We toasted each other. We toasted the Flathead flowing just beside us. We toasted the full moon rising over the Kootenais. We toasted the good fairy. The candles burned low in their sockets this, also, is figurative; they were stuck on pieces of wood. With due formality I was presented with a birthday gift, a fishing-reel purchased by the Big and the Middle and the Little Boy.
A tropical night is seldom quiet, what with the croaking of frogs, the chirping of the cicadas, and some bird, insect, or reptile that imitates the winding in of a fishing-reel for hours together, but really the noise of the Jamaican nights after the earthquake was quite unbearable.
They studied to dissemble with their lips and to imitate the vocabulary of nature. They grew more and more chary of human speech, and listening posts talked with the trenches by pulls on a fishing-reel. They never sheathed their claws, and working-parties wore their equipment as though it were the integument of nature. Bayonets were never unfixed unless the moon were very bright.