. He was conscious of a shrill
crowing, thin as a bugle, from some farm-yard out of sight; then he
turned over and slept again.

When he awoke it was daylight. He lay on his back looking at the network
of twigs overhead, the beech leaves beyond, and the sky visible only in
glimpses--feeling extremely awake and extremely content. Certainly he
was a little stiff when he moved, but there was a kind of interior
contentment that caused that not to matter.

After a minute or two he sat up, felt about for his shoes and slipped
them on. Then he unwound the wrapping about his neck, and crept out of
the shelter.

It was that strange pause before the dawn when the light has broadened
so far as to extinguish the stars, and to bring out all the colors of
earth into a cold deliberate kind of tint. Everything was absolutely
motionless about him as he went under the trees and came out above the
wide park-land of which the copse was a sort of barrier. The dew lay
soaking and thick on the grass slopes, but there was not yet such light
as to bring out its sparkle; and everywhere, dotted on the green before
him, sat hundreds of rabbits, the nearest not twenty yards away.

The silence and the solemnity of the whole seemed to him extraordinary.
There was not a leaf that stirred--each hung as if cut of steel; there
was not a bird which chirped nor a distant cock that crew; the rabbits
eyed him unafraid in this hour of truce.

It seemed to him like some vast stage on to which he had wandered
unexpectedly. The performance of the day before had been played to an
end, the night scene-shifting was finished, and the players of the new
eternal drama were not yet come. An hour hence they would be all about:
the sounds would begin again; men would cross the field-paths, birds
would be busy; the wind would awake and the ceaseless whisper of leaves
answer its talking. But at present the stage was clear-swept, washed,
clean and silent.

It was the solemnity then that impressed him most--solemnity and an air
of expectation. Yet it was not mere expectation. There was a suggestion
of the fundamental and the normal, as if perhaps movement and sound
were, after all, no better than interruptions; as if this fixed poise of
nature were something complete in itself; as if these trees hung out
their leaves to listen to something that they could actually hear, as if
these motionless creatures of the woodland were looking upon something
that they could actual