The speech was the terrifying north-wind, which drives the ship into the harbor.  While the scoffer spoke, women rushed up to the platform.  The Salvation Army soldiers’ hands were embraced and kissed; they were scarcely able to receive them all.  The boys and the old men praised God.

He who spoke continued.  The words intoxicated him.  He said to himself:  “I speak, I speak, at last I speak.  I tell them my secret, and yet I do not tell them.”  For the first time since he made the great sacrifice he was free from care.

***

It was a Sunday afternoon in the height of the summer.  The town looked like a desert of stones, like a moon landscape.  There was not a cat to be seen, nor a sparrow, hardly a fly on the sunny wall.  Not a chimney smoked.  There was not a breath of air in the sultry streets.  The whole was only a stony field, out of which grew stone walls.

Where were the dogs and the people?  Where were the young ladies in narrow skirts and wide sleeves, long gloves and red sunshades?  Where were the soldiers and the fine people, the Salvation Army and the street boys?

Whither had all those gay picnickers gone in the dewy cool of the morning, all the baskets and accordions and bottles, which the steamer landed?  And what had happened to the procession of Good Templars?  Banners fluttered, drums thundered, boys swarmed, stamped, and hurrahed.  Or what had happened to the blue awnings under which the little ones slept while father and mother pushed them solemnly up the street.

All were on their way out to the wood.  They complained of the long streets.  It seemed as if the stone houses followed them.  At last, at last they caught a glimpse of green.  And just outside of the town, where the road wound over flat, moist fields, where the song of the lark sounded loudest, where the clover steamed with honey, there lay the first of those left behind; heads in the moss, noses in the grass.  Bodies bathed in sunshine and fragrance, souls refreshed with idleness and rest.

On the way to the wood toiled bicyclists and bearers of luncheon baskets.  Boys came with trowels and shiny knapsacks.  Girls danced in clouds of dust.  Sky and banners and children and trumpets.  Mechanics and their families and crowds of laborers.  The rearing horses of an omnibus waved their forelegs over the crowd.  A young man, half drunk, jumped up on the wheel.  He was pulled down, and lay kicking on his back in the dust of the road.

In the wood a nightingale trilled and sang, piped and gurgled.  The birches were not thriving, their trunks were black.  The beeches built high temples, layer upon layer of streaky green.  A toad sat and took aim with its tongue.  It caught a fly at every shot.  A hedgehog trotted about in the dried, rustling beech leaves.  Dragonflies darted about with glittering wings.  The people sat down around the luncheon-baskets.  The piping, chirping crickets tried to make their Sunday a glad one.