wood into the fields.  Though I knew the field I was in well, I didn’t remember the young sycamores growing in one corner of it.  Yesterday I could not but notice them, for they seemed to be like children dying of consumption in a hospital ward—­girls of twelve or thirteen.  You will think the comparison far-fetched and unhealthy, one that could only come out of a morbidly excited imagination.  Well, I cannot help that; like you, I must write as I feel.

’Suddenly I heard the sound of an axe, and I can find no words to tell you how impressive its sound was in the still autumn day.  “How soon will the tree fall?” I thought; and, desirous of seeing it fall, I walked on, guided by the sound, till I saw at the end of the glade—­whom do you think?  Do you remember an old man called Patsy Murphy?  He had once been a very good carpenter, and had made and saved money.  But he is now ninety-five, and I could hardly believe my eyes when I saw him trying to cut down a larch.  What his object could be in felling the tree I could not tell, and, feeling some curiosity, I walked forward.  He continued to chip away pieces of the bark till his strength failed him, and he had to sit down to rest.  Seeing me, he took off his hat—­you know the tall hat he wears—­a hat given him twenty or thirty years ago by whom?  Patsy Murphy’s mind is beginning to wander.  He tells stories as long as you will listen to him, and it appears now that his daughter-in-law turned him out of his house—­the house he had built himself, and that he had lived in for half a century.  This, however, is not the greatest wrong she had done him.  He could forgive her this wrong, but he cannot forgive her stealing of his sword.  “There never was a Murphy,” he said, “who hadn’t a sword.”  Whether this sword is an imagination of Patsy’s fading brain, I cannot say; perhaps he had some old sword and lost it.  The tale he tells to-day differs wholly from the tale he told yesterday and the tale he will tell to-morrow.  He told me once he had been obliged to give up all his savings to his son.  I went to interview the son, determined to sift the matter to the bottom, and discovered that Patsy had still one hundred and twenty pounds in the bank.  Ten pounds had been taken out for—­I needn’t trouble you with further details.  Sufficient has been said to enable you to understand how affecting it was to meet this old man in the red and yellow woods, at the end of a breathless autumn day, trying to fell a young larch.  He talked so rapidly, and one story flowed so easily into another, that it was a long time before I could get in a word.  At last I was able to get out of him that the Colonel had given him leave to build a house on the shore, where he would be out of everybody’s way.  “All my old friends are gone, the Colonel’s father and his mother.  God be merciful to her! she was a good woman, the very best.  And all I want now is time to think of them that’s gone....  Didn’t I know the Colonel’s grandfather and his grandmother?  They’re all buried in the cemetery yonder in Kiltoon, and on a fine evenin’ I do like to be sittin’ on a stone by the lake, thinking of them all.”