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A thrill of pious awe made the whole band halt as they had before Alush, and every man, from the first rank to the last, in mute devotion raised his hands to pray. Then they moved on with hearts uplifted, and one shouted joyously to another as some pretty dark birds flew twittering toward them, a sign of the neighborhood of fresh water.
Such faint human twittering as may have grown up amongst even these poor exiles would suddenly die into a silence white with fear, as when the shadow of a hawk falls across the song of smaller birds. No human relations are acknowledged here.
Days like these the ducks have no alternative but the bay. Only a black diver can stand the strain outside. Tough old pirates these diving to keep warm. I kept on, foolish as it was. A flight of becassines were whirled past me, twittering in a panic as they fought their way out of sudden squalls. I turned to look back.
I heard the notes of warning and alarm and approached to within eye-shot. The bluebirds were cautious and hovered about uttering their peculiar twittering calls; but the jays were bolder and took turns looking in at the cavity, and deriding the poor shrinking owl.
The day was stifling; and this transition from the pitiless, visible heat of the parched fields to the cool gloom, heavy with pungency of cedars and vocal with twittering of the birds that had been driven to its leafy asylum, was exquisitely refreshing.
It was time for Pelle to move on. Yet from all this raggedness and overcrowding rose a voice which one did not hear elsewhere; a careless twittering, like that of unlucky birds that sit and plume their feathers when a little sunlight falls on them. He looked back on the time he had spent here with pensive melancholy. On the night before his wedding he lay restlessly tossing to and fro.
In the garden, the shrubs and flowers, not yet damp with dew, were sending forth their richest fragrance; the latest birds were twittering softly before settling themselves to sleep in their leafy nests; and the earliest insects were tuning up their tiny, gleeful pipes before commencing their evening concert.
The rough wind of March, worn out with its own boisterous passions, sobbed itself to rest like a tired child, and little green buds came cropping up sparsely and timidly out of the brown bosom of the earth; and, presently, all the glory of the golden crocuses unfolded itself in long golden lines in the vicarage garden; and there were twittering of birds and flutterings of soft breezes among the tree-tops, and a voice seemed to go forth over the face of the earth.
High above them, in the very heart of the great Cathedral tower, a mist, reflected above the windows until it was coloured a very faint rose, trembled like a sea about the black rafters and rounded pillars. Even as they looked some bird flew twittering from corner to corner. "When I'm worked up," said Davray, "which I'm not to-day, I just long to clear all you officials out of it.
In the street, the mere cessation of Miss White's joyous twittering was a relief. Well, she must go where she could be alone. She walked several blocks before she thought of Willis's; it would take at least two hours to get there, and she could think things over without interruption.
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