d to him oddly unartificial. It made him think of trees swept by
the wind, of night breezes singing among wires and chimney-stacks, or in
the rigging of invisible ships; or--and the simile leaped up in his
thoughts with a sudden sharpness of suggestion--a chorus of animals, of
wild creatures, somewhere in desolate places of the world, crying and
singing as animals will, to the moon. He could fancy he heard the
wailing, half-human cries of cats upon the tiles at night, rising and
falling with weird intervals of sound, and this music, muffled by
distance and the trees, made him think of a queer company of these
creatures on some roof far away in the sky, uttering their solemn music
to one another and the moon in chorus.

It was, he felt at the time, a singular image to occur to him, yet it
expressed his sensation pictorially better than anything else. The
instruments played such impossibly odd intervals, and the crescendos and
diminuendos were so very suggestive of cat-land on the tiles at night,
rising swiftly, dropping without warning to deep notes again, and all in
such strange confusion of discords and accords. But, at the same time a
plaintive sweetness resulted on the whole, and the discords of these
half-broken instruments were so singular that they did not distress his
musical soul like fiddles out of tune.

He listened a long time, wholly surrendering himself as his character
was, and then strolled homewards in the dusk as the air grew chilly.

"There was nothing to alarm?" put in Dr. Silence briefly.

"Absolutely nothing," said Vezin; "but you know it was all so
fantastical and charming that my imagination was profoundly impressed.
Perhaps, too," he continued, gently explanatory, "it was this stirring
of my imagination that caused other impressions; for, as I walked back,
the spell of the place began to steal over me in a dozen ways, though
all intelligible ways. But there were other things I could not account
for in the least, even then."

"Incidents, you mean?"

"Hardly incidents, I think. A lot of vivid sensations crowded themselves
upon my mind and I could trace them to no causes. It was just after
sunset and the tumbled old buildings traced magical outlines against an
opalescent sky of gold and red. The dusk was running down the twisted
streets. All round the hill the plain pressed in like a dim sea, its
level rising with the darkness. The spell of this kind of scene, you
know, can be very moving, and