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The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black

night for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in

the stables rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl

made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise

conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the

obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set

down for them.

For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and

human, stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the

landscape, dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust

on all the roads. The burial-place had got to the pass that its

little heaps of poor grass were undistinguishable from one

another; the figure on the Cross might have come down, for

anything that could be seen of it. In the village, taxers and

taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as the

starved usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and

the yoked ox may, its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were

fed and freed.