Ch. 5: A Centurion of the Thirtieth

Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die.
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth
The Cities rise again.

This season's Daffodil,
She never hears
What change, what chance, what chill,
Cut down last year's:
But with bold countenance,
And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days' continuance
To be perpetual.

So Time that is o'er-kind
To all that be,
Ordains us e'en as blind,
As bold as she:
That in our very death,
And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,
'See how our works endure!'

Dan had come to grief over his Latin, and was kept in; so
Una went alone to Far Wood. Dan's big catapult and the
lead bullets that Hobden had made for him were hidden
in an old hollow beech-stub on the west of the wood.
They had named the place out of the verse in Lays of
Ancient Rome:

From lordly Volaterrae,
Where scowls the far-famed hold
Piled by the hands of giants
For Godlike Kings of old.

They were the 'Godlike Kings', and when old Hobden
piled some comfortable brushwood between the big wooden
knees of Volaterrae, they called him 'Hands of Giants'.

Una slipped through their private gap in the fence, and
sat still awhile, scowling as scowlily and lordlily as she
knew how; for Volaterrae is an important watch-tower
that juts out of Far Wood just as Far Wood juts out of the
hillside. Pook's Hill lay below her and all the turns of the
brook as it wanders out of the Willingford Woods, between
hop-gardens, to old Hobden's cottage at the
Forge. The sou'-west wind (there is always a wind by
Volaterrae) blew from the bare ridge where Cherry Clack
Windmill stands.

Now wind prowling through woods sounds like exciting
things going to happen, and that is why on blowy
days you stand up in Volaterrae and shout bits of the Lays
to suit its noises.

Una took Dan's catapult from its secret place, and
made ready to meet Lars Porsena's army stealing
through the wind-whitened aspens by the brook. A gust
boomed up the valley, and Una chanted sorrowfully:

'Verbenna down to Ostia
Hath wasted all the plain:
Astur hath stormed Janiculum,
And the stout guards are slain.'

But the wind, not charging fair to the wood, started
aside and shook a single oak in Gleason's pasture. Here it
made itself all small and crouched among the grasses,
waving the tips of them as a cat waves the tip of her tail
before she springs.

'Now welcome - welcome, Sextus,' sang Una, loading
the catapult -

'Now welcome to thy home!
Why dost thou stay, and