disaster; we were tossed about the boiling water like bubbles;
incredible masses of water flowed over us, warm and strong, in a few
seconds, and we came out of the roaring pool so beaten and thrashed by
the violence of the stream that every nerve quivered. Breakfast was a
great occasion after these adventures. Then came a stroll round our
small estate, and an hour or so over books. Matthew Arnold's _Thyrsis_
was a favourite poem with us all on these mornings. It breathed the
very spirit of the life we lived, but for its sadness--this we did not
feel. But we did appreciate its wonderfully exact and beautiful
interpretation of Nature, and we had but to look around us to see the
very picture Arnold painted when he wrote:


Soon will the high midsummer pomps come on,
Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
Sweetwilliam with his homely cottage smell,
And stocks in fragrant blow:
Roses that down the alley shine afar,
And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,
And groups under the dreaming garden trees,
And the full moon, and the white evening star.


Such was the life we lived. If we looked back at all to the life we
had left, it was with that sort of sick horror which a prisoner may
feel who has endured and survived a long term of imprisonment. It
seemed to us that we had never really lived before. The past was a
dream, and an evil dream. We had moved in a world of bad enchantment,
like phantoms, barely conscious of ourselves. We had now recovered