He laughed heartily, throwing back his head with a sense of enjoyment in his laughter.  Then, rising from his desk, he turned towards the wide latticed doors of his study, which opened into the garden, and looked out dreamily, as though looking across the world and far beyond it.  The sweet mixed warbling of birds, the thousand indistinguishable odours of flowers, made the air both fragrant and musical.  The glorious sunshine, the clear blue sky, the rustling of the young leaves, the whispering swish of the warm wind through the shrubberies,—­all these influences entered the mind and soul of the man and aroused a keen joy which almost touched the verge of sadness.  Life pulsated about him in such waves of creative passion, that his own heart throbbed uneasily with Nature’s warm restlessness; and the unanswerable query which, in spite of his high and spiritual faith had often troubled him, came back again hauntingly to his mind,—­“Why should Life be made so beautiful only to end in Death?”

This was the Shadow that hung over all things; this was the one darkness he and others of his calling were commissioned to transfuse into light,—­this was the one dismal end for all poor human creatures which he, as a minister of the Gospel was bound to try and represent as not an End but a Beginning,—­and his soul was moved to profound love and pity as he raised his eyes to the serene heavens and asked himself:  “What compensation can all the most eloquent teaching and preaching make to men for the loss of the mere sunshine?  Can the vision of a world beyond the grave satisfy the heart so much as this one perfect morning of May!”

An involuntary sigh escaped him.  The beating wings of a swallow flying from its nest under the old gabled eaves above him flashed a reflex of quivering light against his eyes; and away in the wide meadow beyond, where the happy cattle wandered up to their fetlocks in cowslips and lush grass, the cuckoo called with cheerful persistence.  One of old Chaucer’s quaintly worded legends came to his mind,—­telling how the courtly knight Arcite,

    “Is risen, and looketh on the merrie daye
     All for to do his observance to Maye,—­
     And to the grove of which that I you told,
     By aventure his way he gan to hold
     To maken him a garland of the greves,
     Were it of woodbind or of hawthorn leaves,
     And loud he sung against the sunny sheen,—­
     ’O Maye with all thy flowers and thy green,
     Right welcome be thou, faire, freshe, Maye! 
     I hope that I some green here getten may!”

Smiling at the antique simplicity and freshness of the lines as they rang across his brain like the musical jingle of an old-world spinet, his ears suddenly caught the sound of young voices singing at a distance.

“Here come the children!” he said; and stepping out from his open window into the garden, he again bent his ear to listen.  The tremulous voices came nearer and nearer, and words could now be distinguished, breaking through the primitive quavering melody of ‘The Mayers’ Song’ known to all the country side since the thirteenth century: