166 THE GARDEN, YOU, AND I 



Oh, Mrs. Evan, dear ! there is one thing in which 

 The Man from Everywhere reckoned without his host ! 

 Stopping the clocks when we went in camp did not dis- 

 lodge Time from the premises ; rather did it open the 

 door to his entrance hours earlier than usual, when one 

 of the chiefest luxuries we promised ourselves was late 

 sleeping. 



Stretched on our wire-springed, downy cots (there is 

 positively no virtue in sleeping on hard beds, and Bart 

 considers it an absolute vice), there is a delicious period 

 before sleep comes. Bats flit about the rafters, and an 

 occasional swallow twitters and shifts among the beams 

 as the particular nest it guarded grew high and diffi- 

 cult to mount from the growth of the lusty brood within . 

 The scuffle of little feet over the rough floor brings indo- 

 lent, half-indifferent guessing as to which of the lesser 

 four-foots they belonged. The whippoorwills down in 

 the river woods call until they drop off, one by one, and 

 the timid ditty of a singing mouse that lives under the 

 floor by my cot is the last message the sandman sends 

 to close our eyes before sleep. And such sleep ! That 

 first steel-blue starlit night in the open we said that 

 we meant to sleep and sleep it out, even if we lost a 

 whole day by it. It seemed but a moment after sleep had 

 claimed us, when, struggling through the heavy darkness, 



