Welsh Journals

next movement, but no, there it is again, knocking at the door of your heart and asking and begging for praise. It sings to you yet for a while, and you fancy to keep it always, but like a will o' the wisp it eludes you and dies away only to be heard once more as if from a great distance. Then as the Nocturne comes to an end, you hear that refrain, sweet, pas- -sionate, full of poetry and magic, stealing once more insidiously into your senses, until with the last notes it rings out triumphantly, as if determined that you shall hear it for ever, and think of it with joyous delight. A big burly man next took the boards, cleared his throat, and began in a deep bass voice. He sang a song, a gay song, a hunting song, a song of hill and dale, and the music of harrying hounds. He sang that there was a fox in the spinney (they say), and that it behoved us all to be up and doing, man, woman, and child, parson and squire, and old Farmer Giles. And as it was a favorite song, every- body immediately went out in thought into the open air, to the wind-swept hill tops, or the valley slopes down which the brooklets bicker, and when the time for the chorus came we roared out that we'd all go a-hunting to-day, until the rafters rang and the roosting daws fluttered uneasily. Scarcely had the burly bass-singer stepped down, when a group of small girls, shy and flushed, marched on to the platform. They were clad in white, and stood there with wide-open eyes staring at us, until the tall thin girl smiled at them from over the piano, and they all smiled back, and their stage-fright had gone. They told us (confidentially) of their Dolly, how she had been a naughty girl, but now was good, how it would soon be bed-time, for all the birds had gone to rest, and a tweeny-weeny moon was peeping through the fir-trees. Then they sang their Lullaby, a sad and plaintive melody, such indeed as a mother might well croon over a cradle when the shades of night were falling. As they sang, they turned this way and that, and gently rocked the pink dolls they had in their hands, just as if they were real little mothers, full of pride and joy. The autumn evening was fast slipping away, and it was time for me to get on. Three boys and a young man in khaki were now on the platform, singing lustily Larboard Watch," and as their stentorian voices rolled out a long-drawn Ahoy I went out quietly into the night. There was still, I found, a good seven miles for me to do before I could claim shelter, so I stepped out briskly. The new moon showed itself for a moment. It might have been the moon of which the school babes had just been singing, for it was a shy moon, casting a thin beam through the leaves and branches, and pencilling on the turn-pike a slender thread of light that seemed to move in front of me and keep me company. My thoughts strayed back to the school-room. Now it seemed strange that men and women and little children should be singing and making merry there, so that the village and parish might be able to set up a monument for those who, having lived between the moorland and the sea, would sing and make merry no more. What if it be true, I thought, as men have claimed, that the spirits of the dead come back to this world of ours, there to hover and flit about the hearths and homes and meeting places of their mortal existence. What if there had been in that little school house at the foot of the moorland unseen listeners and watchers to the talking and the singing, invisible forms peering through the half-gloom of the door- way or the subdued light of the shuttered oriels, listeners and watchers from stricken fields of France or Flanders, or from the deep green waters of far- away seas. Would they be content, I thought as I onward tramped, to know, that though their bodies had perished, the shrine with their names written in letters of gold, might keep their memory alive until the stone itself crumbled away in dust, and the voices of men and women and prattling children were heard no more between the moorland and the sea. These things I pondered as I went my way, and the tally of miles got less and less. And then, by one of those transitions of thought wlvch come to most of us at times, the village concert brought to my mind another use of the term which had been very current in the years before the Great War. Men who wrote and spoke of the nations of the west, talked much of The Concert of Europe. The phrase itself had become one of the little penny-pieces of diplomatic phraseology, a phrase or a catch-word to be used when there was need to speak complacently of the international situation. It was a phrase elevated into a sort of shibboleth, not that those who did so believed in it, but because it was con- venient and respectable to comfort oneself and others with the thought that the Great Powers were in agreement on something at least. Those who talked most about The Concert of Europe often knew best of the hollowness and sham of it all, knew of the divisions into the great armed camps, knew of the secret intrigues, the pawns of which were the blood and lives of men, the end of which was the agony and tears of widows and orphans. The wind had risen again, and as the gusts swept into my face, they brought with them a salty tang that told me the sea was near, and my journey almost at end. As I went slowly down the hill my thoughts went back with curious persistency to the village