TRAVELLER'S JOY.
HE was sitting in the hedge at the top of Pagan's Hill, on the stump of a felled ash-tree, and a tangle of seeded clematis spread a feathery grey cloud overhead and ran along on one side and the other of the quiet old figure so very still by the wayside. He had been sitting there a long time, much longer than it took to smoke the short black pipe he had been bolding cold on his knee for nearly an hour. He did not appear to be waiting for anybody or expecting anything while he sat looking out at the world from his patient old eyes. The portion of the world within his range of vision was just then aflame with the mighty colours of a late autumn running on into winter. Below the steep fall of the hill there were horses ploughing near an avenue of elm-trees leading to a farmhouse. The a.uti mn colours have a magnifying quality that makes the world seem larger than it really is, and looking down from above the horses were dwarfed at the foot of the big yellow trees that were like vast pillars reaching up to prop the sky. The whole valley was full of elms heavy in their unlightened waning yellow, but where the rare beech- trees stood, they showed like a furnace-flame blazing up into the blue, and even their grey boles caught the reflection of the red-gold leaves thick-fallen on the ground beneath, so that the whole tree, trunk and branch, looked like a pillar of fire.
Up above here on the hillside the hedge was blown nearly bare of leaves; only the arresting silvery tangle of " traveller's joy " lay lightly along the top. The old man sitting below the wild clematis looked out over the valley less as if he were consciously admiring the beauty of earth than as if he himself were part of the whole scheme. It must have been some kind of satisfaction with the world around that kept him there for such a long time without moving.
A young man came down the lane before long with a load of stones. He was a very big sun-browned Somerset carter with fair hair, almost flaxen, shining above his deeply burned skin. He and the big horse went along with something of the same powerful heavy-gaited movement. The young man looked for a moment at the figure in the hedge and then nodded without speaking. The old man smiled at him without speaking either, and the movement gave his passionless old face an expression of immense benignity. The big young man sauntered a few yards further down the road, and then as the descent steepened be took from under his arm with great composure a young larch-sapling, and thrust it between the wheel and the upper projection of the cart, making just such a primitive brake as giants in old days would have used as they went striding over the hills with a fir-pole for a walking- stick. The wheel grated against the rude brake and the big horse slowed his slow walk and wheeled a little. The young giant made some remark which the horse seemed to under- stand, and presently the cart appeared to tilt itself up and shoot out the load in a heap beside the hedge. Then they readjusted themselves and went away back over the brow of the hill. All this time the old man had not spoken at all and had not appeared to move. He went on sitting there, while
the sound of wheels died away and the light grew low over the valley. Then another man came up the road with a pickaxe on his shoulder and his clothes stained red with ore. He went slowly too and rather stiffly, as if the earth that reared him and dyed him and gave him his livelihood had given him rheumatism too. He came painfully up the steep part of the hill, and when he neared the top he looked-up at the traveller's joy in the hedge, and so caught sight of the other traveller sitting beside it. He smiled suddenly at the sight, and his face— younger than the old man's by more than twenty years—had exactly the same expression of benignity that the other's had worn when be greeted the carter. He called out quickly in the idiom of Somerset children. " Our feyther," he said, and moved his stiff legs a little faster till he came close to the
old man—" Our feyther how be? " The old man stood up and came to his son in the road, putting out his band with grave dignity. " I be main well, my son," he said, and they talked a little. " How'm thy mother P " at last, and the younger man's careful face fell a little. " Her've a-bin very rough wi' her lungs," he said, " and can't do but little, the poor soul of her." His father looked concerned. " Ah," be said, " a righteous woman her be, an' good children all of you too that do help the two of us." His son looked deprecating. Could his father not come back home again ? One house cost less to keep than two. But the old man refused. He was perfectly content as he was. He had left his own home years before to go away and live all by himself in a mining village some miles away. He used to have periodical drinking-bouts and "knock the things about," and his wife, a timid, con- scientious body, could not bear it, so they had lived apart for years, while his children toiled and his grandchildren grew up in the place he had left. Now and then he would walk over to the neighbourhood of the home where he had been born and married and lived so long, and look across at the old house, but he went no nearer. He used to visit his sons and their wives, who held " Feyther " in esteem because of his dignified manner and gentle speech. His children helped both father and mother out of the earnings for which they toiled hard, and of which they might have been supposed to need every penny for their own growing families. The old man took their help with perfect dignity, and was always benign and gentle to every living creature except during his periodical drinking-bouts. He seemed to have achieved the impossible feat of giving up almost every responsibility in life without losing personal dignity and the affection of his children. After they had talked awhile, the younger man took some coins from his pocket and gave them to his father, and then went stiffly up the road, looking out over the valley now and then with his anxious face. The old man stayed a little longer, and then he too turned to go. Under the wild clematis for a moment there was a bustling movement of things unseen, and all at once the air was full of birds flying. They fluttered in a cloud, darkening the air and filling the space between the hedges with the pulse of beating wings and shrill crying " Pinck, pin—n—nck—." Thenthey disappeared suddenly into the hedge a dozen yards in front of the traveller, and the rustling began again until he reached their point of disappearance, when out they all fluttered crying shrilly, and went on with their whimsical game until the hedge ended, and they all flew away to a big wych-elm in the middle of a field and settled there chirming together in its branches with a noise like a cutting- machine.
The old man paused to watch the birds with his benign face, and stood listening to their chirming as if it contented him. They were the autumn chaffinches, the " bachelor " birds who after September cast off all the cares of family life and congregate in flocks to live on the stubbles and pastures in a cheerful community. " Coelebs' " chaffinch is a sort of Jekyll-and-Hyde bird, if such a comparison with our clumsy human morals may be applied to creatures so ethereal. For six months in the year he is a poet, a lover, and an artist; for the remaining six he is a garrulous glutton who gobbles and gossips all day long, having packed off his wife somewhere with other people's wives in order, apparently, to devote himself to the discussion of politics or theology, since no other subjects could set masculine tongues wagging at such a rate.
The old man waited until the crowd of birds flew out of sight. Then he went tranquilly down the road and disappeared among the yellow elm-trees.
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