“And he told me that man had been there before he had. For there was a roofless stone house there, and the remains of a walled garden. And a skull deep in the wild grasses.” Selden paused and looked down at the recently healed scars on his wrists and hands. “It was a rotten trip,” he said bluntly. “It took me three days to cut a tunnel through that accursed tangle of matted brier and grey birch.... Fool’s Acre is a grove of giant trees—first growth pine, oak, and maple. Great outcrops of limestone ledges bound it on the east. A brook runs through the woods. “There is a house there, _no longer roofless_, and built of slabs of fossil-pitted limestone. The glass in the windows is so old that it is iridescent. “A seven-foot wall encloses the house, built also of slabs blasted out of the rock outcrop, and all pitted with fossil shells. “Inside is a garden—not the _remains_ of one—a beautiful garden full of unfamiliar flowers. And in this garden I saw the Yezidee on his knees _making living things out of lumps of dead earth_!” “The Tchordagh!” whispered the girl. “What was the Yezidee doing?” demanded Cleves nervously. Involuntarily all three drew nearer each other there in the sunshine. “It was difficult for me to see,” said Selden in his quiet, serious voice. “It was nearly twilight: I lay flat on top of the wall under the curving branches of a huge syringa bush in full bloom. The Yezidees——” “Were there two!” exclaimed Cleves. “Two. They were squatting on the old stone path bordering one of the flower-beds.” He turned to Tressa: “They both wore white cloths twisted around their heads, and long soft garments of white. Under these their bare, brown legs showed, but they wore things on their naked feet which were shaped like what we call Turkish slippers—only different.” “Black and green,” nodded Tressa with the vague horror growing in her face. “Yes. The soles of their shoes were bright green.” “Green is the colour sacred to Islam,” said Tressa. “The priests of Satan defile it by staining with green the soles of their footwear.” After an interval: “Go on,” said Cleves nervously. Selden drew closer, and they bent their heads to listen: “I don’t, even now, know what the Yezidees were actually doing. In the twilight it was hard to see clearly. But I’ll tell you what it looked like to me. One of these squatting creatures would scoop out a handful of soil from the flower-bed, and mould it for a few moments between his lean, sinewy fingers, and then he’d open his hands and—and something _alive_—something small like a rat or a toad, or God knows what, would escape from between his palms and run out into the grass——” Selden’s voice failed and he looked at Cleves with sickened eyes. “I can’t—can’t make you understand how repulsive to me it was to see a wriggling live thing creep out between their fingers and—and go running or scrambling away—little loathsome things with humpy backs that hopped or scurried through the grass——”