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adventurous thought and he proceeded, refreshed and in good spirit.

Chapter Five
    P
erhaps the exhausting and exciting nature of his day had induced a certain heightening even in his vision, for the houses of Clachar had, it seemed to him, a remarkable aptness to their location. Each had grown up in its own place and was well content, taking to the lie of the ground as a man might who had time to sit down, turning a gable here like a shoulder and a front there like a face. Where the ground tumbled in antique frolic the grass was thick and lush with wild flowers, and the scent from uncountable blossoms came to his nostrils like an immortal essence. An old tethered dun cow stared at him over a knoll. The wandering footpath found in the end a wooden footbridge and he looked down into the clear water that seemed a warm brown. Some way below him boys were wading in a pool, perhaps looking for sea trout which the tide had left behind. Their voices were shrill and yet strangely harmonious in the flat long-shadowed evening light. All at once, as, having straightened himself, he stood still and involuntarily listened, he had the odd illusion of that extra dimension into which our solid world stands back, and this experience, as always, had for him an air of beneficence and strange beauty.
    His face turned to the west and for a moment an orange light shone on it, then he crossed the small bridge and went up towards the house to which the young woman had pointed. A big red cock by the gable-end lifted a yellow leg in high and brittle dignity, said “Kok—kok?” and winked. Along the front wall ran a narrow strip of flowers, hedged in with boxwood, a miniature border of colour all weeded and tidy, broken by the blue flagstone before the door. As he stepped lightly on the stone and raised his hand to knock, he heard an old woman’s voice say. “Now will you go to sleep! It’s ashamed you should be of yourself at this time of night and you not sleeping.”
    â€œGranny, tell me, does the standing stone stop standing when it’s dark and go walking away off?”
    â€œPerhaps it’s not away off it goes. But one thing is certain: it never comes near little girls who are good.”
    â€œI’m good, amn’t I, Granny?”
    â€œYou’re only just middling good. But if you went to sleep, then you would be good indeed, and it’s the other way the stone would go altogether.”
    â€œTell me a story, Granny”
    As the old woman was asking the young one what story she would like, Grant’s fist slowly fell and he looked around to make sure he was not being overseen, standing there as the queer stranger who didn’t knock. The blue cat on the low garden wall had closed its eyes, and now with its whiskers sticking out from its squashed features it looked for all the world as if it had laughed in its sleep and forgotten to put its face right.
    â€œThe Silver Bough,” answered the child.
    â€œIs it that one again? Very well,” said the old woman. “Once upon a time there was a king, and he was walking by his palace wall when who should he see but a young man passing by, and the young man held in his hand a silver branch—all right, all right,” the old woman interrupted herself as if she had been corrected, “a silver bough. He held in his hand a silver bough, and it was the branch of an apple tree and from it there hung nine golden apples, and when he shook the branch, the nine golden apples hit against each other, and made the sweetest music the king had ever heard in all his life. So sweet was the music that the king forgot all his cares and they departed from his mind, and he thought the world was fresh and beautiful. The king asked the young man if he would sell the branch to him, and the young man said he would, but if so it would not be for money he would sell it. What would it be for? asked the king. And the young man said it will be for your wife