Theron had no ears for these noises of the woodland. He had halted, and
was searching through the little vistas offered between the stout gray
trunks of the beeches for some sign of a more sophisticated sort. Yes!
there were certainly voices to be heard, down in the hollow. And
now, beyond all possibility of mistake, there came up to him the low,
rhythmic throb of music. It was the merest faint murmur of music, made
up almost wholly of groaning bass notes, but it was enough. He moved
down the slope, swiftly at first, then with increasing caution. The
sounds grew louder as he advanced, until he could hear the harmony of
the other strings in its place beside the uproar of the big fiddles, and
distinguish from both the measured noise of many feet moving as one.

He reached a place from which, himself unobserved, he could overlook
much of what he had come to see.

The bottom of the glade below him lay out in the full sunshine, as flat
and as velvety in its fresh greenness as a garden lawn. Its open expanse
was big enough to accommodate several distinct crowds, and here the
crowds were--one massed about an enclosure in which young men were
playing at football, another gathered further off in a horse-shoe curve
at the end of a baseball diamond, and a third thronging at a point where
the shade of overhanging woods began, focussed upon a centre of interest
which Theron could not make out. Closer at hand, where a shallow stream
rippled along over its black-slate bed, some little boys, with legs
bared to the thighs, were paddling about, under the charge of two men
clad in long black gowns. There were others of these frocked monitors
scattered here and there upon the scene--pallid, close-shaven, monkish
figures, who none the less wore modern hats, and superintended with
knowledge the games of the period. Theron remembered that these were the