"When my father died all he left me was this little--bungalow they'd call it nowadays, I suppose, and a few acres 'round it. You remember, Maw, how, when the sun first came sneakin' over that knob off to the left, the shadow of those two oaks used to just touch the stone wall on the western border of father's property, and when the sun was just crawlin' into bed behind those woods off yonder the shadow of the oaks just overlapped the rail fence on the eastern border? That's all my father left me--that and the mortgage. That's all I brought you home to, Maw. I'm not disparaging my father. He was a great man. When he left his own home in the East and came out here all this was woods, woods, woods, far as you can see. Even that pond wasn't there then. My father cleared it all--cut down everything except those two oak-trees. He used to call them the Twin Oaks, but they always seemed to me like man and wife. I kind o' like to think that they're you and me. And like you and me they're all that's left standin' of the old trees. They were big trees, too, and those were big days." The greatness of his thoughts rendered him mute. He was a plain man, but he was hearing the unwritten music of the American epic of the ax and the plow, the more than Trojan war, the more than ten years' war, against forests and savages. His wife brought him back from hyper-Homeric vision to the concrete. "Thank Heaven, Susan's finished gossipin' and started home." The mail-carrier in his little umbrellaed cart was vanishing up the hill, and the sunbonnet was floating down the road. The sky was an unmitigated blue, save for a few masses of cloud, like piles of new fleece on a shearing-floor. Green woods, gray road, blue sky, pale clouds, all were steeped in heat and silence so intense it seemed that something must break. And something broke. Appallingly, abruptly, came a shattering crash, a streak of blinding fire, an unendurable noise, a searing blast of blaze as if the sun had been dynamite exploded, splintering the very joists of heaven. The whole air rocked like a tidal wave breaking on a reef; the house writhed in all its timbers. Then silence--unbearable silence. The old woman, made a child again by a paralytic stroke of terror, found herself on her knees, clinging frantically to her husband. The cheek buried in his breast felt the lurch and leap of his pounding heart. Manlike, he found courage in his woman's fright, but his hand quivered upon her hair; she heard his shaken voice saying: "There, there, Maw, it's all over." When he dared to open his eyes he was blinded and dazed like the stricken Saul. When he could see again he found the world unchanged. The sky was still there, and still azure; the clouds swam serenely; the road still poured down from the unaltered hills. He tried to laugh; it was a sickly sound he made.