midnight
I went back up the road , threw down the bars to the pasture , and counted the cattle as they went strolling in . The Polled-Angus muleys seemed none the worse for their long swim , and they began to crop the brown grass the moment they were out in the field . Jud and the Cardinal came up after the first hundred , and took a place by El Mahdi . I think I know now the joy of the miser counting his gold pieces at midnight in his cellar , looking at each yellow eagle lovingly , and passing his finger over the milled rim of each new-minted coin , while the tallow candle melts down on the bench beside him . I could close my eyes and see a black mass going down in the yellow water , with here and there a bullock drifting exhausted in the eddy , or heaps of bloated bodies piled up on a sandbar of the Valley River . And there , with my eyes wide open , was the drove spreading out along the hillside as it passed in between the two chestnut bar-posts . I was as happy as a man can be when his Armada sails in with its sunlit canvas ; and yet , had that Armada gone to pieces on a coast , I think my tears over its wreckage had been the deeper emotion .