ever seemed to touch, but the laughter in it made it friendly, for it was far deeper than humour, it was gaiety of heart. Her goings to and fro on those light feet had the grace, quickness, suddenness of a bird, of a wren that slips from twig to twig and jets out its needle of song, of a moorhen flicking its tail and hooting sharply. Her laugh startled and delighted like the laugh of the woodpecker as it leaps across the glades--like the whistling of birds up amongst the dark clouds and the moon. But most of all she called to mind the meadow pipit of her own crags, that rises from green ledges out over the sea and then, falling slantwise with body curved like a crescent, utters his passionate pulsating song, so rapid and passionate that it seems impossible and unfit that it should end except in death, yet suddenly ceasing as it lands again upon the samphire or the thrift. The spirit was as quicksilver in the corners of her eyes, as quicksilver in the heart. Such a maid she must have been as the bard would have thought to send out the thrush to woo for him, when he heard the bird of ermine breast singing from the new-leaved hazel at dawn, on the edge of a brook among the steep woods--singing artfully with a voice like a silver bell--solemnly, too, so as to seem to be performing a sacrifice--and amorously, bringing balm to lovers’ hearts and inspiring the bard to send by him a message to the sun of all maidens that she, white as the snow of the first winter night, should come out to the green woods to him. She had lived for generations on the moor, for generations upon generations, and this was what she had gained from heather and furze and crag and seawind and sunshine tempered by no trees--inextinguishable laughter. But she was inarticulate. She milked the cows, made butter, baked bread, kept the peat fire burning and tended her children. When she talked, I asked for more cream. Perhaps after several more generations have passed she will be a poet and astonish the world with a moorland laughter of words that endure. * * * * *