Only at night had he respite for a while. Two of the children slept in his little room, and even they, incredibly curious as they were, were forced to close their peering eyes at times. The old man, kept awake when he might have slept, could not always sleep later on, and often sat for hours by his window, looking out into the night. Up there, it almost seemed as though he were in the chestnuts over the road, only out in the branches where the birds slept it was cool, and full of a rocked and murmuring peace. Sometimes, though, on the stillest nights, not a leaf moved or shook on the giant boughs, but more often there was a little breeze that whispered busily all the time. There was a wind, too, that did nothing but sigh, and another that hissed in angry little gusts. The one that sighed meant that thunder was about, and the fretted one was the herald of change and rain. And another wind rolled in a long, soft soughing all the way through the trees, like the long, smooth waves of a very far-off tide. It would swell and rise while he listened for it to break, but always it ebbed and died without breaking at all. Sometimes it stopped in the midst of the downward curve, like a sentence softly suspended without cause. He liked this wind because it took him back to the marsh, but best of all he liked the big gales that came to him straight from the west. The wind that thrashed and tramped on the great trees, that hammered the little window of his room and sent great draughts down chimneys and through keyholes, and flung the blue slates spinning into the street, came to him straight from the place where he belonged. Sometimes, when it was very dark and wild, he was sure the street was full of the sea. He thought of it rolling and pushing at all the doors.... There was a meadow beyond the chestnuts over the road, and often he heard the water under the wall, like the tide that beat at the banks along the marsh. He was fond of that meadow beyond the trees, with its shimmering levels golden in the sun, yet cool to the eye because of the shadow in between. At first he spent his time by the leaning wall, talking to people as they came along, but that was another thing Marget couldn’t abide. Strangers stared at his violin, and asked questions, and that vexed her pride. It was like a beggar-man, she said, to be seen with a fiddle in the street. Folks would be giving him coppers before so long, and shaming them all and pulling them all down. Kit held to his talking-ground for a while, but after one dreadful episode he gave way. Sometimes people asked if the old man were dead, the old man with the fiddle beside the wall.