und of tone. I thought at first it was a child calling,
but no, it was not that; it was not a call, but a song; and not that
either--it was more like many voices, high but not shrill, and very far
away, softly intoning. It was neither sad nor joyous; it suggested
dreamy, reiterant thoughts; it was not music, but the memory of music.
If one listened too keenly, it was gone, like a faint star which can be
glimpsed only if one looks a little away from it.

As I had listened that night I began to wonder if it was all my own
fancy, and when I met Jonathan I made him stop.

"Wait a minute," I begged him, "and listen."

"I hear it. Come on," he had said. Supper was in his thoughts.

"What do you hear?"

"Just what you do."

"What's that?" I had persisted, as we fumbled our way along.

"Voices--I don't know what you'd call it--the woods. It often sounds
like that in a big rain."

Jonathan's matter-of-factness had rather pleased me.

"I thought it might be my imagination. I'm glad it wasn't," I said.

"Perhaps it's both our imaginations," he suggested.

"No. We both do lots of imagining, but it never overlaps. When it does,
it shows it's so."

Perhaps I was not very clear, but he seemed to understand.

Since then I have heard it now and again, this singing of the rain-swept
woods. Not often, for it is a capricious thing, or perhaps I ought
rather to say I do not understand the manner of its uprising. Rain alone
will not bring it to pass, wind alone will not, and sometimes even when
they are importuned by wind and rain together the woods are silent.
Perhaps, too, it is not every stretch of woods that can sing, or at all
seasons. In winter they can whistle, and sigh, and creak, but I am sure
that when I have heard these singing voices the trees have always had
their full leafage. But however it comes about, I am glad of the times
that I have heard it. And whenever I read tales of the Wild Huntsman and
all his kind, there come into my mind as an interpreting background
memories of wonderful black nights and storm-ridden woods swept by
overtones of distant and elusive sound.

We did not hear the woods sing that day. Perhaps there was not wind
enough, or perhaps the woods on the "home piece" are not big enough,
for it chances that I have never heard the sound there.

As we came up the lane at dusk we saw the glimmer of the house lights.

"Doesn't that look good?" I said to Jonathan. "And won't it be good when
we ar