Barron, in fact, was already nearly a mile from Newlyn, and, at the moment
when the younger artist sought him, he stood upon a footpath which ran
through plowed fields to the village of Paul. In the bottom of his mind ran
a current of thought occupied with the problem of Joan Tregenza, but,
superficially, he was concerned with the spring world in which he walked.
He stood where Nature, like Artemis, appeared as a mother of many breasts.
Brown and solemn in their undulations, they rose about and around him to
the sky-line, where the land cut sharply against a pale blue heaven from
which tinkled the music of larks. He watched a bird wind upward in a spiral
to its song throne; he noted the young wheat brushing the earth with a veil
of green; he dawdled where elms stood, their high tops thick with blossom;
and he delayed for full fifteen minutes to see the felling of one giant
tree. A wedge-shaped cut had been made upon the side where the great elm
was to fall, and, upon the other side, two men were sawing through the
trunk. There was no sound but the steady hiss of steel teeth gnawing inch
by inch to the wine-red heart of the tree. Sunshine glimmered on its leafy
crown, and as yet distant branch and bough knew nothing of the midgets and
Death below.

Barron took pleasure in seeing the great god Change at work, but he mourned
in that a masterpiece, on which Nature had bestowed half a century and more
of love, must now vanish.

"A pity," he said, while the executioners rested a few moments from their
labors, "a pity to cut down such a noble tree."

One woodman laughed, and the other--an old rustic, brown and bent--made
answer: