John Penhallow walked slowly up the rough road to where the
ruined bastions of Port Putnam rose high above the Hudson. He was aware
of being tired as he had not been for years. The hot close air and the
long hours of concentration of mind left him discouraged as well as
exhausted. He was still in the toils of the might-have-been, of that
wasting process--an examination, and turning over in his mind logistics,
logarithms, trajectories, equations, and a mob of disconnected questions.
"Oh, by George!" he exclaimed, "what's the worth while of it?" All the
pleasantly estimated assets of life and love and friendship became
unavailable securities in the presence of a mood of depression which came
of breathing air which had lost its vitalizing ozone. And now at a turn
in the road nature fed her child with a freshening change of horizon.
Looking up he saw a hawk in circling flight set against the blue sky. He
never saw this without thinking of Josiah, and then of prisoned things
like a young hawk he had seen sitting dejected in a cage in the barracks.
Did he have dreams of airy freedom? It had affected him as an image of
caged energy--of useless power. With contrasted remembrance he went
back to the guarded procession of boys from the lyceum in France, the
flower-stalls, and the bird-market, the larks singing merrily in their
small wicker cages.
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