out a few tones paler.

With the fall of the billhooks fell solemnity, and men, women and
children ran wildly hither and thither, shouting, singing, and breaking
out into rough dances.

A new and blissful excitement tingled through Ishmael. When the
labourers had shouted he had dropped Phoebe's hand and shouted with
them, flinging up his arms. The glamorous light, the sense of something
primitive and vital that the ceremony expressed, and the stir at the
pulses caused by the sight of many people moved to do the same thing at
the same moment, went to his head. He ran about singing and leaping like
the rest, but keeping a little away from them, and quite suddenly there
came to him for the first time that consciousness of pleasure which
marks man's enjoyment off from the animal's. Hitherto, in his moments of
happiness, he had not paused to consider the matter, but merely been
happy as a puppy is when it plays in the sun. Now, suddenly, he stopped
still, and stood looking at the distant blackthorn hedge that made a
dark network against the last gleam in the west.

"I am happy? I am _being happy_!" he said to himself, and he turned this
consciousness over in his mind as he would have turned a sweet in his
mouth. Ever afterwards the memory of that moment's realisation was
connected for him with a twisted line of hedge and a background of pale
greenish sky. He stared at the distorted hedgerow that stood out so
clearly, and to him this moment was so vividly the present that he did
not see how it could ever leave off.... "This is now ..." he thought;
"how can it stop being now?" And the shouting and the still air and the
definite look of that hedge all seemed, with himself as he was and felt
at that moment, to be at the outermost edge of time, suspended there for