In the yellow bracken he laid her down, While the wind blew shrill and the river ran; And never again she saw Shaftesbury-town, Whom Long Thomas had taken for his leman!

The smell of the bracken rose up from that bed and took the words of this old song and turned them into the wild beating of the very pulse of love.

To the end of his days he associated that moment with these dried-up aromatic leaves and with that remembered rhyme. The sweetness of his paramour, her courage, her confiding trust, her “fatal passivity,” were blended with the fragrance of those withered ferns and with that old ballad.