f droplets, like the droplets of oil in water. These droplets
would sometimes sparkle in a mild, unobtrusive way as they were nearing
the light; and then they would dash against the pane and keep it
dripping, dripping down.

I leaned back again; and I watched the whole of the light-cone. Snow
white wisps would float and whirl through it in graceful curves, stirred
into motion by the horses' trot. Or a wreath of it would start to dance,
as if gently pulled or plucked at from above; and it would revolve,
faster towards the end, and fade again into the shadows behind. I
thought of a summer in Norrland, in Sweden, in the stone-and-birch waste
which forms the timberline, where I had also encountered the mist pools.
And a trip down a stream in the borderland of the Finns came back with
great vividness into my mind. That trip had been made in a fog like
this; only it had been begun in the early morning, and the whole mass
of the mist had been suffused with the whitest of lights. But strange
to say, what stood out most strikingly in the fleeting memory of the
voyage, was the weird and mocking laughter of the magpies all along the
banks. The Finnish woods seemed alive with that mocking laughter, and
it truly belongs to the land of the mists. For a moment I thought
that something after all was missing here on the prairies. But then I
reflected again that this silence of the grave was still more perfect,
still more uncanny and ghostly, because it left the imagination entirely
free, without limiting it by even as much as a suggestion.

No wonder, I thought, that the Northerners in their land of heath and
bog were the poets of elves and goblins and of the fear of ghosts.
Shrouds were these fogs, hanging and waving and floating shrouds!
Mocking spirits were plucking at them and setting them into their gentle
motions. Gleams of light, that dance over the bog, lured you in, and
once caught in these veils after veils of mystery, madness would seize
you, and you would wildly dash here and there in a vain attempt at
regaining your freedom; and when, exhausted at last, you broke down and
huddled together on the ground, the werwolf would come, ghostly himself,
and huge and airy and weird, his body woven of mist, and in the fog's
stately and leisurely way he would kneel down on your chest,
slowly crushing you beneath his exceeding weight; and bending and
straightening, bending and stretching, slowly--slowly down came his head
to your throat