noon
From it I heard a sudden shrill chorus of voices and the clatter of feet , and I knew that the day 's work was over . I saw the children emerge , like bees out of a beehive , and loneliness no longer reigned over that bald yard in the betraying northern sunlight . Yet they were not riotous , those children confronting the wine-like air of the open . They were more subdued than I had looked for , since I could only too easily remember one of my earlier calls for Dinkie at noon , when I found the entire class turned out and riding a rancher 's pig , a heavy brood-sow that had in some luckless moment wandered into the school-yard and had been chased and raced until it was too weary to resent a young barbarian mounting its broad back and riding thereon , to the shouts of the other boys and the shrill cries of the girls . But now , from my car-seat , I could see Gershom surrounded by a multi-colored group of little figures , as he stopped to fix a strap-buckle on the school-bag of one of his pupils . And as he stood there in the slanting afternoon sunlight surrounded by his charges he suddenly made me think of the tall old priest in Sorolla 's _ Triste Herencia _ surrounded by his waifs . I caught the echo of something benignant and Lincoln-like from that raw-boned figure in the big-lensed eye-glasses and the clothes that did n't quite fit him .