12 In the Forest of Stone

monastery except the name of some field or
street or well, which people continue to use
out of old habit and custom.

It was with the thought of helping the
busy little brain to realise something of that
bygone existence, with its strange modes of
thought, its unquestioning faith in the un-
seen and eternal, its vivid consciousness of the
veiled but constant presence of the holy and
omnipotent God, its stern self-repression and
its tender charity, its lovely ideals and haunt-
ing legends, that I told W. V. the stories
in this little book. It mattered little to her
or to me that that existence had its dark
shadows contrasting with its celestial light :
it was the light that concerned us, not the
- shadows.

Some of the stories were told on the log,
while Guy slept in his mail-cart in the
dappled shelter of the dingle ; others by a
winter fire when the days were short, and the
cry of the wind in the dark made it easy for
one to believe in wolves; others in the
Surrey hills, a year ago, in a sandy hollow
crowned with bloom of the ling, and famous
for a little pool where the martins alight to