When I could, I slipped out in the garden. It was darkening; the frogs in the Slough were chorussing, and down on the river-bank a cat-bird sang at intervals, was silent long enough to make you think that he had ceased, and then burst forth again. The town clock struck eight, as if eight were an ancient thing, full of dignity. Our kitchen clock answered briskly, as if eight were a proud and novel experience of its own. The ’bus rattled past for the Eight-twenty. And away down in the garden, I heard a step. Someone had come in the back gate and clicked the pail of stones that weighted its chain. I thought that it would be one of the girls, who not infrequently chose this inobvious method of entrance. I ran toward her, and was amazed to find Mary Elizabeth kneeling quietly on the ground, as she had been when I came upon her at noon. “What you doing?” I demanded, before I could see what she was doing. “This,” she said. I stooped. And she had a little maple tree, for which she was hollowing a home with a rusty fire-shovel that she had brought with her. “It’s the one Delia Dart pulled out,” she said. “I thought it’d be kind of nice to put it here. In your yard. You could bring the water, if you want.” I brought the water. Together we bent in the dusk, and we set out the little tree, near the back gate, close to my play-house. “We’d ought to say a verse or something,” I said vaguely. “I can’t think of any,” Mary Elizabeth objected. Neither could I, but you had to say something when you planted a tree. And a line was as good as a verse. “‘God is love’ ’s good enough,” said Mary Elizabeth, stamping down the earth. Then we dismissed the event, and hung briefly above the back gate. Somehow, I was feeling a great and welcome sense of relief. “It was kind o’ nice to do that,” I observed, with some embarrassment. “No, it wasn’t either,” rejoined Mary Elizabeth, modestly. We stood kicking at the gravel for a moment. Then she went away. I faced about to the quiet garden. And suddenly, for no reason that I knew, I found myself skipping on the path, in the dark, just as if the day were only beginning. V THE KING’S TRUMPETER And so it is for that night long ago when Mary Elizabeth and I stood by the tree and tried to think of something to say, that after all these years I have made the story of Peter. * * * * * Long years ago, when the world was just beginning to be, there was a kingdom which was not yet finished. Of course when a world has just stopped being nothing and is beginning to be something, it takes a great while to set all the kingdoms going. And this one wasn’t done.