"As these two slept, the shapeless moon sank down over the rim of the Polden Hills. As these two slept, little gusts of midnight air, less noticeable than any wind but breaking the absolute stillness, stirred the pale, green leaf-buds above many a half-finished hedge-sparrow's nest between Queen's Sedgemoor and the Lake Village flats. Here and there, unknown to Sam Dekker or any other naturalist, a few among such nests held one or two cold untimely eggs, over whose brittle blue-tinted rondure moved in stealthy motion these light-borne air-stirrings pursuing their mysterious journeys from one dark horizon to another. Drooping over the rich, black earth in Mr. Weatherwax's two walled gardens hung motionless the heads of the honey-sweet jonquils and the faint-breath'd narcissi, too heavily asleep in that primordial sleep of green-calyxed vegetation, deeper and older than the sleep of birds or beasts or men, to respond, even by the shiver of the least petal among them, to these light motions of the midnight air. The sensitised earth-nerves of that portion of the maternal planet upon which these beings lived responded, as she swung forward on her orbit, to the sleep of her numerous offspring by a drowsy deliciousness of her own in the arms of the night, enclosing them all in those interstellar spaces and comforting them all with a peace greater than their peace."
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