1 - The Tale of the Peacock Trees

Chapter I of the Trees of Pride. This is the Libbervox Recording, while Libbervox recordings

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Recording by Maria Teresa.

The Trees of Pride by G.K. Chesterton. Chapter I.

The Tale of the Peacock Trees.

Squire Vane was an elderly schoolboy of English education and Irish extraction. His English

education at one of the great public schools had preserved his intellect perfectly and

permanently at the stage of boyhood. But his Irish extraction subconsciously upsetting

him, the proper slumnity of an old boy, and sometimes gave him back the brighter outlook

of a naughty boy. He had bodily impatience, which played tricks upon him almost against

as well, and had already rendered him rather too radiant of failure in civil and diplomatic

service. Thus it is true that compromise is the key of British policy, especially as

affecting an impartiality among the religions of India. But Vane's attempt to meet the

Muslim halfway by kicking off one boot at the gate of the mosque was felt not so much

to indicate true impartiality as something that could only be called an aggressive indifference.

Again, it is true that an English aristocrat can hardly enter fully into the feelings of

either party and a quarrel between a Russian Jew and an orthodox procession carrying relics.

But Vane's idea that the procession might carry the Jew as well, himself a venerable

and historic relic, was misunderstood on both sides. In short, he was a man who particularly

prided himself on having no nonsense about him, the result that he was always doing

nonsensical things. He seemed to be standing on his head merely to prove that he was hard

headed. He had just finished a hearty breakfast in the society of his daughter, at a table

under a tree in his garden by the Cornish coast. For, having a glorious circulation, he insisted

on as many outdoor meals as possible, though spring had barely touched the woods and

warm the seas around that southern extremity of England.

His daughter, Barbara, a good-looking girl, with heavy red hair and a face as grave as

one of the garden statues still sat almost motionless as a statue when her father rose.

A fine tall figure in light clothes, with his white hair and moustache flying backwards

rather fiercely from a face that was good humored enough, for he carried his very wide

Panama hat in his hand. He stirred across the terraced garden, down some stone steps,

flanked with old ornamental urns, to a more woodland path furniture with little trees,

and so down as zigzagrary which descended the craggy cliff to the shore, where he was

to meet a guest arriving by boat. A yacht was already in the blue bay, and he could see

a boat pulling toward the little paved pier. And yet in that short walk between the green

turf in the yellow sands he was destined to find, his hardheadedness provoked into a

not unfamiliar phase, which the world was inclined to call hotheadedness. The fact was of the

Cornish peasantry who composed his tenon tree and domestic establishment, were far from

being people with no nonsense about them. There was, alas, a great deal of nonsense

about them, with ghosts, witches, and traditions as old as Merlin. They seemed to surround him

with a fairy ring of nonsense. But the magic circle had one center, there was one point

in which the curving conversation of the rustics always returned. It was a point that always

picked the squire to exasperation, and even in this short walk he seemed to strike it everywhere.

He paused before descending the steps from the lawn to speak to the gardener about potting

some foreign shrubs, and the gardener seemed to be gloomily gratified, in every line of

his leathery brown visage, at the chance of indicating that he had formed a low opinion

of foreign shrubs. We wished you'd get rid of what you've got here, sir, he observed

digging dodgedly, nothing will grow right with them here.

Shrubs, said the squire laughing, you don't call the peacock tree as shrubs, do you? Fine tall

trees, you ought to be proud of them. All weeds grow a pace, observed the gardener.

Roads can grow as houses when somebody plants them, then he added, him that sowed terrors

in the Bible's squire.

Oh, blast your! began the squire, and then replaced the more apt and illiterative word

Bible by the junior word's superstition. He was himself a robust rationalist, but he

went to church to set his tenants an example of what it would have puzzled him to say.

