The full Southern moon was savagely vivid that evening, devouring dreams as easily as it did the clouds that saluted too familiarly; so I left the house by what Sam called the stove-wood trail, a rear way softened by a lane of shadows. What trips the eye will halt the foot; and mine poised in air for a second or less as I sighted a hemlock bough like laced jet against the moon; as if Night, in defense, had thrown a torn bit of her garment over the face of the usurper. When I touched earth again, I was on new, mysterious ground, so quickly are worlds created for us, the ramblers of the universe, tenants insatiable. The mountains sat about me, cloaked sages waiting my indiscretions. Like the roll of a hidden sea, the valleys whispered upward with the life that stirs by night, the smaller wings, that dart fearlessly when the birds are asleep; and the lithe, furry dwellers in secret that come out of the earth to thread, more graceful than swimmers, the channels of shadow. But that purring wave was only the foam-flower of a vastly bedded silence; silence in which Nature dreamed of a way to reconquer her world and rule alone; while, against that dream, Beauty everywhere uncovered her soul. In behalf of man, the first to divine her, the first to adore, she arrayed her magic, invincible if so was his love. Everywhere she shone; on the laurel shedding a vapor of light, on the laps of the orange fungi with their creamy apron cascades; on the roots of trees, and the rocks that fed them endurance. Blue mosses, pale lichens, grasses with heads of mauve and pearl, gleamed in the unsubdued strips of golden light. The world of minute things pressed as hugely significant as the solar system. And as the sea, never hushed, the valley whisper reached for an intangible shore. High above me there was escape by way of a blue eternity, where two walls of cloud parted to show a chasm of sky. Lower down a mist wound reverently about a star, then crept elfishly to the most portentous peak, hanging there like a comic beard. While I waited its whim, a voice, too fervently human, came through the clump of bushes at my side. A second later, a tall figure bearing an armful of fagots was checkered disappearingly along the path toward the cabin. The next morning when I recalled the sounds I had heard, and put them together understandingly, I had this: “K’rettie can make ’most as good headcheese as ever Cyn could.” And I knew that in Merlin language granpap had said: “My son’s wife, please God, is my daughter.” III