Chapter IX––Oblivion
This, the morning. Then, almost before we mark the change, swift-passing time has moved on; the lowering mist has lifted; the occasional pattering rain-drops have ceased; the wind, in sympathy, is diminished. And of a sudden, arousing us to a consciousness of time and place, the sun peeps forth through a rift in the scattering clouds, and at a point a bit south of the zenith.
“Noon!” comments Sandford, intensely surprised. Somehow, we are always astonished that noon should follow so swiftly upon sunrise. “Well, who would have thought it!”
That instant I am conscious, for the first time, of a certain violent aching void making insistent demand.
“I wouldn’t have done so before, but now that you mention it, I do think it emphatically.” This is a pitiful effort at a jest, but it passes unpunished. “There comes Johnson to bring in the birds.” 302
After dinner––and oh, what a dinner! for, having adequate time to do it justice, we drag it on and on, until even Aunt Martha is satisfied––we curl up in the sunshine, undimmed and gloriously warm; we light our briers, and, too lazily, nervelessly content to even talk, lay looking out over the blue water that melts and merges in the distance with the bluer sky above. After a bit, our pipes burn dead and our eyelids drop, and with a last memory of sunlight dancing on a myriad tiny wavelets, and a blessed peace and abandon soaking into our very souls we doze, then sleep, sleep as we never sleep in the city; as we had fancied a short day before never to sleep again; dreamlessly, childishly, as Mother Nature intended her children to sleep.
Then, from without the pale of utter oblivion, a familiar voice breaks slowly upon our consciousness: the voice of Johnson, the vigilant.
“Got your blind all built, boys, and the decoys is out––four dozen of them,” he admonishes, sympathetically. “Days are getting short, now, so you’d better move lively, if you get your limit before dark.” 303