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Yes, even before the fifteenth of March these terrific ocean waves had disturbed the cormorants at St. Audrie's Bay and scattered the gulls at Black Rock, at Blue Ben, and at Quantock's Head. The dwellers at Kilve Chantry had grown uneasy: and from Benhole to Wick Moor, and from Stert Flats to the mouth of the River Parrett, and over Bridgewater Bar to Gore Sand there were wild gusts of ragged wings and shrieking sea cries and vague sobbings and lappings and murmurs in the night; and all this under a moon that continued growing larger and larger, until it reached a size that seemed pregnant with terrifying events. The mouths of the Parrett and the Brue are not far from each other, opposite Stert Island, and the whole seven miles from Otterhampton to Mark's Causeway, across PawTlett Level and Huntspill Level, inland from Highbridge and Burnham, are intersected with dams and sluices and weirs, holding back the sea floods. From Huntspill Level to Glastonhury cannot be much more than eight miles' distance, as the crowT flies, and it is across these eight miles that the waters of the Channel wTould flow—for it is all beneath sea-level—if those dykes, as they had done at least once in the memory of living men, should yield to the rising of the tides.

Of all mortal senses the sense of smell carries the human soul back the farthest in its long psychic pilgrimage; and by these far-drawn channel airs and remote sea odours the inmost souls of many dwellers in northwest Somerset must have been roused, during those weeks of March. It is the old recurrent struggle with the elements, as the sense of these things reaches the spirit -by the sharp sudden poignance of smell, that brings one age of human life into contact with another. There is a comfort in these continuities and a feeling of mysterious elation, but strange forebodings, too, and uneasy warnings. That hidden wanderer, incarnated in our temporary flesh and blood, that so many times before—centuries and aeons before—has smelt deep-sea seaweed and sun-bleached driftwood and the ice-cold chills of Arctic seas, sinks *lown upon such far-off memories, as upon the stern of a voyaging ship, and sees, as if in a dream, the harbours and the islands of its old experience.

Thus as these unnatural tides under this unusual moon gathered and rose out of the Western Channel, feelings that had not come to the population of those places for many a long year caught them unawares, as they went to and fro about their business, and disturbed them with thoughts “beyond the reaches of their souls.”

But the people of Glastonbury that year—especially the ones with whom the reader has most to do in this present narration— were so preoccupied with the exciting public events of that epoch that they gave little heed to these “airy syllables.” The humbler people, especially, continued to buy and sell, as the new fashion dictated, much as their fathers had done before in their fashion, without paying any attention to these fleeting intimations drawn forth from the recesses of their beings by these ocean smells, smells so soul-piercing and so mysterious, following the waxing of this portentous moon.

Meanwhile the strangely constituted Glastonbury commune— a little microcosmic state within the historic kingdom of England —continued to function in its own queer, unprecedented manner. The London newspapers had grown recently a little weary of this nine days' wonder and the various protracted lawsuits, evoked by the small commune's interferences with private property, excited much less attention than they had done a couple of months before, when the thing began.

Philip Crow no longer required the protection of the Taunton police for his non-union labourers, brought into Wookey from Bristol and Birmingham; and all the various legal actions that he had initiated against this new tiny state—this microscopic imperium in imperio—were dragging on in the London courts without doing anything to change the curious status quo at Glastonbury. Both his new road, however, proudly skirting Mr. Twig's fields, and his great new bridge, proudly disregarding the ancient Bridge Perilous, were growing towards completion. Of solid cement the new road was, and the new bridge was of solid steel, and the chief troubles that still spasmodically arose were wordy battles—mounting sometimes to fisticuffs and the throwing of# stones—between the Glastonbury mob and the men hired by Philip's Taunton contractor.

The surveyor from Shepton Mallet—whose father-in-law, with demonic longevity, still continued to milk his Jersey cattle—appeared and disappeared at intervals in that debatable ground, replacing his stakes and strings along the edge of the Lake Village Mounds, tokens of private possession which, although watched imperturbably by Number One's inquisitive Betsy, were always being carried off by invaders from Bove Town and Paradise, invaders not unaided, you may be sure, by a familiar robber band.

It was surprising how the new co-operative or collective system of retail trade introduced among the various shops that had been included in the new lease from the lord of the manor, proceeded, running much more smoothly than anyone would have supposed possible. This, however, was largely due to a somewhat extraneous cause, namely the overwhelming influx of religious pilgrims into the little commune from every portion of the inhabited globe.

