He wandered through the woods, over the country, noting the different signs of spring, for, in spite of his sorrow, he could not but admire the slender spring.  He could not tell why, perhaps because he had always associated Nora with the gaiety of the spring-time.  She was thin like the spring, and her laughter was blithe like the spring.  She seemed to him like a spirit, and isn’t the spring like a spirit?  She was there in the cow-parsley just coming up, and the sight of the campions between the white spangles reminded him of the pink flowers she wore in her hat.  The underwood was full of bluebells, but her eyes were not blue.  The aspens were still brown, but in a month the dull green leaves, silvery underneath, would be fluttering at the end of their long stems.  And the continual agitation of the aspen-leaf seemed to him rather foolish, reminding him of a weak-minded woman clamouring for sympathy always.  The aspen was an untidy tree; he was not sure that he liked the tree, and if one is in doubt whether one likes or dislikes, the chances are that one dislikes.  Who would think of asking himself if he liked beech-trees, or larches, or willows?  A little later he stood lost in admiration of a line of willows all a-row in front of a stream; they seemed to him like girls curtseying, and the delicacy of the green and yellow buds induced him to meditate on the mysteries that common things disclose.

Seeing a bird disappear into a hole in the wall, he climbed up.  The bird pecked at him, for she was hatching.  ‘A starling,’ he said.  In the field behind his house, under the old hawthorn-tree, an amiable-looking donkey had given birth to a foal, and he watched the little thing, no bigger than a sheep, covered with long gray hair ...  There were some parishioners he would be sorry to part with, and there was Catherine.  If he went away he would never see her again, nor those who lived in the village.  All this present reality would fade, his old church, surrounded with gravestones and stunted Scotch firs, would become like a dream, every year losing a little in colour and outline.  He was going, he did not know when, but he was going.  For a long time the feeling had been gathering in him that he was going, and her letter increased that feeling.  He would go just as soon as a reputable way of leaving his parish was revealed to him.

By the help of his reason he could not hope to find out the way.  Nothing seemed more impossible than that a way should be found for him to leave his parish without giving scandal; but however impossible things may seem to us, nothing is impossible to Nature.  He must put his confidence in Nature; he must listen to her.  She would tell him.  And he lay all the afternoon listening to the reeds and the ducks talking together in the lake.  Very often the wood was like a harp; a breeze touched the strings, and every now and then the murmur seemed about to break into a little tune, and as if in emulation, or because