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He was to leave them before noon, to hurry on horseback to overtake the wagons that he might personally oversee the arrangements to be made upon their coming into the Valley. And there was much to be done, many specific orders to give the Lark, before he dared leave. Upon the dam itself he put a hundred men to work.
She turned her back upon the Hall and looked steadily seawards, across the waste of sands and pasture-land to where sky and sea met. Here at least was peace. She drew a long breath of relief, cast aside the book which she had never dreamed of reading, and lay full length in the grass, with her eyes upturned to where a lark was singing his way down from the blue sky.
The wedding morning dawned, as bright and beautiful a winter's day as nature ever vouchsafed a happy bridal pair. Checkers was up with the lark. He felt the weight of the nations upon his shoulders.
He grinned as he unfastened himself: "Well, the snail seems to be on the thorn; the lark certainly is on the wing. "God's in his heaven. All's right with the world!" And he batted his eyes at the group of loafing local statesmen in his office as he viewed the wreckage, and went to the telephone and ordered a carpenter, without wasting any words on the crowd.
At first they welcomed the whites, and were eager to trade with them particularly for muskets; for their pastime was internecine war, and they greatly preferred the white man's weapons to their own. War was their pastime I use the word advisedly. They often met and slaughtered each other just for a lark, and when there was no quarrel.
Slanting off the shoulder, he led down towards the coombe on his right. The boy on his arm was trembling. In the deep bosom of the coombe was a green hollow. On the brink they paused. Above them a lark sang. A little circle of men lay round the saucer in the sun, the flies upon their faces. In front of the others a big man sprawled across a great black horse.
To them the attendants hinted that they were going to shut shop, and one by one they shuffled out, the readier that Clare was now so tired that Pummy could not get up the merest tail of a lark more. He was quite fresh himself, and had he been out in the woods, would certainly not have gone home till morning.
If the lark be not really the soul of joy, he is the greatest hypocrite under the sun. Many insects seem to be pin-points of vibrant vitality which we can scarcely believe to be unaccompanied by pleasurable sensation. The mosquito which I squash on the back of my hand, and which dies in a bath of my own blood, has had a short life but doubtless a merry one.
"That's me!" cries the Boy at Mugby, exultantly, adding, with an intense relish for his occupation, "what a delightful lark it is!"
The skylark, on the other hand, when he did not readily find a tree-top, said to himself, "Never mind! I have a pair of wings." And so the lark is famous, while the sparrow remains unheard-of, and is even mistaken for a grasshopper. How true it is that the very things which dishearten one nature and break it down, only help another to find out what it was made for!
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