THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD
When, once more, the exquisite mystery of spring came upon the world,
there was a not less wonderful rebirth in the heart of Ynys.
With the coming of that child upon whom such high hopes had been
set--its birth, still and quiet as a snowdrop fallen before an icy wind
upon the snow which nurtured it--all the fear of a mysterious Nemesis,
because of her union with Alan despite the shadow of tragic crime which
made that union ominous of evil destiny; all the vague forebodings
which had possessed her ever since she left Kerival; and, at the last,
all the mystic elation with which her mind had become a winged and
wandering spirit, passed from her.
The gloom of that northern winter was tonic to them both. As soon as
her weakness was past, and once more she was able to go about with
Alan, her old joyousness returned. In her eyes it was almost as though
the islanders shared her recovered happiness. For one thing, they
no more avoided her and Alan. With the death of the man who had so
long sustained a mysterious existence upon Rona, their superstitious
aversion went; they ceased to speak of _Am Buchaille Bàn_ and, whether
Donnacha Bàn had found on Rona one of the hidden ways to heaven or had
only dallied upon one of the byways to hell, it was commonly held that
he had paid his death-eric by his lonely and even appalling life of
unredeemed solitude. Now that there was no longer any possibility of
confusion between the outcast who had come to his tragic end, among the
sea caves of Rona, and his kinsman who bore to him so extraordinary a
resemblance, a deep sense of the injustice that had been done to Alan
Carmichael prevailed among the islanders. In many ways they showed
their regret; but most satisfactorily, so far as Alan was concerned, by
taking him as one of themselves; as a man no longer under the shadow
of doom or in any way linked to a disastrous fate.
True, there were still some of the isle folk on Borosay and Barra who
maintained that the man who had been found in the sea cave, whether
Donnacha Bàn or some other, had nothing to do with the mysterious
Herdsman, whose advent, indeed, had long been anticipated by a
section of the older inhabitants. It was only seven years since Murdo
Macphail--better known as Murdo-Bronnach-namhara, Brown Murdoch of
the Sea, from his habit of preaching to the islanders from where he
stood waist-deep in the water--had prophesied that the Herdsman who
was Shepherd of Israel would indeed come again, and that within seven
years. And had he not added that if the Fair Lonely One were not
accepted of the people, there would be deep sorrow for one and all, and
a bitter wrong upon all the isles of the west?
These murmurers now shook their heads and whispered often. Of a truth,
they said, the Herdsman was come as foretold, and Alan Carmichael
was blind indeed not to see that Ynys, his wife, had received a
vision, and, because of her silence, been punished in the death of her
first-born.
But with the white growth of winter, the pleasant, familiar intercourse
that everywhere prevailed wrought finally against the last threadbare
fabric of superstition. Before the glow of the peats the sadness and
gloom slowly dissipated. It was a new delight to both Alan and Ynys to
find that the islanders could be so genial and almost gay, with a love
of laughter and music and grotesque humor which, even in the blithe
little fishing haven of Ploumaliou, they had never seen surpassed.
The cold months passed for them in a quiet content. That could not be
happiness upon which was the shadow of so much pain; but there was
something akin to it in the sweet serenity which came like calm after
storm.
Possibly they might have been content to remain in Rona; to find in
the island their interest and happiness. Ynys, indeed, often longed
to leave the place where she had been so sadly disillusioned; and yet
she did not urge that the home at Caisteal-Rhona should be broken up.
While they were still in this state of quiet suspense, news came that
affected them strangely.
They had had no word from Kerival since they left, but one windy March
day a boat from Borosay put into the haven with letters from Alan's
agents in Edinburgh. Among them was one from the Abbé Cæsar de La
Bruyère, from Kerloek. From this Alan learned strange news.
* * * * *
On the very day that he and Ynys had left Kerival, Annaik had
disappeared. None knew where she had gone. At first it was thought
that Judik Kerbastiou had something to do with her absence, but two
days after she had gone he was again at Kerival. The house was a place
of anarchy. No one knew whom to obey; what to do. With the Marquise
Lois in her grave, with both Ynys and Annaik mysteriously absent and
apparently with no intention to return, and with Tristran the Silent
more morosely taciturn than his wont, and more than ever an invalid,
with all this it was difficult for those in authority to exact the
habitual duties. But in addition to this there were the imperious
claims of Judik Kerbastiou, emphasized by his refusal to be addressed
by any other name than the Sieur Jud de Kerival.
