"Well," I said, "you must know it. We have lost him."

"Ah!" said the girl, "I lost him long ago."



WOOD-MAGIC

There are three vines that belong to the ancient forest.
Elsewhere they will not grow, though the soil prepared for
them be never so rich, the shade of the arbour built for them
never so closely and cunningly woven. Their delicate,
thread-like roots take no hold upon the earth tilled and
troubled by the fingers of man. The fine sap that steals
through their long, slender limbs pauses and fails when they
are watered by human hands. Silently the secret of their life
retreats and shrinks away and hides itself.

But in the woods, where falling leaves and crumbling
tree-trunks and wilting ferns have been moulded by Nature into
a deep, brown humus, clean and fragrant--in the woods, where
the sunlight filters green and golden through interlacing
branches, and where pure moisture of distilling rains and
melting snows is held in treasury by never-failing banks of
moss--under the verdurous flood of the forest, like sea-weeds
under the ocean waves, these three little creeping vines put
forth their hands with joy, and spread over rock and hillock and
twisted tree-root and mouldering log, in cloaks and scarves and
wreaths of tiny evergreen, glossy leaves.