Not quite three months had passed since the Mayor's notorious opening of his Saxon arch and doubtless there were places in Africa, India and China where pilgrims were only then just setting out for Glastonbury; but the world was so unsettled and there was such a spirit of restlessness abroad, that this new outburst of magic and miracle in -a spot so easy of access, had been responded to in a wave of excitement from every country upon the earth. Afrd as all these pilgrims had to be fed, and as all these visitors wanted souvenirs to carry back to their homes, the town began to grow rich. Thus when the Glastonbury council-men—now promoted to be bureaucrats in an independent community—came to divide, as they did on the first day of each week, the profits of the new commune, these profits were found to be so considerable and so far beyond anything that the worthy tradesmen had ever earned for themselves under normal conditions, that their tendency was to make hay while the sun shone and allow the methods and sources of this new increment to pass unquestioned.

v They were of course unaware, these good men, for Providence had not endowed many of them wiLh the acquisitive wit of Harry Stickles, how large a portion of what came to the town from the feeding of pilgrims and from the selling of curiosities, both to the religious and to the profane, was divided among the real proletariat of the place; but since this proletariat, in its turn not accustomed to such wealth, hurried to spend it in these very shops, there was—as can easily be believed—a sort of revival of those fortunate mediaeval times, when the whole of Glastonbury throve and grew fat upon the Saint Joseph's Pence of religious Christendom.

Mr. Geard himself, in these- lucky days, grew more and more indifferent to the practical and economic aspects of his great design. Having, as we have seen, taken measures to get rid of every penny of Canon Crow's large fortune, the Mayor accepted whatever salary, as head of the commune, was set apart for him each week by the energetic assessors and bothered his brains no more about the matter. Had he been “Head of Hades,” or Lord of that “Annwn” of which Mr. Evans had so obstinately murmured; had he been a reincarnation of that old Celtic divinity mentioned in the Mabinogi as Bendigeitvran, or Bran the Blessed, he could not have worried less about these mundane affairs.

What he was now doing all this time was receiving religious disciples, or, if it is too early in the history of the new Glastonbury Religion to call them by that name, followers., learners, pupils, neophytes. These he received, not in Cardiff Villa—indeed he was seldom to be found in Cardiff Villa now; and Megan had required all her dignified Rhys blood to be reserved and patient over this—but in that solid erection, something between a farm-barn and a collegiate chapel, which his London architect had built for him near his Saxon arch within sound of the trickling of his Fountain of Life and that had come to be called “The Rotunda.”

It was with a positive genius for what might be named the psychic nuances of building, that this great adept in stone had constructed out of timber, bought in the same woody^rd of the worthy

Mr. Johnson where Mr. Evans' Cross had been purchased, a sort of Platonic lecture hall. Like the Saxon arch which now rose triumphantly over the Grail Fount, this wooden erection, when Geard first spoke of it, sounded as if it would be something in unbelievably bad taste. But the very reverse of this was what developed. By an extensive use of carving—for many of the heavy cross-beams of this edifice were terminated by massive heads of the old Saxon Kings, while a colossal image of Saint Dunstan looked down from above the entrance—this secular hall was made to correspond with the mystical arch which covered the path to the Grail Spring.

The ritual, or, if the reader prefers it, “the procedure,” that came to establish itself in this singular hall, originated in so spontaneous and natural a manner as to excite in the architect —who refused to leave the place till he had satisfied himself with what he did—a desire to supply an organic outward form for such a repetition of spontaneous religious gestures.

Mr. Geard—growing more and more obsessed by his ideas as he was given a fuller chance to express them—had caused a mysterious altar to be constructed and placed in the centre of this wooden building, an altar dedicated to the worship of his heretical Christ. The bulk of this altar was made of oak, in harmony with the finely chiselled wainscotting that the architect had designed for the lower portion of the walls, but on the top of this wooden base—placed there suddenly in the night, none but Mr. Geard himself knowing its origin—appeared a square slab of about five inches thick, of a substance, colour, texture and polish completely different from any stone that had, until that day, been found in Glastonbury.

