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“Be still,” I said to Herman, who was protesting cheerfully behind me; “you have waked the wood people and now we shan’t see any of them.”

“What people?”

“The people who walk in the woods and leave the meadows warm and tender, whom you feel by the pricking between your shoulders when you come upon the places where they have been. The people who made this trail, whom we heard calling one to another just now. The people——” And just then we came upon the faggot.

It lay close beside the trail, little sticks all in order except a last handful dropped hurriedly on top when the faggot-gatherer had started at our approach.

“Look!” I said; “that is what they were doing when we came stumbling on them.”

It was a faggot, I shall always insist that it was a faggot, and I should have said so if nothing had happened afterward to prove it. Herman kicked it impatiently with his foot.

“There’s a literary temperament for you,” he protested. “You find a trail made by wood-choppers, you hear jays squawking and see a heap of brushwood. Straightway you create a race of people to account for them.”