still as the pivot of this circle
of heath-country was just as obscure. Her extraordinary fixity, her
conspicuous loneliness, her heedlessness of night, betokened among
other things an utter absence of fear. A tract of country unaltered
from that sinister condition which made Caesar anxious every year
to get clear of its glooms before the autumnal equinox, a kind of
landscape and weather which leads travellers from the South to
describe our island as Homer's Cimmerian land, was not, on the face
of it, friendly to women.

It might reasonably have been supposed that she was listening to the
wind, which rose somewhat as the night advanced, and laid hold of the
attention. The wind, indeed, seemed made for the scene, as the scene
seemed made for the hour. Part of its tone was quite special; what
was heard there could be heard nowhere else. Gusts in innumerable
series followed each other from the north-west, and when each one
of them raced past the sound of its progress resolved into three.
Treble, tenor, and bass notes were to be found therein. The general
ricochet of the whole over pits and prominences had the gravest pitch
of the chime. Next there could be heard the baritone buzz of a holly
tree. Below these in force, above them in pitch, a dwindled voice
strove hard at a husky tune, which was the peculiar local sound
alluded to. Thinner and less immediately traceable than the other
two, it was far more impressive than either. In it lay what may be
called the linguistic peculiarity of the heath; and being audible
nowhere on earth off a heath, it afforded a shadow of reason for the
woman's tenseness, which continued as unbroken as ever.

Throughout the blowing of these plaintive November winds that note
bore a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remain
to the throat of fourscore and ten. It was a worn whisper, dry and
papery, and it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the
accustomed, the material minutiae in which it originated could be
realized as by touch. It was the united products of infinitesimal
vegetable causes, and these were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades,
prickles, lichen, nor moss.

They were the mummied heath-bells of the past summer, originally
tender and purple, now washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and
dried to dead skins by October suns. So low was an individual sound
from these that a combination of hundreds only just emerged from
silence, and the myriads of the whole