the window. The sound began
faintly and far away, up above the trees; then it came gradually nearer,
only to die away again almost to a whisper.

If it was not the voice of the governess, he could only say it was a
very good imitation of it.

The words forming out of the empty air rose and fell with the wind, and,
taking his thoughts, flung them in a stream through the dark sky towards
the hidden, misty moon:

"O misty moon,
Dear, misty moon,
The nights are long without thee;
The shadows creep
Across my sleep,
And fold their wings about me!"

And another silvery voice, that might have been the voice of a star,
took it up faintly, evidently from a much greater distance:

"O misty moon,
Sweet, misty moon,
The stars are dim behind thee;
And, lo, thy beams
Spin through my dreams
And weave a veil to blind me!"

The sound of this beautiful voice so delighted Jimbo that he sprang
from his bed and rushed to the window, hoping that he might be able to
hear it more clearly. But, before he got half-way across the room, he
stopped short, trembling with terror. Underneath his very feet, in the
depths of the house, he heard the awful voice he dreaded more than
anything else. It roared out the lines with a sound like the rushing of
a great river:

"O misty moon,
Pale misty moon,
Thy songs are nightly driven,
Eternally,
From sky to sky,
O'er the old, grey Hills of Heaven!"

And after the verse Jimbo heard a great peal of laughter that seemed to
shake the walls of the house, and rooted his feet to the floor. It
rolled away with thundering echoes into the very bowels of the earth. He
just managed to crawl back to his mattress and lie down, when another
voice took up the song, but this time in accents so tender, that the
child felt something within him melt into tears of joy, and he was on
the verge of recognising, for the first time since his accident, the
voice of his mother:

"O misty moon,
Shy, misty moon,
Whence comes the blush that trembles
In sweet disgrace
O'er half thy face
When Night her stars assembles?"

But his memory, of course, failed him just as he seemed about to grasp
it, and he was left wondering why the sound of that one voice had
brought him a moment of radiant happiness in the midst of so much horror
and pain. Meanwhile the answering voices went on, each time different,
and in new directions.

But the next verse somehow b