all at once a great baffled desire told its story. Then he pulled out
his watch and merely said:

"I must be going. Good morning." He turned his way across the rock.

Disappointment darkened the lad's face when he saw that he was to
receive no answer; withering blight dried up its joy. But he recovered
himself quickly.

"Well, I must be going, too," he said bravely and sweetly. "Good
morning." He turned his way across the rock. But he had had a good time
talking with this stranger, and, after all, he _was_ a Southerner; and
so, as his head was about to disappear below the cliff, he called back
in his frank human gallant way:

"I'm glad I met you, Mister."

The man went up and the boy went down.

The man, having climbed to the parapet, leaned over the stone wall. The
tops of some of the tall poplar-trees, rooted far below, were on a level
with his eyes. Often he stopped there to watch them swaying like upright
plumes against the wind. They swayed now in the silvery April air with a
ripple of silvery leaves. His eyes sought out intimately the barely
swollen buds on the boughs of other forest trees yet far from leaf. They
lingered on the white blossoms of the various shrubs. They found the
pink hawthorn; in the boughs of one of those trees one night in England
in mid-May he had heard the nightingale, master singer of the non-human
world. Up to him rose the enchanting hillside picture of grass and moss
and fern. It was all like a sheet of soft organ music to his