him--not the
stuff that rhymes, yer know, like 'The Psalm of Life' and so forth, but
real po'try. I wish I could tell yer what I mean--" His face was
puckered into a thousand wrinkles with the intellectual effort, and his
little diamond eyes gleamed. "He could take a trumpery common thing
like that there mug-faced, lop-eared hare and make it stand for the
medi-what-you-call-it-forest. I've said to him, 'Come out with me on
the old 'bus if you want green and loneliness and nature.' And he has
said--I recollect one talk in particular--he said, 'I'd love to hear'
something about a pipe--I'm getting old, sonny--"

"The Pipes of Pan?" Paul suggested.

"The very words. Lor lumme! how did you guess it?" He paused, his
fingers holding the lighted match, which went out before he could apply
it to his tobacco. "Yus. 'The Pipes of Pan.' I don't know what it
means. Anyway, he said he'd love to hear them in the real forest, but
duty kept him to bricks and mortar and so he had to hear them in
imagination. He said that all them footling little beasts were
a-listening to 'em, and they told him all about it. I remember he told
me more about the woods than I know myself--and I reckon I could teach
his business to any gamekeeper or poacher in England. I don't say as
how he knew the difference between a stoat and a weasel--he didn't. A
cock-pheasant and a hen-partridge would have been the same to him. But
the spirit of it--the meaning of it--he fair raised my hair off--he
knew it a darned sight better nor I. And that's what I set out for to
say, sonny. He had po'try in him. And all this"--he swept an
all-inclusive hand--"all this meant to him something that you and I
can't tumble to, sonny. It meant something different to what it looked
like--ah!" and impatient at his impotence to express philosophic
thought, he cast another lighted match angrily into the fire.

Paul, high product of modern culture, sat in wonder at the common old
fellow's clarity of vision. Tears rolled down his cheek. "I know, dear
old Bill, what you're trying to say. Only one man has ever been able to
say it. A mad poet called Blake.

'To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower;
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour'."

Barney Bill started forward in his chair and clapped his hand on the
young man's knee. "By gum! you've got it. That's what I was a-driving
at. That's Silas. I call to mind when he