Mr. Merry the curator shook his head very knowingly, after he had spent some time examining this stone, which he declared was much older than the one in St. Patrick's chapel, and in private conversations with his nephew, Paul Trent, he maintained the daring opinion that it was an altar stone of the Bronze Age, “probably used in the invocation of some god of fertility.'” How Mr. Merry deduced this opinion, or what evidence he found for it in his examination of the stone has not become common knowledge; for the curator held the view that there were enough mischief-makers already in the town; and far too much talk about subjects which, in wiser times, were restricted to the learned alone. Our architect from London, however, by no means confined himself to the erection of this altar upon which Bloody Johnny's younger daughter had placed in little vases of clear glass the season's earliest primroses. He also caused to be constructed, in the same solid oak, a hieratic seat for the founder of the new western religion. Few things about this “Hall of Marvels,” as John Crow called it, interested the Mayor less than this pontifical throne. Its extreme discomfort was, nevertheless, modified by Megan Geard, as soon as she saw it. She unceremoniously threw over it the familiar threadbare bearskin snatched up from the floor on the Cardiff Villa drawing-room. The architect did make ¦ a somewhat wry face when he saw what she had done; but he uttered no overt protest; and from his place in this singular chair of office Mr. Geard continued to expound, day by day—it seemed to be the dominant purpose of his life now, and he pursued it with massive concentration—the doctrines of his new mystical faith.

The strange man never lacked an audience for these uninterrupted discourses. Sometimes indeed that circular hall was packed tightly with people. But whether there were many there, or the merest handful, the Mayor would always be ready to carry further and further his mystical doctrines .about the Blood of his Glastonbury Christ. Megan and Crummie brought him his meals once or Lwice out there; but this soon became unnecessary, because Mrs. Jones, Sally's mother, who through Red Robinson, her son-in-law, possessed an advantage over the other tea-shops of the town, started a refreshment booth just inside the entrance to Chalice Hall.

This ramshackle edifice, run up over-night by some artisan-relative of Mrs. Jones, ruined entirely, from a purely aesthetic point of view, the whole beauty of what the architect had done. But the architect only laughed when this was pointed out to him, declaring that the reason why the gaudy tinsel ornaments in a Roman Church were less irreligious than the collegiate dignity of a London church, was that they were the expression of the inherent barbarism and crudity of rank human nature with which any genuine Religion—to be really organic—must keep in close touch. “Our communal refreshment-booth,” he said to Paul Trent, whose taste was offended by this circus-looking shanty, "is like the crowds of beggars outside St. Peter's, or the guides outside the Mosque of Omar. If Glastonbury is destined to become—as with all these foreigners it looks as if she were— a mystical rival to Rome and Jerusalem, you must expect worse things than a few catch-penny cook-shops P

And indeed with this concession of the architect—for the man had come to exercise the dominant influence over what was going on in Chalice Hill—Mrs. Jones' initiative was followed by a rush of enterprising pedlars who set up far more unsightly stalls than hers* They had to turn over their gains to the assessors every evening, but as their bookkeeping was very casual and as private property, in spite of Dave Spear, still existed in Glastonbury, it was an extremely approximate sum that was thus poured daily into the community's exchequer.

But the heart of Glastonbury was still the Fountain on Chalice Hill. To this Fountain, passing to and fro under the Saxon arch, came a constant influx of visitors. Mr. Geard had insisted upon one restriction alone, namely, that there should be no sacerdotalism. Women were allowed to come bareheaded. Men wTere allowed to bring their hats and sticks. Children were allowed to drift in and out at will. At the Fountain itself, dressed in corduroys like a gamekeeper, stood, in the morning, none other than our friend, Young Tewsy, while in the afternoon, wThen the crowds were much greater, a strapping youth from the upper Mendips who had been “converted” by Bloody Johnny in his street-preaching days and who was too simple in his wits to notice the difference between what the man taught now and what he had taught then, kept the crowd in order. This powerfully built lad had been dismissed for poaching by one of Lord P.'s tenant-farmers, and he had turned up in Glastonbury in his old-fashioned shepherd's smock with an eye to communal flocks and herds. It had been Paul Trent—the only one of the town's rulers who had the faintest artistic feeling—who had advised Geard to let the lad wear this primitive garment when he was about the business of guarding the Orail Spring; and the Mayor, who remembered a highly-coloured picture in his native national school of Our Lord Himself, clothed in a costume resembling that of old Bill Chant, Farmer Manley's head-shepherd, had jumped at this proposal.