



Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer





DREAM DAYS

by Kenneth Grahame




Contents:

     THE TWENTY-FIRST OF OCTOBER
     DIES IRAE
     MUTABILE SEMPER
     THE MAGIC RING
     ITS WALLS WERE AS OF JASPER
     A SAGA OF THE SEAS
     THE RELUCTANT DRAGON
     A DEPARTURE




THE TWENTY-FIRST OF OCTOBER


In the matter of general culture and attainments, we youngsters stood on
pretty level ground. True, it was always happening that one of us would
be singled out at any moment, freakishly, and without regard to his own
preferences, to wrestle with the inflections of some idiotic language
long rightly dead; while another, from some fancied artistic tendency
which always failed to justify itself, might be told off without warning
to hammer out scales and exercises, and to bedew the senseless keys with
tears of weariness or of revolt. But in subjects common to either sex,
and held to be necessary even for him whose ambition soared no higher
than to crack a whip in a circus-ring--in geography, for instance,
arithmetic, or the weary doings of kings and queens--each would have
scorned to excel. And, indeed, whatever our individual gifts, a general
dogged determination to shirk and to evade kept us all at much the same
dead level,--a level of Ignorance tempered by insubordination.

Fortunately there existed a wide range of subjects, of healthier tone
than those already enumerated, in which we were free to choose for
ourselves, and which we would have scorned to consider education; and in
these we freely followed each his own particular line, often attaining
an amount of special knowledge which struck our ignorant elders as
simply uncanny. For Edward, the uniforms, accoutrements, colours,
and mottoes of the regiments composing the British Army had a special
glamour. In the matter of facings he was simply faultless; among
chevrons, badges, medals, and stars, he moved familiarly; he even knew
the names of most of the colonels in command; and he would squander
sunny hours prone on the lawn, heedless of challenge from bird or beast,
poring over a tattered Army List. My own accomplishment was of another
character--took, as it seemed to me, a wider and a more untrammelled
range. Dragoons might have swaggered in Lincoln green, riflemen might
have donned sporrans over tartan trews, without exciting notice or
comment from me. But did you seek precise information as to the fauna of
the American continent, then you had come to the right shop. Where and
why the bison "wallowed"; how beaver were to be trapped and wild turkeys
stalked; the grizzly and how to handle him, and the pretty pressing
ways of the constrictor,--in fine, the haunts and the habits of all that
burrowed, strutted, roared, or wriggled between the Atlantic and the
Pacific,--all this knowledge I took for my province. By the others my
equipment was fully recognized. Supposing a book with a bear-hunt in
it made its way into the house, and the atmosphere was electric with
excitement; still, it was necessary that I should first decide whether
the slot had been properly described and properly followed up, ere the
work could be stamped with full approval. A writer might have won
fame throughout the civilized globe for his trappers and his realistic
backwoods, and all went for nothing. If his pemmican were not properly
compounded I damned his achievement, and it was heard no more of.

Harold was hardly old enough to possess a special subject of his own. He
had his instincts, indeed, and at bird's-nesting they almost amounted to
prophecy. Where we others only suspected eggs, surmised possible eggs,
hinted doubtfully at eggs in the neighbourhood, Harold went straight for
the right bush, bough, or hole as if he carried a divining-rod. But this
faculty belonged to the class of mere gifts, and was not to be ranked
with Edward's lore regarding facings, and mine as to the habits of
prairie-dogs, both gained by painful study and extensive travel in those
"realms of gold," the Army List and Ballantyne.

