CHAPTER V.THE OLD CHURCH.
I followed him deep into the pine-forest.

Neither of us said much while yet the sacred gloom of it closed us round.

We came to larger and yet larger trees--older, and more individual, some of them grotesque with age.

Then the forest grew thinner.
"You see that hawthorn ?" said my guide at length, pointing with his beak.
I looked where the wood melted away on the edge of an open heath.
"I see a gnarled old man, with a great white head," I answered.
"Look again," he rejoined: "it is a hawthorn." "It seems indeed an ancient hawthorn; but this is not the season for the hawthorn to blossom!" I objected.
"The season for the hawthorn to blossom," he replied, "is when the hawthorn blossoms.

That tree is in the ruins of the church on your home-farm.