A little way along the lower path by the trees he encountered a woodcutter, one martin,

who was more explicit having more of a grievance. His daughter was at that time seriously ill

with a fever recently coming on that coast, and the squire, who was a kindhearted gentleman,

would normally have made allowances for those spirits and loss of temper. But he came near

to losing his own again when the peasant persisted in connecting his tragedy with this

traditional monomania about the foreign trees.

If she were well enough, I'd move her, said the woodcutter, as we can't move them,

I suppose. I'd just like to get my chopper into them and feel them come crashing down.

One would think they were dragons, said Vene. And that's about what they look like,

replied martin, look at him. The woodmen was naturally a rougher and even

wilder figure than the gardener. His face also was brown, and looked like an antique

parchment, and it was framed in an outlandish arrangement of raven beard and whiskers, which

was really a fashion 50 years ago, but might have been 5,000 years older or older.

Phoenicians, one felt, trading on those strange shores in the morning of the world, might

have cooned or curled or braided their booed back hair into some such quaint patterns.

For this patch of population was as much a corner of Cornwall as Cornwall is a corner of

England, a tragic and unique race, small and interrelated like a Celtic clan. The

clan was older than the Vane family, though that was old as county families go. For many

such parts of England is the aristocrat to where the latest arrivals. It was the sort

of racial type that is supposed to be passing, and perhaps has already passed. The obnoxious

objects stood some hundred yards away from the speaker, who waved towards them with

his axe, and there was something suggestive in the comparison. That coast, to begin with,

stretching towards the sunset, was itself almost as fantastic as a sunset cloud. It was cut

out against the emerald or indigo of a sea in raven horns and crescents, that might

be the cast or mold of some such crest at serpents, and beneath was pierced and fredded by caves

and crevices, as if by the boring of some such titanic worms. Over and above the stacconean

architecture of the earth, a veil of grey woods hung thinner like a vapor, woods which

the witchcraft of the sea had as usual both blighted and blown out of shape. To the right,

the trees charred along the sea front in a single line, each drawn out and thin wild lines

like a caricature. At the other end of their extent, they multiplied into a huddle of

hunchback trees, a woods spreading toward a projecting part of the high coast. It was

here that the sight appeared to which so many eyes and minds seemed to be almost automatically

turning. Out of the middle of this low, in more or less level wood, roofs three separate

stems that shot up and soared into the sky like a lighthouse out of the waves were

a church-spire out of the village roofs. They formed a clump of three columns close together,

which might well be the mere bifurcation or rather trifurcation of one tree, the lower

part being lost or sunken in the thick wood around. Everything about them suggests it's

something stranger and more southern than anything even in that last peninsula of Britain

which pushes out farthest towards Spain and Africa and the southern stars. Their leathery

leafy had sprouted in advance of a faint mist of yellow green around them, and it was

of another and less natural green tinge with blue like the colors of a kingfisher. But

one might fancy at the scales of some three-headed dragon towering over a herd of huddled

and thin cattle.

I am exceedingly sorry your girl is so unwell, said Vane shortly, but really, any strobe

down the steep road with plunging strides. The boat was already secured to the little

stone jetty, and the boatman, a younger shadow of the wood-covered, and indeed a nephew

of that useful malcontent, saluted his territorial lord with a sole informality of the family.

The squire acknowledged it casually, and had soon forgotten all such things and shaking

hands with the visitor who had just come ashore. The visitor was a long, loose man, very

lean to be so young, whose long, fine features seemed toly fit it together of bone and nerve,

and seemed somehow to contrast with his hair that showed him vivid yellow patches upon

his hollow temples, under the brim of his white holiday hat. He was carefully dressed

in exquisite taste, though he had come straight from a considerable sea voyage, and he carried

something in his hand, which in his long European travels, and even longer European visits,

he had almost forgotten to call a grip sack. Mr. Sipprian Painter was an American who

lived in Italy. There was a good deal more to be said about him, for he was a very acute

and cultivated gentleman. But those two facts would, perhaps, cover most of the others.

