"There's no sayin' where anybody sich as you describe him to be might hide hisself a day like this," he observed deliberately, his optic ranging the sunny landscape with approval. "I never saw sich a beautiful day before--not like to-day. It's endless sort of. Seems to me as if I'd been at this 'ole for weeks." He paused. The others waited. WEEDEN was going to say something real any moment now, they felt. "No hurry," the Tramp reminded him. "Everything's light and careless, and so are we. There is no longer any Time--to lose." His voice half sang, half chanted in the slow, windy way he had, and the Gardener looked up as if a falling apple had struck him on the head. He shifted from one leg to the other; he seemed excited, moved. His single eye was opened--to the sun. He looked as if his body was full of light. "_You_ was the singer, was you?" he asked wonderingly, the tone low and quiet. "It was you I heard a-singin'--jest as dawn broke!" He scratched his head again. "And me thinkin' all the time it was a bird!" he added to himself. The Tramp said nothing. WEEDEN then resumed his ordinary manner; he went on speaking as before. But obviously--somewhere deep down inside himself--he had come to a big decision. "Gettin' nearer and nearer," he resumed his former conversation exactly where he had left it off, "but never near enough to get disappointed--ain't it? When you gets to the end of anything, you see, it's over. And that's a pity." Uncle Felix glanced at Stumper; Stumper glanced down at the end of his "wooden" leg; the Tramp still said nothing, smiling in his beard, now combed out much smoother than before. "It comes to this," said Weeden, "my way of thinkin' at least." He scratched wisdom from another corner of his head. "There's a lot of 'iding goin' on, no question about _that_; and the great thing is--my way of thinkin' at any rate--is--jest to keep on lookin'." The children met him eagerly at this point, using two favourite words that Aunt Emily strongly disapproved of: "deslidedly," said one; "distinkly," exclaimed the other. "That's it," continued WEEDEN, pulling down his cap to hide, perhaps, the spot where wisdom would leak out. "And, talking of signs, I say--find out yer own pertickler sign, then follow it blindly--till the end." He straightened up and looked with an air of respectful candour at the others. The decision of his statement delighted them. The children felt something of awe in it. Something of their Leader's knowledge evidently was in him. "Miss Judy, she gets 'er signs from the air," he said, as no one spoke. "Master Tim goes poking along the ground, looking for something with his feet. He feels best that way, feels the earth--things a-growin' up or things wot go down into 'oles. Colonel Stumper--and no offence to you, sir--chooses dark places where the sun forgets to shine--" "Dangerous, jungly places," whispered Tim, admiringly.