inside of an English tavern seemed savory and right and all in consonance with his new realism: "Here, at any rate, no spiritual treachery is tolerated; here, at any rate, no deceitful idealism stretches tendrils white and sickly. He who sits down on a tavern settle must even take the world as he finds it. He must know what birth means, and that we come into the world in no very cleanly manner; he must know what love means, and wrath, and lust, and, above all, death. In a tavern, come winter, come summer, the truth will out."
Now in "Ebony and Ivory" and in "Black Laughter" Mr. Powys carried his personal philosophy far from the sanatorium, where he first encountered it in general practice, and tested it for its universal values among the brutalized English stockmen and big game hunters, the Indian traders, the black "boys" and the animals, wild and domesticated, of a ranch in Africa of 30,000 acres, grazing 2,000 cattle and 14,000 sheep.
But before he entered on his career as ranch manager he had subjected his sensibilities, acutely sharpened to the sweetness of life by the prospect of death—to the loveliness of southern England, where he tasted the delight of a stately Elizabethan garden and brushed the dew from bluebells and pink campions while the cuckoos called, and roamed on Egdon moor, "in the meadows by the river Yeo," and between "musk-laden Wiltshire hedges," trying his brother John's advice to the convalescent, to divert his mind "from what is mean and sordid, so that large, luminous thoughts may roll in upon it like amber-colored waves."
The effect upon him of passing from the most exquisitely cultivated beauty of the English scene to the
