So Time that is o’er-kind,
  To all that be,
Ordains us e’en as blind,
  As bold as she: 
That in our very death,
  And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
  ‘See how our works endure!’

A Centurion of the Thirtieth

Dan had come to grief over his Latin, and was kept in; so Una went alone to Far Wood.  Dan’s big catapult and the lead bullets that Hobden had made for him were hidden in an old hollow beech-stub on the west of the wood.  They had named the place out of the verse in Lays of Ancient Rome: 

     From lordly Volaterrae,
       Where scowls the far-famed hold
     Piled by the hands of giants
       For Godlike Kings of old.

They were the ‘Godlike Kings’, and when old Hobden piled some comfortable brushwood between the big wooden knees of Volaterrae, they called him ‘Hands of Giants’.

Una slipped through their private gap in the fence, and sat still awhile, scowling as scowlily and lordlily as she knew how; for Volaterrae is an important watch-tower that juts out of Far Wood just as Far Wood juts out of the hillside.  Pook’s Hill lay below her and all the turns of the brook as it wanders out of the Willingford Woods, between hop-gardens, to old Hobden’s cottage at the Forge.  The Sou’-West wind (there is always a wind by Volaterrae) blew from the bare ridge where Cherry Clack Windmill stands.

Now wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting things going to happen, and that is why on blowy days you stand up in Volaterrae and shout bits of the Lays to suit its noises.

Una took Dan’s catapult from its secret place, and made ready to meet Lars Porsena’s army stealing through the wind-whitened aspens by the brook.  A gust boomed up the valley, and Una chanted sorrowfully: 

     ’Verbenna down to Ostia
       Hath wasted all the plain: 
     Astur hath stormed Janiculum,
       And the stout guards are slain.’

But the wind, not charging fair to the wood, started aside and shook a single oak in Gleason’s pasture.  Here it made itself all small and crouched among the grasses, waving the tips of them as a cat waves the tip of her tail before she springs.

‘Now welcome—­welcome, Sextus,’ sang Una, loading the catapult—­

’Now welcome to thy home! 
Why dost thou stay, and turn away? 
Here lies the road to Rome.’

She fired into the face of the lull, to wake up the cowardly wind, and heard a grunt from behind a thorn in the pasture.

‘Oh, my Winkie!’ she said aloud, and that was something she had picked up from Dan.  ‘I b’lieve I’ve tickled up a Gleason cow.’

‘You little painted beast!’ a voice cried.  ’I’ll teach you to sling your masters!’

She looked down most cautiously, and saw a young man covered with hoopy bronze armour all glowing among the late broom.  But what Una admired beyond all was his great bronze helmet with a red horse-tail that flicked in the wind.  She could hear the long hairs rasp on his shimmery shoulder-plates.