Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/239

 seem to listen to what I had to say. And he said something of—love."

The youngest tapped his girder on the edge of his iron sole and laughed. "Brother Redwood," he said, "has dreams."

Neither spoke for a space. Then the eldest brother said, "This cooping up and cooping up grows more than I can bear. At last, I believe, they will draw a line round our boots and tell us to live on that."

The middle brother swept aside a heap of pine boughs with one hand and shifted his attitude. "What they do now is nothing to what they will do when Caterham has power."

"If he gets power," said the youngest brother, smiting the ground with his girder.

"As he will," said the eldest, staring at his feet.

The middle brother ceased his lopping and his eye went to the great banks that sheltered them about. "Then, brothers," he said, "our youth will be over and as Father Redwood said to us long ago, we must quit ourselves like men."

"Yes," said the eldest; "but what exactly does that mean? Just what does it mean—when that day of trouble comes?"

He too glanced at those rude vast suggestions of entrenchment about them, looking not so much at them as through them and over the hills to the innumerable multitudes beyond. Something of the same sort came into all their minds, a vision of little people coming out to war, in a flood, the little people inexhaustible, incessant, malignant

"They are little," said the youngest brother; "but