scent sparks in
the sea foam.

I could bear it no longer, and awoke. I was in darkness, but not in my
own bed. When I proceeded to turn, I found myself hemmed in on all
sides. I could not stretch my arms, and there was hardly room for my
body between my feet and my head. I was dreadfully frightened at
first, and felt as if I were being slowly stifled. As my brain awoke,
I recalled the horrible school, the horrible schoolmistress, and the
most horrible dog, over whose defeat, however, I rejoiced with the
pride of a dragon-slayer. Next I thought it would be well to look
abroad and reconnoitre once more. I drew away the straw from the
entrance to my lair; but what was my dismay to find that even when my
hand went out into space no light came through the opening. What could
it mean? Surely I had not grown blind while I lay asleep. Hurriedly I
shot out the remainder of the stopper of straw, and crept from the
hole. In the great barn there was but the dullest glimmer of light; I
had almost said the clumsiest reduction of darkness. I tumbled at one
of the doors rather than ran to it. I found it fast, but this one I
knew was fastened on the inside by a wooden bolt or bar, which I could
draw back. The open door revealed the dark night. Before me was the
cornyard, as we called it, full of ricks. Huge and very positive
although dim, they rose betwixt me and the sky. Between their tops I
saw only stars and darkness. I turned and looked back into the barn.
It appeared a horrible cave filled with darkness. I remembered there
were rats in it. I dared not enter it again, even to go out at the
opposite door: I forgot how soundly and peacefully I had slept in it.
I stepped out into the night with the grass of the corn-yard under my
feet, the awful vault of heaven over my head, and those shadowy ricks
around me. It was a relief to lay my hand on one of them, and feel
that it was solid. I half groped my way through them, and got out into
the open field, by creeping through between the stems of what had once
been a hawthorn hedge, but had in the course of a hundred years grown
into the grimmest, largest, most grotesque trees I have ever seen of
the kind. I had always been a little afraid of them, even in the
daytime, but they did me no hurt, and I stood in the vast hall of the
silent night--alone: there lay the awfulness of it. I had never before
known what the night was. The real sting of its fear lay in this--that
there was nobody else i