When they emerged into the clearing, the Colonel sat down upon a stump and wiped his red face.  The veins in his forehead and neck were swollen purple, and he breathed hard.  “It’s hotter than seven devils,” he gasped.

“Devils are supposed to be acclimated,” John Jennings remarked, softly.  He stood looking about him.  The Squire had gone into the mill, where Jerome was at work.

Martin Cheeseman was outside, shearing from lengths of logs some last straggling twigs before they were taken into the mill for sawing.  The old man’s hat had lost its brim, and sat back on his head like a crown; some leaves were tangled in his thick, gray fleece of hair and beard.  His shaggy arms were bare; he wielded his hatchet with energy, grimacing at every stroke.

“He might be the god Pan putting his fallen trees out of their last agonies,” said Jennings, dreamily, and yet half laughing, as if at himself, for the fancy.

The Colonel only groaned in response.  He fanned himself with his hat.  Jennings stood, backed up against a tree, surveying things, his fine, worn face full of a languid humor and melancholy.

The place looked like a sylvan slaughter-field.  The ground was thick-set with the mangled and hacked stumps of great chestnut-trees, and strewn with their lifeless limbs and trunks, as with members of corpses; every stump, as Jennings surveyed it with fanciful gaze, looked with its spread of supporting roots upon the surface, curiously like a great foot of a woody giant, which no murderer could tear loose from its hold in its native soil.

All the clearing was surrounded with thickets of light-green foliage, amidst which clouds of white alder unfolded always in the soft wind with new surfaces of sweetness.

However, all the fragrant evidence of the new leaves and blossoms was lost and overpowered here.  One perceived only that pungent aroma of death which the chestnut-trees gave out from their fresh wounds and their spilled sap of life.  One also could scarcely hear the spring birds for the broad whir of the saw-mill, which seemed to cut the air as well as the logs.  Even the gurgling rush of the brook was lost in it, but not the roar of water over the dam.

The Squire came out of the mill, whither he had been to say a good word to Jerome, and stood by Martin Cheeseman.  “Lord,” he said, “think of the work those trees had to grow, and the fight they made for their lives, and then along comes a man with an axe, and breaks in a minute what he can never make nor mend!  What d’ye mean by it, eh?”

Martin Cheeseman looked at him with shrewd, twinkling eyes.  He was waist-deep in the leafy twigs and boughs as in a nest.  “Well,” he said, “we’re goin’ to turn ’em into somethin’ of more account than trees, an’ that’s railroad-sleepers; an’ that’s somethin’ the way Natur’ herself manages, I reckon.  Look at the caterpillar an’ the butterfly.  Mebbe a railroad-sleeper is a butterfly of a tree, lookin’ at it one way.”