conversation
began on the sights and sounds of the day. For my own part, unable to
quiet the uneasy questioning which possessed me, I wandered down to the
shore and took a seat in the stern of one of the boats, which, hauled
part of their length upon the sandy beach, reached out some distance
among the lily-pads which covered the shallow water, and whose folded
flowers dotted the surface, the white points alone visible. The uneasy
question still stirred within me; and now, looking towards the
northwest, where the sky yet glowed faintly with twilight, a long line
of pines, gaunt and humanesque, as no tree but our northern white-pine
is, was relieved in massy blackness against the golden gray, like a long
procession of giants. They were in groups of two and three, with now and
then an isolated one, stretching along the horizon, losing themselves in
the gloom of the mountains at the north. The weirdness of the scene
caught my excited imagination in an instant, and I became conscious of
two mental phenomena. The first was an impression of motion in the
trees, which, whimsical as it was, I had not the slightest power to
dispel. I trembled from head to foot under the consciousness of this
supernatural vitality. My rational faculties were as clear as ever they
had been, and I understood perfectly that the semblance of motion was
owing to two characteristics of the white-pine, namely,--that it follows
the shores of the lakes in lines, rarely growing back at any distance
from the water, except when it follows, in the same orderly
arrangement, the rocky ridges,--and that, from its height above all
other forest-trees, it catches the full force of the prevalent winds,
which here are from the west, and consequently leans slightly to the
east, much as a person leans in walking. These traits of the tree
explained entirely the phenomenon; yet the knowledge of them had not the
slightest effect to undeceive my imagination. I was awe-struck, as
though the phantoms of some antediluvian race had arisen from the
valleys of the Adirondack and were marching in silence to their old
fanes on the mountain-tops. I cowered in the boat under an absolute
chill of nervous apprehension.--The second phenomenon was, that I heard
_mentally_ a voice which said distinctly these words,-"The procession of
the Anakim!"--and at the same time I became conscious of some
disembodied spiritual being standing near me, as we are sometimes aware
of the presence of a fr