bed in his garret while yet the daylight was
abroad and the birds were still chattering in the pear-trees in the
garden. He wished the night to pass quickly that the morrow and the
soldiers should find him still in his fine anticipation.

He woke in the dark. The house was still. A rumour of the sea came up
to his window and a faint wind sighed in the garden. Suddenly, as he lay
guessing at the hour and tossing, there sounded something far-off and
unusual that must have wakened half the sleeping town. The boy sat
up and listened with breath caught and straining ears. No, no, it was
nothing; the breeze had gone round; the night was wholly still; what he
had heard was but in the fringes of his dream. But stay! there it was
again, the throb of a drum far-off in the night. It faded again in
veering currents of the wind, then woke more robust and unmistakable.
The drums! the drums! the drums! The rumour of the sea was lost, no more
the wind sighed in the pears, all the voices of nature were dumb to that
throb of war. It came nearer and nearer and still the boy was all in
darkness in a house betraying no other waking than his own, quivering
to an emotion the most passionate of his life. For with the call of the
approaching drums there entered to him all the sentiment of the family
of that house, the sentiment of the soldier, the full proclamation of
his connection with a thousand years of warrior clans.

The drums, the drums, the drums! Up he got and dressed and silently down
the stair and through a sleeping household to the street. He of all that
dwelling had heard the drums that to ancient soldiers surely should have
been more startling, but the town was in a tumult ere he reached the
Cross. The windows flared up in the topmost of the tall lands, and
the doors stood open to the street while men and women swept along the
causeway. The drums, the drums, the drums! Oh! the terror and the joy of
them, the wonder, the alarm, the sweet wild thrill of them for Gilian as
he ran bare-legged, bare-headed, to the factor's corner there to stand
awaiting the troops now marching on the highway through the wood! There
was but a star or two of light in all the grudging sky, and the sea, a
beast of blackness, growled and crunched upon the shore. The drums, the
drums, the drums! Fronting that monotonous but pregnant music by the
drummers of the regiment still unseen, the people of the burgh waited
whispering, afraid like the Paymaster's boy