Storing his mind like a museum with the wonder of the old world, put all lit up as by a window

with the wonder of the new, he had fallen air to something of the unique critical position

of Ruskin, or Painter, and was further famous as a discoverer of minor poets. He was a judicious

discoverer, and he did not turn all his minor poets into major prophets. If his geese were

swans, they were not all swans of even. He had even incurred the deadly suspicion of

classicism by differing from his young friends, the punctuous poets, when they produced

versification consisting exclusively of commas and coolans. He had a more humane sympathy

with the modern flame, kindled from the embers of Celtic mythology, and it was in reality

the recent appearance of a Cornished Poet, a sort of parallel to the new Irish poets,

which had brought him on this occasion to Cornwall. He was, indeed, far too well-mannered

to allow a host to guess that any pleasure was being sought outside his own hospitality.

He had a long-standing invitation from Vein, whom he had met in Cyprus in the latter's

days of undiplomatic diplomacy, and Vein was not aware that relations had only been

thus renewed after the critic Headred Merlin and other verses by a new writer named John

Treeherne. Nor did the squar even begin to realize the much more diplomatic diplomacy

by which he had been induced to invite the local bard to launch on the very day of the

American critics' arrival. Mr. Painter was still standing with his grip sack, gazing

in a trance of true admiration at the hollowed craigs, topped by the grey grotesque wood

and crusted finely by the three fantastic trees. It is like being shipwrecked on the coast

of Fairyland, he said. I hope you haven't been shipwrecked much, replied his host smiling.

I fancy Jake here can look after you very well. Mr. Painter looked across at the boatman

and smiled also. I'm afraid, he said. Our friend is not quite so enthusiastic for this

landscape as I am. Oh, the trees, I suppose, so the squire wearily. The boatman was by

normal trade a fisherman, but as his house built a black tarred timber stood right on the

foreshore a few yards from the pier, he was employed in such cases as a sort of ferryman.

He was a big, black-browed youth, generally silent, but something seemed now to sting

him into speech. Well, sir, he said. Everybody knows it's not natural. Everybody knows the

sea blight's trees and beats them under when they're only just trees. These things thrive

like some unholy great seaweed that don't belong to the land at all. It's like the, the

blessed sea serpent got on shore, squire, and eating everything up. There is some stupid

legend said squire being gruffly, but come up into the garden. I want to introduce you

to my daughter. When, however, they reached the little table under the tree, the apparently

immovable young lady had moved away after all, and it was some time before they came upon

the track of her. She had risen, though languidly, and wandered slowly among the upper path

of the terraced garden, looking down on the lower path where it ran closer to the main

bulk of the little wood by the sea. Her anger was not a feebleness, but rather a fullness

of life, like that of a child have awake. She seemed to stretch herself and enjoy everything

without noticing anything. She passed the wood into the grey huddle of which a single

white path vanished through a back coal. Along this part of the terraced ran something

like a low rampart, or bowed straight, and powered with flowers at intervals, and she leaned

over it looking down at another glimpse of the glowing sea behind the clump of trees,

and on another irregular path tumbling down to the pier and the boatman's cottage on

the beach. As she gazed, sleepily enough, she saw that a strange figure was very actively

climbing the path, apparently coming from the fisherman's cottage. So actively that

a moment afterward it came out between the trees and stood upon the path just below her.

