“H’m! Never mind. It doesn’t matter so much about Nunan the gipsy; but Nunan was daft about his horses--the Johnnie Faws’ horses. He thought the quarry where they’d left them would be somewhere about there. He wanted us to stop and look for them, and climbed up into the boat to put the matter in a reasonable light to Joe. He woke Osa Couper--did I say that Osa was asleep in the boat? He was; but of course Joe wasn’t going to burrow up and down the headland for the Johnnie Faws’ horses, and Nunan became morose. By and by Joe packed him off with another fellow to rouse Hadwen--he was a farmer--and to meet us with the farm-horses at the Beck; and I began to envy Osa in the boat myself. Let me see....” * * * * * He tapped with his lean fingers, as if continuing to himself: it is not unlikely we missed part of the tale. He was very old; and when at last he went on again, it was with a little rousing and pulling of himself together. * * * * * “Well, we saw it at last, when the moon got high--what the wind had done to the snow. It was glorious, that mounting ... all in a frost of brilliant stars, ... and it showed us a miracle. We could see half over the Head now. Acre after acre was fluted and rippled and ravelled, all so still and quiet and spotless; ... and only thin copses, a mile, two, four miles away, broke the whiteness. The wind had touched and left it in tresses and flounces; ... far away it was channeled like billows, and again thick and smooth; ... and trees and bushes were as if something thick and white had been poured over them, all coronets and garlands. The lanterns were murky orange spots, and every detail of the boat, the horses, the harnessing, old Joe’s artificial chin over the gunnel.... The _Lizzie Martin_ might be driftwood by this time on the other side of the Heights. I didn’t think of the _Lizzie Martin_; I didn’t think of that grammar-school I was going to have one day; I only wanted to look at the snow and the serene moon.... Ah well!... “From the top of the next rise we could see Lee Wood, black below us, and the grey Heights beyond. For the first time the grass showed in patches, and the boat rocked on the carriage, and we dragged back as we descended the slope. Then all at once Joe Barker shouted, ‘Don’t turn ’em!’ “It seemed that a cart-track ran through the wood that would save a mile and more. In the deep dip at the bottom Nunan was waiting with Hadwen’s horses; and we had taken the dip and risen again on the other side through a gap in a wall before anybody had fairly counted the risk. It was too late to turn them, or perhaps worth chancing--a thirty-foot boat, and all that tangle of cordage.... Anyway, we went on, and the wood closed in behind us.