north to south and was
natural; that is, the strip of trees had been left when the land was
cleared, and they had reached a venerable age. Oak, hickory and
beech--clean, vast, in-their-prime forest-men--with thorn and dogwood
growing between. It had been like a prayer to ride through that Lane.
The cattle had made a path on the clay and the grass had grown in soft
and blue-green in the shade. In sapling days, the great trees had woven
their trunks on either side of a rail-fence that had stood for a
half-century. It was an approach to the farm-house that an artist would
have named an estate after--or a province.

Then came the day that I rode toward a smudge in the sky, and found men
and boys at work burning and cutting. The superb aisle was down. I
turned the horse and rode back. I learned that in the fields on either
side of the lane a strip of land, fifty or sixty feet wide, had been too
much shaded so that the corn and oats had not prospered. Perhaps it was
there that the cruelty of the narrow-templed Order made its deepest
impression. God bless the fodder--but what a price to pay. They had
burned the thorn and dogwood, felled the giants; they would plough under
that sacred cattle-path.

Then I thought of the denuded lands of North America; the billions of
cubic feet of natural gas wasted; lakes of oil, provinces of pine and
hard-wood vanished; the vast preserves of game destroyed to the wolf and
the pig and the ostrich still left in man's breast. The _story_ of the
struggle for life on Mars came to me--how the only water that remains in
that globe of quickened evolution is at the polar caps, and that the
canals draw down from the meltings of the warm season the entire supply
for the midland zones. They have stopped wastage on Mars.

It was these things that came to me at the mere mention of the transfer
of the woodland property. If it were going to be cut, I was glad I
hadn't seen it, and certainly I didn't want to enter now.

"What's your father going to do with it?" I asked.

"Use it for a pasture."

"Isn't going to cut it--any of it?"

"No."

Always there had been something absolute about the Abbot's _No_ and
_Yes_. I took hope.

"Is it thin enough to pasture?"

"The main piece is. Better come and see."

A pair of rubber boots in the corner of the Chapel caught my eye and the
wan light of March outside.

"There's everything there--a virgin beech wood--a few acres of
second-growth stuff that has a