The stirring air brought a smell of blossoms; the distance took on faint lavender hazes which blended the outlines of the fields, lying like square coverlets upon the long slope of rising ground beyond the bottom-land, and empurpled the blue woodland shadows of the groves.
For the first time, it struck Joe that it was a beautiful day, and it came to him that a beautiful day was a thing which nothing except death, sickness, or imprisonment could take from him--not even the ban of Canaan! Unforewarned, music sounded in his ears again; but he did not shrink from it now; this was not the circus band he had heard as he left the Square, but a melody like a far-away serenade at night, as of "the horns of elf-land faintly blowing"; and he closed his eyes with the sweetness of it.
"Go ahead!" he whispered."Do that all you want to.If you'll keep it up like this awhile, I'll follow with `Little Brown Jug, How I Love Thee!'
It seems to pay, after all!"
The welcome strains, however, were but the prelude to a harsher sound which interrupted and annihilated them: the Court-house bell clanging out twelve."All right," said Joe."It 's noon and I'm `across Main Street bridge.' "He opened his eyes and looked about him whimsically.Then he shook his head again.
A lady had just emerged from the bridge and was coming toward him.
It would be hard to get at Joe's first impressions of her.We can find conveyance for only the broadest and heaviest.Ancient and modern instances multiply the case of the sleeper who dreams out a long story in accurate color and fine detail, a tale of years, in the opening and shutting of a door.So with Joseph, in the brief space of the lady's approach.And with him, as with the sleeper, it must have been--in fact it was, in his recollections, later--a blur of emotion.