"Then, brothers," he said, "our youth will be over, and, as Father Redwood said to us long ago, we must quit ourselves like men." "Yes," said the eldest brother; "but what exactly does that mean?
Just what does it mean--when that day of trouble comes ?" He too glanced at those rude vast suggestions of entrenchment about them, looking not so much at them as through them and over the hills to the innumerable multitudes beyond.

Something of the same sort came into all their minds--a vision of little people coming out to war, in a flood, the little people, inexhaustible, incessant, malignant....
"They are little," said the youngest brother; "but they have numbers beyond counting, like the sands of the sea." "They have arms--they have weapons even, that our brothers in Sunderland have made." "Besides, Brothers, except for vermin, except for little accidents with evil things, what have we seen of killing ?" "I know," said the eldest brother.

"For all that--we are what we are.
When the day of trouble comes we must do the thing we have to do." He closed his knife with a snap--the blade was the length of a man--and used his new pine staff to help himself rise.

He stood up and turned towards the squat grey immensity of the house.

The crimson of the sunset caught him as he rose, caught the mail and clasps about his neck and the woven metal of his arms, and to the eyes of his brother it seemed as though he was suddenly suffused with blood ...
As the young giant rose a little black figure became visible to him against that western incandescence on the top of the embankment that towered above the summit of the down.