Nicholas looked at her in perplexity, his arm resting on the little shelf outside, which supported the wooden water bucket and the long-handled gourd.

“You can go when I come back,” he said at last, adding with an effort, “or, if it’s so bad, I can stay at home.”

But, having asserted her supremacy over his inclinations, Marthy Burr relented.  “Oh, I don’t know as I’ll go in to-day,” she returned.  “I ain’t got enough teeth left now to chew on, an’ I don’t believe it’s the teeth, nohow.  It’s the gums—­”

She retreated into the room, whence the shrill voice of Sairy Jane inquired: 

“Air you up, ma?  Why, ’tain’t day!”

Nicholas closed the door and went out upon the porch.  The yard looked deserted and desolated, giving him a sudden realisation of his own littleness and the immensity of the hour.  It was as if the wheels of time had stopped in the dim promise of things unfulfilled.  A broken scythe lay to one side amid the straggling ailanthus shoots; near the wood-pile there was a wheelbarrow half filled with chips, and at a little distance the axe was poised upon a rotten log.  From the small coops beside the hen-house came an anxious clucking as the fluffy yellow chickens strayed beneath the uneven edges of their pointed prisons and made independent excursions into the world.

In the far east the day was slowly breaking, and the open country was flooded with pale, washed-out grays, like the background of an impressionist painting.  A heavy dew had risen in the night, and as the boy passed through the dripping weeds on his way to the stable they left a chill moisture upon his bare feet.  His eyes were heavy with sleep, and to his cloudy gaze the familiar objects of the barnyard assumed grotesque and distorted shapes.  The manure heap near the doorway presented an effect of unreality, the pig-pen seemed to have suffered witchery since the evening before, and the haystack, looming vaguely in the drab distance, appeared to be woven of some phantasmal fabric.

He led out the old sorrel mare and followed her into the large ploughed field beyond the cow-pen, where the harrow was lying on one side of the brown ridges.  As he passed the pen the startled sheep huddled into a far corner, bleating plaintively, and the brindle cow looked after him with soft, persuasive eyes.  When he had attached the clanking chains of the plough harness to the single-tree, he caught up the ropes which served for reins and set out laboriously over the crumbling earth, which yielded beneath his feet and made walking difficult.

The field extended from the cow-pen and the bright, green rows of vegetables that were raised for market to the reedy brook which divided his father’s land from that belonging to General Battle.  The brook was always cool and shady, and silvery with minnows darting over the shining pebbles beneath the clear water.  As Nicholas looked across the neutral furrows he could see the feathery branches of willows rising from the gray mist, and, farther still up the sloping hillside, the dew-drenched green of the mixed woodlands.