At last, he gave a great sigh and said, "I am _so_ tired!" He did not
hear the gentle echo which answered from far away over his head. For at
that moment, he came against the lowest of a few steps that stretched
across the church, and fell down and hurt his arm. He cried a little at
first, and then crawled up the steps on his hands and knees. At the top,
he came to a little bit of carpet on which he lay down. And there he lay
staring at the dull windows that rose nearly a hundred feet above his
head.
The moon was at that moment just on the edge of the horizon. And lo!
with the moon, lovely figures began to dawn in the windows. He lay and
looked at them backward over his head, wondering if they would come
down. He heard a low, soft murmuring as if they were talking to
themselves about him. But his eyes grew tired, and more and more tired.
His eyelids grew so heavy that they _would_ keep tumbling down over his
eyes. He kept lifting them and lifting them. But every time, they were
heavier than the last. It was no use! They were too much for him.
Sometimes before he got them half way up, down they went again. At
length, he gave it up quite, and the moment he gave it up, he was fast
asleep!
When his eyes came wide open again, there were no lovely figures--or
even windows--but a dark heap of hay all about him. The small panes in
the roof of his loft were glimmering blue in the light of the morning.
Old Diamond was coming awake down below in the stable. In a moment more
he was on his feet and shaking himself so that young Diamond's bed
trembled under him.
"He is grand at shaking himself!" said Diamond. "I wish I could shake
myself like that. But then I can wash myself and he can't. What fun it
would be to see old Diamond washing his face with his hoofs and iron
shoes! Wouldn't it be a picture!"
He dressed himself quickly and ran out. Down the stairs he went and
through the little door out upon the lawn of Mr. Coleman's house next
door. He wanted to see how things looked since last night. There was the
little summer-house with the tulip bed before it where he had been
sitting the evening before, crushed to the ground! Over it lay the great
elm tree which the wind had broken across! As he stood looking at it, a
gentleman who was staying at the Coleman house came out upon the lawn.
"Dear me!" said the gentleman. "There has been terrible work here! This
is the North Wind's doing! What a pity! I wish we lived at the back of
it, I am sure!"
"Where is that, sir?" asked Diamond.
"Away in the Hyperborean regions," answered the gentleman. He smiled for
he knew well enough that Diamond would not understand that big word
which means the country away in the far, far north.
"I never heard of that place," returned Diamond.
"No," said the gentleman. "I suppose not. But if this tree had been
there, it would not have been blown down. There is no wind in that
country."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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