For I thought he was exceedingly well off. Because I have to share mine with the Maid, who kicks like a young colt in her sleep. But Hugh John gave me a look of utmost contempt.
"Did you never hear of Obermann?" he said, "—the man who made a cave on the Pic de Jaman. I showed it to you when we stopped at Glion on the way to Lausanne."
"It was a cow-châlet then," I reminded him. But he swept on without the least heed of details.
"Yes, and Mr. Arnold has a lovely poem all about him, and 'the wild bees' hum,' and 'his sad tranquil lore.' This isn't quite the Pic de Jaman, of course, but it is just as lonely, if you don't tell anybody, that is, and I've only told you, Sis! Never mind!"
So I swore never to reveal his hiding-place, and he showed me all he had written about his observations. He had a shelf covered in with wood and a lot of copy-books. Here was written all he had seen through the glasses he had borrowed and the three-draw telescope of his own which he carried constantly in his pocket.
Oh, it was wonderful what he had observed—all about the changing seasons, the country people, the moor-birds, the gamekeepers, and the comings and goings of Sir Bulleigh Bunny.
"Anybody can hide in a wood," he said, "but it takes Obermann and me to do it on a bare hill!"
Then he smiled a little and confessed.
"I don't really know much about him," he said, "except that his name was Senancour. I got his book out of the library, all marked with father's scribblings, but I really couldn't understand much of it. Only this that I translated—you could do it better, of course. It is about himself when he was as old as we are, and felt just the same.
"'I loved all manner of glades, valleys where it was always dusk—and thick woods. I loved heathery hills, ruined pleasaunces, and tumbled rocks fallen in avalanche. Still more I loved vast and shifting sands which never plowshare had furrowed nor human foot crossed—plains abandoned to the mountain doe or the frightened scouring hare. I never liked to sit amid the storming of cataracts, nor on a little hill overlooking a boundless plain. Rather I chose a hiding-place well sheltered, a block of stone wetted lip deep with the brook which glided through the silence of the valley, or better still, a mossy trunk, prone in the deeps of the forest, with the dry rustle of beech-leaves above me which the wind is getting ready to blow down when the time is ripe. Silently I march, my feet deep in last year's fallen leaves—the little worn footpath full of them from side to side.'