and sent up gouts of blood. But already about the town the darkness was
forming; fast, fast the shadows crept upon it from the forest, and from
all sides banks and wreaths of curling mist were gathering, as if a
ghostly leaguer were being built up against the city, and the strange
race who lived in its streets. Suddenly there burst out from the
stillness the clear and piercing music of the _réveillé_, calling,
recalling, iterated, reiterated, and ending with one long high fierce
shrill note with which the steep hills rang. Perhaps a boy in the school
band was practicing on his bugle, but for Lucian it was magic. For him it
was the note of the Roman trumpet, _tuba mirum spargens sonum_, filling
all the hollow valley with its command, reverberated in dark places in
the far forest, and resonant in the old graveyards without the walls. In
his imagination he saw the earthen gates of the tombs broken open, and
the serried legion swarming to the eagles. Century by century they passed
by; they rose, dripping, from the river bed, they rose from the level,
their armor shone in the quiet orchard, they gathered in ranks and
companies from the cemetery, and as the trumpet sounded, the hill fort
above the town gave up its dead. By hundreds and thousands the ghostly
battle surged about the standard, behind the quaking mist, ready to march
against the moldering walls they had built so many years before.

He turned sharply; it was growing very dark, and he was afraid of missing
his way. At first the path led him by the verge of a wood; there was a
noise of rustling and murmuring from the trees as if they were taking
evil counsel together. A high hedge shut out the sight of the darkening
valley, and he stumbled on mechanically, without taking much note of the
turnings of the track, and when he came out from the wood shadow to the
open country, he stood for a moment quite bewildered and uncertain. A
dark wild twilight country lay before him, confused dim shapes of trees
near at hand, and a hollow below his feet, and the further hills and