The
bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent round in scalding
thimblefuls. So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest.
And then we go home in the moonlit morning, straggling a good deal
among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called together
again, as one of our leaders winds his horn. Perhaps some one of
the party will not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of
his own. As he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the
flourishes grow fainter and fainter in the distance, and die
finally out, and still walks on in the strange coolness and silence
and between the crisp lights and shadows of the moonlit woods,
until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away Chailly,
and he starts to find himself alone. No surf-bell on forlorn and
perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-place, can
speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears.
Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind.
And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent
that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the hour
out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away
in outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where his
childhood passed between the sun and flowers.
IDLE HOURS
The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to
be understood until you can compare them with the woods by day.
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