“Well, he was like that too.  He had lots of po’try in him—­not the stuff that rhymes, yer know, like ‘The Psalm of Life’ and so forth, but real po’try.  I wish I could tell yer what I mean—­” His face was puckered into a thousand wrinkles with the intellectual effort, and his little diamond eyes gleamed.  “He could take a trumpery common thing like that there mug-faced, lop-eared hare and make it stand for the medi-what-you-call-it-forest.  I’ve said to him, ’Come out with me on the old ’bus if you want green and loneliness and nature.’  And he has said—­I recollect one talk in particular—­he said, ‘I’d love to hear’ something about a pipe—­ I’m getting old, sonny—­”

“The Pipes of Pan?” Paul suggested.

“The very words.  Lor lumme! how did you guess it?” He paused, his fingers holding the lighted match, which went out before he could apply it to his tobacco.  “Yus.  ‘The Pipes of Pan.’  I don’t know what it means.  Anyway, he said he’d love to hear them in the real forest, but duty kept him to bricks and mortar and so he had to hear them in imagination.  He said that all them footling little beasts were a-listening to ’em, and they told him all about it.  I remember he told me more about the woods than I know myself—­and I reckon I could teach his business to any gamekeeper or poacher in England.  I don’t say as how he knew the difference between a stoat and a weasel—­he didn’t.  A cock-pheasant and a hen-partridge would have been the same to him.  But the spirit of it—­the meaning of it—­he fair raised my hair off—­he knew it a darned sight better nor I. And that’s what I set out for to say, sonny.  He had po’try in him.  And all this”—­he swept an all-inclusive hand—­“all this meant to him something that you and I can’t tumble to, sonny.  It meant something different to what it looked like—­ah!” and impatient at his impotence to express philosophic thought, he cast another lighted match angrily into the fire.

Paul, high product of modern culture, sat in wonder at the common old fellow’s clarity of vision.  Tears rolled down his cheek.  “I know, dear old Bill, what you’re trying to say.  Only one man has ever been able to say it.  A mad poet called Blake.

    ’To see a world in a grain of sand,
     And a heaven in a wild flower;
     Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
     And eternity in an hour’.”

Barney Bill started forward in his chair and clapped his hand on the young man’s knee.  “By gum! you’ve got it.  That’s what I was a-driving at.  That’s Silas.  I call to mind when he was a boy—­ pretty dirty and ragged he was too—­as he used to lean over the parapet of Blackfriars Bridge and watch the current sort of swirling round the piers, and he used to say as how he could hear what the river was saying.  I used to think him loony.  But it was po’try, sonny, all the time.”