his arms.

After a while the sounds from the public room below, where men were
carousing, disturbed his slumber. He stirred, and awoke refreshed. It was
afternoon, but he felt no hunger, only thirst, which he quenched with the
wine at hand. His windows gave upon the Capitol and a green wood beyond;
the waving trees enticed, while the room was dull and the noises of the
house distasteful. He said to himself that he would walk abroad, would go
out under the beckoning trees and be rid of the town. He remembered that
the Council was to meet that afternoon. Well, it might sit without him! He
was for the woods, where dwelt the cool winds and the shadows deep and
silent.

A few yards, and he was quit of Duke of Gloucester Street; behind him,
porticoed Capitol, gaol, and tiny vineclad debtor's prison. In the gaol
yard the pirates sat upon a bench in the sunshine, and one smoked a long
pipe, and one brooded upon his irons. Gold rings were in their ears, and
their black hair fell from beneath colored handkerchiefs twisted
turbanwise around their brows. The gaoler watched them, standing in his
doorway, and his children, at play beneath a tree, built with sticks a
mimic scaffold, and hanged thereon a broken puppet. There was a shady road
leading through a wood to Queen's Creek and the Capitol Landing, and down
this road went Haward. His step was light; the dullness, the throbbing
pulses, the oppression of the morning, had given way to a restlessness and
a strange exaltation of spirit. Fancy was quickened, imagination
heightened; to himself he seemed to see the heart of all things. Across
his mind flitted fragments of verse,--now a broken line just hinting
beauty, now the pure passion of a lovely stanza. His thoughts went to and
fro, mobile as the waves of the sea; but firm as the reefs beneath them
stood his knowledge that presently he was going back to Fair View.