We slipped out behind the stores and outhouses to a field that had a stream running across—a stream and a hill and a band of oaks that still held fast to a few leaves on the lower limbs, where the winds could not get at them so freely. You can't expect to get anything out of an oak-tree without working for it. I have seen an oak-log softened to punk, the bark gone, having lain in a woodland shadow, doubtless for thirty or forty years, but still holding fast to its unmistakable grain and formation, though you could rub it to powder between the fingers. For quite a little way, we followed the stream which was swollen with melting snows, and then straight toward the wooded horizon line, the afternoon hastening so that we marched with it, hot under our sweaters, presently getting the stride of fence and ditch. The sun appeared at times milk-like and ghostly in the south-west.... That was the first time I saw the Amphitheatre.
We had reached the edge of the woodland and the height of land and looked over the wooded slope into a silent pasture-land, a stream winding through the centre. The grass had been cropped to the last of the Fall days, and in the recent thaws the stream had overrun the entire bottom, so that the lowland pasture was not only tonsured, but combed and washed. I looked up. A beech-tree was shivering on the slope beside me, holding fast to her leaves of paper white on wide and pendent branches; a smooth and beautiful trunk of bedford grey, with eyes like kine carved upon it. Then I saw that this was but one of a sisterhood—the mother-tree fallen. Across were oaks and hickories, and through the naked branches, a log cabin.
An enumeration will not even suggest the picture. Sheep and cattle had made it a grove of the earth-gods. We remembered the Spring by the cabin, and crossed to it. Skimming the leaves from the basin, we watched it fill with that easy purity of undisturbed Nature.... Now there was a fine blowing rain in our faces, and the smell of the woods itself in the moist air was a Presence. The cabin had been built for many decades—built of white oak, hewn, morticed and tenoned. The roof and floor was gone, but the walls needed only chinking. They were founded upon boulders.... I saw in days to come a pair of windows opening to the north, and a big open fireplace on the east wall, a new floor and a new roof.... It would be a temple. I saw young men and children coming there in the long years ahead.... Across the open field beyond was a forest.
"The big beeches are there," the Abbot said.
"It can't be so perfect as this," I declared.
"It is different. This is a grove—thinned for pasture land. Over there it is a forest of beech. To the west is a second growth of woods—everything small but thick. You can see and take things right in your hand——"
We did not go to the forest nor to the jungle that day, but moved about the rim of that delved pasture-land, watching the creek from different angles, studying the trees without their insignia. We knew the main timbers only—beech, oak, elm, maple and hickory and ash, blue beech and ironwood and hawthorn. There were others that I did not know, and the Abbot seemed disturbed that he could not always help.
"It won't be so another Spring," he said.
Altogether it hushed us. I was holding the picture of the temple of the future years—for those to come, especially for the young ones, who were torn and wanted to find themselves for a time.
"You say he is not going to cut anything from the pasture-grove?" I repeated.