Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/335

 Sometimes too she saw grow out of the clouds great monumental heads, aquiline-nosed and lofty-browed, full of dignity and repose, as solid and eternal looking as though they were of carved rock instead of drifting cloud vapors.

With a pencil and a piece of wrapping paper, she sometimes tried to catch and hold the fleeting faces that most stirred her fancy. She had a little pile of such drawings laid away in the bottom drawer of the dresser.

It grew too dark to sew. She threw aside the half finished dress and stood looking out of the window seeking peace and a something more than peace which she had learned to draw to herself out of the sunset. It had been a soft, springlike day in March with a mackerel sky undecided between rain and shine. Now the western sky was dappled with a gray and silver sunset, like the spread-out wool of old, weatherbeaten ewes backed by the shining fleece of lambs. She went out and stood on the rickety porch. The air was pungent with the smell of damp earth and springing grass. A silvery quiet, pensive but serene, spread from the sky through the soft air, and in the evening silence a returned robin twittered from the top of a tall hickory tree.

Far down the ridge Marsh Gibbs was bringing up Hiram Stone's sheep and lambs to house them in the tobacco barn for the night. The hundreds of woolly backs moving separately yet together made a soft, undulating carpet that grew grayer as the twilight shadows crept over it and at the edges merged imperceptibly with the earth. Mingled with the tremulous bleating of the sheep and the shriller ba-ha-ha of the lambs, the sheep bells tinkled faintly; and dominating all Marsh's long drawn "sheep-ee, sheep-ee," as he led the flock, was not a human-seeming sound, but weird and melancholy, like the cry of some creature born of the twilight. She could not see, but she knew, how trustingly the little lambs ran by their mothers. Soon they would all be at rest in the big barn, safe, warm, and quiet.

In the dooryard she saw the last chickens straggling up one by one, obeying the homing instinct that brought them always