yce: I said nothing, Master Pippin.

Martin: I thought I heard you sigh.

Joyce: I did not--you did not.

Martin: My imagination exceeds all bounds.)

Because of their mutual dislike, when the boy was put in charge of his
own sheep the two shepherds spent their days apart. The Old Gerard
grazed his flock to the east as far as Chantry, but the Young Gerard
grazed his flock to the west as far as Amberley, whose lovely dome was
dearer to him than all the other hills of Sussex. And here he would sit
all day watching the cloud-shadows stalk over the face of the Downs, or
slipping along the land below him, with the sun running swiftly after,
like a carpet of light unrolling itself upon a dusky floor. And in the
evening he watched the smoke going up from the tiny cottages till it
was almost dark, and a hundred tiny lights were lit in a hundred tiny
windows. Sometimes on his rare holidays, and on other days too, he ran
away to the Wildbrooks to watch the herons, or to find in the
water-meadows the tallest kingcups in the whole world, and the myriad
treasures of the river--the giant comfrey, purple and white,
meadowsweet, St. John's Wort, purple loose-strife, willowherb, and the
ninety-nine-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-five others, or whatever
number else you please, that go to make a myriad. He came to know more
about the ways of the Wildbrooks than any other lad of those parts, and
one day he rediscovered the Lost Causeway that can be traveled even in
the floods, when the land lies under a lake at the foot of the hills.
He kept this, like many other things, a secret; but he had one more
precious still.

For as he lay and watched the play of sun and shadow on the plains, he
fancied a world of strange places he had known, somewhere beyond the
veils of light and mist that hung between his vision and the distance,
and he fell into a frequent dream of tunes and laughter, and sunlit
boughs in blossom, and dancing under the boughs; or of fires burning in
the open night, and a wilder singing and dancing in the starlight; and
often when his body was lying on the round hill, or by the smoky
hearth, his thoughts were running with lithe boys as strong and
careless as he was, or playing with lovely free-limbed girls with
flowing hair. Sometimes these people were fair and bright-haired and in
light and lovely clothing, and at others they were dark, with eyes of
mischief, and clad in the gayest rags; and sometimes they came to him