As
the late darkness deepened, my literary tapers beaconed forth more
brightly; thicker and thicker came the dusty night-fliers, to
gyrate for one brilliant instant round the flame and fall in
agonies upon my paper. Flesh and blood could not endure the
spectacle; to capture immortality was doubtless a noble enterprise,
but not to capture it at such a cost of suffering; and out would go
the candles, and off would I go to bed in the darkness raging to
think that the blow might fall on the morrow, and there was VOCES
FIDELIUM still incomplete. Well, the moths are - all gone, and
VOCES FIDELIUM along with them; only the fool is still on hand and
practises new follies.
Only one thing in connection with the harbour tempted me, and that
was the diving, an experience I burned to taste of. But this was
not to be, at least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a
change of scene to the sub-arctic town of Wick. You can never have
dwelt in a country more unsightly than that part of Caithness, the
land faintly swelling, faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow,
the fields divided by single slate stones set upon their edge, the
wind always singing in your ears and (down the long road that led
nowhere) thrumming in the telegraph wires.
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