"The birds is welcome to my gatherin'," he replied scattering his bundle of wool. "I's'll go and pull rushes. We's gettin' short o' candles down-by," and he shuffled away. Barbara watched him go. She thought how hard it was to be old and lonely and poor. Jan had bed and whittle-gate at the farm--decency could do no other after a life of honest service--but, as the old man was past work, what use had he for wages? Such was her great-grandmother's argument for refusing to part with a penny of her hoard. Barbara went slowly down-hill. She had an hour to spare before milking-time, and it was too precious to be lost. She passed along a ledge of the Mickle Crags, found a sheltered spot, and sat down. She could not see Greystones, as it lay right below her, but she could smell the turf-smoke from its fire. There, with her hands clasped upon her knees, surrounded by a wilderness of grey rocks, she gave wings to her mind. All through this Easter-tide she had walked as in a dream; but it was the dream and not the actual that had life. She came and went, rose before dawn, and passed the day toiling upon the fells, but now and again she culled an hour to spend with her book--Pope's "Homer"--at the cave. Sometimes Peter came there and read to her, often the old herbalist Timothy Hadwin accompanied him, and the two men would talk, while she listened, weaving withy baskets, but weaving into her own mind many a wonderful thought. Thus she learned to know the old stories of Achilles and Hector and Helen, of Ulysses and Penelope; she was thrilled with the beauty, pathos and madness of them. The natural objects about her began to take on a new meaning; she was able to feel the freshness of the early world, when men's hearts were fuller of the mystery of things, less sure of their own place in the Universe, and stricken with fear before the veiled faces of the gods. She likened her mind to the shield of Achilles, which Vulcan forged for him; she thought of it as a great disc engraved with strange pictures--emblems of all that she thought and knew and felt. But as the ocean encompassed the shield-- "In living silver seemed the waves to roll, And beat the buckler's verge, and bound the whole," so about her beat the waves of a mystery, which shut in a part of her life, that her inward eye might concentrate upon it, and yet be conscious of the depths surging round. The human mind is stupendous, she thought, beyond the power of man to understand. When she considered her own mind, and all that was written upon it--its ideas of life, of men and women, of religion and destiny, she was awed with wonder that a thing so mighty should have been forged for her by the hand which gave her life.