ere resolved to feast upon nature. And moreover the
houses became very gaunt and shadowy after the sunlight had faded out
of the sky. So after they had rested a little time they went to the
crest of the hill again to see with their own eyes the silence of heaven
set with stars, about which the old poets had had so many things to
tell. It was a wonderful sight, and Denton talked like the stars, and
when they went down the hill at last the sky was pale with dawn. They
slept but little, and in the morning when they woke a thrush was singing
in a tree.

So these young people of the twenty-second century began their exile.
That morning they were very busy exploring the resources of this new
home in which they were going to live the simple life. They did not
explore very fast or very far, because they went everywhere
hand-in-hand; but they found the beginnings of some furniture. Beyond
the village was a store of winter fodder for the sheep of the Food
Company, and Denton dragged great armfuls to the house to make a bed;
and in several of the houses were old fungus-eaten chairs and
tables--rough, barbaric, clumsy furniture, it seemed to them, and made
of wood. They repeated many of the things they had said on the previous
day, and towards evening they found another flower, a harebell. In the
late afternoon some Company shepherds went down the river valley riding
on a big multicycle; but they hid from them, because their presence,
Elizabeth said, seemed to spoil the romance of this old-world place
altogether.

In this fashion they lived a week. For all that week the days were
cloudless, and the nights nights of starry glory, that were invaded each
a little more by a crescent moon.

Yet something of the first splendour of their coming faded--faded
imperceptibly day after day; Denton's eloquence became fitful, and
lacked fresh topics of inspiration; the fatigue of their long march from
London told in a certain stiffness of the limbs, and each suffered from
a slight unaccountable cold. Moreover, Denton became aware of unoccupied
time. In one place among the carelessly heaped lumber of the old times
he found a rust-eaten spade, and with this he made a fitful attack on
the razed and grass-grown garden--though he had nothing to plant or sow.
He returned to Elizabeth with a sweat-streaming face, after half an hour
of such work.

"There were giants in those days," he said, not understanding what wont
and training will do. And thei