Harkless nodded without the least apprehension of his meaning, and waved farewell as Bowlder finally turned his attention to the mare.

When the flop, flop of her hoofs had died out, the journalist realized that the day was silent no longer; it was verging into evening.
He dropped from the fence and turned his face toward town and supper.

He felt the light and life about him; heard the clatter of the blackbirds above him; heard the homing bees hum by, and saw the vista of white road and level landscape, framed on two sides by the branches of the grove, a vista of infinitely stretching fields of green, lined here and there with woodlands and flat to the horizon line, the village lying in their lap.

No roll of meadow, no rise of pasture land, relieved their serenity nor shouldered up from them to be called a hill.

A second great flock of blackbirds was settling down over the Plattville maples.