He was not only a figure strange to her, but won so much strange in itself. He was

out of a man still young, and seeming somehow younger than his own clothes, which were not

only Chevy, but antiquated. Clothes come in enough in texture, yet carried in an uncommon

fashion. He wore what was presumably a light waterproof, perhaps through having come off

the sea, but it was held at the throat by one button, and hung, sleeves and all, more

like a cloak than a coat. He rested at one bony hand on a black stick. Under the shadow

of his broad hat, his black hair hung down in a tuft or two. His face, which was swarvy,

but he rather handsome in itself, or something that might have been a slightly embarrassed

smile, but had too much the appearance of a sneer. Whether this operation was a tramp

or a trespasser, or a friend of some of the fishers or woodcutters, Barbara Van was quite

unable to guess. He removed his hat, still with his unaltered and rather sinister smile,

and said civilly, excuse me, the squire asked me to call. Here he caught sight of Martin,

the woodman who was shifting along the path, sending the thin trees, and the stranger made

a familiar salute with one finger. The girl did not know what to say. Have you? Have

you come about cutting the wood she asked at last? I would, I were so honest a man replied

the stranger. Martin is, I fancy, a distant cousin of mine. We Cornish folk just around

here are nearly all related, you know, but I do not cut wood. I do not cut anything,

except perhaps capers. I am, so to speak, a jungler. A what? asked Barbara. A menstrual,

shall we say, and to the newcomer, and looked up at her more steadily. During a rather odd

silence, their eyes rested on each other. What she saw has been already noted, though by

her at any rate, not in the least understood. What he saw was a decidedly beautiful woman,

with a statuesque face, and here that shone in the sun like a helmet of copper. Do you

know, he went on, but in this old place, hundreds of years ago, a jungler may really have

stood where I stand, and a lady may really have looked over that wall and thrown her money.

Do you want money? She asked, all at sea. Well, dropped the stranger, and the sense of

lacking it perhaps, but I fear there is no place now for a menstrual, except nigger menstrual.

I must apologize for not blacking my face. She left a little in her bewilderment, and

said, well, I hardly think you need to do that. You think the natives here are dark enough

already, perhaps, he observed calmly. After all, we are aborigines, and are treated as such.

She threw out some desperate remark about the weather, or the scenery, and wondered what

would happen next. The prospect is certainly beautiful, he ascended in the same inigmatic

manner. There is only one thing in it I am doubtful about. While she stood in silence,

he slowly lifted his black stick, like a long black finger, and pointed it at the peacock

trees above the wood, and a queer feeling of disquiet fill on the girl, as if he were,

by that mere gesture, doing a destructive act, and could send a blight upon the garden. The

strange and almost painful silence was broken by the voice of square vein, loud even while

it was still distant. We couldn't make out where you'd gone to Barbara, he said. This is my

friend, Mr. Sipprian Painter. The next moment he saw the stranger and stopped a little puzzled.

It was only Mr. Sipprian Painter himself who was equal to the situation. He had seen months ago

a portrait of the new Cornish poet in some American literary magazine, and he found himself

to his surprise, the introducer instead of the introduced. Why squire, he said, and considerable

astonishment, don't you know Mr. Treeherne? I suppose, of course, he was a neighbor.

Delighted to see you, Mr. Treeherne, to the square, recovering his manners with a certain

genial confusion, so pleased you were able to come. This is Mr. Painter, my daughter,

and turning with a certain boisterous embarrassment, he led the way to the table under the tree.

Sipprian Painter followed innumerately revolving a puzzle which had taken even his experience by

surprise. The American, eventually an aristocrat, was still socially and subconsciously a Democrat.

It had never crossed his mind that the poet should be counted lucky to know the squire,

and not the squire to know the poet. The honest patronage in Vain's hospitality was something

which made Painter feel he was after all in exile in England. The squire, anticipating the trial

of luncheon with a strange literary man, had dealt with the case tactfully from his own standpoint,

County society might have made the guests feel like a fish out of water,

and except for the American critic and the local lawyer and doctor,

worthy of middle-class people who fit it into the picture. He had kept it as a family party.

He was a widower, and when the meal had been laid out on the garden table, it was barber who

presided his hostess. She had the new poet on her right hand and made her very uncomfortable.

She had practically offered that fallacious John Glermoney,

and it did not make it easier to offer him lunch. The whole countryside's gone mad

announced the squire, by way of the latest local news, is about this infernal legend of ours.

