• THE DEWY MORN ' 251 



done more, but that would encourage waste. If only a 

 little was cut up, only a little would be used. 



* He planed a piece of timber intended for the head of 

 a gate. He counted the poles aslant against the wood- 

 pile. Nothing else remaining that he could do, he re- 

 turned to the garden, took off his coat, set the lantern on 

 the grass, and dug where the gardener had left off. While 

 he dug the night went on — the night that was in no 

 haste to do anything ; and by degrees a pale light grew up 

 above the eastern horizon. The dawn comes early in 

 summer. 



' Still Robert dug steadily on till the other mail-cart 

 — the down mail — approached. He stopped and 

 listened ; the driver did not pull up, so there were no 

 letters. Robert scraped his boots, put away the spade, 

 blew out the lantern, and went indoors. 



' By the pale white light he looked again at his bed ; 

 but he could not lie down. There was no rest in him that 

 night. He lit his cheap candle and went up into the attic 

 overhead, where he had not been for years. The shutters 

 were perpetually closed up there, so that the place was 

 partly dark, although streaks of dawn came through 

 the chinks. The great bare room was full of ancient 

 lumber. 



' He set the candle on an oak press and fell to work, 

 sorting the confused mass which strewed the floor. Old 

 chairs — some broken, some perfect — a picture or two, 

 hair-trunks, books, bundles of newspapers, pieces of chain 

 — odd lengths thrown aside — nameless odds and ends, 

 such as candlesticks, parts of implements, the waste of a 

 century, all covered with dust and dead black cobwebs. 

 Dead cobwebs thick with dust, not the fine clean threads 

 the spider has in use ; webs which had been abandoned 

 fifty years ago. 



' The skeleton of a bird lay at the bottom of a hollow 

 in the pile, perhaps an injured swallow that had crept in 

 there to die. A pair of flintlock pistols, the flints still in 

 the hammers, were in very good condition, scarcely 



