abundance, the thrush sing with a February voice. Here too, almost at
my right hand, perched a score or more of robins, bright-dyed,
warbling elvishly in chorus as if the may-boughs whereon they sat were
white with hoarfrost and not buds. Birds also unknown to me in voice
and feather I saw, and little creatures in fur, timid yet not wild;
fruits, even, dangled from the trees, as if, like the bramble, blossom
and seed could live here together and prosper.

Yet why should I be distracted by these things, thought I. I
remembered Maundeville and Hithlodaye, Sindbad and Gulliver, and many
another citizen of Thule, and was reassured. A man must either believe
what he sees, or see what he believes; I know no other course. Why,
too, should I mistrust the bounty of the present merely for the
scarcity of the past? Not I!

I rode on, and it seemed had advanced but a few miles before the sun
stood overhead, and it was noon. We were growing weary, I think, of
sheer delight: Rosinante, with her mild face beneath its dark forelock
gazing this side, that side, at the uncustomary landscape; and I ever
peering forward beneath my hat in eagerness to descry some living
creature a little bigger than these conies and squirrels, to prove me
yet in lands inhabited. But the sun was wheeling headlong, and the
stillness of late afternoon on the woods, when, dusty and parched and
heavy, we came to a break in the thick foliage, and presently to a
green gate embowered in box.




III