When, suddenly, and while quietly dictating a letter, the Marquis
Tristran died, it seemed at last as though Judik's triumph had come.
For a brief while he was even addressed as M. le Marquis. But on
the noon following that day he had a rude awakening. A notary from
Ploumaliou arrived with the family lawyers, and produced a written and
signed confession on the part of the woman whom he had called mother,
that he was not her child at all, that her own child was dead, and
that Kerbastiou was really a forest foundling. As if this were not
enough, the notary also proved, even to the conviction of Judik, that
the written marriage testimony from the parish books was an impudent
forgery.
So the man who had made so abrupt and dramatic an appearance on the
threshold of Kerival had, in the very moment of his triumph, to retreat
once more to his obscurity as a homeless woodlander.
The sole heirs now were Annaik and Ynys, but of neither was any thing
known. The difficulty was partially solved by the abrupt appearance of
Annaik on the day of the second conclave.
For a time thereafter all went well at Kerival. Then rumor began to
spread mysterious whispers about the Lady Annaik. She would see none of
her neighbors, whether from far or near, and even the Sieur de Morvan
and his kith or kin were denied. Then, too, she disappeared for days at
a time. Some thought she went to Ploumaliou or Kerloek, some that she
had gone as far away as Rennes or St. Brieuc, and a few even imagined
the remote Paris to be her goal. None dreamed that she had gone no
further than the forest of Kerival.
But as the autumn waned, rumors became more explicit. Strange things
were said of Annaik de Kerival. At last the anxious Curé of Ploumaliou
took it upon himself to assure all who spoke to him about the Lady of
Kerival that he had good reason to believe she was privately married.
This, at least, drew some of the poison out of the gossip that had
arisen.
Then a day came when the Lady Annaik dismissed the servants at Kerival,
and left none in the house save an old gardener and his wife. She was
going away for a time, she said. She went, and from that day was not
seen again.
Then came, in the Abbé Cæsar de La Bruyère's letter, the strangest part
of the mystery.
Annaik, ever since the departure of Alan and Ynys, had been living the
forest life. All her passionate sylvan and barbaric instincts had been
suddenly aroused. For the green woods and the forest ways she suffered
an intolerable nostalgia. But over and above this was another reason.
It seemed, said the Abbé Cæsar, that she must have returned the rude
love of Judik Kerbastiou. However this might be, she lived with him for
days at a time, and he himself had a copy of their marriage certificate
made out at a registrar's in a remote little hill-town in the Montagnes
Noires.
This union with the morose and strange Judik Kerbastiou had not been
known to any of the peasants until her trouble came to her. When the
day was near she did not return to Kerival, but kept to the gypsy tent
which she shared with Judik. After the birth of the child, every one
knew, and every one marvelled. It was a madness: that was what all
said, from Kerloek to Ploumaliou.
But neither the union nor the child brought happiness to these twain,
so much at one in their woodland life, so hopelessly alien in all else.
One day a man named Iouenn Kerbac'h, passing by the tent where Judik
and Annaik had taken shelter from a violent thunder-storm, overheard a
savage upbraiding on the part of Kerbastiou. Annaik was his wife, it
was true--so he cried--but a wife who had in nothing short of madness
renounced every thing, and now would claim nothing of her own nor allow
him to claim aught; a wife whom he loved with another madness, and yet
hated because she was so hopelessly remote from himself; a wife who
had borne a child, but a child that had nothing of the gypsy eyes and
swarthy darkness of Judik Kerbastiou, but was fair, and with skin as
white and eyes as blue as those of Alan de Kerival.
It was this, and the terrible words that were said, which made Iouenn
Kerbac'h hurry onward, dreading to listen further. Yet nothing that he
overheard gave him so strange a fear as the laugh with which Annaik
de Kerival greeted a savage, screaming threat of death, hurled at her
because of her silence after the taunting accusation he had made ...
had made, and defied her to refute.
None heard or saw Annaik Kerbastiou after that day, till the night of
the evening when Judik came into Haut-Kerloek and went straight to
Jehan Rusgol, the Maire.
