waiting
for the word, the whole rookery rises in a black mass and drifts
westward across the tree-tops.

_Flood Tide of Night_.

In these long midsummer nights the twilight lingers till within an hour
or two of dawn. When the green cool abyss of fathomless sky melts into
pale slate-grey in the west, and the high tide of darkness pauses
before it begins to ebb, then is the watershed of day and night. The
real noon of night is quite an hour and a half after the witching hour,
just as the depth of winter is really a month after the shortest day.
Indeed, at this time of the year, it is much too bright at twelve for
even so sleepy a place as a churchyard to yawn. And if any ghost peeped
out, 'twould only be to duck under again, all a-tremble lest, the
underground horologes being out of gear, a poor shade had somehow
overslept cockcrow and missed his accustomed airing.

_Way for the Sun_.

By two o'clock, however, there is a distinct brightening in the east,
and pale, streaky cirrus cloudlets gather to bar the sun's way. Broad,
equal-blowing airs begin to draw to and fro through the woods. There is
an earthy scent of wet leaves, sharpened with an unmistakable aromatic
whiff of garlic, which has been trodden upon and rises to reproach us
for our carelessness. Listen! Let us stand beneath this low-branched
elder.

"We cannot see what flowers are at our feet,"

but that there is violet in abundance we have the testimony of a sense
which the darkness does not affect, the same which informed us of the
presence of the garlic. Over the hedge the sheep are cropping the clover
with short, sharp bites--one, two, three, four, five bites--then three
or four shiftings of the short black legs, and again "crop, crop." So
the woolly backs are bent all the night, the soft ears not erected as by
day, but laid back against the shoulders. Sheep sleep little. They lie
down suddenly, as though they were settled for the night; but in a
little there is an unsteady pitch fore and aft, and the animal is again
at the work of munching, steadily and apparently mechanically. I have
often half believed that sheep can eat and walk and sleep all at the
same time. A bivouac of sheep without lambs in the summer is very like
an Arab encampment, and calls up nights in the desert, when, at whatever
hour the traveller might look abroad, there were always some of the
Arabs awake, stirring the embers of the camp fire, smoking,
story-telling, or simply