Snatches of his dream still hovered in his mind. There had been a voice with a stammer, and he remembered that he himself had had a stammer in his first years at the national school. One day, when he was on his way to school, he had flung his schoolbag through a gap in a hedge and gone wriggling in to find a hidden place beside it. He remembered his dismay when he could not find the schoolbag in the breast-high corn. Just like his portmanteau, which he had lost in the tellonaria. In the tellonaria? He groped toward the source of that long-forgotten phrase and, for once, came triumphantly upon it. Origen! The pilgrims on their journey through life! The customhouses, where their goods were stolen or mislaid, so that when they reached their destination at last, they had nothing left. He too had started out with his schoolbag and now he had divested himself of everything. Even the tools of his trade were back in Holyhead, probably in the hands of her Majesty’s Customs!

But surely he had found the schoolbag, after all? Yes, he must have found it. Wasn’t that the day he mitched from school, and his father came upon him in the corner of a field of barley? There he was, trapped as the reaping machine came rattling nearer, drawing with it the voices of the laboring men. His father parted the tall grasses of the headland and found him there, waiting, crouched on the ground like a hare in its form. His father was shouting – what, he could not remember, but he could remember the pain of being the cause of that anger. And he had answered, with his head bowed in shame, “Because I’d s-s-sooner be here with you!”

What had happened then? Had he been beaten? Had his father looked at him, speechless, and turned away? He could not remember. He did not know whether it had turned out happily or not, and now, no one would ever know. He had kept it buried too long in his memory. Soon it would be buried with him forever in the darkness of the clay.

But, no, he did not believe that. He could not believe it.

It would be remembered; somehow it would live on, every detail of it fresh and clear to a new generation, the children of light. Yes, he thought, looking up into the sun, whose bright particles showered him with their sharp, glinting edges, “Et claritas Dei circumfulsit illos.” Claritas Dei, the light of God.

*