by one: "Yes, it makes you feel sometimes as if
your soul would get away from you."

They stood there for a while, watching the cloud-shadows swimming upon
that mystic sea. The smoke of an express train on the horizon seemed
fairly to crawl, so great was the distance.

"That looks like the smoke of a steamer," Sir Bryan observed.

"Then you think it seems like the sea, as everybody else does," she
answered. "I never saw the sea, myself, but I don't believe it can be
finer than this."

There was another pause, and then, with a sudden change of mood, to
which she seemed subject, the rapt worshipper turned her thoughts to
practical things, saying briskly: "Here's your spade, Mr. Bryan. You
had better go and begin, while I get the dinner. I'll fire a shot when
it's ready."

Sir Bryan obediently took the spade.

"How am I to find my way to the bear?" he asked.

All about the little clearing was an unbroken wilderness of scrub-oaks,
gorgeous but bewildering.

"Why, you can just follow Comrag's tracks," she said, pointing toward
the spot where the hoof-prints emerged from the brush. "You'd better
leave your rifle here," she added with some asperity, "You might take a
fancy to shoot Comrag if he strayed your way."

It was Sir Bryan Parkhurst's first attempt at digging, and he devoutly
hoped it might be his last. He thought at first that he should never get
his spade inserted into the earth at all, so numerous and exasperating
were the hindrances it met with. The hardest and grittiest of stones,
tangled roots, and solid cakes of earth, which seemed to cohere by means
of some subterranean cement, offered a complicated resistance, which was
not what he had expected of Mother Earth. He began to fear that that
much bepraised dame was something of a vixen after all.

The other Brian lay, meanwhile, in all the dignity and solemnity of
funeral state, awaiting burial. As Sir Bryan toiled at his thankless
task he found himself becoming strangely impressed. There seemed to be a
weird and awesome significance in the scene. He did not know why it was,
but the beetling crags above him, the consciousness of the marvellous
plains below, the rhythmic murmur of the wind in the pine trees near at
hand, the curious impenetrableness of the old earth, the kingship of
death asserting itself in the motionless brute which he had killed, but
which he was powerless to make alive again--all these weird and
unaccustomed influences seemed to be