That little pine-clad hill with the graves was pleasantly sheltered by hills higher than itself. The pines were very tall and shapely. They soared skyward like clustering brown masts, decked out at their far tops with tossing banners of holiday green. The summer sunlight paid long visits at their feet. If you should lay down your head under those trees, and then lift your eyes, you would be startled to discover the unbelievable purple pomp of those woven branches, and the intense blueness beyond. The shadows on the ground were more golden there than elsewhere, the sunbeams more serious-minded. They had all played together there for so many years, seeing the same sights and thinking the same thoughts, that they had at last come to look somewhat like each other. L’Allegro and Il Penseroso had mingled their identities. A scarlet tanager flared down from a far purple bough, to sing the peace that brooded over the place. Both the man and the boy had their reasons for seeking peace. Though unknown to each other, they knew that peace might be found under those pines, but they had no mind for sharing it with each other. II The boy Royal had a poem of his own make in his pocket, and being on his travels, he had climbed up from the east to rest himself, and to re-read his verses yet again in solitude. Perhaps he was about to add to them some touch of immortality, some wistful trace of that philosophy which may not revisit the mind of man after his seventeenth year, but day by day loses itself more deeply in the underbrush of uncharted, enchanted woodways. The poem was about a maiden called Amaryllis. In the prose of private life, Royal’s Amaryllis was a wholly good and pretty girl a little older than himself. Her name was Mary, but even at nineteen she was still signing herself Maimée. However, what is poetry for, unless to quicken and rechristen all worlds into strangeness and beauty? Let Royal keep his Amaryllis a while longer, I beg!