t break its

silence with a long sigh as he composed himself to sleep.

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black

night for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in

the stables rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl

made a noise with very little resemblance in it to the noise

conventionally assigned to the owl by men-poets. But it is the

obstinate custom of such creatures hardly ever to say what is set

down for them.

For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and

human, stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the

landscape, dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust

on all the roads. The burial-place had got to the pass that its little

heaps of poor grass were undistinguishable from one another; the

figure on the Cross might have come down, for anything that could

be seen of it. In the village: taxers and taxed were fast asleep.

Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as the starved usually do, and of

ease and rest, as the driven slave and the yoked ox may, its lean

inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and freed.

The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the

fountain at the chateau dropped unseen and unheardboth

melting away, like the minutes that were falling from the spring of

Timeth