the same half-way rock. Close on dawn it was,
the moon still sailing wide over the moor, and the flowers of this
"buttercup-night" fast closed, not taken in at all by her cold glory!

Most silent hour of all the twenty-four--when the soul slips half out of
sheath, and hovers in the cool; when the spirit is most in tune with
what, soon or late, happens to all spirits; hour when a man cares least
whether or no he be alive, as we understand the word.... "None of us
goes such a brave way off--there's room for all, dead or alive." Though
it was almost unbearably colourless, and quiet, there was warmth in
thinking of those words of his; in the thought, too, of the millions of
living things snugly asleep all round; warmth in realising that
unanimity of sleep. Insects and flowers, birds, men, beasts, the very
leaves on the trees--away in slumber-land. Waiting for the first bird to
chirrup, one had, perhaps, even a stronger feeling than in daytime of
the unity and communion of all life, of the subtle brotherhood of living
things that fall all together into oblivion, and, all together, wake.

When dawn comes, while moonlight is still powdering the world's face,
quite a long time passes before one realises how the quality of the
light has changed; and so, it was day before I knew it. Then the sun
came up above the hills; dew began to sparkle, and colour to stain the
sky. That first praise of the sun from every bird and leaf and blade of
grass, the tremulous flush and chime of dawn! One has strayed far from
the heart of things that it should come as something strange and
wonderful! Indeed, I noticed that the beasts and birds gazed at me as if
I simply could not be there at this hour which so belonged to them. And
to me, too, they seemed strange and new--with that in them "which
passeth show," and as of a world where man did not exist, or existed
only as just another sort of beast or bird.

But just then began the crowning glory of that dawn--the opening and
lighting of the buttercups. Not one did I actually see unclose, yet, of
a sudden, they were awake, and the fields once more a blaze of gold.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TATTERDEMALION***

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