le babble; the tune
was an improvisation, a weary, unrhythmic thing of rise and fall: and
yet it seemed to me a genuine utterance, and just at that moment the one
thing fitting and right and perfect. Humanity would have rejected it
with scorn. Nature, everywhere singing in the same key, recognised and
accepted it without a flicker of dissent.

All the time the hearty wind was calling to me companionably from where
he swung and bellowed in the tree-tops. 'Take me for guide to-day,' he
seemed to plead. 'Other holidays you have tramped it in the track of the
stolid, unswerving sun; a belated truant, you have dragged a weary foot
homeward with only a pale, expressionless moon for company. To-day why
not I, the trickster, the hypocrite? I who whip round corners and
bluster, relapse and evade, then rally and pursue! I can lead you the
best and rarest dance of any; for I am the strong capricious one, the
lord of misrule, and I alone am irresponsible and unprincipled, and obey
no law.' And for me, I was ready enough to fall in with the fellow's
humour; was not this a whole holiday? So we sheered off together,
arm-in-arm, so to speak; and with fullest confidence I took the jigging,
thwartwise course my chainless pilot laid for me.

A whimsical comrade I found him, ere he had done with me. Was it in
jest, or with some serious purpose of his own, that he brought me plump
upon a pair of lovers, silent, face to face o'er a discreet unwinking
stile? As a rule this sort of thing struck me as the most pitiful
tomfoolery. Two calves rubbing noses through a gate were natural and
right and within the order of things; but that human beings, with
salient interests and active pursuits beckoning them on from every side,
could thus--! Well, it was a thing to hurry past, shamed of face, and
think on no more. But this morning everything I met seemed to be
accounted for and set in tune by that same magical touch in the air; and
it was with a certain surprise that I found myself regarding these
fatuous ones with kindliness instead of contempt, as I rambled by,
unheeded of them. There was indeed some reconciling influence abroad,
which could bring the like antics into harmony with bud and growth and
the frolic air.

A puff on the right cheek from my wilful companion sent me off at a
fresh angle, and presently I came in sight of the village church,
sitting solitary within its circle of elms. From forth the vestry window
projected two small legs,