No More Learning

'Yes, Miss. '

'Then you are to weed the small bed under the pear-tree by the
tool-house. Do not go yet, child. This is Mr. Sherman. Sit down a
little. '

The child sat down on the corner of a chair with a scared look in her
eyes. Suddenly she said--

'Oh, what a lot of burnt paper! '

'Yes; I have been burning some old letters. '

'I think,' said John, 'I will go now. ' Without a word of farewell he
went out, almost groping his way.

He had lost the best of all the things he held dear. Twice he had gone
through the fire. The first time worldly ambition left him; the second,
love. An hour before the air had been full of singing and peace that
was resonant like joy.
Now he saw standing before his Eden the angel
with the flaming sword. All the hope he had ever gathered about him had
taken itself off, and the naked soul shivered.


IV

The road under his feet felt gritty and barren. He hurried away from
the town. It was late afternoon. Trees cast bands of shadow across the
road. He walked rapidly as if pursued. About a mile to the west of
the town he came on a large wood bordering the road and surrounding
a deserted house. Some local rich man once lived there, now it was
given over to a caretaker who lived in two rooms in the back part. Men
were at work cutting down trees in two or three parts of the wood.
Many places were quite bare. A mass of ruins--a covered well, and the
wreckage of castle wall--that had been roofed with green for centuries,
lifted themselves up, bare as anatomies. The sight intensified, by
some strange sympathy, his sorrow, and he hurried away as from a thing
accursed of God.

The road led to the foot of a mountain, topped by a cairn supposed
in popular belief to be the grave of Maeve, Mab of the fairies, and
considered by antiquarians to mark the place where certain prisoners
were executed in legendary times as sacrifices to the moon.

He began to climb the mountain. The sun was on the rim of the sea.