rying to make iron
do what iron won't do--that's how you may put it." The wife, who was
a silly woman, and (like many another such) looked down on her
husband's trade, maintained that her boy ought to have been born a
squire, with game of his own.

Young John went up to Balmain; and there, sure enough, he found
wrens and titlarks flitting about everywhere, cheeping amid the
furze-bushes on the low stone hedges and the granite boulders,
where the winter rains had hollowed out little basins for themselves,
little by little, working patiently for hundreds of years.
The weather was cold, but still and sunny. As he climbed, the sea at
first made a blue strip beyond the cliff's edge on his right, then
spread into a wide blue floor, three hundred feet below him, and all
the width of it twinkling. Ahead and on his left all the moorland
twinkled too, with the comings and goings of the birds. The wrens
mostly went about their business--whatever that might be--in a sharp,
practical way, keeping silence; but the frail note of the titlarks
sounded here, there, everywhere.

Young John might have shot scores of them. But, as he headed for the
old mine-house of Balmain and the cromlech, or Main-Stone, which
stands close beside it--and these are the only landmarks--he did not
even trouble to charge his gun. For the miracle was happening
already.

It began--as perhaps most miracles do--very slowly and gently,
without his perceiving it; quite trivially, too, and even absurdly.
It started within him, upon a thought that wren-pie was a foolish
dish after all! His mother, who prided herself upon making it, did
but pretend to enjoy it after it was cooked. His father did not even
pretend: the mass of little bones in it cheated his appetite and
spoiled his temper. From this, young John went on to consider.
"Was it worth while to go on killing wrens and shamming an appetite
for them, only because a wren had once informed against St. Stephen?
How were _these_ wrens guilty? And, anyway, how were the titlarks
guilty?" Young John reasoned it out in this simple fashion. He came
to the Main-Stone, and seating himself on the turf, leaned his back
against one of the blocks which support the huge monolith. He sat
there for a long while, puckering his brows, his gun idle beside him.
At last he said to himself, but firmly and aloud:

"Parson and the rest say 'tis true. But I can't believe it, and
something inside says 'tis wrong. . . .