beneath the blackness of close-set plumes above, to light
long aisles between the naked boles below. These that had been so
invisible before that I had to find my way among them by the
friendly leading of the path beneath my feet, now took on a
radiance of their own. Green and brown no longer, they glowed with
the witchery of the level light, their real colors only shining
faintly through this transparent frosting, this veneer of cool
fire, till the place was like those European salt caverns of which
one reads where the dark roof is upheld by crystalline pillars
that give ghostly reflections of the lights that the miners carry.
Here, groping in the grotesque glow of their own lanterns might
well come the gnomes of German tales although, so sweetly gentle
is the light, I can think of them only as kindly goblins bent on
quaint deeds of goodness.

Beyond the pines the path led me moonward through glades among
deciduous trees, no doubt the abodes of elves. That may have been
but a sphinx moth that flew down the path before me, his fat gray
body silvered by the moonlight, his short, narrow wings beating so
fast that they became but a gauzy nimbus about him, or it may have
been Puck, training to put that girdle round about the earth in
forty minutes. Here invisible creatures scurried away from a fairy
ring whose flagging is of round pyrola leaves, lighted by ghostly
white candelabras of the waxy blooms, field mice, very likely, or
black beetles, or elves dancing in the moonlight about their
queen. How am I to know which? Surely if elves dance anywhere it
is on midsummer nights like this when the dew has clotted on all
the leaves till they are pearled with a soft green fire as if from
caverns under sea and I walk down the path through such caves and
among such kelp and corals as a merman might. All about me I hear
the stirring of the little people and now and then soft airs
fanned from invisible wings touch my cheek. It may be moth, or
bat, or tricksy Ariel for all I know or care, such glamour does
the haunted air throw about him who will leave the brown earth
behind and plunge in its silvery depths.

Pushing aside tapestries woven of such figures as these on a cloth
of white silver, I stepped out of the wood on to the shore of the
unruffled pond. Here a man might well pause and take no further
step lest he fall into the blue depths of space. The moon hangs
like a great shield in a sky of soft sapphire, piled with luminous