an fifteen minutes that I lay there in
reverie, yet the weather, I at once noticed, had changed very abruptly,
for mist was seething here and there about me, rising somewhere from
smaller valleys in the hills beyond, and obscuring the path, while
overhead there was plainly a sound of wind tearing past, far up, with a
sound of high shouting. A moment before it had been the stillness of a
warm spring night, yet now everything had changed; wet mist coated me,
raindrops smartly stung my face, and a gusty wind, descending out of
cool heights, began to strike and buffet me, so that I buttoned my coat
and pressed my hat more firmly upon my head.

The change was really this--and it came to me for the first time in my
life with the power of a real conviction--that everything about me
seemed to have become suddenly _alive_.

It came oddly upon me--prosaic, matter-of-fact, materialistic doctor
that I was--this realisation that the world about me had somehow
stirred into life; oddly, I say, because Nature to me had always been
merely a more or less definite arrangement of measurement, weight, and
colour, and this new presentation of it was utterly foreign to my
temperament. A valley to me was always a valley; a hill, merely a hill;
a field, so many acres of flat surface, grass or ploughed, drained well
or drained ill; whereas now, with startling vividness, came the
strange, haunting idea that after all they could be something more than
valley, hill, and field; that what I had hitherto perceived by these
names were only the veils of something that lay concealed within,
something alive. In a word, that the poetic sense I had always rather
sneered at, in others, or explained away with some shallow
physiological label, had apparently suddenly opened up in myself
without any obvious cause.

And, the more I puzzled over it, the more I began to realise that its
genesis dated from those few minutes of reverie lying under the
gorse-bush (reverie, a thing I had never before in all my life indulged
in!), or, now that I came to reflect more accurately, from my brief
interview with that wild-eyed, swift-moving, shadowy man of whom I had
first inquired the way.

I recalled my singular fancy that veils were lifting off the surface of
the hills and fields, and a tremor of excitement accompanied the
memory. Such a thing had never before been possible to my practical
intelligence, and it made me feel suspicious--suspicious about myself.
I stood