He pointed to the glass and the volumes lying on the stone at his hand. "Those have been my life," he went on. "The books have brought me a world wherein there was ever a goodly company, suited to my mood. For me, in that world, there are no disappointments nor unfulfilled dreams. King, lover, courtier and clown--how often at my bidding have they trooped out of the shadows to gather with me about this hearth! Oh, I should have been poor indeed without the books! Yet the glass has been to me even more, for it brought me her. "I have already told you that their cottage could be seen from this mountain top. I learned this when I came stealthily to the hills and sought out their home, and some spot amid the overhanging peaks where I might pitch my camp and there unseen look down upon her life. This is the place I found. I had my traps borne up the trail to the foot of the little fall, as if I would camp there. Then when the guides were gone I carried them here, and reared my small establishment, away from the track of hunters, on this high finger of rock which commanded the valley and her home. There is a spring here and a bit of fertile land. It was State land and free, and I pitched my tent here, and that summer I cleared an open space for tillage and built a hut for the winter. The sturdy labor and the air of the hills strengthened my arm and renewed my life. But there was more than that. For often there came a clear day, when the air was like crystal and other peaks drew so near that it seemed one might reach out and stroke them with his hand. On such a day, with my glass, I sought a near-by point where the mountain's elbow jutted out into the sky, and when from that high vantage I gazed down on the roof which covered her, my soul was filled with strength to tarry on. For distance became as nothing to my magic glass. Three miles it may be as the crow flies, but I could bring the tiny cottage and the door-yard, as it stood there at the turn of the road above the little hill, so close to me that it seemed to lie almost at my very feet." Again the speaker rested for a moment, but presently the tale went on. "You can never know what I felt when I first saw _her_. I had watched for her often, and I think she had been ill. I had seen him come and go, and sometimes I had seen a child--Robin it was--playing about the yard. But one day when I had gone to my point of lookout and had directed my glass--there, just before me, she stood. There she lived and moved--she who had been, who was still my life--who had filled my being with a love that made me surrender her to another, yet had lured me at last to this lonely spot, forever away from men, only that I might now and again gaze down across the tree tops, and all unseen, unknown to her, make her the companion of my hermit life.