The moonlight flooded that great, silent land. The reaped field lay yellow in it.

The straw stacks and poplar windbreaks threw sharp black shadows. The roads 

were white rivers of dust. The sky was a deep, crystalline blue, and the stars 

were few and faint. Everything seemed to have succumbed, to have sunk to 

sleep, under the great, golden, tender, midsummer moon. The splendor of it 

seemed to transcend human life and human fate. The senses were too feeble to 

take it in, and every time one looked up at the sky one felt unequal to it, as if 

one were sitting deaf under the waves of a great river of melody.