"'Sleep in peace and wake in joy.'--SCOTT, _Lord of the Isles._ "'Never sleep the sun up. Rise to prevent the sun.'--VAUGHAN." When I had written to Constance, I thought of bed in a happy sleepy state of mind. As I brushed out my hair, I went over our pleasant long day in the woods, away from men, and noise, and even home. A day spent amidst birds and beasts, looking at nests, resting on mossy banks, and seeing only the sweet, sprouting things of field and lane, is a delightful thing. Is there anything better than a day out in the heart of the country? As I slipped into bed, Bess's last words came back to me as she went off to her cot. "Is it really very wicked, mamsie, to take nests and eggs?--for Fred says he has done it scores and scores of times, and he doesn't see no use in such things if they can't make sport for young ladies and gentlemen." "Some day you will understand," I had replied. "One cannot know some things when one is very young." And I have often noticed with children, that, up to a certain age, the uneducated view of everything is the sympathetic and natural one; later, to a few, the light does come. CHAPTER V _MAY_ "Come lasses and lads, take leave of your dads, And away to the May-pole hie; For every he has got him a she, And a minstrel standing by. For Willy has gotten his Jill, And Johnny has got his Joan To jig, to jig it, jig it up and down." _Old May Song._ All the morning Bess had been beside herself, jumping up and down, and running round in gusts of wild excitement. At noon the _fête_ was really to take place, and at that hour Constance and her band were to come down by a back way through the town. The piano had already been moved on the bowling green, between the yew hedges. In the distance I had watched Burbidge superintending, and I am sure grumbling freely by the ominous shakes of his head. Our old servant had been in a great state of alarm about his lawns since the dawn, and the passing of the piano under the great yew arch had been to him a matter of grave anxiety "They be centuries in growing, be yews," he said to me, "and the commonest piano as is made, can break 'em."