plenty of time at his own disposal and no responsibilities.
Looking across I can watch the martins at work; they have a
starling and a sparrow for near neighbours in the wooden gutter.
One nest is already complete all but the coping, the other two are
a-building: I wonder whether I or they will be first to go south
through the mist.

This great tree is a world in itself, and the denizens appear full
of curiosity as to the Gulliver who has taken up his abode beneath
it. Pale green caterpillars and spiders of all sizes come spinning
down to visit me, and have to be persuaded with infinite difficulty
to ascend their threads again. There are flies with beautiful
iridescent wings, beetles of all shapes, some of them like tiny
jewels in the sunlight. Their nomenclature is a sealed book to me;
of their life and habits I know nothing; yet this is but a little
corner of the cosmos I am leaving, and I feel not so much desire
for the beauty to come, as a great longing to open my eyes a little
wider during the time which remains to me in this beautiful world
of God's making, where each moment tells its own tale of active,
progressive life in which there is no undoing. Nature knows naught
of the web of Penelope, that acme of anxious pathetic waiting, but
goes steadily on in ever widening circle towards the fulfilment of
the mystery of God.

There are, I take it, two master-keys to the secrets of the
universe, viewed sub specie aeternitatis, the Incarnation of God,
and the Personality of Man; with these it is true for us as for the
pantheistic little man of contemptible speech, that "all things are
ours," yea, even unto the third heaven.