The Moon by Night by Madeleine L'Engle Read Free Book Online

in the part-singing deal. I’m pretty good on the alto of “All Through the Night,” and “Now the Day Is Over” is a cinch. It’s the Bach ones I’m apt to goof on, but they’re really my favorites.
    Mother put the guitar down and said, “Let’s end up with ‘I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills.’ After the glorious hills we’ve seen today it seems the perfect way to say good-night.”
    As far as the Bible goes (and I suppose you might say it goes pretty far, even if not with me at this point) I like the psalms best, and that’s one of my particular best ones, so that was okay.
    We cut five minutes off breaking-camp time the next morning and headed for Tennessee.
    Don’t let anybody kid you. Tennessee’s quite a state. When I look back on that night at Cosby Camp Site in the Great Smokies National Park I still get gooseflesh.

Four
    B ut the day started peacefully enough. We drove through more beautiful mountains and more beautiful mountains, till I stopped looking. In the afternoon it began to cloud up, and the weather reports started mentioning possible showers. But this was becoming routine for afternoons and didn’t bother us any more. We stopped at a market and bought food for dinner: pork chops, turnip greens, lettuce. We still had potatoes and tomatoes and milk, and we’d replenished our ice the day before with a twenty-five pound chunk which would last forty-eight hours.
    As we got near the Great Smokies National Park we passed an inn called the Black Bear Inn. It had a sign with a big picture of a bear on it, and Rob cried out, “A bear! A bear!”
    â€œWhere?” Suzy yelled, reaching for her notebook, because she was keeping lists, too, only her lists were of animals and insects and (she hoped and I didn’t) snakes.
    Daddy pointed to the sign and said, “Take a good look, kids.
That’s probably as close to a bear as you’ll get till we reach the Rockies.”
    As we drove into the park the wind began to whip at the trees, and dark clouds scudded across the sky. It wasn’t actually raining, but the air felt wet. There were puddles at the sides of the road, so we knew it must have showered here earlier.
    â€œWe’d better set up camp and get dinner quickly,” Mother said.
    We had our choice of campsites. At Caledonia it was almost crowded; and at Peaks of Otter, in Virginia, there’d been other families. Here we were the only people in the largest campgrounds we’d been to so far. I suppose the reason there wasn’t anybody else there was that we’d started out almost a month ahead of usual camping time. School was still open most places and people wouldn’t be going on vacations yet.
    It was a beautiful campgrounds, with big stone tables and benches, and really good fireplaces for each campsite. But it was lonely, and for some reason I felt edgy and almost scared. I didn’t quite know why, and I certainly didn’t say anything about it. But I wished the ranger’s house were nearer the campgrounds instead of way down the mountain.
    The ground was soft and wet; it must have rained hard here. But this at least made the tent pegs lots easier to drive into the ground, so John and Daddy got the tent up quickly. The late afternoon was chill, so we built an extra big fire. We put on our sweaters and stayed close by the tent instead of running off to explore the way we usually did. The sky was full of low, black clouds, making it dark for this time of day. The wind was rising, whipping the trees so that the younger ones bent against its lash and the small branches tossed wildly.

    As soon as dinner was ready we sat down at the big stone table. Because we were the only people there we sang grace, one we do to the Tallis Canon, a very joyful noise. Despite my current feelings about loud singings of grace it made me feel better. Also there’s something very matter-of-fact