When asked what he had come for he had replied simply: "The woman
Annaik is dead." It was commonly thought that he had killed her, but
there was no evidence of this, and the end of the inevitable legal
procedure was the acquittal of the woodlander. From that day the man
was rarely seen of his fellows, and even then, for the most part, only
by charcoal-burners and others who had forest business. A few peasants
knew where his hut was, and now and again called to speak with him, or
to drink a cup of cider; but oftener than not he was absent, and always
with the child. The boy had survived his mother's death, and in some
strange way had suddenly become so dear to Judik Kerbastiou that the
two were inseparable.
This, then, was the tidings which startled Alan and Ynys out of their
remote quiescence.
The unexpected news, coupled with the urgent request that both should
return to Kerival, if only for a brief while, so as to prevent the
property falling into absolute ruin, came as a whip upon Alan's mind.
To all he said Ynys agreed, and was even glad to leave Rona and return
to Brittany.
* * * * *
So it was that, with the first days of April, they bade farewell to Ian
and his sister, whom they left at Caisteal-Rhona, which was henceforth
to be their home, and to all upon the island, and set forth in a
fishing smack for Borosay.
It was not till the last of the precipices of Rona was lost to view
behind the south headland of Borosay that Ynys clearly realized the
deep gladness with which she left the lonely Isle of the Caves. That it
would have been impossible for her to live there long she was now well
assured; and for Alan, too, the life was not suitable. For the north,
and for the islands, they would ever have a deep feeling, almost sacred
in its intensity; but all that had happened made living there a thing
difficult and painful for them, and moreover each, though Ynys most,
missed that green woodland beauty, the ceaseless forest charm, which
made the very memory of Kerival so fragrant.
They went away, then, not as travellers who fare far with no thought of
return, but rather as pilgrims returning homeward from a shrine sacred
to them by profound and intimate associations.
That was, indeed, for them a strange home-going. From the first there
was something dreamlike, unreal, about that southward flight; in the
long sail across Hebrid seas, calm as glass until the south headlands
of Mull were passed, and then storm-swept; in the rapid journey across
Scotland and through England; and in the recrossing of that narrow sea
which had once seemed to them a gulf of ultimate division.
But when once more they saw the grotesque bulbous spire of Ploumaliou
rising above the sand-dunes by which, from St. Malo, they approached
the dear, familiar country, all this uncertainty went from them. With
light hearts they realized it was indeed true; that they were free at
last of a life for which they were now unfitted, and that the lost
threads in the maze had been found.
By their own wish the home-coming was so private that none knew of
it save the doctor, the Curé, the lawyer who accompanied them from
Ploumaliou, and the old gardener and his wife. As they neared the
château from the north, Alan and Ynys alighted from the dishevelled
carriage which was the sole vehicle of which Ploumaliou could boast. M.
Auriol could drive on alone; for themselves, they chose to reach their
home by the dunes and scattered pines, and thence by the yew close
behind the manor-house.
The day was windless and of a serene beauty. Ever since noon the few
clouds, suspensive in the azure flood like islets of snow, had waned
till they were faint and light as blown swan's-down, then filmy as
vapor lifted against the sun, and at last were no more visible; there
had been the same unfathomable depths of azure, through which the
tides of light imperceptibly ebbed from the zenith. The sea, too, was
of a vivid though motionless blue, save where luminous with a white
sheen or wrought with violet shadows and straits of amethyst. Upon the
land lay a golden peace. A richer glow involved the dunes, where the
pine-shadows cast long, motionless blue shapes. As, hand in hand, Ynys
and Alan moved athwart the pine glade whence they could pass at once
either westward into the cypress alley or eastward through the yew
close, they stopped instinctively. Beyond them rose the chimneys and
gables of the House of Kerival, strangely still and remote, for all
their familiar look. What a brief while ago it seemed since he and she
had walked under these pines, wrought by the first ecstasy of their
virginal love. Then, those who now lay quiet in the darkness of the
earth were alive; Lois de Kerival, with her repressed, passionate heart
still at last; the Marquis Tristran, with the young grass growing soft
and green over his bitterness; Alasdair Carmichael, with the echo of
the island waves stilled under the quiet bells of the little church
which guarded the grave-yard of St. Blaise; and Annaik--poor lost waif
of beautiful womanhood, submerged forever in the green woods she loved
so well, and sleeping so sound a sleep at last in an unmarked hollow
beneath an ancient tree in some obscure glade or alley.
