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."CHAPTER XI.c.SOME OF THE SIGHTS WILLIE SAW.I FANCY some of my readers would like to hear what were some of the scenesWillie saw on such occasions.The little mill went on night after night-almosteverynight in the summer, and those nights in the winter when the frost wasn'tso hard that it would have frozen up the machinery.But to attempt to describethe variety of the pictures Willie saw would be an endless labour.Sometimes, when he looked out, it was a simple, quiet, thoughtful night that methis gaze, without any moon, but as full of stars as it could hold, all flashingand trembling through the dew that was slowly sinking down the air to settleupon the earth and its thousand living things below.On such a night Willienever went to bed again without wishing to be pure in heart, that he might oneday see the God whose thought had taken the shape of such a lovely night.Foralthough he could not have expressed himself thus at that time, he felt that itmust be God's thinking that put it all there.Other times, the stars would be half blotted out-all over the heavens-not withmist, but with the light of the moon.Oh, how lovely she was I-so calm! so allalone in the midst of the great blue ocean! the sun of the night! She seemed tohold up the tent of the heavens in a great silver knot.And, like the starsabove, all the flowers below had lost their colour and looked pale and wan,sweet and sad.It was just like what the schoolmaster had been telling him aboutthe Elysium of the Greek and Latin poets, to which they fancied the good peoplewent when they died-not half so glad and bright and busy as the daylight worldwhich they had left behind them, and to which they always wanted to go back thatthey might eat and drink and be merry again-but oh, so tender and lovely in itsmournfulness!Several times in winter, looking out, he saw a strange sight-the air so full ofgreat snowflakes that he could not see the moon through them, although her lightwas visible all about them.They came floating slowly down through the duskylight, just as if they had been a precipitate from that solution of moonbeams.He could hardly persuade himself to go to bed, so fascinating was the sight; butthe cold would drive him to his nest again.Once the wheelwatchman pulled him up in the midst of a terriblethunderstorm-when the East and the West were answering each other with alternateflashes of forked lightning that seemed to split the black clouds with cracks ofblinding blue, awful in their blasting silence-followed by great, billowy,shattering rolls of thunder, as loud as if the sky had been a huge kettledrum,on which the clubs of giant drummers were beating a terrible onset; while atsudden intervals, down came the bigdropped rain, pattering to the earth as ifbeaten out of the clouds by the blows of the thunder.But Willie was notfrightened, though the lightning blinded and the thunder deafened him-notfrightened any more than the tiniest flower in the garden below, which, if shecould have thought about it, would have thought it all being done only that shemight feel cooler and stronger, and be able to hold up her head better.And once he saw a glorious dance of the aurora borealis-in all the colours of afaint rainbow.The frosty snow sparkled underneath, and the cold stars of wintersparkled above, and between the snow and the stars, shimmered and shifted,vanished and came again, a serried host of spears.Willie had been reading the"Paradise Lost," and the part which pleased him, boylike, the most, was the warsof the angels in the sixth book.Hence it came that the aurora looked to himlike the crowding of innumerable spears-in the hands of angels, themselvesinvisible-clashed together and shaken asunder, however, as in the convolutionsof a mazy dance of victory, rather than brandished and hurtled as in the tumultof the battle.Another vision that would greatly delight him was a far more common one: themoon wading through clouds blown slowly across the sky-especially if by an upperwind, unfelt below.Now she would be sinking helpless in a black faint-growingmore and more dim, until at last she disappeared from the night-was blotted fromthe face of nature, leaving only a dim memorial light behind her; now her soulwould come into her again, and she was there once more-doubtful indeed: but witha slow, solemn revival, her light would grow and grow, until the last fringe ofthe great cloud swung away from off her face, and she dawned out stately andglorious, to float for a space in queenly triumph across a lake of clearestblue.And Willie was philosopher enough to say to himself, that all thisfainting and reviving, all this defeat and conquest, were but appearances; thatthe moon was her own bright self all the time, basking contented in the light ofher sun, between whom and her the cloud could not creep, only between her andWillie.But what delighted him most of all was to catch the moon dreaming.That was whenthe old moon, tumbled over on her back, would come floating up the east, like alittle boat on the rising tide of the night, looking lost on the infinite sea!Dreaming she must be surely!-she looked nothing but dreaming; for she seemed tocare about nothing-not even that she was old and worn, and withered anddying,-not even that, instead of sinking down in the west, into some deep bed ofdim repose, she was drifting, haggard and battered, untidy and weak and sleepy,up and up into the dazzling halls of the sun.Did she know that his light wouldclothe her as with a garment, and hide her in the highest recesses of hislightfilled ceiling? or was it only that she was dreaming, dreaming-sweet, cool,tender dreams of her own, and neither knew nor cared about anything around her?What a strange look all the night wore while the tired old moon was thusdreaming of the time when she would come again, back through the vanishing andthe darkness-a single curved thread of a baby moon, to grow and grow to a greatfullgrown lady moon, able to cross with fearless gaze the gulf of the vaultedheavens-alone, with neither sleep nor dreams to protect her!There were many other nights, far more commonplace, which yet Willie liked wellto look out upon, but which could not keep him long from his bed.There was, forinstance, the moonless and cloudy night, when, if he had been able to pierce thedarkness to the core, he would have found nothing but blackness It had a powerof its own, but one cannot say it had much to look at.On such a night he wouldsay to himself that the day was so sound asleep he was dreaming of nothing atall, and make haste to his nest.Then again there was the cold night of blackfrost, when there was cloud enough to hide the stars and the moon, and yet alittle light came soaking through, enough to reveal how hopeless and dreary theearth was
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