ight have seen a little brown thing leaping free from the clothes,
then it sprang into the bright light of the hall, and became
invisible to any human eye.

It dashed about for a little, then found the door, and presently was
in the lamplit streets.

To those that were born in the dusk hour it might have been seen
leaping rapidly wherever the streets ran northwards and eastwards,
disappearing from human sight as it passed under the lamps and
appearing again beyond them with a marsh-light over its head.

Once a dog perceived it and gave chase, and was left far behind.

The cats of London, who are all born in the dusk hour, howled
fearfully as it went by.

Presently it came to the meaner streets, where the houses are
smaller. Then it went due north-eastwards, leaping from roof to roof.
And so in a few minutes it came to more open spaces, and then to the
desolate lands, where market gardens grow, which are neither town
nor country. Till at last the good black trees came into view, with
their demoniac shapes in the night, and the grass was cold and wet,
and the night-mist floated over it. And a great white owl came by,
going up and down in the dark. And at all these things the little
Wild Thing rejoiced elvishly.

And it left London far behind it, reddening the sky, and could
distinguish no longer its unlovely roar, but heard again the noises
of the night.

And now it would come through a hamlet glowing and comfortable in
the night; and now to the dark, wet, open fields again; and many an
owl it overtook as they drifted through the night, a people friendly
to the Elf-folk. Sometimes it crossed wide rivers, leaping from star
to star; and, choosing its way as it went, to avoid the hard rough
roads, came before midnight to the East Anglian lands.

And it heard
there the shout of the North Wind, who was dominant and angry, as he
drove southwards his adventurous geese; while the rushes bent before
him chaunting plaintively and low, like enslaved rowers of some
fabulous trireme, bending and swinging under blows of the lash, and
singing all the while a doleful song.

And it felt the good dank air that clothes by night the broad East
Anglian lands, and came again to some old perilous pool where the
soft green mosses grew, and there plunged downward and downward into
the dear dark water till it felt the homely ooze once more coming
up between its toes. Thence, out of the lovely chill that is in the
heart of the oo