It must be granted to them that a grey day robs of their decoration the walls that should be sprinkled with shadows.  Let, then, a plaque or a picture be kept for hanging on shadowless clays.  To dress a room once for all, and to give it no more heed, is to neglect the units of the days.

Shadows within doors are yet only messages from that world of shadows which is the landscape of sunshine.  Facing a May sun you see little except an infinite number of shadows.  Atoms of shadow—­be the day bright enough—­compose the very air through which you see the light.  The trees show you a shadow for every leaf, and the poplars are sprinkled upon the shining sky with little shadows that look translucent.  The liveliness of every shadow is that some light is reflected into it; shade and shine have been entangled as though by some wild wind through their million molecules.

The coolness and the dark of night are interlocked with the unclouded sun.  Turn sunward from the north, and shadows come to life, and are themselves the life, the action, and the transparence of their day.

To eyes tired and retired all day within lowered blinds, the light looks still and changeless.  So many squares of sunshine abide for so many hours, and when the sun has circled away they pass and are extinguished.  Him who lies alone there the outer world touches less by this long sunshine than by the haste and passage of a shadow.  Although there may be no tree to stand between his window and the south, and although no noonday wind may blow a branch of roses across the blind, shadows and their life will be carried across by a brilliant bird.

To the sick man a cloud-shadow is nothing but an eclipse; he cannot see its shape, its color, its approach, or its flight.  It does but darken his window as it darkens the day, and is gone again; he does not see it pluck and snatch the sun.  But the flying bird shows him wings.  What flash of light could be more bright for him than such a flash of darkness?

It is the pulse of life, where all change had seemed to be charmed.  If he had seen the bird itself he would have seen less—­the bird’s shadow was a message from the sun.

There are two separated flights for the fancy to follow, the flight of the bird in the air, and the flight of its shadow on earth.  This goes across the window blind, across the wood, where it is astray for a while in the shades; it dips into the valley, growing vaguer and larger, runs, quicker than the wind, uphill, smaller and darker on the soft and dry grass, and rushes to meet its bird when the bird swoops to a branch and clings.