Edmund Murdoch's studio stood high on Newlyn hill, and Barron had taken comfortable rooms in a little lodging-house close beside it. The men often enjoyed breakfast in each other's company, but on the following morning, when Murdoch strolled over to see his friend, he found that his rooms were empty. Barron, in fact, was already nearly a mile from Newlyn, and, at the moment when the younger artist sought him, he stood upon a footpath which ran through plowed fields to the village of Paul. In the bottom of his mind ran a current of thought occupied with the problem of Joan Tregenza, but, superficially, he was concerned with the spring world in which he walked. He stood where Nature, like Artemis, appeared as a mother of many breasts. Brown and solemn in their undulations, they rose about and around him to the sky-line, where the land cut sharply against a pale blue heaven from which tinkled the music of larks. He watched a bird wind upward in a spiral to its song throne; he noted the young wheat brushing the earth with a veil of green; he dawdled where elms stood, their high tops thick with blossom; and he delayed for full fifteen minutes to see the felling of one giant tree. A wedge-shaped cut had been made upon the side where the great elm was to fall, and, upon the other side, two men were sawing through the trunk. There was no sound but the steady hiss of steel teeth gnawing inch by inch to the wine-red heart of the tree. Sunshine glimmered on its leafy crown, and as yet distant branch and bough knew nothing of the midgets and Death below. Barron took pleasure in seeing the great god Change at work, but he mourned in that a masterpiece, on which Nature had bestowed half a century and more of love, must now vanish. "A pity," he said, while the executioners rested a few moments from their labors, "a pity to cut down such a noble tree." One woodman laughed, and the other--an old rustic, brown and bent--made answer: "I sez 'dang the tree!' Us doan't take no joy in thrawin' en, mister. I be bedoled wi' pain, an' this 'ere sawin's just food for rheumatiz. My back's that bad. But Squire must 'ave money, an' theer's five hundred pounds' value o' ellum comin' down 'fore us done wi' it." The saw won its way; and between each spell of labor, the ancient man held his back and grumbled. "Er's Billy Jago," confided the second laborer to Barron, when his companion had turned aside to get some steel wedges and a sledge-hammer. "Er's well-knawn in these paarts--a reg'lar cure. Er used tu work up Drift wi' Mister Chirgwin."