ds with morning which was which. An
occasional bat would flit like a doubtful shadow across his eyes, but a
cool breath of air was roaming about as well, which was not of the night
at all, but plainly belonged to the morning. He wandered to the bottom
of the garden--to the clump of trees, lay down where Agnes had been
lying the night before, and thought and thought until he felt in himself
how the child had felt when she longed to be a bird. What could he do
to content her? He knew every bough of the old trees himself, having
scrambled over them like a squirrel scores of times; but even if he
could get Agnes up the bare bole of an elm or fir, he could not trust
her to go scrambling about the branches. On the other hand, wherever he
could go, he could surely somehow help Agnes to go. Having gathered a
thought or two, he went back to bed.

The very next evening he set to work and spent the whole of that and the
following at his bench, planing, and shaping, and generally preparing
for a construction, the plan of which was now clear in his head. At
length, on the third evening, he carried half a dozen long poles, and
wheeled several barrowfuls of short planks, measuring but a few inches
over two feet, down to the clump of trees.

At the foot of the largest elm he began to dig, with the intention
of inserting the thick end of one of the poles; but he soon found it
impossible to get half deep enough, because of the tremendous roots of
the tree, and giving it up, thought of a better plan.

He set off to the smithy, and bought of Mr Willett some fifteen feet of
iron rod, with a dozen staples. Carrying them home to his small forge,
he cut the rod into equal lengths of a little over two feet, and made a
hook at both ends of each length. Then he carried them down to the
elm, and drove six of the staples into the bole of the tree at equal
distances all round it, a foot from the ground; the others he drove one
into each of the six poles, a foot from the thick end; after which
he connected the poles with the tree, each by a hooked rod and its
corresponding staples, when the tops of the poles just reached to the
first fork of the elm. Then he nailed a bracket to the tree, at the
height of an easy step from the ground, and at the same height nailed a
piece of wood across between two of the poles. Resting on the bracket
and this piece of wood, he laid the first step of a stair, and fastened
it firmly to both. Another bracket a little