XTH DAY--_Continued_

THE GRANITZ WOODS, SCHWARZER SEE, AND KIEKOeWER

In the woods behind Binz, alone in the heart of them, near a clearing
where in past days somebody must have lived, for ancient fruit trees
still mark the place that used to be a garden, there is a single grave
on which the dead beech leaves slowly dropping down through the days and
nights of many autumns, have heaped a sober cover. On the headstone is a
rusty iron plate with this inscription--

Hier ruht ein Finnischer Krieger
1806.

There is no fence round it, and no name on it. Every autumn the beech
leaves make the unknown soldier a new brown pall, and through the
sparkling frozen winters, except for the thin shadows of naked branches,
he lies in sunshine. In the spring the blue hepaticas, children of those
that were there the first day, gather about his sodden mound in little
flocks of loveliness. Then, after a warm rain, the shadows broaden and
draw together, for overhead the leaves are bursting; the wind blowing on
to him from the clearing is scented, for the grass out there has violets
in it; the pear trees in the deserted garden put on their white robes of
promise; and then comes summer, and in the long days there are wanderers
in the woods, and the chance passer-by, moved perhaps by some vague
sentiment of pity for so much loneliness, throws him a few flowers or a
bunch of ferns as he goes his way. There was a cross of bracken lying on
the grave when I came upon it, still fresh and tied together with bits
of grass, and a wreath of sea-holly hung round the headstone.

Sitting down by the side of the nameless one to rest, for the sun was
high and I began to be tired, it seemed to me as I leaned my face
against his cool covering of leaves, still wet with the last rain, that
he was very cosily tucked away down there, away from worries and the
chill fingers of fear, with everything over so far as he was concerned,
and each of the hours destined for him in which hard things were to
happen lived through and done with. A curiosity to know how he came to
be in the Granitz woods at a time when Ruegen, belonging to the French,
had nothing to do with Finland, made me pull out my guide-book. But it
was blank. The whole time I was journeying round Ruegen it was invariably
blank when it ought to have been illuminating. What had this man done or
left undone that he should have been shut out from the company of those
who are bur