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"Am I a babe, forsooth, to be dosed to slumber? Ha, by the foul fiend his black dam, ne'er will I drink it, lad!" "Then will she smile on thee, sad-eyed, and set it to thy lip, and woo thee soft-voiced, so shalt thou swallow it every drop " "Not so dear blood of all the saints! Must I be mewed up within an accursed bed on such a day and all by reason of a small axe-stroke? Malediction, no!"
Here his practised eye, with the aid of a perilous axe-stroke here and there, strokes which might possibly bring the whole looming mass down upon him in a moment, presently located the timbers which held the structure firm, "the key-logs," as the men call them. These he marked with his axe. Then, returning to the shore, he called for two volunteers to dare the task of cutting these key-logs away.
From the top of the next hill the travellers descended into a village lying fast asleep, with the morning star blazing over it, the cocks calling to each other from their roosts, and here and there a light twinkling from a kitchen window, or a lazy axe-stroke smiting the logs at a wood-pile.
And out of the dark had come the axe-stroke that ends weakness, and crushes the unsteeled, inconstant will. After long silence, she began to talk in a rambling, delirious way of her months in Bosnia. She spoke of the cold of the high mountain loneliness of the terrible sights she had seen till he drew her, shuddering, closer into his arms.
When the last venerable giant trunk has fallen, the last axe-stroke which severs the circle of vital sap will cut the only thread of individual life which joins in time the beating of our pulses to-day with the beginning of human history and philosophy, thousands of years in the past.
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