just before dark, and usually begin again at eight and keep it up for an
hour or two."

So we two took our coffee cups and our cigars in our hands and went out
through a side passage to the terrace, and sat on a little iron bench,
where a shaft of light, from a window of the room we had just quit,
showed a narrow streak of flowering plants beyond the bricked wall and a
clump of red and yellow woodbine on a low wall.

The rest lay in blackness; but I knew, from what I had seen before dusk
came, that we must be somewhere near the middle of a broad terrace--a
hanging garden rather--full of sundials and statues and flower beds,
which overhung the southern face of the Hill of Laon, and from which, in
daylight, a splendid view might be had of wooded slopes falling away
into wide, flat valleys, and wide, flat valleys rising again to form
more wooded slopes. I knew, too, from what I remembered, that the
plateau immediately beneath us was flyspecked with the roofs of small
abandoned villages; and that the road which ran straight from the base
of the heights toward the remote river was a-crawl with supply wagons
and ammunition wagons going forward to the German batteries, seven miles
away, and with scouts and messengers in automobiles and on motor cycles,
and the day's toll of wounded in ambulances coming back from the front.

We could not see them when we went to the parapet and looked downward
into the black gulf below, but the rumbling of the wheels and the
panting of the motors came up to us. With these came, also, the remote
music of those queer little trumpets carried by the soldiers who ride
beside the drivers of German military automobiles; and this sounded as
thinly and plaintively to our ears as the cries of sandpipers heard a
long way off across a windy beach.