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The shining levels and the dazzled wave
Emerging from his covert, errant long,
In solitude descending by a vale
Lost between uplands, where the harvesters
Pause in the swathe, shading their eyes to watch
Some barge or schooner stealing up from sea;
Themselves in sunset, she a twilit ghost
Parting the twilit woods . .

Ah, loving God!
Grant, in the end, this world may slip away
With whisper of that water by the bows
Of such a bark, bearing me home–thy stars
Breaking the gloom like kingfishers, thy heights
Golden with wheat, thy waiting angels there
Wearing the dear rough faces of my kin!

I doubt if he meant it, any more than Virgil meant his “flumina amem silvasque inglorius.” At any rate, the public knew what was due to itself, and when the time came, gave the man a handsome funeral in Westminster Abbey. Among his pall-bearers walked the Prime Minister, the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the Royal Academy of Arts, and (as representing rural life) the Chief Secretary of Foreign Affairs.

What else disturbed the placid current of Master Simon’s cogitations? Why, this: he was the last of his race, and unmarried.

For himself, he had no inclination to marry. But sometimes, as he shaved his chin of a morning, the reflection in his round mirror would suggest another. Was he not neglecting a public duty?

Now there dwelt down at Ponteglos a Mistress Prudence Waddilove, a widow, who kept the “Pandora’s Box” Inn on the quay–a very tidy business. Master Simon had known her long before she married the late Waddilove; had indeed sat on the same form with her in infants’ school–she being by two years his junior, but always a trifle quicker of wit. He attended her husband’s funeral in a neighbourly way, and, a week later, put on his black suit again and went down–still in a neighbourly way–to offer his condolence. Mistress Prudence received him in the best parlour, which smelt damp and chilly in comparison with the little room behind the bar. Master Simon remarked that she must be finding it lonely. Whereupon she wept.

Master Simon suggested that he, for his part, had tried pigeon-breeding, and found that it alleviated solitude in a wonderful manner. “There’s my tumblers. If you like, I’ll bring you down a pair. They’re pretty to watch. Of course, a husband is different–“

“Of course,” Mistress Prudence assented, her grief too recent to allow a smile even at the picture of the late Waddilove (a man of full habit) cleaving the air with frequent somersaults. She added, not quite inconsequently:

“He is an angel.”

“Of course,” said Master Simon, in his turn.

“But I think,” she went on, quite inconsequently, “I would rather have a pair of carriers.”

“Now, why in the world?” wondered Master Simon. He kept carrier pigeons, to be sure. He kept pigeons of every sort–tumblers, pouters, carriers, Belgians, dragons . . . the subdivisions, when you came to them, were endless. But the carriers were by no means his show-birds. He kept them mainly for the convenience of Ann the cook. Ann had a cunning eye for a pigeon, and sometimes ventured a trifle of her savings on a match; and though in his masculine pride he never consulted her, Master Simon always felt more confident on hearing that Ann had put money on his bird. Now, when a match took place at some distant town or flying-ground, Ann would naturally be anxious to learn the result as quickly as possible; and Master Simon, finding that the suspense affected her cookery, had fallen into the habit of taking a hamper of carriers to all distant meetings and speeding them back to “Flowing Source” with tidings of his fortune. Apart from this office–which they performed well enough–he took no special pride in them. The offer of a pair of his pet tumblers, worth their weight in gold, had cost him an effort; and when Mistress Prudence, ordinarily a clear-headed woman, declared that she preferred carriers, she could hardly have astonished him more by asking for a pair of stock-doves.