d went to the window of the
loft, a little square open at the level of the floor, through which came
a dazzle of blue and gold and green. He looked out. Stables and
hay-barns filled two sides of the farmyard below him. Behind them was a
mass of rustling oak-trees. On the lichen-greened tile roofs pigeons
strutted about, putting their coral feet daintily one before the other,
puffing out their glittering breasts. He breathed deep of the smell of
hay and manure and cows and of unpolluted farms.

From the yard came a riotous cackling of chickens and quacking of ducks,
mingled with the peeping of the little broods. In the middle a girl in
blue gingham, sleeves rolled up as far as possible on her brown arms, a
girl with a mass of dark hair loosely coiled above the nape of her neck,
was throwing to the fowls handfuls of grain with a wide gesture.

"And to think that only yesterday ..." said Martin to himself. He
listened carefully for some time. "Wonderful! You can't even hear the
guns."

CHAPTER IX

The evening was pearl-grey when they left the village; in their nostrils
was the smell of the leisurely death of the year, of leaves drying and
falling, of ripened fruit and bursting seed-pods.

"The fall's a maddening sort o' time for me," said Tom Randolph. "It
makes me itch to get up on ma hind legs an' do things, go places."

"I suppose it's that the earth has such a feel of accomplishment," said
Howe.

"You do feel as if Nature had pulled off her part of the job and was
restin'."

They stopped a second and looked about them, breathing deep. On one side
of the road were woods where in long alleys the mists deepened into
purple darkness.

"There's the moon."

"God! it looks like a pumpkin."

"I wish those guns'd shut up 'way off there to the north."

"They're sort of irrelevant, aren't they?"

They walked on, silent, listening to the guns throbbing far away, like
muffled drums beaten in nervous haste.

"Sounds almost like a barrage."

Martin for some reason was thinking of the last verses of Shelley's
_Hellas_. He wished he knew them so that he could recite them.

"_Faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks in a dissolving dream._"

The purple trunks of saplings passed slowly across the broad face of the
moon as they walked along. How beautiful the world was!

"Look, Tom." Martin put his arm about Randolph's shoulder and nodded
towards the moon. "It might be a ship with puffed-out pumpkin-c