e and help the woodmen when they cut the copse. That's
pleasant work, you know, cutting and binding. I sometimes wonder if the
hazels hate being slashed about. I expect they do; but it can't hurt them
much, for up they come again. It's the right way to live, of course, to
begin again the minute you are cut down to the roots, to struggle out to
the air and sun again, and to give thanks for life. Don't you feel yourself
as if you were good for centuries of living?"

"I'm not sure that I do," I said, "I don't feel as if I had quite got my
hand in."

"Yes, that's all right for you, old boy," said Father Payne. "You are
learning to live, and you are living. But an old fellow like me, who has
got in the way of it, and has found out at last how good it is to be alive,
has to realise that he has only got a fag-end left. I don't at all want to
die; I've got my hands as full as they can hold of pretty and delightful
things; and I don't at all want to be cut down like the copse, and to have
to build up my branches again. Yes," he added, pondering, "I used to think
I should not live long, and I didn't much want to, I believe! But now--it's
almost disgraceful to think how much I prize life, and how interesting I
find it. Depend upon it, on we go! The only thing that is mysterious to me
is why I love a place like this so much. I don't suppose it loves me. I
suppose there isn't a beast or a bird, perhaps not a tree or a flower, in
the place that won't be rather relieved when I go back home without having
killed something. I expect, in fact, that I have left a track of death
behind me in the grass--little beetles and things that weren't doing any
harm, and that liked being alive. That's pretty beastly, you know, but how
is one to help it? Then my affection for it is very futile. I can't
establish a civilised system here; I can't prevent the creatures from
eating each other, or the trees from crowding out the flowers. I can't eat
or use the things myself, I can't take them away with me; I can only stand
and yearn with cheap sentiment.

"And yet," he said after a moment, "there's something here in this bit of
copse that whispers to me beautiful secrets--the sunshine among the stems,
the rustle of leaves, the wandering breeze, the scent and coolness of it
all! It is crammed with beauty; it is all trying to live, and glad to live.
You may say, of course, that you don't see all that in it, and it is I that
am abnormal. But that doesn't exp