I collect legends, said Painter Smiling. You must remember I haven't yet had a chance to

collect yours, and this, he added looking round at the romantic coast, is a fine theater for

anything dramatic. Oh, it's dramatic in its way, admitted Vain, not without a faint satisfaction.

It's all about those things over there we call the peacock trees, I suppose,

because of the queer color of the leaf. You know, though I have heard they make a

shrill noise and a high wind that's supposed to be like the shriek of a peacock,

something like a bamboo in the botanical structure perhaps.

Well, those trees are supposed to have been brought over from Barbary by my ancestor, Sir Walter Vain.

One of those is the beef and patriots or parrots, or whatever you call them.

They say that at the end of his last voyage, the villagers gathered on the beach down there

and saw the boat standing in from the sea, and the new tree stood up in the boat like a mast.

All gay with leaves out of season, like green munting. And as they watched they thought at first

that the boat was steering oddly, and then that it wasn't steering at all.

And when it drifted to the shore, at last, every man in that boat was dead.

And Sir Walter Vain, with his sword drawn, was leaning up against the tree trunk as stiff as the

tree. Now, this is where the curious remark to paint your thoughtfully. I told you I collected

legends, and I fancy I can tell you the beginning of the story of which that is the end,

though it comes hundreds of miles across the sea. He tapped meditatively on the table with

his thin taper fingers, like a man trying to recall a tune. He had, indeed, made a hobby of such

fables, and he was not without vanity about his artistic touch and telling them.

Oh, do tell us you're part of it, cried Barbara Vain, whose era of sunny sleepingness seemed in

some vague degree to have fallen from her. The American bowed across the table with serious

politeness, and then began playing idly with a quaint ring on his long finger as he talked.

If you go down to the Barbary coast, where the last wedge of the forest narrows down between

the desert and the great tideless sea, you will find the natives still telling a strange story

about the saint of the dark ages. There, on the twilight border of the dark continent, you feel

the dark ages. I've only visited the place once, though it lies, so to speak, opposite to the

Italian city where I lived for years, and yet you would hardly believe how the topsy turvidum

and transmigration of this myth somehow seemed glass mad than they really are, with the wood

loud with lions at night, and that dark red solid to be on. They say that the hermit

saints are curious, living there among trees, grew to love them like companions,

since the great giants with many arms like Bararius, they were the mildest and most

blameless of the creatures. They did not devour like the lions, but rather opened their arms

to all the little birds. Any prey that they might be loosened from time to time to walk like

other things. And the trees removed upon the prayer of the curious, as they were at the

song of Orpheus. The men of the desert were stricken from afar with fear, seeing the saint

walking with a walking grove, like a schoolmaster with his boys, while the trees were thus freed

under strict conditions of discipline. They were to return at the sound of the hermit's bell,

and above all to copy the wild beast and walking only to destroy and devour nothing.

Well, it is said that one of the trees heard a voice that was not the saints,

that in the warm green twilight of one summer evening, it became conscious of something

sitting and speaking in its branches and the guise of a great bird, and it was that which once

spoke from a tree in the guise of a great serpent. As the voice grew louder among its murmuring leaves,

the tree was torn with a great desire to stretch out and snatch at the birds that flew

harmlessly about their nests and plucked them to pieces. Finally, the tempter filled the tree

top with his own birds of pride, the story pageant of the peacocks, and the spirit of the

brute overcame the spirit of the tree, and it ran and consumed the blue green birds to not a bloom

was left and returned to the quiet tribe of trees. But they say that when spring came all the other

trees put forth leaves, but this put forth feathers of a strange human pattern. And by that

monstrous assimilation, the saint knew of the sin, and he rooted that one tree to the earth

with a judgment, so that evil should fall on any who removed it. That square is the beginning

in the deserts of the tale that ended here, almost in this garden. And the end is about as reliable

as the beginning, I should say, said vain. Yours is a nice plain tale for small tea party,

quiet little bit of still life, that is. What a queer, horrible story explained Barbara,

it makes one feel like a cannibal. X Africa said the law you're smiling, it comes from a

cannibal country. I think it's the touch of the tar rush that nightmare feeling that you don't

know whether the hero is a plant or a mean or a devil. Don't you feel it sometimes and Uncle

Remus? True, said painter, perfectly true. And he looked at the law you're with a new interest.

The law you who had been introduced as Mr. Ash was one of those people who are more worth

looking at than most people realize when they look. If Napoleon had been red-haired and had

been all his powers with a curious contentment upon the petty lawsuits of a province, he might

have looked much the same. The head with the red hair was heavy and powerful. The figure in

its dark quiet clothes was comparatively insignificant, as was Napoleon's. He seemed more at ease

in the squire of society than a doctor, who, though a gentleman, was a shy one and a mere shadow

of his professional brother. As you truly say, Remark Painter, the story seems touched with quite

barbarous element, probably Negro. Originally, though, I think there was really a hagiological story

about some hermit. Though some of the higher critics say St. Securius never existed,

but was only an allegory of Arboric culture, since his name is the Latin foreign axe.

Oh, if you come to that, Remark the Poet Treehern, you might as well say Squire Vane doesn't

exist, and that he's only an allegory for a weathercock. Something a shade to cool about this

celly through the Lawyer's Red Browse together. He looked across the table and met the poets

somewhat equivocal smile. Do I understand, Mr. Treehern, to ask Ash, that you support the

miraculous claim of St. Securius in this case? Do you by any chance believe in the walking trees?

I see men as walking trees answer the poet, but the man cured of blindness in the gospel.

By the way, do I understand that you support the miraculous claims of that

vomiturgist? Pain intervenes swiftly and suavly. Now that sounds a fascinating piece of

psychology. You see men as trees? As I can't imagine why men should walk, I can't imagine why

trees shouldn't answer Treehern. Obviously it is the nature of the organism,

interposed the medical guest, Dr. Burton Brown. It is necessary in the very type of vegetable

structure. In other words, a tree sits in the mud from years in to years in, answer Treehern.

So do you stop in your consulting room from 10 to 11 every day? And don't you fancy a fairy

looking in at your window for a flash, after having just jumped over the moon and played

momentary bush with the Pleiades, would think you were a vegetable structure, and that sitting

still was a nature of the organism. I don't happen to believe in fairies, said the doctor

rather stiffly, for the argumentum at hominum was becoming too common. All sulfurous subconscious

anger seemed to radiate from the dark poet. Well, I should hope not, Dr. Began the Squire,

in his loud and friendly style, and then stop seeing the other's attention arrested.

While silent butler, waiting on the guest, had appeared behind the doctor's chair,

and was saying something in the low level tones of the well-trained servant.

He was so smooth as the specimen of the type, that others never noticed at first,

that he also repeated the dark portrait, however vanished, so common in this particular family

of Cornish Celts. His face was salo and even yellow, and his hair ended to go black.

He went by the name of Miles. Some fellow pressed by the tribal type in this tiny corner

England. They felt somehow as if all these dark faces were the mask of a secret society.

The doctor rose with a half-apology. I must ask pardon for disturbing this pleasant

party. I am called away on duty. Please don't let anybody move. We have to be ready for these

things, you know. Perhaps Mr. Treehairmore meant that my habits are not so very vegetable after all.

With this pathian shaft, by which there was some laughter, he started away very rapidly across

the sunny lawn to where the road dipped down towards the village. He is very good among the poor

that the girl with an honorable seriousness. A capital fellow agreed this choir. Where is Miles?

