All day long M’sieur Michel stayed about his hut engaged in some familiar employment that he hoped might the unaccountable impressions of the morning. But his restlessness was unbounded. A had sprung up within him as sharp as pain and not to be . At once, on this bright, warm Easter morning the voices that till now had filled his became meaningless. He stayed mute and uncomprehending before them. Their significance had vanished before the driving want 120for human sympathy and companionship that had reawakened in his soul.  
When night came on he walked through the woods down the of the hill again.
 
“It mus’ be all fill’ up with weeds,” muttered M’sieur Michel to himself as he went. “Ah, Bon Dieu! with trees, Michel, with trees—in twenty-five years, man.”
 
He had not taken the road to the village, but was pursuing a different one in which his feet had not walked for many days. It led him along the river bank for a distance. The narrow stream, stirred by the restless breeze, gleamed in the moonlight that was flooding the land.
 
As he went on and on, the of the new- earth that had been from the first keenly perceptible, began to him. He wanted to kneel and bury his face in it. He wanted to dig into it; turn it over. He wanted to the seed again as he had done long ago, and watch the new, green life spring up as if at his bidding.
 
When he turned away from the river and had walked a piece down the lane that divided Joe Duplan’s from that bit of land 121that had once been his, he wiped his eyes to drive away the mist that was making him see things as they surely could not be.
 
He had wanted to plant a hedge that time before he went away, but he had not done so. Yet there was the hedge before him, just as he had meant it to be, and filling the night with . A broad, low gate divided its length, and over this he leaned and looked before him in . There were no weeds as he had fancied; no trees except the live oaks that he remembered.
 
Could that row of trees, old, and gnarled, be the that he himself had set one day into the ground? One raw December day when there was a fine, cold mist falling. The chill of it breathed again upon him; the memory was so real. The land did not look as if it ever had been plowed for a field. It was a smooth, green meadow, with cattle upon the cool sward, or moving with slow, stately tread as they the tender shoots.
 
There was the house unchanged, gleaming white in the moon, seeming to invite him beneath its calm shelter. He wondered who 122dwelt within it now. Whoever it was he would not have them find him, like a prowler, there at the gate. But he would come again and again like this at nighttime, to gaze and refresh his spirit.
 
A hand had been laid upon M’sieur Michel............