stable, when I spied a bight of meadow some way below the roadway in an
angle of the river. Thither I descended, and, tying Modestine
provisionally to a tree, proceeded to investigate the neighbourhood. A
grey pearly evening shadow filled the glen; objects at a little distance
grew indistinct and melted bafflingly into each other; and the darkness
was rising steadily like an exhalation. I approached a great oak which
grew in the meadow, hard by the river's brink; when to my disgust the
voices of children fell upon my ear, and I beheld a house round the angle
on the other bank. I had half a mind to pack and be gone again, but the
growing darkness moved me to remain. I had only to make no noise until
the night was fairly come, and trust to the dawn to call me early in the
morning. But it was hard to be annoyed by neighbours in such a great
hotel.

A hollow underneath the oak was my bed. Before I had fed Modestine and
arranged my sack, three stars were already brightly shining, and the
others were beginning dimly to appear. I slipped down to the river,
which looked very black among its rocks, to fill my can; and dined with a
good appetite in the dark, for I scrupled to light a lantern while so
near a house. The moon, which I had seen a pallid crescent all
afternoon, faintly illuminated the summit of the hills, but not a ray
fell into the bottom of the glen where I was lying. The oak rose before
me like a pillar of darkness; and overhead the heartsome stars were set
in the face of the night. No one knows the stars who has not slept, as
the French happily put it, a la belle etoile. He may know all their
names and distances and magnitudes, and yet be ignorant of what alone
concerns mankind,--their serene and gladsome influence on the mind. The
greater part of poetry is about the stars; and very justly, for they are
themselves the most classical of poets. These same far-away worlds,
sprinkled like tapers or shaken together like a diamond dust upon the