ll the vines and trailers--then the stream
and the big hollow where the cattle move up and down."

"Did you have anything to do with keeping it unspoiled?" I asked.

"My father didn't intend to cut anything right away. He might have
thinned the pasture section a little. I asked him not to. When he saw
the way I felt about it, he said he would never cut it."

There was a healing in that _never_.... The Abbot was not the kind to
ask his father for unreasonable things. I had seen the two together, and
had studied their relation with some pleasure. In the main, the father
had merely to understand, to be at one with the boy.... It happened that
we were alone in the Chapel at that time. I reached for the
rubber-boots.

"I'll ride as far as town and put the horse up," said I. "Meet me at the
far-end in a half-hour and we'll start the hike from there."

He was off at once. Chillness was still in the air, the land grey,
clouds yellowish-grey and watery.

We slipped out behind the stores and outhouses to a field that had a
stream running across--a stream and a hill and a band of oaks that still
held fast to a few leaves on the lower limbs, where the winds could not
get at them so freely. You can't expect to get anything out of an
oak-tree without working for it. I have seen an oak-log softened to
punk, the bark gone, having lain in a woodland shadow, doubtless for
thirty or forty years, but still holding fast to its unmistakable grain
and formation, though you could rub it to powder between the fingers.
For quite a little way, we followed the stream which was swollen with
melting snows, and then straight toward the wooded horizon line, the
afternoon hastening so that we marched with it, hot under our sweaters,
presently getting the stride of fence and ditch. The sun appeared at
times milk-like and ghostly in the south-west.... That was the first
time I saw the Amphitheatre.

We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and
looked over the wooded slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream
winding through the centre. The grass had been cropped to the last of
the Fall days, and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire
bottom, so that the lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed
and washed. I looked up. A beech-tree was shivering on the slope beside
me, holding fast to her leaves of paper white on wide and pendent
branches; a smooth and beautiful trunk of bedford grey, with eyes like
ki