same
familiar flower-beds, alleys, clumps of verdure, patches of sward?
At least this full white light that was flooding them was new, and
accounted for all. It was Moonlight Land, and Past-Ten-o'clock Land, and
we were in it and of it, and all its other denizens fully understood,
and, tongue-free and awakened at last, responded and comprehended and
knew. The other two, doubtless, hurrying forward full of their mission,
noted little of all this. I, who was only a super, had leisure to take
it all in, and, though the language and the message of the land were not
all clear to me then, long afterwards I remembered and understood.

Under the farthest hedge, at the loose end of things, where the outer
world began with the paddock, there was darkness once again--not the
blackness that crouched so solidly under the crowding laurels, but a
duskiness hung from far-spread arms of high-standing elms. There, where
the small grave made a darker spot on the grey, I overtook them, only
just in time to see Rosa laid stiffly out, her cherry cheeks pale in the
moonlight, but her brave smile triumphant and undaunted as ever. It
was a tiny grave and a shallow one, to hold so very much. Rosa once in,
Potiphar, who had hitherto stood erect, stout-necked, through so many
days and such various weather, must needs bow his head and lie down
meekly on his side. The elephant and the beetle, equal now in a silent
land where a vertebra and a red circulation counted for nothing, had to
snuggle down where best they might, only a little less crowded than in
their native Ark.

The earth was shovelled in and stamped down, and I was glad that no
orisons were said and no speechifying took place. The whole thing was
natural and right and self-explanatory, and needed no justifying or
interpreting to our audience of stars and flowers. The connexion was not
entirely broken now--one link remained between us and them. The Noah's
Ark, with its cargo of sad-faced emigrants, might be hull down on
the horizon, but two of its passengers had missed the boat and would
henceforth be always near us; and, as we played above them, an elephant
would understand, and a beetle would hear, and crawl again in spirit
along a familiar floor. Henceforth the spotty horse would scour along
far-distant plains and know the homesickness of alien stables; but
Potiphar, though never again would he paw the arena when bull-fights
were on the bill, was spared maltreatment by town-bred stra