know them very well you will be able to detect their
nearness by sound, oftentimes, long before sight of them is
vouchsafed you. When they do appear it is usually a sort of
embodiment. They materialize as if out of thin air and disintegrate
by the same route. This is not because they fear you. It is simply
because it has been the habit of pasture people for untold
generations.

Thus it is that a lovely white moth flits often in the veriest
gray of dawn just to the eastward of where I lie. It always seems
as if he were a condensation out of the white mists that are born
in that darkest hour when the night winds cease and that runic
rhyme of the pines is lulled for a time. He seems as transparent
as they and is nothing but the ghost of a moth as he passes from
one head of goldenrod bloom to another. Some mornings he vanishes
in the amber glow that ushers in the daylight and then I think I
have merely been dreaming of lepidoptera. This morning he did not
appear, either in the early gray or the amber glow, and I went out
to look for him. The waning moon hung wan and white in the west, a
white paper ghost of a moon that had no light left in her. All the
east had the clear translucent yellow radiance of the yellow birch
leaves, a cool, pale gold, and between lay dead the morning mists,
chilled to white frost on all the pasture shrubs and the level
reaches of brown grass. Along the hedgerow of barberry, wild
cherry, raspberry, hardhack, meadow sweet, sweet fern and
goldenrod that deck the ancient wall I looked for the white
radiance of my moth's wings in vain, and I pictured him as dead
among the frozen grasses, and mourned him thus.

*****

The day grew with all the wonderful still radiance which so often
follows a frosty morning in October. The pine trees could not
sing; there was no wind to give them voice. The still flood of
golden sunshine warmed to the marrow, yet did not wilt as in
summer. Instead, it informed all things with a glow like an elixir
of life. To feel it well within one's flesh is to have a
forecasting of immortality, to know that one is to be born again
and again. I did not wonder that as I once more scanned the
hedgerow along the ancient wall I saw my white moth clamber
bravely up a goldenrod stem and begin a half-scrambling,
half-fluttering pilgrimage from one to another of the hardy blooms
that had survived the frost as well as he. Most of the goldenrod and
meadow sweet blooms are well past their