me with a new curiosity in their gaze. I began to wonder whether I had made some absurd mistake in my dressing. I grew uncomfortable and had an insane desire to see what kind of a spectacle my back presented. I tried to use shop-windows as mirrors, twisting my neck to catch glimpses of myself. Then there occurred to me what my grandmother had said to me on the previous night. So it was true, and all the town was talking about me!

As I approached the chemist shop at the top of the road, Fenwick, the chemist, was sunning himself in the doorway.

“Why, Mr. Cardover!” he exclaimed, stepping out on to the pavement and seizing my hand with unaccustomed effusiveness. Then, lowering his voice, “Suppose you’ve heard about Lord Halloway?”

I nodded.

“It’s lucky to be you,” he added knowingly. “But, there, I always did tell your Grannie that luck would turn your way.”

I passed on through the sunshine in a wild elation. What if it were true this time? I asked myself. What if it were really true?

Ransby is built like a bent arm, jutting out into the sea, following the line of the coast. At the extreme point of the elbow, where I was now standing, is the wooden pier, on which the visitors parade. Running from the elbow to the shoulder is the sheltered south beach and the esplanade, given up to visitors and boarding-houses. These terminate in the distance in a steep headland, on which stands the little village of Pakewold. On the other side of the pier is the harbor, entering or departing out of which fishing vessels and merchantmen may be seen almost any hour of the day. From the elbow to the finger tips, running northward, is the bleak north beach, gnawed at by the sea and bullied by every wind that blows. Here it is that most of the wrecks take place. The older portion of the town, climbing northward from the harbor, overhangs it, scarred and weather-beaten. Where the town ends, seven miles of crumbling gorse-grown cliff continue the barricade.

Separating the town from the north beach, stretch the denes—a broad strip of grassy sand, on which fishing-nets are dried. Parallel with the denes is the gray sea-wall; and beyond the wall a shingle beach, low-lying and defended at intervals by breakwaters. Here the waves are continually attacking: on the calmest day there is anger in their moan. From far away one can hear the scream of pebbles dragged down as the waves recede, the long sigh which follows the weariness of defeat, and the loud thunder as the water hurls itself in a renewed attack along the coast. On the denes stands a lighthouse, warning vessels not to come too close; for, when the east wind lashes itself into a fury, the sea leaps the wall and pours across the denes to the foot of the town, like an invading host. A vessel caught in the tide-race at such a time, is flung far inland and left there stranded when the waves have gone back to their place. Facing the denes, lying several miles out in the German Ocean, are a line of sand-banks; between them and the shore is a channel, known as the Ransby Roads, which affords safe anchorage to ............