gold crosses, and scarlet birds. The colors and cubic corners
of that painted board pleased him like a play or a puppet show.
He stood staring and straddling for some moments on the cobbles
of the little market place; then he gave a short laugh and began
to mount the steep streets toward the high park and garden beyond.
From the high lawn, above the tree and table, he could see on one side
the land stretch away past the house into a great rolling plain,
which under the clear edges of the dawn seemed dotted with
picturesque details. The woods here and there on the plain looked
like green hedgehogs, as grotesque as the incongruous beasts found
unaccountably walking in the blank spaces of mediaeval maps.
The land, cut up into colored fields, recalled the heraldry
of the signboard; this also was at once ancient and gay.
On the other side the ground to seaward swept down and then up
again to the famous or infamous wood; the square of strange
trees lay silently tilted on the slope, also suggesting,
if not a map, or least a bird's-eye view. Only the triple
centerpiece of the peacock trees rose clear of the sky line;
and these stood up in tranquil sunlight as things almost classical,
a triangular temple of the winds. They seemed pagan in a newer
and more placid sense; and he felt a newer and more boyish
curiosity and courage for the consulting of the oracle.
In all his wanderings he had never walked so lightly, for the
connoisseur of sensations had found something to do at last;
he was fighting for a friend.

He was brought to a standstill once, however, and that at
the very gateway of the garden of the trees of knowledge.
Just outside the black entry of the wood, now curtained with
greener and larger leafage, he came on a solitary figure.