ife."

"Thank you. Let us go!" I answered, and immediately he led the way.

CHAPTER V. THE OLD CHURCH

I followed him deep into the pine-forest. Neither of us said much while
yet the sacred gloom of it closed us round. We came to larger and yet
larger trees--older, and more individual, some of them grotesque with
age. Then the forest grew thinner.

"You see that hawthorn?" said my guide at length, pointing with his
beak.

I looked where the wood melted away on the edge of an open heath.

"I see a gnarled old man, with a great white head," I answered.

"Look again," he rejoined: "it is a hawthorn."

"It seems indeed an ancient hawthorn; but this is not the season for the
hawthorn to blossom!" I objected.

"The season for the hawthorn to blossom," he replied, "is when the
hawthorn blossoms. That tree is in the ruins of the church on your
home-farm. You were going to give some directions to the bailiff about
its churchyard, were you not, the morning of the thunder?"

"I was going to tell him I wanted it turned into a wilderness of
rose-trees, and that the plough must never come within three yards of
it."

"Listen!" said the raven, seeming to hold his breath.

I listened, and heard--was it the sighing of a far-off musical wind--or
the ghost of a music that had once been glad? Or did I indeed hear
anything?

"They go there still," said the raven.

"Who goes there? and where do they go?" I asked.

"Some of the people who used to pray there, go to the ruins still," he
replied. "But they will not go much longer, I think."

"What makes them go now?"

"They need help from each other to get their thinking done, and their
feelings hatched, so they talk and sing together; and then, they say,
the big thought floats out of their hearts like a great ship out of the
river at high water."

"Do they pray as well as sing?"

"No; they have found that each can best pray in his own silent
heart.--Some people are always at their prayers.--Look! look! There goes
one!"

He pointed right up into the air. A snow-white pigeon was mounting, with
quick and yet quicker wing-flap, the unseen spiral of an ethereal stair.
The sunshine flashed quivering from its wings.

"I see a pigeon!" I said.

"Of course you see a pigeon," rejoined the raven, "for there is the
pigeon! I see a prayer on its way.--I wonder now what heart is that
dove's mother! Some one may have come awake in my cemetery!"

"How can a pigeon be a praye