He threw himself into a chair, dead beat, at the end of emotional strain, and remained talking with the old man of he scarce knew what. But these two--Jane and the old man--were linked to him by imperishable ties, and he could not leave them yet awhile in the house of death. Barney Bill stirred the fire, which blazed up, making the perky animals on the hearth cast faint and fantastic shadows. "It's funny how he loved those darned little beasts, isn't it now? I remember of him telling me as how they transported him into magic something--or the other--medi--he had a word for it--I dunno--" "Mediaeval?" "That's it, sonny. Mediaeval forests. It means back of old times, don't it? King Arthur and his Round Table--I done a bit of reading, yer know." The old man took out pouch and pipe. "That's what drew us together, sonny, our taste for literature. Remember?" "Can I ever forget?" said Paul. "Well, he was like that too. He had lots of po'try in him--not the stuff that rhymes, yer know, like 'The Psalm of Life' and so forth, but real po'try. I wish I could tell yer what I mean--" His face was puckered into a thousand wrinkles with the intellectual effort, and his little diamond eyes gleamed. "He could take a trumpery common thing like that there mug-faced, lop-eared hare and make it stand for the medi-what-you-call-it-forest. I've said to him, 'Come out with me on the old 'bus if you want green and loneliness and nature.' And he has said--I recollect one talk in particular--he said, 'I'd love to hear' something about a pipe--I'm getting old, sonny--" "The Pipes of Pan?" Paul suggested. "The very words. Lor lumme! how did you guess it?" He paused, his fingers holding the lighted match, which went out before he could apply it to his tobacco. "Yus. 'The Pipes of Pan.' I don't know what it means. Anyway, he said he'd love to hear them in the real forest, but duty kept him to bricks and mortar and so he had to hear them in imagination. He said that all them footling little beasts were a-listening to 'em, and they told him all about it. I remember he told me more about the woods than I know myself--and I reckon I could teach his business to any gamekeeper or poacher in England. I don't say as how he knew the difference between a stoat and a weasel--he didn't. A cock-pheasant and a hen-partridge would have been the same to him. But the spirit of it--the meaning of it--he fair raised my hair off--he knew it a darned sight better nor I. And that's what I set out for to say, sonny. He had po'try in him. And all this"--he swept an all-inclusive hand--"all this meant to him something that you and I can't tumble to, sonny. It meant something different to what it looked like--ah!" and impatient at his impotence to express philosophic thought, he cast another lighted match angrily into the fire.