the gate, against which rested an enormous icicle. When I started to
enter she seized the icicle, presented arms, and demanded the
countersign.

"Love, captain," I said, "If it be not that, slay me at your feet!"

She threw away her great white spear and put her arms around my neck.

"It is 'Peace,'" she said. "But I desert to the enemy."

Without going to my fireside that evening I hurried on to the stable;
for I do not relinquish to my servants the office of feeding my stock.

Believe in the divine rights of kings I never shall, except in the
divine right to be kingly men, which all men share; but truly a divine
right lies for any man in the ownership of a comfortable barn in
winter. It is the feudal castle of the farm to the lower animals, who
dwell in the Dark Ages of their kind--dwell on and on in affection,
submission, and trust, while their lord demands of them their labor,
their sustenance, or their life.

Of a winter's day, when these poor dumb serfs have been scattered over
the portionless earth, how often they look towards this fortress and
lift up their voices with cries for night to come; the horses, ruffled
and shivering, with their tails to the wind, as they snap their frosted
fodder, or paw through the rime to the frozen grass underneath, causing
their icy fetlocks to rattle about their hoofs; the cattle, crowded to
leeward of some deep-buried haystack, the exposed side of the outermost
of them white with whirling flakes; the sheep, turning their pitiful,
trusting eyes about them over the fields of storm in earth and sky!