A shadow was in Alan's eyes--a deeper shadow than that caused by
thought of the dead who lay heedless and listless, at once so near and
such depths away--a deeper shadow than that cast by memory of the crime
which overlay the past.
As his eyes wandered to the cypress alley, his heart knew again a
pain almost beyond endurance; a pain that only the peace of Rona had
translated into a strong acquiescence in the irrevocable past--a pain
become less haunting under the stress of all which had happened in
connection with the Herdsman, till it knew a bitter resurrection when
Alan came to read of the tragic fate of the woman who had loved him.
Through some wayward impulse Ynys abruptly asked him to go with her
through the cypress alley, so that they should approach the château
from the forest.
Silently, and with downcast eyes, he walked by her side, his hand
still in hers. But his thoughts were with the dead woman, on the
bitter hazard of love, and on what lay, forever secret, between Annaik
and himself. And as he communed with himself, in an austere pain of
remembrance, he came to see more and more clearly that in some strange
way the Herdsman episode, with all involved therein, was no arbitrary
chance in the maze of life, but a definite working out of destiny. None
could ever know what Annaik had foretold, had known, on that terrible
night when the silence of the moonlit peace was continuously rent by
the savage screams of the peacocks; nor could any other than himself
discern, against the dark tapestries of what veiled his inner life, the
weaving of an inextricable web.
It was difficult for him to believe that she was dead--Annaik, who had
always been so radiantly, superbly alive. Now there was dust upon that
wonderful bronze hair; darkness upon those lambent eyes; no swift pulse
beating in the red tide in the veins; a frost against the heart. What
a burden it had carried, poor heart! "Oh, Annaik, Annaik!" he muttered
below his breath, "what a hard wayfaring because of a passion crucified
upon the bitter tree of despair; what a fierce, silent, unwavering
tyranny over the rebellious voices crying unceasingly from every nerve,
or swept this way and that on every stormy tide of blood."
That Annaik who loved the forest so passing well, and in whom the green
fire of life flamed consumingly, should no longer be alive to rejoice
in the glory of spring, now once again everywhere involving the brown
earth and the purple branches, was an almost unrealizable thing. To
walk in that cypress alley once more; to cross that open glade with its
single hawthorn; to move in the dark green shadow of that yew close; to
do this and remember all that Annaik had suffered, and that now she lay
quiet and beyond all pain or joy to touch her, was to Alan a thought
almost too poignant to be borne.
It was with an effort he answered Ynys when she spoke, and it was in
silence that they entered the house which was now their home, and
where--years ago, as it seemed--they had been young and happy.
But that night he sat alone for a time in the little room in the tower
which rose from the east wing of Kerival--the room he had fitted up as
an observatory, similar, on a smaller scale, to that in the Tour de
l'Ile where he had so deeply studied the mystery of the starry world.
Here he had dreamed many dreams, and here he dreamed yet another.
For out of his thoughts about Annaik and Ynys arose a fuller, a deeper
conception of Womanhood. How well he remembered a legend that Ynys had
told him on Rona: a legend of a fair spirit which goes to and fro
upon the world, the Weaver of Tears. He loves the pathways of sorrow.
His voice is low and sweet, with a sound like the bubbling of waters
in that fount whence the rainbows rise. His eyes are in quiet places,
and in the dumb pain of animals as in the agony of the human brain:
but most he is found, oftenest are the dewy traces of his feet, in the
heart of woman.
Tears, tears! They are not the saltest tears which are on the lids of
those who weep. Fierce tears there are, hot founts of pain in the mind
of many a man, that are never shed, but slowly crystallize in furrows
on brow and face, and in deep weariness in the eyes; fierce tears,
unquenchable, in the heart of many a woman, whose brave eyes look
fearlessly at life; whose dauntless courage goes forth daily to die,
but never to be vanquished.
In truth the Weaver of Tears abides in the heart of Woman. O Mother of
Pity, of Love, of deep Compassion! with thee it is to yearn forever
for the ideal human; to bring the spiritual love into fusion with
human desire; endlessly to strive, endlessly to fail; always to hope
in spite of disillusion; to love unswervingly against all baffling
and misunderstanding, and even forgetfulness! O Woman, whose eyes are
always stretched out to her erring children, whose heart is big enough
to cover all the little children in the world, and suffer with their
sufferings, and joy with their joys! Woman, whose other divine names
are Strength and Patience, who is no girl, no Virgin, because she has
drunk too deeply of the fount of Life to be very young or very joyful.
