In the west, there was South Mountain. As a little boy he had pondered on that. South Mountain … how could it be in the west? But there it lay, a low bulwark of purple, two-dimensioned, a painted barricade against all eternity which fell beyond. From the parceled valley where Plum Run had its birth, farms went curling toward the highland in genial rolls. And the sun over them all, to hatch drowsy sawings from a million insects hidden within the barley.

The town had tumbled into a round chancel northwest of the cemetery hill. It tried to draw a coverlet of trees over its face; it was rooted to this soil by the threads of country lanes which twitched off among the swales of green. This path led to Taneytown, that lower road led to Emmetsburg. So many cart wheels had crushed these patches of dazzlement and shade; the memory of peaches and corn and butter were solid from wall to wall; their riches had stained the fence rails to a mellow brown.

He saw cattle lying in the woods beneath him, comfortable little bulbs of russet and white. That was the Niede farm. A blue apron wavered on the porch of the toy house beyond. Perhaps that apron was Amelia … He remembered how he and Elijah and Andrew Leen used to go into that pasture after berries; remembered the berries, warty and cool and bitter sweet. It seemed as if he could hear the tinny sound of a little pail, thudded softly by the hands of children who were vanished forever.

This was a trance, he knew—an absurd dreaminess which the sun had soaked into him … He climbed over a fence and went down the slope toward the Emmetsburg road. Little field and little field again, and many warm stones, and most of this ridge land was pasture, or hayfields where the cows might do their gleaning after the grass had been cut. When he reached Niede’s rye at the foot of the ridge he walked carefully along its edge with the bearded weeds, already tough, swishing against his legs.

In the road beyond a farm wagon lumbered toward the town, and a row of little girls—white dot and pink dot and yellow dot—were ambling south near the Codori place. He passed the drowsing cattle; they watched him, broad-faced, inevitably docile. Their droppings lay in pasty pools among the rocks. Over toward Little Round Top, crows were flapping above the trees. “Out west,” Dan thought, “there are the hawks and eagles.” Pennsylvania summer … he was here in a valley where he had walked as a child, and all this earth had been shaped and herded over a long time.