lined, but took a draught from the jug; and Waldo lay down not far
off and fell to work again. It mattered nothing if cold eyes saw it. It
was not his sheep-shearing machine. With material loves, as with human,
we go mad once, love out, and have done. We never get up the true
enthusiasm a second time. This was but a thing he had made, laboured
over, loved and liked--nothing more--not his machine.

The stranger forced himself lower down in the saddle and yawned. It was
a drowsy afternoon, and he objected to travel in these out-of-the-world
parts. He liked better civilised life, where at every hour of the day a
man may look for his glass of wine, and his easy-chair, and paper; where
at night he may lock himself into his room with his books and a bottle
of brandy, and taste joys mental and physical. The world said of
him--the all-knowing, omnipotent world, whom no locks can bar, who has
the cat-like propensity of seeing best in the dark--the world said,
that better than the books he loved the brandy, and better than books
or brandy that which it had been better had he loved less. But for the
world he cared nothing; he smiled blandly in its teeth. All life is a
dream; if wine and philosophy and women keep the dream from becoming a
nightmare, so much the better. It is all they are fit for, all they can
be used for. There was another side to his life and thought; but of that
the world knew nothing, and said nothing, as the way of the wise world
is.

The stranger looked from beneath his sleepy eyelids at the brown earth
that stretched away, beautiful in spite of itself in that June sunshine;
looked at the graves, the gables of the farmhouse showing over the stone
walls of the camps, at the clownish fellow at his feet, and yawned. But
he had drunk of the hind's tea, and must say something.

"Your father's place I presume?" he inquired sleepily.

"No; I am only a servant."

"Dutch people?"

"Yes."

"And you like the life?"

The boy hesitated.

"On days like these."

"And why on these?"

The boy waited.

"They are very beautiful."

The stranger looked at him. It seemed that as the fellow's dark eyes
looked across the brown earth they kindled with an intense satisfaction;
then they looked back at the carving.

What had that creature, so coarse-clad and clownish, to do with the
subtle joys of the weather? Himself, white-handed and delicate, he
might hear the music with shimmering sunshine and solitude play on the