tters all the time--the life that
slides along the tree's life. Yon tree was buried before its seedtime,
and all these years it struggled, up an' up, till it broke through into
the light of the sun. Like God strugglin' at the end through a man's
flesh--"

Marcella stared at him: Wullie often talked like this, and she only
understood very vaguely what he meant. But she could grasp the idea of
something trying to struggle through desperately, and looked pityingly
at the little frail plume of blossom.

"And after all these years, to struggle through on this bleak hill! Poor
little tree!" she said.

"That happens often to folk's lives. They come struggling through tae
something very rough and hard. But it's the struggling that matters. Yon
tree may only have one fruit that will seed. And so life goes on--"

He stroked his beard and stared over the sea to where the brown-sailed
herring boats of his brother and his nephew were coming in through the
morning sunlight.

"It's a bit sad, isn't it?" Marcella said dreamily. "It seems hard on
the tree somehow, Wullie. Just as if the poor tree was only a path for
the new tree to walk along--"

"Well, that's all life is--a path for other life to walk along."

"I wish you'd explain better, Wullie," she said, staring from him to the
plant.

"Explaining's never any use, lassie. Folks have to live things to find
them out." He stood up slowly. "There's the boats comin' in, an' I must
get on back to the huts. Ye'll learn, Marcella--ye'll come tae it some
day that ye're only a path yerself for things to walk along--"

"Wullie--_what_ things?" she demanded.

"Other folks, maybe. Maybe God," he said, and went off to the huts.

Overcome by the pathos of the little hopeful tree, Marcella carried
baskets of soil from the farm and pots of water to lay them round about
it. She planted stakes round it to keep off the force of the wind. But
that year the flowering bore no fruit. And Wullie smiled at her attempts
to help the tree.

"The roots are doon too deep, lassie," he said. "Sae deep ye canna reach
them. There's little ye can dae for tree or man, Marcella, but juist not
hinder them. All we can do, the best of us, is to put a bit of soil an'
watter half-way up a tree trunk an' hope we're feeding the roots--"

"Then what can anyone do?" she said, looking at the pitiful little
tree, stripped now of its leaves in the autumn chill.

"I tauld ye--juist not hinder. An' lie as quiet as y