Selina's subject, quite unaccountably, happened to be naval history.
There is no laying down rules as to subjects; you just possess them--or
rather, they possess you--and their genesis or protoplasm is rarely to
be tracked down. Selina had never so much as seen the sea; but for
that matter neither had I ever set foot on the American continent,
the by-ways of which I knew so intimately. And just as I, if set down
without warning in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, would have been
perfectly at home, so Selina, if a genie had dropped her suddenly on
Portsmouth Hard, could have given points to most of its frequenters.
From the days of Blake down to the death of Nelson (she never
condescended further) Selina had taken spiritual part in every notable
engagement of the British Navy; and even in the dark days when she had
to pick up skirts and flee, chased by an ungallant De Ruyter or Van
Tromp, she was yet cheerful in the consciousness that ere long she would
be gleefully hammering the fleets of the world, in the glorious times
to follow. When that golden period arrived, Selina was busy indeed; and,
while loving best to stand where the splinters were flying the thickest,
she was also a careful and critical student of seamanship and of
maneuver. She knew the order in which the great line-of-battle ships
moved into action, the vessels they respectively engaged, the moment
when each let go its anchor, and which of them had a spring on its cable
(while not understanding the phrase, she carefully noted the fact);
and she habitually went into an engagement on the quarter-deck of the
gallant ship that reserved its fire the longest.

At the time of Selina's weird seizure I was unfortunately away from
home, on a loathsome visit to an aunt; and my account is therefore
feebly compounded from hearsay. It was an absence I never ceased to
regret--scoring it up, with a sense of injury, against the aunt. There
was a splendid uselessness about the whole performance that specially
appealed to my artistic sense. That it should have been Selina, too,
who should break out this way--Selina, who had just become a regular
subscriber to the "Young Ladies' Journal," and who allowed herself to
be taken out to strange teas with an air of resignation palpably
assumed--this was a special joy, and served to remind me that much of
this dreaded convention that was creeping over us might be, after
all, only veneer. Edward also was absent, getting licked into shape at
school; but to him the loss was nothing. With his stern practical bent
he wouldn't have seen any sense in it--to recall one of his favourite
expressions. To Harold, however, for whom the gods had always cherished
a special tenderness, it was granted, not only to witness, but also,
priestlike, to feed the sacred fire itself. And if at the time he paid
the penalty exacted by the sordid unimaginative ones who temporarily
rule the roast, he must ever after, one feels sure, have carried inside
him some of the white gladness of the acolyte who, greatly privileged,
has been permitted to swing a censer at the sacring of the very Mass.

October was mellowing fast, and with it the year itself; full of tender
hints, in woodland and hedgerow, of a course well-nigh completed. From
all sides that still afternoon you caught the quick breathing and sob
of the runner nearing the goal. Preoccupied and possessed, Selina had
strayed down the garden and out into the pasture beyond, where, on a
bit of rising ground that dominated the garden on one side and the downs
with the old coach-road on the other, she had cast herself down to chew
the cud of fancy. There she was presently joined by Harold, breathless
and very full of his latest grievance.

"I asked him not to," he burst out. "I said if he'd only please wait a
bit and Edward would be back soon, and it couldn't matter to him, and
the pig wouldn't mind, and Edward'd be pleased and everybody'd be happy.
But he just said he was very sorry, but bacon didn't wait for nobody.
So I told him he was a regular beast, and then I came away. And--and I
b'lieve they're doing it now!"

"Yes, he's a beast," agreed Selina, absently. She had forgotten all
about the pig-killing. Harold kicked away a freshly thrown-up mole-hill,
and prodded down the hole with a stick. From the direction of Farmer
Larkin's demesne came a long-drawn note of sorrow, a thin cry and
appeals telling that the stout soul of a black Berkshire pig was already
faring down the stony track to Hades.

"D' you know what day it is?" said Selina presently, in a low voice,
looking far away before her.

Harold did not appear to know, nor yet to care. He had laid open his
mole-run for a yard or so, and was still grubbing at it absorbedly.

"It's Trafalgar Day," went on Selina, trancedly; "Trafalgar Day--and
nobody cares!"

Something in her tone told Harold that he was not behaving quite
becomingly. He didn't exactly know in what manner; still, he abandoned
his mole-hunt for a more courteous attitude of attention.

"Over there," resumed Selina--she was gazing out in the direction of the
old highroad--"over there the coaches used to go by. Uncle Thomas was
telling me about it the other day. And the people used to watch for 'em
coming, to tell the time by, and p'r'aps to get their parcels. And one
morning--they wouldn't be expecting anything different--one morning,
first there would be a cloud of dust, as usual, and then the coach would
come racing by, and then they