8

LODGE NIGHT.

The summons sounding out over the garden and fields brings,
on most week-day evenings, no immediate response, ensuring at the
best a gradual assemblage of the band of workers; even in the depth
of winter-time when the signal speaks of logs blazing in the wide
ingle and of the curtained pleasantness of lamplight upon a decked
table. For the relinquishment of the outside world for the night
means that every fire must be visited, clinker raked out and the
fresh fuel piled and banked. Doors and ventilators are best looked
to now while one has one's lantern, to save a slippered pilgrimage
later on, for though the night seem fair, wind and rain may come,
from one hour to another, out of the sea. And then, at the last
moment, the pressure of work lifted, there comes a lingering, a sudden
sense that the day of laborious hours, softening away already to a
harmony, must be relinquished. The sanctuary of work, the shelter
of vinery or peach-house, of potting and chaff-cutting sheds once
abandoned, there is nothing for it but to make one's way to the house,
pass the redoubtable boundary line and commit oneself with what heart
one may to the confinement of the shuttered evening where each must,
at last, play his part unsupported, weathering through the hours
until the opening of the harbour of darkness.

There are, it is true, during the long stillness of the year,
outstanding evenings - marking the passage of the season up to the
high dividing ridge of Christmas, and on again to the April slackening

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of hearth ties - occasions diffuse and impersonal, refuges and distractions. There are "lectures", luminosities introduced with due heralding and ceremony from unknown space, full of disturbing interest. There are "entertainments" and concerts mysteriously "got up" and administered from above. These visitations, however, welcome though they be and scattered sometimes all too sparsely through the long months, are alien, and must be approached with watchful reserve.

But there is, standing between the security of these public ceremonials and the perpetual exposure of home, a weekly festival which none need fear - a continual set-off against private and personal failure - running its course from the opening gathering for "election of officers" through "musicals", and "museum nights" through business evenings, "open socials" conjuring night, and half-pound night, through "Brothers Entertain", "Sisters Surprise", and "Married Members Responsible", to its regretted end. Every hour of the day which brings Lodge Night bears in the homestead on the side of the hill some impress of the occasion. For the entire household is involved. The evening feast is spread with an unfailing promptness, and before the tea is drawn the out-door folk are there in holiday mood. Each one stands, for to-night, beyond the habitual level. Each shows sharply as himself and, ever, as more than one had known. Your neighbour is no longer your accustomed year-long neighbour. He has resources as wide as the world.

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The quiet urgency decking the little feast grows as the appointed time draws near to a pleasant sense of bustle. There is hurrying to and fro, a running up and down, challenges and reminders sound from room to room, and the old house is full of lively stirring until at last all have set out and the rapid following footsteps of the little serving-maid who stayed to "clear" are pattering down the hard roadway. You may fasten the door now and turn back into the empty room. The lamplight throws an unimpeded radiance, shining back from polished wood and metal, picturing the quiet interior upon the gleaming glass panels of the old bookcase. In the deep ingle the piled wood glows like a furnace, without a flicker. Near by, the faded blunt-nose bellows stand propped against the trug of sappy logs. Here, for the evening, at the heart of the old house amidst the sleeping garden girt by sleeping fields, you may make surrender and wait upon the silence. Outside the parlour door, the stillness hangs along the half-lit passage-way brooding thick against the sheen of the rearward window drapery. Away above you are dim chambers, room beyond room - rich with the gloom of curtained moonlight. From an uncovered dormer in a high gable there pours a sharp-edged pool of silver light upon the wooden flooring. The downward fading radiance is caught by white portrait faces shining out along the stairway.

Away in the warm kitchen under the black beams of the low ceiling, the uneven flags grow dark beneath the sinking firelight; and all about the house the ancient walls breathe a faint mouldering.

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It stands along passages and hangs upon the air of fireless rooms,
it meets you, rich and chill, at the door of the dim wide store-
room, and will enfold you if you enter and will join, when you are
still, with faint sounds of stirring life from the garnered wealth,
will mingle with the scent of the sweet rank apples ranged upon
the stone floor, and the fragrance of the bunched herbs hanging
from the rafters. Even in the warm living-room it may be found,
at last, by tranquil senses, fugitive, coming and going, taking
you back among the years telling how, ever, upon the tumult of joy
and sorrow, quiet hours have laid their gentle hands and peace,
slow-dropping, fold upon fold, has wrapped the well-loved place.
The passage of the quiet hours brings old scenes to rise and shift,
to stand serene and clear, to interweave and fade. Under an ever-
smiling sky lies an unbounded garden where summer reigns and bees
sing ever in the bright hot sunlight over banks of dazzling
blossoms. A pathway, long and smooth, bordered with masses of
starry flowers, an alley of sweet air, stretches along between
lines of sacred rose trees, and leads at last into a green para-
dise, distant and shifting - now a maze of apple-bloom, a glory
above the clean tree boles standing sharp upon the sprouting
sward - now long ripe grass in broken shadows, the play of sunlight
through the forest of leaves, and shining from the heavy branches
the magic globes of fruit.

... An ever rippling tide pouring, dancing, over low

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brown rocks at sunset-time, leaving lines of glistening foam along
the golden ridges, pouring on and up over the sands, sweeping
through the sand pools, washing away their stillness, their gleam-
ing rose and sapphire, their soft emerald and purple gray....
Over rugged northern heights cold dawn rises. Little wispy threads
break from the mist dense banked in the hollows, curl upwards over
the dark looming breast of the fell and vanish towards the day....
The logs stir and settle, sending a scatter of ash flakes over the
tiled hearth. A fresh blaze must be made, for down in the village
the festival is at an end, and soon upon the garden path will come
the good sound of returning feet.