woodhens

Updated: May 24, 2025

There was the clear starlit sky, the rushing river, and the stunted trees on the mountain-side; the woodhens cried, and the "more-pork" hooted out her two monotonous notes exactly as they had done years since; one moment, and time had so flown backwards that youth came bounding back to him with the return of his youth's surroundings; the next, and the intervening twenty years most of them grim ones rose up mockingly before him, and the buoyancy of hope yielded to the despondency of admitted failure.

Samuel Butler - Erewhon Revisited