of the doors rather than ran to it. I found it fast, but this one I
knew was fastened on the inside by a wooden bolt or bar, which I could
draw back. The open door revealed the dark night. Before me was the
cornyard, as we called it, full of ricks. Huge and very positive
although dim, they rose betwixt me and the sky. Between their tops I
saw only stars and darkness. I turned and looked back into the barn.
It appeared a horrible cave filled with darkness. I remembered there
were rats in it. I dared not enter it again, even to go out at the
opposite door: I forgot how soundly and peacefully I had slept in it.
I stepped out into the night with the grass of the corn-yard under my
feet, the awful vault of heaven over my head, and those shadowy ricks
around me. It was a relief to lay my hand on one of them, and feel
that it was solid. I half groped my way through them, and got out into
the open field, by creeping through between the stems of what had once
been a hawthorn hedge, but had in the course of a hundred years grown
into the grimmest, largest, most grotesque trees I have ever seen of
the kind. I had always been a little afraid of them, even in the
daytime, but they did me no hurt, and I stood in the vast hall of the
silent night--alone: there lay the awfulness of it. I had never before
known what the night was. The real sting of its fear lay in this--that
there was nobody else in it. Everybody besides me was asleep all over
the world, and had abandoned me to my fate, whatever might come out of
the darkness to seize me. When I got round the edge of the stone wall,
which on another side bounded the corn-yard, there was the
moon--crescent, as I saw her in my dream, but low down towards the
horizon, and lying almost upon her rounded back. She looked very
disconsolate and dim. Even she would take no heed of me, abandoned
child! The stars were high up, away in the heavens. They did not look
like the children of the sun and moon at all, and _they_ took no heed
of me. Yet there was a grandeur in my desolation that would have