He stopped in the middle of the copse, and said:  “Did you ever see anything so perfectly lovely as this place?  And yet it is all living in a state of war and anarchy.  The trees and plants against each other, all fighting for a place in the sun.  The rabbit against the grass, the bird against the worm, the cat against the bird.  There’s no peace here really—­it’s full of terrors!  Only the stream is taking it easy.  It hasn’t to live by taking life, and the very sound of it is innocent.”

Presently he said:  “This is all cut down every five years.  It’s all made into charcoal and bobbins.  Then the flowers all come up in a rush; then the copse begins to grow again—­I never can make up my mind which is most beautiful.  I come and help the woodmen when they cut the copse.  That’s pleasant work, you know, cutting and binding.  I sometimes wonder if the hazels hate being slashed about.  I expect they do; but it can’t hurt them much, for up they come again.  It’s the right way to live, of course, to begin again the minute you are cut down to the roots, to struggle out to the air and sun again, and to give thanks for life.  Don’t you feel yourself as if you were good for centuries of living?”

“I’m not sure that I do,” I said, “I don’t feel as if I had quite got my hand in.”

“Yes, that’s all right for you, old boy,” said Father Payne.  “You are learning to live, and you are living.  But an old fellow like me, who has got in the way of it, and has found out at last how good it is to be alive, has to realise that he has only got a fag-end left.  I don’t at all want to die; I’ve got my hands as full as they can hold of pretty and delightful things; and I don’t at all want to be cut down like the copse, and to have to build up my branches again.  Yes,” he added, pondering, “I used to think I should not live long, and I didn’t much want to, I believe!  But now—­it’s almost disgraceful to think how much I prize life, and how interesting I find it.  Depend upon it, on we go!  The only thing that is mysterious to me is why I love a place like this so much.  I don’t suppose it loves me.  I suppose there isn’t a beast or a bird, perhaps not a tree or a flower, in the place that won’t be rather relieved when I go back home without having killed something.  I expect, in fact, that I have left a track of death behind me in the grass—­little beetles and things that weren’t doing any harm, and that liked being alive.  That’s pretty beastly, you know, but how is one to help it?  Then my affection for it is very futile.  I can’t establish a civilised system here; I can’t prevent the creatures from eating each other, or the trees from crowding out the flowers.  I can’t eat or use the things myself, I can’t take them away with me; I can only stand and yearn with cheap sentiment.