Eventually I came to prefer one spot for my
midday rest in the central part of the wood, where a stone cross,
slender, beautifully proportioned and about eighteen feet high, had been
erected some seventy or eighty years before by the lord of the manor. On
one side of the great stone block on which the cross stood there was an
inscription which told that it was placed there to mark the spot known
from of old as Dead Man's Plack; that, according to tradition, handed
from father to son, it was just here that King Edgar slew his friend and
favourite Earl Athelwold, when hunting in the forest.
I had sat there on many occasions, and had glanced from time to time at
the inscription cut on the stone, once actually reading it, without
having my attention drawn away from the insect world I was living in. It
was not the tradition of the Saxon king nor the beauty of the cross in
that green wilderness which drew me daily to the spot, but its
solitariness and the little open space where I could sit in the shade
and have my rest.
Then something happened. Some friends from town came down to me at the
hamlet I was staying at, and one of the party, the mother of most of
them, was not only older than the rest of us in years, but also in
knowledge and wisdom; and at the same time she was younger than the
youngest of us, since she had the curious mind, the undying interest in
everything on earth--the secret, in fact, of everlasting youth.
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