e might meet on a long
summer's day.

The morning was hot, and the June sun almost at its zenith. The gale
that had rocked the tall trees in fury but a few days before was almost
forgotten in the windless weather that had succeeded it. Master Morgan
had sauntered along one of the broad woodland paths, and was now lying
on his back in a sweet-smelling bed of bracken, gazing up through the
trees to the blue sky beyond. Johnnie was dreaming the happy dreams of
youth and the summer's noontide. The blue of the heavens haloed his
thoughts, and a pair of sweet blue eyes looked out from the midst of
them. A sigh escaped him. "Plague on 't!" he cried petulantly, "I
cannot get verses or rhymes into marching order. My head aches with a
tumble of conceits and dainty fancies. I could whisper a thousand
pretty things to yonder perky robin; I cannot give tongue to one of
them when Mistress Dorothy turns her eyes upon me; and now that my
heart yearns to set them in verse for her reading, I cannot frame a
line that doth not limp and stumble. What a thing it is that I can
sing the tears into mine eyes with another fellow's verses and cannot
build a couplet of mine own." Johnnie closed his eyes, puckered his
brow, and thought hard.

For the better part of an hour Morgan had the cool nook in the woodland
all to himself, and he dreamt of a pair of blue eyes, rhymed them with
"skies," joined "love" with "dove," "sweet" with "fleet," "rosy" with
"posy," and "heart" with "part," and cudgelled his brains for images
and conceits that would express in some scant measure the charms of
pretty Mistress Dorothy Dawe. But his lines would not prance and
curvet as he wished them to do; they laboured along in a heavy,
cart-horse fashion, so that Johnnie at length reluctantly recalled his
wandering wits to the consideration of the practical things of life.
And, immediately upon doing so, he became conscious of the presence of
an intruder upon his privacy. Some one was moving very stealthily
through the bracken; the young forester detected the quick breathing of
a man and he held his own breath in an instant, whilst his body
remained as rigid as though it had been a fallen log of oak. He cast
his eye down the line of buttons on the front of his doublet and
carefully scanned his belt. It held no weapon save a hunting-knife.
His hearing became doubly acute at a sign of danger, and he fixed the
spot from which each faint rustle proceeded. Mea