eard so many voices--But here he was quite rigid in the darkness. "Do
be quiet!" he whispered sharply. "Can't we be quiet!"

"Thanks!" said the voice, with its cool, assured inflections. "There is
nothing so very extraordinary. Men's brains are not unalike.
Merely--shall I go on?"

And before Mr. Vandusen's hurried assent could be uttered, the quiet
tones assumed the accent of narration. "Good," they said. "Very well,
then. But first I must ask of you a large use of your imagination. I
must ask you, for instance, to imagine a scene so utterly unlike this
February night that your eyes will have to close themselves entirely to
the present and open only to my words. I must ask you to imagine a
beech forest in early November; a beech forest dreaming beneath the
still magic of warm, hazy days; days that come before the first sharp
cold of winter. Will you imagine that?"

"Yes!" murmured Mr. Vandusen; and he noticed that the other men did not
answer at all.

"The mild sunlight," continued the voice, "filters through the naked
boughs and touches the smooth silver trunks and the moss about their
feet with a misty gold as iridescent as the wings of dragonflies. And as
far as you can see on every side stretch these silver boles, dusted with
sunlight; in straight lines, in oblique columns, until the eye loses
itself in the argent shadows of the distance.

"In the hidden open places, where the grass is still green toward its
roots, wild swine come out of the woods and stare with small red eyes;
but save for the crackling of the twigs beneath their feet it is very
quiet. Marvellously so. Quiet with the final hush of summer. Only rarely
a breeze stirs the legions of the heaped-up gray leaves, and sometimes,
but rarely, one hears far off the chattering of a squirrel. So!--that is
my forest.

"Through it runs like a purple ribbon a smooth, well-kept road. And it,
too, adds to the impression of stillness, as the untenanted handiwork of
man always does. On the rolled, damp surface are the marks of the cloven
feet of the swine.

"Now there is a snapping of dead wood, a rustling of leaves, and an
immense tusker--a grizzled leader of a herd--comes ponderously through
the sun-dappled aisles to the edge of the road. For a moment he stands
there, secure and unperturbed, and then suddenly he throws up his head,
his little eyes wide and startled, and, wheeling, charges back to where
his satellites are browsing. There is a breathless scur