FullReads

And now, although it is not yet noon, hunger rages in us. The pancakes, the syrup, the toast and the other incidents of breakfast have disappeared the way the rabbit vanishes when the magician waves his hand. The horrid Polyphemus did not so crave his food. And as yet there is no comforting sniff from the kitchen. Scrubbing and other secular matters engage the farmer’s wife. There is as yet not a faintest gurgle in the kettle.

To divert ourselves, we climb three trees and fall out of one. Is twelve o’clock never to come? Have Time and the Hour grown stagnant? We eat apples and throw the cores at the pig to hear him grunt. Is the great round sun stuck? Have the days of Joshua come again? We walk a rail fence. Is it not yet noon? Shrewsbury clock itself–reputed by scholars the slowest of all possible clocks–could not so hold off. I snag myself–but it is nothing that shows when I sit.

Ah! At last! My grandfather is calling from the house. We run back and find that the lunch is ready and is laid upon a table with a red oil-cloth cover. We apply ourselves. Silence….

The journey home started about five o’clock. There was one game we always played. Each of us, having wisely squinted at the sky, made a reckoning and guessed where we would be when the sun set. My grandfather might say the high bridge. I named the Sherman House. But my brother, being precise, judged it to a fraction of a telegraph pole. Beyond a certain turn–did we remember?–well, it would be exactly sixteen telegraph poles further on. What an excitement there was when the sun’s lower rim was already below the horizon! We stood on our knees and looked through the little window at the back of the phaeton. With what suspicion we regarded my grandfather’s driving! Or if Dolly lagged, did it not raise a thought that she, too, was in the plot against us? The sun sets. We cry out the victor.

The sky flames with color. Then deadens in the east. The dusk is falling. The roads grow dark. Where run the roads of night? While there is light, you can see the course they keep across the country–the dust of horses’ feet–a bridge–a vagrant winding on a hill beyond. All day long they are busy with the feet of men and women and children shouting. Then twilight comes, and the roads lead home to supper and the curling smoke above the roof. But at night where run the roads? It’s dark beyond the candle’s flare–where run the roads of night.

My brother and I have become sleepy. We lop over against my grandfather–

We awake with a start. There is a gayly lighted horse-car jingling beside us. The street lights show us into harbor. We are home at last.