It was very quiet in the wood that day, scarcely a bird abroad; now and then a still, winged insect threaded the green and gold arcades of the great fern, or a long sigh from the sea, passed up the hill along the top of the pines. The trail cleared the scrub and went between young trees, skirting a hollow planted with lean, sombre boles. The ground beneath was white with the droppings of shadow-haunting birds. Beyond that there was more open going among splay-footed oaks, crusted thick with emerald moss, all a-drip from their outer branches with the filmy lace of lichen. Then a pleasant grassy space of pines before the close locked redwoods began. I do not know how long we had been following before we heard the jays, but we had come into a little open glade where lilies grew, through which the trail seemed to lead to one of those places where you have always wished to be. There we heard them crying our approach. Herman said they were jays, and the first one might have been. I know the high, strident call they have, which another hears and repeats, and another, until all the wood is cautious and awake. But one jay calls exactly like every other, and about this there was a modulation that assured while it warned; that said: “I have heard; have no concern for me.” And even I could not have fancied so much as that in the mere squawking of jays. “Be still,” I said to Herman, who was protesting cheerfully behind me; “you have waked the wood people and now we shan’t see any of them.” “What people?” “The people who walk in the woods and leave the meadows warm and tender, whom you feel by the pricking between your shoulders when you come upon the places where they have been. The people who made this trail, whom we heard calling one to another just now. _The_ people——” And just then we came upon the faggot. It lay close beside the trail, little sticks all in order except a last handful dropped hurriedly on top when the faggot-gatherer had started at our approach. “Look!” I said; “that is what they were doing when we came stumbling on them.” It _was_ a faggot, I shall always insist that it was a faggot, and I should have said so if nothing had happened afterward to prove it. Herman kicked it impatiently with his foot. “There’s a literary temperament for you,” he protested. “You find a trail made by wood-choppers, you hear jays squawking and see a heap of brushwood. Straightway you create a race of people to account for them.” “You _said_ it was a deer trail a while ago,” I hinted, and Herman laughed. It was still and warm in the glade; the needles lay thick and soft and no grass grew. The scent of the yerba buena stole upon us intermittently, delicate pungent gusts answering each to each like speech. All around the sunlight lay, a thing palpable, as if, like the needles, it had not been lifted for a thousand years, but mellowed there like wine. Herman stretched himself on the brown thick litter beside me.