The Crescent Moon

I PACED alone on the road across the field while the sunset was hiding its last gold like a miser.<br><br>The daylight sank deeper and deeper into the darkness, and the widowed land, whose harvest had been reaped, lay silent.<br><br>Suddenly a boy&#39;s shrill voice rose into the sky. He traversed the dark unseen, leaving the track of his song across the hush of the evening.<br><br>His village home lay there at the end of the waste land, beyond the sugar-cane field, hidden among the shadows of the banana and the slender areca palm, the cocoa-nut and the dark green jack-fruit trees.<br><br>I stopped for a moment in my lonely way under the starlight, and saw spread before me the darkened earth surrounding with her arms countless homes furnished with cradles and beds, mothers&#39; hearts and evening lamps, and young lives glad with a gladness that knows nothing of its value for the world.