“What is noise?” she scrawled.
Poor Peterkin had to give it up after that. He tried to describe to her what the wind was like when it roared in wintry weather—or how the birds sing at evening in the woods—or how men can understand each other’s smiles and scowls by simple noises which they make with their mouths. But she only shrugged her shoulders and sighed. At any rate, Peterkin thought it was a sigh—but he could not hear it.
So he marched along at her side in strange silence, making no noise and hearing none, until they came into the center of a little village.
XIX
EARS TOO SHARP
THERE, in the silent village, they found a group of old men nodding on a bench in the warm sunlight. Across the brook a big mill wheel was turning; but it made no roar or clatter. A cart went by, but there was no rumble to its wheels. Down the street a blacksmith was hammering at his ruddy forge; but there was no clang or clatter to keep noisy company to the flying sparks. All was silence—dreary, unbroken silence.
The old men stirred when Peterkin approached. They knew him for a stranger. They rose and made a place for him beside them on the bench. Then one of them took a piece of white chalk from his vest pocket, turned to the brick wall behind him and began to write. The words he wrote were so many that, before he was through, he had covered the wall from top to bottom with this sad and mysterious tale:
“Once,” he wrote, “this was the Valley of the Rippling Brooks. All were happy here, then. It was in my youth, I remember, when in our ears there ran the murmur of a hundred gleaming, merry brooks that cross the woods and fields and tumble from the hills in frothy white. The music of our laughter was like the music of these brooks—never slowing, never saddening. We were the happiest of all the Four Kingdoms.