Upon her lips is the shadowy kiss of death; in her eyes is the shadow
of birth. She is the veiled interpreter of the two mysteries. Yet what
joyousness like hers, when she wills; because of her unwavering hope,
her inexhaustible fount of love?
So it was that, just as Alan had long recognized as a deep truth how
the spiritual nature of man has been revealed to humanity in many
divine incarnations, so he had come to believe that the spiritual
nature of woman has been revealed in the many Marys, sisters of the
Beloved, who have had the keys of the soul and the heart in their
unconscious keeping. In this exquisite truth he knew a fresh and vivid
hope. Was it all a dream that Ynys had dreamed, far away among the
sea arcades of Rona? Had the Herdsman, the Shepherd of Souls, indeed
revealed to her that a child was to be born who would be one of the
redeemers of the world? A Woman Saviour, who would come near to all of
us, because in her heart would be the blind tears of the child, and the
bitter tears of the man, and the patient tears of the woman; who would
be the Compassionate One, with no end or aim but compassion--with no
doctrine to teach, no way to show, but only deep, wonderful, beautiful,
inalienable, unquenchable compassion?
For, in truth, there is the divine, eternal feminine counterpart to the
divine, eternal male, and both are needed to explain the mystery of the
dual Spirit within us--the mystery of the Two in One, so infinitely
stranger and more wonderful than that triune life which the blind
teachers of the blind have made a rock of stumbling and offence out of
a truth clear and obvious as noon.
We speak of Mother Nature, but we do not discern the living truth
behind our words. How few of us have the vision of this great brooding
Mother, whose garment is the earth and sea, whose head is pillowed
among the stars; she who, with Death and Sleep as her familiar shapes,
soothes and rests all the weariness of the world, from the waning leaf
to the beating pulse; from the brief span of a human heart to the
furrowing of granite brows by the uninterrupted sun, the hounds of rain
and wind, and the untrammelled airs of heaven.
Not cruel, relentless, impotently anarchic, chaotically potent, this
Mater Genetrix. We see her thus, who are flying threads in the loom she
weaves. But she is patient, abiding, certain, inviolate, and silent
ever. It is only when we come to this vision of her whom we call
Isis or Hera or Orchil, or one of a hundred other names, our unknown
Earth-Mother, that men and women will know each other aright, and go
hand in hand along the road of Life without striving to crush, to
subdue, to usurp, to retaliate, to separate.
Ah, fair vision of humanity to come! man and woman side by side, sweet,
serene, true, simple, natural, fulfilling Earth's and Heaven's behests;
unashamed, unsophisticated, unaffected, each to each and for each;
children of one mother, inheritors of a like destiny, and, at the last,
artificers of an equal fate.
Pondering thus, Alan rose and looked out into the night. In that great
stillness, wherein the moonlight lay like the visible fragrance of the
earth, he gazed long and intently. How shadowy, now, were these lives
that had so lately palpitated in this very place; how strange their
silence, their incommunicable knowledge, their fathomless peace!
Was it all lost ... the long endurance of pain, the pangs of sorrow? If
so, what was the lesson of life? Surely, to live with sweet serenity
and gladness, content against the inevitable hour. There is solace of a
kind in the idea of a common end, of that terrible processional march
of life wherein the myriad is momentary, and the immeasurable is but a
passing shadow. But, alas! it is only solace of a kind; for what heart
that has beat to the pulse of love can relinquish the sweet dream of
life, and what coronal can philosophy put upon the brows of youth in
place of eternity?
No, no! of this he felt sure. In the Beauty of the World lies the
ultimate redemption of our mortality. When we shall become at one with
nature, in a sense profounder even than the poetic imaginings of most
of us, we shall understand what now we fail to discern. The arrogance
of those who would have the stars as candles for our night, and the
universe as a pleasaunce for our thought, will be as impossible as the
blind fatuity of those who say we are of dust, briefly vitalized, that
shall be dust again, with no fragrance saved from the rude bankruptcy
of life, no beauty raised up against the sun to bloom anew.
