"Dunsany, Lord - Fifty-one Tales" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunsany Lord)

hold blindly of the world and the moon, and slowly pull down
upon him the House of Man.













The Hen




All along the farmyard gables the swallows sat a-row,
twittering uneasily to one another, telling of many things,
but thinking only of Summer and the South, for Autumn was
afoot and the North wind waiting.
And suddenly one day they were all quite gone. And
everyone spoke of the swallows and the South.
"I think I shall go South myself next year," said a hen.
And the year wore on and the swallows came again, and the
year wore on and they sat again on the gables, and all the
poultry discussed the departure of the hen.
And very early one morning, the wind being from the
North, the swallows all soared suddenly and felt the wind in
their wings; and a strength came upon them and a strange old
knowledge and a more than human faith, and flying high they
left the smoke of our cities and small remembered eaves, and
saw at last the huge and homeless sea, and steering by grey
sea-currents went southward with the wind. And going South
they went by glittering fog-banks and saw old islands
lifting their heads above them; they saw the slow quests of
the wandering ships, and divers seeking pearls, and lands at
war, till there came in view the mountains that they sought
and the sight of the peaks they knew; and they descended
into an austral valley, and saw Summer sometimes sleeping
and sometimes singing song.
"I think the wind is about right," said the hen; and she
spread her wings and ran out of the poultry-yard. And she
ran fluttering out on to the road and some way down it until
she came to a garden.
At evening she came back panting.
And in the poultry-yard she told the poultry how she had