crittur,' he says. What would you say, Mr. Dishart?"

Gavin managed to escape without giving an answer, for here their
roads separated. He did not find the Wild Lindsays, however.
Children of whim, of prodigious strength while in the open, but
destined to wither quickly in the hot air of towns, they had gone
from Caddam, leaving nothing of themselves behind but a black mark
burned by their fires into the ground. Thus they branded the earth
through many counties until some hour when the spirit of wandering
again fell on them, and they forsook their hearths with as little
compunction as the bird leaves its nest.

Gavin had walked quickly, and he now stood silently in the wood,
his hat in his hand. In the moonlight the grass seemed tipped with
hoar frost. Most of the beeches were already bare, but the shoots,
clustering round them, like children at their mother's skirts,
still retained their leaves red and brown. Among the pines these
leaves were as incongruous as a wedding-dress at a funeral. Gavin
was standing on grass, but there were patches of heather within
sight, and broom, and the leaf of the blaeberry. Where the beeches
had drawn up the earth with them as they grew, their roots ran
this way and that, slippery to the feet and looking like
disinterred bones. A squirrel appeared suddenly on the charred
ground, looked doubtfully at Gavin to see if he was growing there,
and then glided up a tree, where it sat eyeing him, and forgetting
to conceal its shadow. Caddam was very still. At long intervals
came from far away the whack of an axe on wood. Gavin was in a
world by himself, and this might be someone breaking into it.

The mystery of woods by moonlight thrilled the little minister.