He heard a rooster crow in the middle of the night onct afore and the next day he got word that his second cousin down at Souris was dead . Mother , if the Master do n't want any more tea , ai n't there some cream for Timothy ? '' CHAPTER V . A PHANTOM OF DELIGHT Shortly before sunset that evening Eric went for a walk . When he did not go to the shore he liked to indulge in long tramps through the Lindsay fields and woods , in the mellowness of `` the sweet ' o the year . '' Most of the Lindsay houses were built along the main road , which ran parallel to the shore , or about the stores at `` The Corner . '' The farms ran back from them into solitudes of woods and pasture lands . Eric struck southwest from the Williamson homestead , in a direction he had not hitherto explored , and walked briskly along , enjoying the witchery of the season all about him in earth and air and sky . He felt it and loved it and yielded to it , as anyone of clean life and sane pulses must do . The spruce wood in which he presently found himself was smitten through with arrows of ruby light from the setting sun . He went through it , walking up a long , purple aisle where the wood-floor was brown and elastic under his feet , and came out beyond it on a scene which surprised him . No house was in sight , but he found himself looking into an orchard ; an old orchard , evidently long neglected and forsaken . But an orchard dies hard ; and this one , which must have been a very delightful spot once , was delightful still , none the less so for the air of gentle melancholy which seemed to pervade it , the melancholy which invests all places that have once been the scenes of joy and pleasure and young life , and are so no longer , places where hearts have throbbed , and pulses thrilled , and eyes brightened , and merry voices echoed . The ghosts of these things seem to linger in their old haunts through many empty years . The orchard was large and long , enclosed in a tumbledown old fence of longers bleached to a silvery gray in the suns of many lost summers . At regular intervals along the fence were tall , gnarled fir trees , and an evening wind , sweeter than that which blew over the beds of spice from Lebanon , was singing in their tops , an earth-old song with power to carry the soul back to the dawn of time . Eastward , a thick fir wood grew , beginning with tiny treelets just feathering from the grass , and grading up therefrom to the tall veterans of the mid-grove , unbrokenly and evenly , giving the effect of a solid , sloping green wall , so beautifully compact that it looked as if it had been clipped into its velvet surface by art . Most of the orchard was grown over lushly with grass ; but at the end where Eric stood there was a square , treeless place which had evidently once served as a homestead garden . Old paths were still visible , bordered by stones and large pebbles . There were two clumps of lilac trees ; one blossoming in royal purple , the other in white .
Between them was a bed ablow with the starry spikes XXXXX June lilies .
At as before by in of over so than under