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When they had gone far up the winding pathway to the cornfields, and the silence was no longer broken by their low cries of dissembled rage and fear, I sometimes lingered in my hiding place; and as on the grass I lay, looking towards the stars that twinkled between the motionless leaves of the trees above me, my thoughts went back to a time long before our village had been built beside the river; before Giraldus Cambrensis had journeyed hence with the pilgrim band towards Sant Dewi's shrine; before the great Crag of Vortigern, across the near dingle, had resounded with the blare of the trumpets of war; before even, in the primitive hut-circle on the opposite hill, wild little children had played about the twilight fires kindled in readiness for the home-coming of the weary hunters a time when the fox, the badger, and the tiny mouse had nightly journeyed through the woods, and the call of the gaunt wolf to his mate had weirdly echoed and re-echoed in the valley, startling the innocent hare in the open waste above the slope, and the busy beaver on the dam below in the pool at the bend of the river.

Anon, he entered the lands of Metherill, and soon afterwards, without deliberate intention, moved through that Damnonian village which lies there. A moment later and he stood in the hut-circle where he himself had been born.

We were working across a piece of ground intersected by peat-cuttings, and after half an hour of it the Indiarubber Man fished out the map and compass from his pocket. "There ought to be a clump of trees, a hut-circle, and a Roman road knocking about somewhere. Can you see anything of them?"

Her custom was at times of hay harvest to assist in the drying of the grass, and few women handled a fork better; but there had recently reached the farm an infant girl, and the mother had plenty to do without seeking beyond her cradle. Phoebe made no demur about receiving Will's little foundling of the hut-circle.

Now and again he told himself that the new emotion must be crushed, in that it began to stand between him and the work he had set himself to do for his county; but during more sanguine moods he challenged this decision and finally, as was proper and right, the flood of the man's first love drowned menhir and hut-circle fathoms deep, and demanded all his attention at the cost of mental peace.

Here, indeed, the first that came in the flesh are the last to vanish in their memorials; here Nature, to whom the hut-circle of granite, all clad in Time's lichen livery of gold and grey, is no older than the mushroom ring shining like a necklace of pearls within it Nature may follow what course she will, may build as she pleases, may probe to the heart of things, may pursue the eternal Law without let from the pigmies; and here, if anywhere from man's precarious standpoint, shall he perceive the immutable and observe a presentment of himself in those ephemera that dance above the burn at dawn, and ere twilight passes gather up their gauze wings and perish.

Other sounds also fretted the air, for a hundred yards distant in a hut-circle the Chagford drum-and-fife band lent its throb and squeak to the hour, and struggled amain to increase universal joy. So the fire flourished, and the plutonian rock-mass of the tor arose, the centre of a scene itself plutonian.

This memory recalled his own nickname in Chagford "Jack-o'-Lantern" and, for the first time in his life, he began to appreciate its significance. Then, being a hundred yards from his starting-place in the hut-circle, he heard the hidden voice again. Clear and low, it stole over the intervening wilderness, and between two utterances was an interval of some seconds. "Will! Will!"

Having described the voice which called him, he proceeded after this fashion to detail what followed: "I looked in the very hut-circle I was born, an' I shivered all over, for I thought 'twas the li'l ghost of our wee bwoy by God, I did! It sat theer all alone, an' I stared an' froze while I stared.