r to a worthy ending.
Presently he would light the gas, and enjoy the satisfaction that only
the work could give him, but for the time he preferred to linger in the
darkness, and to think of himself as straying from stile to stile through
the scented meadows, and listening to the bright brook that sang to the
alders.

It was winter now, for he heard the rain and the wind, and the swaying of
the trees, but in those old days how sweet the summer had been. The great
hawthorn bush in blossom, like a white cloud upon the earth, had appeared
to him in twilight, he had lingered in the enclosed valley to hear the
nightingale, a voice swelling out from the rich gloom, from the trees
that grew around the well. The scent of the meadowsweet was blown to him
across the bridge of years, and with it came the dream and the hope and
the longing, and the afterglow red in the sky, and the marvel of the
earth. There was a quiet walk that he knew so well; one went up from a
little green byroad, following an unnamed brooklet scarce a foot wide,
but yet wandering like a river, gurgling over its pebbles, with its dwarf
bushes shading the pouring water. One went through the meadow grass, and
came to the larch wood that grew from hill to hill across the stream, and
shone a brilliant tender green, and sent vague sweet spires to the
flushing sky. Through the wood the path wound, turning and dipping, and
beneath, the brown fallen needles of last year were soft and thick, and
the resinous cones gave out their odor as the warm night advanced, and
the shadows darkened. It was quite still; but he stayed, and the faint
song of the brooklet sounded like the echo of a river beyond the
mountains. How strange it was to look into the wood, to see the tall
straight stems rising, pillar-like, and then the dusk, uncertain, and
then the blackness. So he came out from the larch wood, from the green
cloud and the vague shadow, into the dearest of all hollows, shut in on
one side by the larches and before him by high violent walls of turf,
like the slopes of a fort, with a clear line dark against the twilight
sky, and a weird thorn bush that grew large, mysterious, on the summit,
beneath the gleam of the evening star.

And he retraced his wanderings in those deep old lanes that began from
the common road and went away towards the unknown, climbing steep hills,
and piercing the woods of shadows, and dipping down into valleys that
seemed virgin, unexplored, secret f