An Angler at Large/Chapter 3
To-night the garden was delicious. The sky was covered with a film of cloud which diffused the light of the moon (in her first quarter) all over the heavens into a soft and radiant blue. She hung just above the greatest of that row of elms which burdens the western sky line. A high branch touched her. The big trees loomed imminent, rather terrible. The great one seemed to crouch there, huge, devilish. In two clear places among its branches there seemed the long slit eyes in the head of a bushy and shapeless demon. It must have been the immense and contrasting peace of the night that put this gruesome idea into my head. The elm-fiend was to the rest of my circumstances like that abominable anticipation of trouble which so often does its best to kill complete happiness. Low among the arms of the smaller, thinner elms to the south, lightning flickered, just above the down. The stars shone very faint, largely luminous. A sigh of breeze stirred rarely. Sounds are never absent in the country, whose silence is made up of a multitude of little noises. Distinct above the rest was the coo of a pigeon from the clump on the flank of the Beacon Down. A cow mooed. The starlings rustled in the thatch above our heads. Somewhere a nightjar sprung its stealthy rattle, and a river bird called once. And four miles away at the station the trains whistled and rolled and puffed, the sound coming loud, caught by the funnel which is this valley, across whose mouth from N.E. to S.W. the railway line runs. Let it run!
And the air, dear God! it seemed to fill one's whole body. We could not drink enough of it.
This is a good place. It always was. But it is better now.