Those were the days for Laura when almost everything in literature was new to her and every fresh discovery was like one of Keats’s own Magic casements opening on the foam. Between the shabby old covers of that one book were the “Ode to a Nightingale,” Shelley’s “Skylark,” Wordsworth’s “Ode to Duty,” and other gems which could move to a heart-shaking rapture. Willie took their readings more calmly. He liked where Laura loved. But he did honestly like, and that meant much to Laura, for none of those she had previously known in her short life, except her brother Edmund, cared two pence for poetry.

But one incident she shared with Willie remained more vivid in her memory than the poetry readings or the scrapes he got into with other boys, such as being let down into a well by the chain to rescue a duck which had spent a day and a night, quacking loudly, as it searched in vain for a shore to that deep, narrow pool into which it had tumbled, or the time when the hayrick was on fire and, against the advice of older men, he climbed to the top to beat the burning thatch with a rake.

She had gone one day to his home with a message from Miss Lane to the housekeeper and, finding no one at home in the house, had crossed the yard to a shed where Willie was working. He was sorting out planks and, intending to tease and perhaps to shock her, he showed her a pile at the farther end of the shed in the semi-darkness. “Just look at these,” he said. “Here! Come right in and put your hand on them. Know what they’re for? Well, I’ll tell you. They’re all and every one of them sides for coffins. I wonder who this one’s for, and this and this. This nice little narrow one may be for you; it looks about the right size. And this one at the bottom,” touching it with his toes, “may be for that very chap we can hear kicking up such a row with his whistling outside. They’re all booked for somebody, mostly somebody we know, but there aren’t any names written on them.”

Laura pretended to laugh and called him a horrid boy, but the bright day seemed to her suddenly to become dark and cold, and, afterwards, whenever she passed that shed she shivered and thought of the pile of coffin boards waiting in the half-darkness until they should be needed to make coffins for people now going happily about the green on their business and passing the shed without a shudder. The elm or the oak which had yet to make her coffin must then have been growing green, somewhere or other, and Willie had no coffin tree growing for him, for his was a soldier’s grave out on the veld in South Africa.