g over his shoulder, and a very large sheath knife buckled by
a belt round his waist, and carried with the cool bravado of the bowie
knife of a cowboy. But in spite of this backwoodsman's simplicity, or
perhaps rather because of it, he eyed with rising relish the picturesque
plan and sky line of the antiquated village, and especially the wooden
square of the old inn sign that hung over his head; a shield, of which
the charges seemed to him a mere medley of blue dolphins, gold crosses,
and scarlet birds. The colors and cubic corners of that painted
board pleased him like a play or a puppet show. He stood staring and
straddling for some moments on the cobbles of the little market place;
then he gave a short laugh and began to mount the steep streets toward
the high park and garden beyond. From the high lawn, above the tree and
table, he could see on one side the land stretch away past the house
into a great rolling plain, which under the clear edges of the dawn
seemed dotted with picturesque details. The woods here and there on
the plain looked like green hedgehogs, as grotesque as the incongruous
beasts found unaccountably walking in the blank spaces of mediaeval
maps. The land, cut up into colored fields, recalled the heraldry of the
signboard; this also was at once ancient and gay. On the other side the
ground to seaward swept down and then up again to the famous or infamous
wood; the square of strange trees lay silently tilted on the slope, also
suggesting, if not a map, or least a bird's-eye view. Only the triple
centerpiece of the peacock trees rose clear of the sky line; and these
stood up in tranquil sunlight as things almost classical, a triangular
temple of the winds. They seemed pagan in a newer and more placid
sense; and he felt a newer and more boyish curiosity and courage for the
consulting of the oracle. In all his wanderings he had never walked so
lightly, for the connoisseur of sensations had found something to do at
last; he was fighting for a friend.

He was brought to a standstill once, however, and that at the very
gateway of the garden of the trees of knowledge. Just outside the black
entry of the wood, now curtained with greener and larger leafage, he
came on a solitary figure.

It was Martin, the woodcutter, wading in the bracken and looking about
him in rather a lost fashion. The man seemed to be talking to himself.

"I dropped it here," he was saying. "But I'll never work with it again I
reckon