Page:The Heart of England.djvu/139

 stood silent with hands together pointing at twelve o'clock, seeming to rest, and to be content with resting, at the tranquil and many-thoughted midnight which it had so often celebrated alone until we came. But we were glad of the clock. It allowed us to measure the rich summer night only by the changing enchantments of Burton's and Cervantes's and Hudson's page, and by the increasing depth of the silence which the owl and restless lapwing broke no more than one red ship breaks the purple of a wide sea. It is a commonplace that each one of us is alone, that every piece of ground where a man stands is a desert island with footprints of unknown creatures all round its shore. Once or twice in a life we cry out that we know the footprints; we even see the boats of the strangers putting out from the shore; we detect a neighbouring island through the haze, and creatures of like bearing to ourselves moving there. On that night a high tide had washed every footprint away, and we were satisfied, raising not a languid telescope to the horizon, nor even studying the sands at our feet.

Not less strangely or sweetly than it creeps in among dreams, came in the whisper of the first swallows of the dawn among our books; and Cleopatra, the cat, slipped out through the window and left me.

But it happened that I rose and drew a curtain aside to see whether she went to the woods or to the barn. The night was over. The pool at the bottom of the garden was glazed and dim and slightly crumpled, like the eye of a dead bird; and all its willows were grim.

In the garden there was a bee. A little wind broke up the poppies petal by petal, so that they vanished like fair