The dew lay soaking and thick on the grass slopes, but there was not yet such light as to bring out its sparkle; and everywhere, dotted on the green before him, sat hundreds of rabbits, the nearest not twenty yards away.
The silence and the solemnity of the whole seemed to him extraordinary.
There was not a leaf that stirred--each hung as if cut of steel; there was not a bird which chirped nor a distant cock that crew; the rabbits eyed him unafraid in this hour of truce.
It seemed to him like some vast stage on to which he had wandered unexpectedly.

The performance of the day before had been played to an end, the night scene-shifting was finished, and the players of the new eternal drama were not yet come.

An hour hence they would be all about: the sounds would begin again; men would cross the field-paths, birds would be busy; the wind would awake and the ceaseless whisper of leaves answer its talking.

But at present the stage was clear-swept, washed, clean and silent.
It was the solemnity then that impressed him most--solemnity and an air of expectation.

Yet it was not mere expectation.