to stop on one spot all
night? It was a tempting suggestion, and he was very near
yielding to it at once. While he wavered, a new set of thoughts
came up to back it. How, if he stayed there, and a gang of
night-poachers came? He knew that many of them were desperate
men. He had no arms; what could he do against them? Nothing; but
he might be maimed for life in a night row which he had no
business to be in--murdered, perhaps. He stood still and listened
long and painfully.

Every moment, as he listened, the silence mastered him more and
more, and his reason became more and more powerless. It was such
a silence--a great illimitable, vague silence? The silence of a
deserted house where he could at least have felt that he was
bounded somewhere, by wall, and floor, and roof--where men must
have lived and worked once, though they might be there no
longer--would have been nothing; but this silence of the huge,
wide out-of-doors world, where there was nothing but air and
space around and above him, and the ground beneath, it was
getting irksome, intolerable, awful! The great silence seemed to
be saying to him, "You are alone, alone, alone!" and he had never
known before what horror lurked in that thought.

Every moment that he stood still the spell grew stronger on him,
and yet he dared not move; and a strange, wild feeling of
fear--unmistakable physical fear, which made his heart beat and
his limbs tremble--seized on him. He was ready to cry out, to
fall down, to run, and yet there he stood listening, still and
motionless.

The critical moment in all panics must come at last. A wild and
grewsome hissing and snoring, which seemed to come from the air
just over his head, made him start and spring forward, and gave
him the use of his limbs again at any rate, though they would not
have been worth much to him had the ghost or hobgoblin appeared
whom he half expected to see the next moment. Then came a
screech, which seemed to flit along the rough meadow opposite,
and come towards him. He drew a long breath, for he knew that
sound well enough; it was nothing after all but the owls.

The mere realized consciousness of the presence of some living
creatures, were they only owls, brought him to his senses. And
now the moon was well up, and the wayward mist had cleared away,
and he could catch glimpses of the solemn birds every now and
then, beating over the rough meadow backwards and forwards, and
over the shallow water as regul