The stranger forced himself lower down in the saddle and yawned. It was a drowsy afternoon, and he objected to travel in these out-of-the-world parts. He liked better civilized life, where at every hour of the day a man may look for his glass of wine, and his easy-chair, and paper; where at night he may lock himself into his room with his books and a bottle of brandy, and taste joys mental and physical. The world said of him — the all-knowing, omnipotent world, whom no locks can bar, who has the cat-like propensity of seeing best in the dark — the world said, that better than the books he loved the brandy, and better than books or brandy that which it had been better had he loved less. But for the world he cared nothing; he smiled blandly in its teeth. All life is a dream; if wine and philosophy and women keep the dream from becoming a nightmare, so much the better. It is all they are fit for, all they can be used for. There was another side to his life and thought; but of that the world knew nothing, and said nothing, as the way of the wise world is.

The stranger looked from beneath his sleepy eyelids at the brown earth that stretched away, beautiful in spite of itself in that June sunshine; looked at the graves, the gables of the farm-house showing over the stone walls of the camps, at the clownish fellow at his feet, and yawned. But he had drunk of the hind’s tea, and must say something.

“Your father’s place, I presume?” he inquired sleepily.

“No; I am only a servant.”

“Dutch people?”

“Yes.”

“And you like the life?”

The boy hesitated.

“On days like these.”

“And why on these?”

The boy waited.

“They are very beautiful.”

The stranger looked at him. It seemed that as the fellow’s dark eyes looked across the brown earth they kindled with an intense satisfaction; then they looked back at the carving.

What had that creature, so coarse-clad and clownish, to do with the subtle joys of the weather? Himself, white-handed and delicate, he might hear the music which shimmering sunshine and solitude play on the finely strung chords of nature; but that fellow! Was not the ear in that great body too gross for such delicate mutterings?

Presently he said:

“May I see what you work at?”

The fellow handed his wooden post. It was by no means lovely. The men and birds were almost grotesque in their labored resemblance to nature, and bore signs of patient thought. The stranger turned the thing over on his knee.

“Where did you learn this work?”

“I taught myself.”

“And these zigzag lines represent — — ”

“A mountain.”

The stranger looked.

“It has some meaning, has it not?”

The boy muttered confusedly:

“Only things.”

The questioner looked down at him — the huge, unwieldy figure, in size a man’s, in right of its childlike features and curling hair a child’s; and it hurt him — it attracted him and it hurt him. It was something between pity and sympathy.