you will both remember all your lives."

We did have it; never has its remembrance faded; that idyllic
afternoon of roving in the old Carlisle woods with the Story Girl
and Uncle Blair gleams in my book of years, a page of living
beauty. Yet it was but a few hours of simplest pleasure; we
wandered pathlessly through the sylvan calm of those dear places
which seemed that day to be full of a great friendliness; Uncle
Blair sauntered along behind us, whistling softly; sometimes he
talked to himself; we delighted in those brief reveries of his;
Uncle Blair was the only man I have ever known who could, when he
so willed, "talk like a book," and do it without seeming
ridiculous; perhaps it was because he had the knack of choosing
"fit audience, though few," and the proper time to appeal to that
audience.

We went across the fields, intending to skirt the woods at the
back of Uncle Alec's farm and find a lane that cut through Uncle
Roger's woods; but before we came to it we stumbled on a sly,
winding little path quite by accident--if, indeed, there can be
such a thing as accident in the woods, where I am tempted to think
we are led by the Good People along such of their fairy ways as
they have a mind for us to walk in.

"Go to, let us explore this," said Uncle Blair. "It always drags
terribly at my heart to go past a wood lane if I can make any
excuse at all for traversing it: for it is the by-ways that lead
to the heart of the woods and we must follow them if we would know
the forest and be known of it. When we can really feel its wild
heart beating against ours its subtle life will steal into our