when there was just the promise of rain in the
air the pine woods were so friendly a place that all the birds
flocked in and seemed to be full of soft and gentle jubilation
because of this promise. The spaces that have been so quiet of
late were full of feathers as they had been in June. Here were
robins innumerable, flitting jerkily about and crying "tut, tut"
in a subdued and genial way that was positively ladylike.
Partridge woodpeckers flocked in, drolly jollying each other and
making much talk, sotto voce. Not one of them cried aloud and
though in their humorous antics more than one cried, "flicker,
flicker, flicker," there was in it none of the usual horse-laugh
tone of the high-hole when he is on a rampage. It was reduced to a
gentle whinny that seemed to vie with the boudoir-built notes of
the robins. Bluejays were there too, but there was no clamor, just
a gentle murmur of subdued tones in the soft, resin-scented
twilight.

In the twilight of twenty-four hours after, all my wood-rimmed
world of pasture and meadow was filled with, the eerie presence of
the rain. It was not like a gentle shower of summer when the
patter of falling drops is like a tinkle of fairy music and
showers spell laughter. The coming of a local shower at nightfall
is as gentle and seems as homelike as the gathering of the birds
in the grove. In this east storm brought from far spaces on the
wings of the east wind there was something of wild unrest. The
cool, salt flavor of the air spoke of wild stretches of the North
Atlantic where sea-fogs have touched the eerie loneliness of
Greenland bergs and passed it on to the wind. In this ghostly dusk
of driving mist the smear of the rain across the face is like a
touch of phantom hands coming out of unfathomed spaces, gentle but
uncanny. All the soft perfumes of wood and field seem beaten to
the ground by this rain which brings with its salt tang faint
breathings of some distant spiciness.

The gray light of the lower spaces goes up into the clouds and in
the dusk below shadowless shrubs take on strange shapes. The
pasture edge is familiar no longer. Gray groups grow where surely
was but clear space and all across the long meadow and up the
slope mist horizons jostle one another one moment and are blotted
out the next. The road entrance to the wood is a black cavern out
of which lean grotesque goblins that wave a disquieting welcome.
Here to the right and left as I enter stand black figures whe