A glorious day, indeed, was that! Keep it in eternal memory, O Lebanon hills! Make your old graves a place of pilgrimages. Sons of the Revolution, have you ever visited Lebanon?
There came an August night, misty and still. A cloud covered the hills, and seemed to fall down like a lake on the cedar swamp. The few distant stars went out.
It lightened—“heat lightning,” as the lightning without thunder was called in the old New England villages.
The turnpike road was silent. There were no sounds of night-birds in the deep cedar swamps.
Peter, the shepherd-boy, stood behind his window light in silence under a cedar that spread itself like a tent. The tree gathered mist and shed it like rain. He had put a mask in the window, for fear of a shot, in case of danger.
“Nothing to-night,” he said.
But what was that?
A dead twig of a tree broke under a foot.
He started and moved behind the window toward the highway.