d bacon. I'm hungry again," and we
routed about for food, but found only a bottle with spirits in it, which we
drank.

We sat there in the careless sloth that follows too great a strain, but
feeling the strength grow as we sat.

"Is he safe?" asked Le Marchant at last. "Or has he gone to bring the
soldiers on us? And is it night or day?" and he felt round with his foot
till it came on the door and let in a bright gleam of daylight.

We crawled out into the sunshine and sat with our backs against the sods of
the house, looking out over the great sweep of the flats. It was like a sea
whose tumbling waves had turned suddenly into earth and become fixed. Here
and there great green breakers stood up above the rest with bristling
crests of wire grass, and the darker patches of tiny tangled shrubs and
heather and the long black pools and ditches were like the shadows that
dapple the sea. The sky was almost as clear a blue as we get in Sercq, and
was so full of singing larks that it set us thinking of home.

Away on the margin of the flats we saw the steeples of churches, and
between us and them a small black object came flitting like a jumping
beetle. We sat and watched it, and it turned into a man, who overcame the
black ditches, and picked his way from tussock to tussock, by means of a
long pole, which brought him to us at length in a series of flying leaps.

"Blight him! Blight him! Blight him!" he said as he landed. "So you are
awake at last."

"Awake and hungry," I said.

He loosed a bundle from his back and opened it, and showed us bread and
bacon.

"Blight him! Eat!" he said, and we needed no second bidding.

"You are from the cage?" he asked as he sat and watched us.

I nodded.

"All the birds that come my way I feed," he said. "For once I was caged
myself. Blight him!"

"Whom do you blight?" I asked.

"Whom?" he cried angrily, and turned a suspicious eye on me. "The Hanover
rat,--George!... And the blight works--oh, it works, and the brain rots in
his head and the maggots gnaw at his heart. And they wonder why!... an
effectual fervent curse!--Oh, it works! For years and years I've cursed him
night and day and--you see! Keep him in the dark, they said. Let no man
speak to him for a twelvemonth and a day, they said. And no man spoke, but
I myself, and all day long and all night I cursed him out loud for the
sound of my own voice, since no other might speak to me. For the silence
and the darkness pressed