Another cloud here stole along, once more blotting out the dog, and blackening all the mountain; while the stillness was so still, deafness might have forgot itself, or else believed that noiseless shadow spoke.

“Birds, Marianna, singing-birds, I hear none; I hear nothing.  Boys and bob-o-links, do they never come a-berrying up here?”

“Birds, I seldom hear; boys, never.  The berries mostly ripe and fall—­few, but me, the wiser.”

“But yellow-birds showed me the way—­part way, at least.”

“And then flew back.  I guess they play about the mountain-side, but don’t make the top their home.  And no doubt you think that, living so lonesome here, knowing nothing, hearing nothing—­little, at least, but sound of thunder and the fall of trees—­never reading, seldom speaking, yet ever wakeful, this is what gives me my strange thoughts—­for so you call them—­this weariness and wakefulness together Brother, who stands and works in open air, would I could rest like him; but mine is mostly but dull woman’s work—­sitting, sitting, restless sitting.”

“But, do you not go walk at times?  These woods are wide.”

“And lonesome; lonesome, because so wide.  Sometimes, ’tis true, of afternoons, I go a little way; but soon come back again.  Better feel lone by hearth, than rock.  The shadows hereabouts I know—­those in the woods are strangers.”

“But the night?”

“Just like the day.  Thinking, thinking—­a wheel I cannot stop; pure want of sleep it is that turns it.”

“I have heard that, for this wakeful weariness, to say one’s prayers, and then lay one’s head upon a fresh hop pillow—­”

“Look!”

Through the fairy window, she pointed down the steep to a small garden patch near by—­mere pot of rifled loam, half rounded in by sheltering rocks—­where, side by side, some feet apart, nipped and puny, two hop-vines climbed two poles, and, gaining their tip-ends, would have then joined over in an upward clasp, but the baffled shoots, groping awhile in empty air, trailed back whence they sprung.

“You have tried the pillow, then?”

“Yes.”

“And prayer?”

“Prayer and pillow.”

“Is there no other cure, or charm?”

“Oh, if I could but once get to yonder house, and but look upon whoever the happy being is that lives there!  A foolish thought:  why do I think it?  Is it that I live so lonesome, and know nothing?”

“I, too, know nothing; and, therefore, cannot answer; but, for your sake, Marianna, well could wish that I were that happy one of the happy house you dream you see; for then you would behold him now, and, as you say, this weariness might leave you.”

—­Enough.  Launching my yawl no more for fairy-land, I stick to the piazza.  It is my box-royal; and this amphitheatre, my theatre of San Carlo.  Yes, the scenery is magical—­the illusion so complete.  And Madam Meadow Lark, my prima donna, plays her grand engagement here; and, drinking in her sunrise note, which, Memnon-like, seems struck from the golden window, how far from me the weary face behind it.