e youth
and summer behind you as you pass along,--behind in hearts which mere
realism would make always old, and counting their slothful beats under
the gray of a sky without sun or stars; wherefore I pray you to consider
how magnificent a mission the singer's is,--to harmonize your life with
your song, and toss your flowers, as your child does, heavenward, with
heavenward eyes. Think only of this when you talk with my sorrowing
friend, and you will do him good, as you have done me, without being
able to guess how a seeker after the Beautiful, such as you, carries us
along with him on his way; so that we, too, look out for beauty, and see
it in the wild-flowers to which we had been blind before."

Here Tom entered the little sanded parlour where this dialogue had been
held, and the three men sallied forth, taking the shortest cut from the
town into the fields and woodlands.

CHAPTER XIII.

WHETHER or not his spirits were raised by Kenelm's praise and
exhortations, the minstrel that day talked with a charm that spellbound
Tom, and Kenelm was satisfied with brief remarks on his side tending to
draw out the principal performer.

The talk was drawn from outward things, from natural objects,--objects
that interest children, and men who, like Tom Bowles, have been
accustomed to view surroundings more with the heart's eye than the
mind's eye. This rover about the country knew much of the habits of
birds and beasts and insects, and told anecdotes of them with a mixture
of humour and pathos, which fascinated Tom's attention, made him laugh
heartily, and sometimes brought tears into his big blue eyes.

They dined at an inn by the wayside, and the dinner was mirthful; then
they wended their way slowly back. By the declining daylight their talk
grew somewhat graver, and Kenelm took more part in it. Tom listened
mute,--still fascinated. At length, as the town came in sight, they
agreed to halt a while, in a bosky nook soft with mosses and sweet with
wild thyme.

There, as they lay stretched at their ease, the birds hymning vesper
songs amid the boughs above, or dropping, noiseless and fearless, for
their evening food on the swards around them, the wanderer said to
Kenelm, "You tell me that you are no poet, yet I am sure you have a
poet's perception: you must have written poetry?"

"Not I; as I before told you, only school verses in dead languages: but
I found in my knapsack this morning a copy of some rhymes, made by a