"Then you got some?" "Feel!" I felt his game pockets. "One, two--oh, three! I didn't hear you shoot except twice. Well"--I was stamping and flinging my arms around myself in the endeavor to thaw out--"I think they're very well off: they're bound for a warm oven." "Cold? Thunder! I ought to have left you the bottle. Here!" I took it and gulped, protesting: "Detestable stuff! Wait, I'll take some more." "This from you! You _must_ be cold! Come on! Run! Look out for the little ditches! Jump where I do." We started stiffly enough, in the teeth of the big, dark wind, till the motion, and the bottle, began to take effect. A haymow loomed. We flung ourselves, panting, against it, and, sinking back into its yielding bulk, drew long breaths. "Did we think it was cold?" I murmured; "or windy?" We were on the leeward side of it, and it gave generous shelter. The wind sighed gently over the top of the mow, breathed past its sides, never touching us, and we gazed up at the stars. "The sky is fairly gray with them," I said. "Perhaps," said Jonathan lazily, "it's that bottle, making you see ten stars grow where one grew before." "Perhaps," I suggested, choosing to ignore this speech, "it's the wind, blowing the stars around and raising star-dust." We lay in our protecting mow, and the warmth of our bodies drew out of it faint odors of salt hay. We did not talk. There are times when one seems to exist in poise, with eternity on all sides. One's thoughts do not move, they float. "Well?" said Jonathan at last. I could hear the hay rustle as he straightened up. "Don't interrupt," I answered. But my spirit had come down to earth, and after the first jolt I realized that, as usual, Jonathan was right. We plunged out again into the buffeting wind and the starlit darkness, and I followed blindly as Jonathan led across the marshes, around pools, over ditches, until we began to see the friendly twinkle of house lights on the edge of the village. On through the lanes to the highroad, stumbling now and then on its stiffened ruts and ridges. As houses thickened the gale grew noisy, singing in telephone wires, whistling around barn corners, slamming blinds and doors, and rushing in the tree-tops. "O for that haymow!" I gasped. "The open fire will be better." Jonathan flung back comfort across the wind. Ten minutes later we had made harbor in the little house by the shore. The candles were lighted, the fire set ablaze, and as we sat before it cooking chops and toast I said, "No, Jonathan, the open fire isn't any better than the haymow." "But different?" he suggested. "Yes, quite different." "And good in its own poor way." He turned his chop. Chops and toast and a blazing fire give forth odors of distracting pleasantness under such circumstances. "I think," I said, "that each gives point to the other." "Aren't you glad I took you for ducks?" he asked.