Homer Wilson tossed and flung his strong arm above his head and murmured a woman's name, and crossed it with another, clinched his upraised hand; and, murmuring, slept.
Deeper and deeper fell the silence; darker and darker grew the midnight; heavier and heavier sleep sank upon those different hearts; until they all beat with the measured cadence of oblivion—until, albeit delayed by devious paths and difficult gates, they all reached the poppied meadow of deep sleep.
CHAPTER XII.
"Lo! where is the beginning, where the end,
Of living, loving, longing?"
"But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
To know the change and feel it,
When there is none to heal it,
Nor numbed sense to steal it,
Was never said in rhyme."
It was late summer. The whirring of reaping-machines sounded upon every side; the roads were strewn with grain from the harvest wagons; the air was murmurous with insects; the ground, parched and thirsty; the grass, sere and harsh; the leaves, laden with dust; the birds sang only in the hours of earliest dawn or in the twilight. At noontide, the horses' flanks dripped sweat, and the men's faces and necks were blistered with the heat. The cows stood knee deep in the ponds, and flicked at the flies with their long tails. The ponds were low, and their wide margins of mud were alive with tiny frogs, that hopped about in thousands. Upon the surface of the water was a glaze of curious animalculæ, as red as blood. Clumps of bullrushes and tasselled tufts of reeds grew in the water, and dragon-flies flitted through the green stems, like darting flashes of blue light. The Jamestown children called them darning-needles; and being assured of their propensity for sewing one's ears up, viewed them with serious apprehension. Often the birds, their breasts panting with heat, came to the ponds, and, fluttering to the margin, splashed the water over their little backs. They were timid, though, and liked better to find a spot where the deep imprint of a hoof was filled with water than to bathe in the ponds.
The little streams by the roadside had long since disappeared, and the famous stream on the Wilson farm, that welled up from the "living rock," stole along so sluggishly that it scarce stirred the watercresses that grew along its course.
It was the culmination of the year's endeavors: a hard season on man and beast; from day-dawn to dark was heard the shouting of men, the trampling of horses, the noise of machines—a feverish season, the fruition of a twelvemonth's expectancy.
"A good harvest, and fine harvest weather," said one and all.