It is no idle dream, this; no idle dream that we are a perishing clan
among the sons of God, because of this slow waning of our joy, of our
passionate delight in the Beauty of the World. We have been unable to
look out upon the shining of our star, for the vision overcomes us; and
we have used veils which we call "scenery," "picturesqueness," and the
like--poor, barren words that are so voiceless and remote before the
rustle of leaves and the lap of water; before the ancient music of the
wind, and all the sovran eloquence of the tides of light. But a day may
come--nay, shall surely come--when indeed the poor and the humble shall
inherit the earth; they who have not made a league with temporal evils,
and out of whose heart shall arise the deep longing, that shall become
universal, of the Renewal of Youth.
* * * * *
Often, in the days that followed their return to Kerival, Alan and Ynys
talked of these hopes and fears. And, gradually, out of the beauty
of the spring, out of the intensity of the green fire of life which
everywhere flamed in the brown earth, on the hills, in the waters, in
the heart and brain of man, in the whole living, breathing world, was
born of them a new joy. They were as the prince and princess of the
fairy tales, for whom every thing was wonderful. Hand in hand they
entered into the kingdom of youth. It was theirs, thenceforth; and all
the joy of the world.
To live, and love, and be full of a deep joy, a glad content, a
supporting hope! What destiny among the stars fairer than this?
They would be harbingers of joy. That was what they said, one to
another. They would be so glad with sweet life that others would
rejoice; out of their strength they would strengthen, out of their joy
they would gladden, out of their peace they would comfort, out of their
knowledge they would be compassionate.
Nor was their dream an unfulfilled vision. As the weeks slipped into
months, and the months lapsed into years, Alan and Ynys realized all
that it is possible for man and woman to know of happiness. Happiness,
duties, claims held them to Kerival; but there they lived in fair
comradeship with their fellows, with the green forest, with all that
nature had to give them for their delight through wind and wave,
through shadow and shine, through changing seasons and the exquisite
hazard of every passing hour.
To them both, too, came the added joy which they feared had been
forfeited at Rona. When Ynys felt the child's hands on her breast,
she was as one transformed by a light out of heaven. Alan, looking at
mother and child, understood, with all his passion for the intimate
wonder and mystery of nature, the deeper truth in the words of one of
the greatest of men ... "the Souls of the Living are the Beauty of the
World."
That sometimes a shadow fell was inevitable. None ever so dusked the
sun-way of Alan's mind as when, remote in the forest of Kerival, he
came upon the unkempt figure of Judik Kerbastiou, often carrying upon
his shoulder a little child whose happy laughter was sweet to hear, in
whose tawny hair was a light such as had gleamed in Annaik's, and whose
eyes were blue as the north seas and as Alan's were.
Often, too, Alan, alone in his observatory, where he was wont to
spend much of his time, knew that strange nostalgia of the mind for
impossible things. Then, wrought for a while from his vision of green
life, and flamed by another green fire than that born of the earth,
he dreamed his dream. With him, the peopled solitude of night was a
concourse of confirming voices. He did not dread the silence of the
stars--the cold remoteness of the stellar fire.
In that other watch-tower in Paris, where he had spent the best hours
of his youth, he had loved that nightly watch of the constellations.
Now, as then, in the pulse of the planets he found assurances which
Faith had not given him. In the vast, majestic order of that nocturnal
march, that diurnal retreat, he had learned the law of the whirling
leaf and the falling star; of the slow, æon-delayed comet and of the
slower wane of solar fires. Looking with visionary eyes into that
congregation of stars, he realized, not the littleness of the human
dream but its divine impulsion. It was only when, after long vigils
into the quietudes of night, he turned his gaze from the palaces of the
unknown, and thought of the baffled, fretful swarming in the cities of
men, that his soul rose in revolt against the sublime ineptitude of
man's spiritual leaguer against destiny.
Destiny--_An Dan_--it was a word familiar to him since childhood,
when first he had heard it on the lips of old Ian Macdonald. And
once, on the eve of the Feast of Paschal, when Alan had asked Daniel
Darc what was the word which the stars spelled from zenith to nadir,
the astronomer had turned and answered simply, "_C'est le Destin_."
But Alan was of the few to whom this talismanic word opens lofty
perspectives, even while it obscures those paltry vistas which we deem
unending and dignify with vain hopes and void immortalities.
THE END
Transcriber's Note
Variations in spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been retained
except in obvious cases of typographical errors.
Italics are shown thus _italic_.