_Who is the honest man? He that does still and strongly good pursue, To God, his neighbour, and himself most true; Whom neither force nor fawning can Unpinne, or wrench from giving all their due._ GEORGE HERBERT. A great oak in Wyncliffe Chase was doomed to be cut down. It was a goodly, wide-spreading tree, too wide-spreading indeed, for some of its branches came in the way of a certain forest-king, a huge-limbed mighty giant among trees, within whose stately area of space no neighbour was allowed to trespass. So the younger tree was to come down. It met its fate on a sparkling autumn day. There was just a touch of sharpness in the air. The woods were mostly green still, though already plenty of red and brown and yellow patches told that autumn was upon us. The horse-chestnuts shining on the ground near their empty white shells, and the crimson and purple leaves of the bramble-bushes belonged to autumn too. Now it is the old story. I have forgotten the great things and remembered the small. Nine years or more had passed since Caleb Morton's marriage. We had been growing up all this time, and changing by little and little, outwardly and inwardly. We left school and set about our business in life--Cuthbert became second forester under Clifford, Hildred's brother, and I had lately begun to be old Farmer Foster's bailiff at Furzy Nook. How all these changes came about by degrees I have well-nigh forgotten. But I remember quite well the pheasants crowing in the wood that day, and the dead gold fern, and the voices that talked and laughed round the falling tree. And out of the mists of failing memory, where they have been hidden for so long, Cuthbert and Hildred, and I myself, seem to come forth again distinctly on that autumn morning; Cuthbert and I no longer boys, Hildred a girl, not any more a child. Cuthbert raised his axe, and struck and struck, until he was fain, for want of breath, to draw back, and turn towards us and laugh. Hildred sat on the trunk of a fallen tree, with a great bundle of sticks she had been gathering, tied up in a red handkerchief at her feet, and I stood near her--sometimes speaking to her, oftener full of thoughts that were an idle many-coloured medley, brightly-tinted as the autumn woods themselves.