his body was dead; but he had done the next best thing and dreamed a small

tract of such countryside in the region east of the city where meadows

roll gracefully up from the sea-cliffs to the foot of the Tanarian Hills.

There he dwelt in a grey Gothic manor-house of stone looking on the sea,

and tried to think it was ancient Trevor Towers, where he was born and

where thirteen generations of his forefathers had first seen the light.

And on the coast nearby he had built a little Cornish fishing village with

steep cobbled ways, settling therein such people as had the most English

faces, and seeking ever to teach them the dear remembered accents of old

Cornwall fishers. And in a valley not far off he had reared a great Norman

Abbey whose tower he could see from his window, placing around it in the

churchyard grey stones with the names of his ancestors carved thereon, and

with a moss somewhat like Old England's moss. For though Kuranes was a

monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and marvels,

splendours and beauties, ecstasies and delights, novelties and excitements

at his command, he would gladly have resigned forever the whole of his

power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a simple boy in that

pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded

his being and of which he must always be immutably a part.

So when Carter bade that old grey chief of the cats adieu, he did not seek

the terraced palace of rose crystal but walked out the eastern gate and