his eyes.

THE MAN WHO DESIRED TO BE A TREE.

THE sunshine streamed across the lush-grassed meadows, and beat fiercely
down on the huge-limbed elms whose myriad leaves kept fluttering
ceaselessly. In the dense green covert, formed by the multitude of
interlacing branches, several wee brown songsters had built their nests,
and they kept flitting to and fro and trilling joyously as the light
breeze stirred the innumerable leaves.

The air was warm, and soft, and pleasant. The deep green arcades were
cool and moist, full of the drowsy flutter that rippled through the
branches, and full also of the deliciously delicate fragrance from the
budding sprays and fresh green foliage. May was in the woodlands, shy
and winsome; she had not yet shaken herself free from her day-dreams,
and the wonder of her young hopes lingered about her still.

At the foot of a tree, reclining against its roots, lay a lean-visaged
student, very shabbily dressed and with patches of thin grey hair around
his temples. A volume of the _Faery Queen_ lay open beside him, but he
had for some time ceased to pore over its pages, being engaged instead
in chasing Fancy as she flitted hither and thither through the vast
green woodland, dallying with the shadows and gossiping with the wind.

His mind's eye revelled in the picturesque suggestions that seemed to
him, as he lay here with half-closed lids, to be fleetingly visible, as
if in a dream. He was aware of beautiful damsels in gauzy draperies
pantingly hurrying through the dusky avenues with steel-clad knights in
hot pursuit; of grey old monks, cowled and sandalled, moving hither and
thither in a world of utter peace; and of dryads and fairies, fauns and
satyrs, filling the woodland with dreamy poetry, as the wind filled its
giant rafters with music, and the brooks purled babblingly through the
crevices of its floor.

How delightful it would be to be a denizen of the forest--to be this elm
in whose shadow he was lying! he thought.

The huge tent-like shadow of the elm-tree deepened and widened with the
dropping sun, and the shadows of other trees in the vicinity--dainty
saplings and gnarled old foresters--fell across the nearer margin of the
grass-land in fantastic, almost semi-human outlines: at least, so it
seemed to the dreamy student, as he lay here watching the breeze ripple
across the grass-blades and listened to the murmur of the forest at his
back.

"I should like to be a tree," he