There was no other sign of life except that once five large black and white birds rose from the ground immediately before him, seeming to rise from between his feet as the grasshoppers had done. This did not frighten Florian, exactly, but the suddenness of it, in this lonely place, gave him a shock not wholly delightful. These birds, he saw, had been feeding there upon the berries of a small bush, upon purple berries which were about the size of a wren’s egg, and whose outer sides had been pecked away by the birds, leaving the seeds exposed. All this was natural enough until you reflected that in these latitudes no bush produced berries as early as April. Now toward twilight Florian came to clumps of big and vividly yellow toad-stools, which seemed fat and poisonous and very evil. He passed among these, breaking many of them with his feet, and reflecting that the tiny screams which appeared to be uttered by these broken, loathsomely soft things must be the cry of some other sort of queer bird hidden somewhere near at hand. And he presently saw the appearance of a man coming toward him, and about the head of this man was a shining, as Florian perceived from afar, and was so assured that this was Hoprig. Florian went forward intrepidly, once he had loosened Flamberge in the scabbard. But this was not Hoprig. It was, instead, an incredibly old man in faded blue, who carried upon his arm an open basket filled with small roots. At his heel came a blue and white dog. The old man looked once at Florian, with peculiarly bright eyes, like the eyes of those who had watched the Feast of the Wheel, and he passed without speaking. The dog paused, and without making any noise, sniffed about Florian’s legs once or twice, as if this inspection were a matter of duty, and then followed this old man who had about his head a shining. It was odd, but the dog made no noise when he sniffed thus close to you; and neither the man in blue nor the blue and white dog made any least noise as they passed through the thick and tangled vines underfoot; nor did their passing at all move these vines which caught at the buckles of Florian’s shoes so that he was continually tripping. These things rendered it difficult to believe that the man and the dog could be wholly natural. And still those pertinacious midges danced before Florian’s eyes: and he was tired of slapping at them without ever driving them away. Morven did not appear a merry place, upon this the last day of April, as Florian toiled through Morven’s thickening twilight, in search of Holy Hoprig’s hermitage, wherein was now the child that Florian had need of. _26._ _Husband and Wife_