SHIPS OF PEARL

It was a grey day in the early autumn. The leaden sky showed nowhere any rift of blue. It chanced that My Invariable Companion and I had, that morning, to travel some hundreds of miles by air.

At a height of about two miles we found ourselves luxuriating in brilliant sunshine, watching the shadow of our plane skimming across what looked like a polar continent beneath us. The white clouds, almost dazzling in their sunlit splendour, were sometimes spread out like  level plains of virgin snow and sometimes piled up like lofty glacial ranges. And far below, under the gloomy canopy of those very clouds, men were muttering to each other that it was a dull and heavy day!

Thus we discovered that, all through life, sunshine is simply a matter of altitude. But we learned a still more subtle lesson. For, on those lustrous levels, we sat with folded hands: there was nothing to be done. To play our part in the general scheme of things, we must descend! Like the three men who craved permission to build dwelling-places for themselves on the Shining Mount, but were bidden to return to the unromantic lowlands in order to heal the sick and solace the broken-hearted, we found it good to pierce that blanket of mist and to plunge once more into the shadowed world of men.

This heterogeneous collection of casual studies contains impressions gathered in the luxurious and irresponsible hours in which I have seemed to monopolize the sunshine, together with impressions gleaned in those graver moments in which, pursuing the serious business of living, I have rubbed shoulders with my fellow-men.

FRANK W. BOREHAM

Kew, Victoria, Australia.
Easter, 1935.

CONTENTS

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3