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The long shadows lay across an open green glade, narrowing towards one end, where a path, nearly lost amid dwarf furze, crested heather, and soft bent-grass, led towards a hut, rudely constructed of sods of turf and branches of trees, whose gray crackling foliage contrasted with the fresh verdure around.
He will remember us every one and will come to us, and the place of our rest shall be marked for centuries, for years, or for seconds, for each a stone, or a few green sods laid upon a mound beneath the sky, or the ripple on a changing wave when the loaded sack has slipped from the smooth plank, and the sound of a dull splash has died away in the wind.
Thus it continued at intervals more and more remote, till a late hour in the night, making desperate efforts to disgorge the sods that were swept back after every ejection, and to rid itself of the foul water that remained. Those attempts gradually grow fainter and fainter, subsiding at last into mere grumblings.
Some had got ladders, and attempted, at the risk of their lives, to secure the thatch upon the roofs by placing flat stones, sods, and such other materials, as by their weight, might keep it from being borne off like dust upon the wings of the tempest.
On a roadside barricade of stones, chinked with sods of turf a breastwork the French probably had erected before the fight and which the Germans had kicked half down I counted three cats, seated side by side, washing their faces sedately and soberly.
In fact, it was a kind of oven which had been prepared; and in a very short time about half an hour or so the operation was at an end. Beneath the double layer of stones and sods lay the roots cooked by this violent heating. On crushing them there was obtainable a flour well fitted for making into bread, but, even eaten as they were, they proved much like potatoes of highly nutritive quality.
A moment later, the window-shutter was closed, and the sound of a bar of iron which was placed against it was audible outside. Night continued to fall. A cold wind from the Alps was blowing. By the light of the expiring day the stranger perceived, in one of the gardens which bordered the street, a sort of hut, which seemed to him to be built of sods.
The sods in places not before hoed are separated from the soil beneath and collected into flattened heaps, the grass undermost; when dried, fire is applied and slow combustion goes on, most of the products of the burning being retained in the ground, much of the soil is incinerated.
At that time, it being supposed that some delicacy of the lungs had threatened serious results, my father, who always moved the sods beneath him and the skies above him to care for a sick child, had managed to insert a little stove into the room, to soften its chill when needed.
His shop opens out of the cabin, and I love to sit by the Hoey fireside, where the fan bellows, turned by a crank, brings in an instant a fresh flame to the sods of smouldering turf, and watch a wee Colleen Bawn playing among her daddy's shavings, tying them about her waist and fat wrists, hanging them on her ears and in among her brown curls.
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