“And lonesome; lonesome, because so wide. Sometimes, ’tis true, of afternoons, I go a little way; but soon come back again. Better feel lone by hearth, than rock. The shadows hereabouts I know—those in the woods are strangers.”
“But the night?”
“Just like the day. Thinking, thinking—a wheel I cannot stop; pure want of sleep it is that turns it.”
“I have heard that, for this wakeful weariness, to say one’s prayers, and then lay one’s head upon a fresh hop pillow—”
“Look!”
Through the fairy window, she pointed down the steep to a small garden patch near by—mere pot of rifled loam, half rounded in by sheltering rocks—where, side by side, some feet apart, nipped and puny, two hop-vines climbed two poles, and, gaining their tip-ends, would have then joined over in an upward clasp, but the baffled shoots, groping awhile in empty air, trailed back whence they sprung.
“You have tried the pillow, then?”
“Yes.”
“And prayer?”
“Prayer and pillow.”