But each of these years brought riper knowledge, until God's leafy acre, with its canopy of changing sky, both teeming with life to his quickened vision, became not only the outcast's second Bible, but all the almanac he needed or possessed. With no newspaper to distract his mind, and perhaps not a letter or a human voice for months, it was on bird and leaf that he came to rely for the time of year; while the field of his research was greatly extended by nocturnal exercise upon the pine-serrated plateau beyond the church. Now the tips of the chestnut twigs might bulge and bud, but spring was not spring until the plover paraded his new black breast, or a peewit rose screaming at the midnight intruder. All summer the small bird was king; hedgerows twittered; crumbs were scorned; man was jilted for slug and worm. But the end came in sight with the homebred mallard, flying feebly in his summer feathers; and the flight of the wild duck was the end of all. The third year found Carlton watching for the mallard as his bird of ill-omen, and redoubling his efforts while his ear prepared for the shrill music of the full-grown quills in final flight. Harsh experience had taught him how little he could do, with any certainty or any continuity, in the season when the little birds and he were best friends. It was late in May, and the church would soon be hidden for another summer; meanwhile Carlton was still at work upon his transept window, in a corner which a great stack of undressed sandstone made invisible from the lane, as it already was from the road. The folk from other villages were beginning to stop and watch him longer than he liked, and he did not care to be a cynosure at all. He only asked to build his church in peace, and with it an example which should do at least a little to counteract the one he had already set; and he meant both for his own people, not for the outlying world. He really feared a reaction in his favour on the part of the sentimental outsider. It would do him fresh injury in the eyes of many of whom he honestly longed to win back in the end. Moreover, his head was very level in these days. He saw nothing heroic in his own conduct. With all his wish to undo a little of the harm that he had done to others, there was a very human eagerness to redeem his own past, so far as that was possible upon earth. Carlton was never unaware of this incentive. He entertained no illusions about himself, nor did he wish to create any in others. For example, there was his work. It was never easy, sometimes hopeless, always fascinating. But the man himself desired no credit for devotion to labour which he loved for its own sake, and in which he was still capable (but no longer ashamed) of forgetting the past.