they rested on some straw in a loft until the middle of the night, and then rode forward again when all the town was asleep. among the many wild changes observable on familiar things which made this wild ride unreal, not the least was the seeming rarity of sleep. after long and lonely spurring over dreary roads, they would come to a cluster of poor cottages, not steeped in darkness, but all glittering with lights, and would find the people, in a ghostly manner in the dead of the night, circling hand in hand round a shrivelled tree of liberty, or all drawn up together singing a liberty song. happily, however, there was sleep in beauvais that night to help them out of it and they passed on once more into solitude and loneliness: jingling through the untimely cold and wet, among impoverished fields that had yielded no fruits of the earth that year, diversified by the blackened remains of burnt houses, and by the sudden emergence from ambuscade, and sharp reining up across their way, of patriot patrols on the watch on all the roads.