tends to have," answered Pan, with one of his most
fluty jeers, and he shook his head until the crests ruffled still lower
over the tips of his ears.

"Are you--you one of his agents--that is, _spies_, and was it you that
insulted me by wanting to buy Elmnest just because it was poor and old?" I
demanded, with the color in my cheeks.

"I am not his spy or his agent, and do you want to come down to the
spring-house and cook these wild-mustard shoots for our dinner, or shall I
go at our old garden with the prospect of an empty stomach at sunset?"

"Why won't you come in to dinner with me?" I asked, with a mollified laugh,
though I knew I was bringing down upon myself about my hundredth refusal of
proffered hospitality.

"Two reasons--first, because I won't eat with my neighbors at the 'great
house' when I can't eat with them in the cottage, and I just can't eat the
grease that a lot of the poorer villagers deluge their food with. I'm Pan,
and I live in the woods on roots and herbs. Second--because about six weeks
ago I found a farm woman who would come out at my wooing to cook and eat
the herbs and roots with me and I could have her to myself all alone. Now,
will you come on down to the spring?" And without waiting for my reply,
Adam started down the hill, crosswise from the path by which I had
ascended, padding ahead in his weird leather sandals and breaking a path
for me through the undergrowth as I followed close at his shoulder, an
order of rough travel to which I had become accustomed in the weeks that
had passed and that now seemed to me--well, I might say racial.

In the riot of an April growing day, in which we could hear life fairly
teem and buzz at our feet, on right, and left, and overhead, Adam and I
worked shoulder to shoulder in the old garden of Elmnest. Every now and
then I ran down to the spring to put a green fagot under the pot of herbs,
which needed to simmer for hours to be as delicious as was possible for
them. From the library came a rattle and bang of literary musketry from the
blessed parental twins, who were for the time being with Julius Caesar in
"all Gaul," and oblivious to anything in the twentieth century, even a
spring-intoxicated niece and daughter down in her grandmother's garden with
a Pan from the woods; occasionally Rufus rattled a pot or a pan; but save
for these few echoes of civilization, Adam and I delved and spaded and
clipped and pruned and planted in the old garden just as if