The music of the birds
was in his ears. Sweet wild flowers bloomed about him. Thatched roofs of
poor men's homes were in the distance; and an old grey spire, surmounted
by a Cross, rose up between him and the coming night.
He had never read the lesson which these things conveyed; he had ever
mocked and turned away from it; but, before going down into a hollow
place, he looked round, once, upon the evening prospect, sorrowfully.
Then he went down, down, down, into the dell.
It brought him to the wood; a close, thick, shadowy wood, through which
the path went winding on, dwindling away into a slender sheep-track. He
paused before entering; for the stillness of this spot almost daunted
him.
The last rays of the sun were shining in, aslant, making a path of
golden light along the stems and branches in its range, which, even as
he looked, began to die away, yielding gently to the twilight that came
creeping on. It was so very quiet that the soft and stealthy moss about
the trunks of some old trees, seemed to have grown out of the silence,
and to be its proper offspring. Those other trees which were subdued
by blasts of wind in winter time, had not quite tumbled down, but being
caught by others, lay all bare and scathed across their leafy arms, as
if unwilling to disturb the general repose by the crash of their fall.
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