You will have a cigar, Mr. Treehairmorene? And he got up from the table, the rest followed,

and the group broke up on the lawn. Remarkable man, Treehairne, said the American to the lawyer

conversationally. Her marker was the word, ascended ash or the grimly, but I don't think I'll

make any remark about him. The choir, too impatient to wait for the yellow-faced Miles, had be

taken himself indoors for the cigars, and Barbara found herself once more paired off with the

poet, as she floated along the terrace garden. But this time, symbolically enough, upon the same

level of lawn, Mr. Treehairne looked less eccentric after having shed his curious cloak,

and seemed the quieter and more casual figure. I didn't mean to be rude to you, just now,

she said abruptly. And that's the worst of it replied the man, a lotters. For I am horribly afraid,

I didn't mean to be rude to you. When I looked up and saw you up there, something surged up

in me that was in all the revolutions of history. Oh, there was admiration in it, too. Perhaps there

was idolatry in all that kind of class. He seemed to have a power of reaching

whether intimate conversation in one silent and cat-like bound, as he scaled the steep road.

And it made her feel him to be dangerous and perhaps unscrupulous.

She changed the subject sharply, not without it movement towards gratifying her cure and curiosity.

What did you mean by all that about walking trees? She said,

don't tell me you really believe in a magic tree that eats birds.

I should probably surprise you, such Treehairne gravely, more by what I don't believe than by what I do.

Then, after a pause, he made a general gesture towards the house and garden.

I'm afraid I don't believe in all this, for instance, and Elizabethan houses,

and Elizabethan families, and the way estates have been improved, and the rest of it.

Look at our friend, the white cutter now, and he pointed to the man with the quaint black beard,

he was still applying his acts upon the timber below.

The man's family goes back for ages, and it was far richer and freer in what you call the

dark ages than it is now. What till the Cornish peasant writes a history of Cornwall?

Put what in the world she demanded, has this to do with whether you believe in a tree eating birds?

Why should I confess what I believe in? He said a muffled drum of mutiny in his voice.

The gentry came here and took our land and took our labor and took our customs.

And now, after exploitation, a vialer thing, education, they must take our dreams.

Well, this dream was rather a nightmare, wasn't it, as barbarous smiling, and the next moment grew quite

great, saying almost anxiously, but here's Dr. Brown back again, while he looks quite upset.

A doctor, a black figure on the green lawn, was indeed coming towards them at a very vigorous walk.

His body and gate, very much younger than his face, which seemed prematurely lined as with worry.

His brow was bald and projected from the straight dark hair behind it.

He was visibly palored than when he left lunch table.

I am sorry to say, Miss Veen, he said.

I am the bearer of bad news to poor Martin, the woodman here.

His daughter died half an hour ago.

Oh, cried Barbara warmly. I am so sorry.

So am I, sub the doctor, and passed on rather abruptly.

He ran down the stone steps between the stone urns, and they saw him in talk with the wood cutter.

They could not see the wood cutter's face. He stood with his back to them,

but they saw something that seemed more moving than any change of countenance.

The man's hand holding the axe rose high above his head, and for a flash it seemed as if he

would have cut down the doctor, but in fact he was not looking at the doctor.

His face was set towards the cliff, where she or out of the dwarf forest rose gigantic and

gilded by the sun and trees of pride.

Though strong brown hand made a movement and was empty, the axe went circling swiftly

through the air, its head showing like a silver crescent against the grey twilight of the trees.

It did not reach its tall objective, but fell among the ender growth,

shaking up a flying litter of birds. But in the poet's memory, full of primal things,

something seemed to say that he had seen the birds of some pagan augury, the axe of some pagan

sacrifice. A moment after the man made a heavy movement forward, as if to recover his

toe, while the doctor put a hand on his arm.

Never mind that now, they heard him say sadly and kindly, the squire will excuse you any more

work, I know. Something made the girl look at tree herring. He stood gazing his head a little bit,

and one of his black elf locks had fallen forward over his forehead, and again she had the sense of a

shadow over the grass. She almost fell as if the grass were a host of fairies, and that the fairies

were not her friends.