Timothy was some time returning, and Joel, for lack of better occupation, began to puzzle over the mystery of the little man--he remained a mystery in High Fold, though the villagers had long ceased to speculate about it, and had probably forgotten, so many years had he lived among them, that his origin was still unknown. He had arrived one spring-tide, forty years ago, and settled down in this cot. Though a young man then, his head was silver-white. He lived quietly, received no letters, paid no visits, save to the sick in the neighbourhood--but spent his time gathering herbs, and, when he found an understanding ear, he talked garrulously about his thoughts, but never alluded to his circumstances. He was an educated man, knew many foreign languages, had read many strange books, studied the stars, and believed, to some extent, in astrology. Further than that no one knew about him. Presently the old man came, wet with dew, and carrying a basket of roots, which he had been digging up in Cringel Forest. "There's a virtue in them at dawn," he said, "that's gone by the time the sun is high. Everybody who rises at dawn has felt the same virtue in his own body." Timothy talked cheerfully, and prepared their morning meal without ever remarking upon the previous night. "Take an old man's advice, and a fishing-rod," he said, "and spend the day on Swirtle Tarn. I'll come too. It's a long time since I tempted trout with a bracken clock." Soon after breakfast they sallied forth, and went up the dale past Greystones. Even on this June day the house seemed to stand aloof from the sunshine. It looked lonely and out in the cold, like a soul that had withdrawn itself from intercourse with its fellows. The heavy green of the sycamores, now in full leaf, hid the barns. They kept by the beck-side. The bracken all about them was glittering with beetles--bronzy, golden things, that hung like beads to the fronds. In the distance they saw Barbara; near at hand Jan Straw was weeding a little patch of cultivated ground with slow, slow fingers. Silence held the inside of the house as well as the outside. Lucy was baking scones on the griddle, but the curtains of her great-grandmother's bed had not yet been withdrawn. The old woman kept Midsummer's Day like a fast. In the annals of her life it was marked as a day of doom, a day when her spirit came into touch with the supernatural, when her heart wept tears, though her eyes were dry. Its return each year brought the past back to her, the wild past when adventure came riding to the door, and no one need go out to seek it. Sometimes she could reach back through the dusty years, and feel her flesh grow young and warm, and know that she, and the Annas Lynn of twenty, were one. But at other times, the eyes that she fixed upon those ancient scenes were old and cold, and she failed to make the dry bones live.