really had very slight bearing on the matter in hand. Here he
said to Michael he would retire: here he would live and write poetry:
here life would be escorted to the tread of great verse: here an eremite
of art he would show forth the austerity of his vocation.

Meanwhile, Michael's books arrived, and at Guy's exhortation he worked
in the orchard of Plashers Mead--so the small property of some twenty
acres was called. Guy was busy all day with decorators and carpenters
and masons. The old landlord had immediately surrendered his house to so
enterprising a tenant; an agreement for three years had been signed; and
Guy was going to make all ready in summer that this very autumn with
what furniture he had he might inhabit his own house set among these
singing streams.

Michael found it a little hard to pay the keenest attention to Anson's
or to Dicey's entertainment of his curiosity about the Constitution, too
much did the idea of Guy's emancipation alluringly rustle as it were in
the tree-tops, too much did the thought of Guy's unvexed life draw
Michael away from his books. And even if he could blot out Guy's
prospect, it was impossible not to follow in fancy the goldfinches to
their thistle-fields remote and sunny, the goldfinches with their
flighted song.

Summer passed, and Michael did not find that the amount of information
he had absorbed quite outweighed a powerful impression, that was shaping
in his mind, of having wasted a good deal of time in staring at trees
and the funnels of light between them, in listening to the wind and the
stream, to the reapers and the progress of time.

One evening in mid-September he and Guy went after supper to see how
some newly painted room looked by candlelight. They sat on a couple of
borrowed windsor chairs in the whitewashed room that Guy had chosen for
his own. Two candles stuck on the mantelpiece burned with motionless
spearheads of gold, and showed to their great satisfaction that by
candlelight as well as by day the green shelves freshly painted were
exactly the green they had expected. When they blew out the candles,
they realized, such a plenitude of silver light was left behind, that
the full moon of harvest was shining straight in through the easterly
bow window which overhung the stream.

"By gad, what a glorious night!" sighed Guy, staring out at the orchard.
"We'll take a walk, shall we?"

They went through the orchard where the pears and pippins were lustered
b