This season's Daffodil, She never hears, What change, what chance, what chill, Cut down last year's: But with bold countenance, And knowledge small, Esteems her seven days' continuance To be perpetual.
So Time that is o'er-kind, To all that be, Ordains us e'en as blind, As bold as she: That in our very death, And burial sure, Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith, 'See how our works endure!'
A Centurion of the Thirtieth
Dan had come to grief over his Latin, and was kept in; so Una went alone to Far Wood. Dan's big catapult and the lead bullets that Hobden had made for him were hidden in an old hollow beech-stub on the west of the wood. They had named the place out of the verse in Lays of Ancient Rome:
From lordly Volaterrae, Where scowls the far-famed hold Piled by the hands of giants For Godlike Kings of old.
They were the 'Godlike Kings', and when old Hobden piled some comfortable brushwood between the big wooden knees of Volaterrae, they called him 'Hands of Giants'.
Una slipped through their private gap in the fence, and sat still awhile, scowling as scowlily and lordlily as she knew how; for Volaterrae is an important watch-tower that juts out of Far Wood just as Far Wood juts out of the hillside. Pook's Hill lay below her and all the turns of the brook as it wanders out of the Willingford Woods, between hop-gardens, to old Hobden's cottage at the Forge. The Sou'-West wind (there is always a wind by Volaterrae) blew from the bare ridge where Cherry Clack Windmill stands.
Now wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen, and that is why on blowy days you stand up in Volaterrae and shout bits of the Lays to suit its noises.