One by one the starlings died; the last remaining bird, with a pain in its crop, whistled at the late afternoon. ApLlewelyn, returning from music and marvelling at the sky, heard the last starling’s voice as he walked up the drive. Why is there no welcome, wondered the keeper, from my starling charges. Every day of the year they had lost their tempers, tore at the sashes of the window watching on the flying world; they had scraped on the glass, and fetched up their wings from the limed bar, signalling before him. On the rug at his feet lay six starlings, cold and stiff, the seventh mourning. Death in his absence had laid six singers low. He who marks the sparrow’s fall has no time for my birds, said ApLlewelyn. He smote big, bloody death, and death, relenting, pulled a last fart from the bodies of the dead birds.

Plague, plague, cried Tom Twp, standing in a new rain. Where the undertaker’s house had died in the trees, he holla’d, like ApLlewelyn, of big, bloody death; he heard the rooks cawing in the trees, and saw a galloping shadow. The trees smelt of opium and mice, to Tom two sorts of the hell-headed animal who ran in the skirtings of the grave. There were, on the branches of the trees and hanging upright from the earth, the owls that ate the mice and the mouths of the rosy flowers that fed on opium. To the chimneys of Last House and the one illuminated window he called the plague. Out came the undertaker in a frock coat; distrusting the light of the moon, he carried a candle in his gloved hand, the candle casting three shadows. To the middle shadow Tom Twp addressed his words of the white coming. Shall I measure, said the shadow on the left, the undead of Wales? Plague on a horse, said Tom Twp to the left shadow, and heard the darker shadow on the right reply.

No drug of man works on the dead. The parson, at his pipe, sucked down a dead smoke from the nostrils of the travelling horse, who now, on a far-off mountain, neighed down at Africa. Smitten by God, the parson, as the dark rose grew deepest where the moon rose in a blaze of light, counted his blessings, the blazing (ire, the light in the tobacco, and the shape of the deep bowl. Hell was this fire, the dark denial burning like a weed, and the poppy out of the smoking earth. The lines of the bowl, that patterned his grave, were the lines of the weedy world; the light in the tobacco faded; the weed was at the parson’s legs, worrying him into a longer fall than the fall from heaven, and, heavier than the poppy, into a long sleep.