-dwarfed men that talk like that. The owl's call was to
his mate, as was the roosters', but there was no bombast in its
plaint, just a mournfulness of endearment, a touch of tears at the
silence and delay. After a little the other came and all the
mournfulness went out of the tone. Instead there was cooing in its
quality as the two talked reassuringly a moment. The first call is of
six or eight notes that start high and tremulo down the owl's diatonic
scale to a low one that has a round, flute-like quality though the
whole sounds as if it were made somewhere else and were merely
echoing from the wood. The bird is as hard to locate by sound as
an echo would be and is usually much nearer than it seems when I
hear him. The second call is the last note of the first one, three
or four times repeated with such rapidity that it has a flute-like
reverberation that is almost like a round and very musical purr.
The cry of this bird has been called eerie and disquieting, but I
do not think it so, even in the loneliness of the question call.
The satisfied one is as gentle and cuddly as one can find among
birds.

[Illustration: The Fox that slips along the Winding Path at Dawn]

The pasture ghosts of still November nights are apt to be most
portentous between the hours of midnight and dawn. The giants of
eld stall noiselessly about them, figures of gray mist out of a
world of silence. Sometimes they rise like simulacrums of ancient
forest trees out of grassy spots that by day were cosey with
sunshine and enclosed by barberry bushes hung with coral fruit and
prim cedars, spots where no tree has stood these hundred years.
Anon they change to dim figures of preposterous beasts, called
back to earth for a brief hour while the old moon, worn and thin,
rises through them, a nebulous red crescent, and the stars fade,
yet show dimly through like the moon, proving that these are but
disembodied monsters. Sometimes they wait till dawn bids them
dematerialize before it. More often winter, which is most apt to
steal in upon us late at night in November, breaks their backs
with the weight of his cold and spreads them as hoar frost upon
all things below, showing us how thin and of little substance they
really are. Sometimes this breakage comes with the first gleams of
morning light and I feel the chill of their passing as they sink
slowly to the grass. They are beautiful in their eerie suggestions
as they flout my three o'clock in the morning