but told so well in tone that it was easy,
seeing nothing there in the black shadow of the wood, yet to see
it all; the jagged horizon against the sullen sky, the streaks of
mottled foam sliding landward along the weltering backs of black
waves, spinning into sea drift at every wind-sheared crest, and
blowing, soft as wool, in rolling masses far inland. It was easy
to see the greatest crests rear and draw back, showing the roots
of the ledges among boulders brown with weed and sea wrack, then
swing forward with seemingly irresistible might, to be shattered
as if their crystal was that of glass and to fly skyward a hundred
feet, scintillant white star drift of comminuted sea. The crash of
such waves on such rocks, the hollow diapason of their like on
sands, and the shrill roar of a pebbly beach torn and tossed by
the waves, all sprang from nothingness into vibrant being there in
the black woods as the gale shouldered by the pine tops.

There is a point where the pines group on the pond shore and look
expectantly east, wistful of the sea. Here they caught the full
force of the gale and sang mightily, a wild, deep-toned, marching
symphony of crashing forces. Now and then a lull came, as comes in
the fiercest gales, and in the vast silence which ensued I heard
the pines across the pond singing antiphonally. Black as it was
under the trees, there was a moon behind the night. No suggestion
of it showed through the clouds, yet from the pond surface itself
came a weird twilight, filtered no doubt through a mile of flying
scud a mile above, reflected from the wind-swept surface and
showing these distant pines lifting heads of murk against the
murky sky. But their antiphonal shout was no pine-voiced song of
the sea, it was the sea itself. Again and again I listened in
successive lulls. I could not believe it the pines. I heard so
surely the rush of waves, the deep boom of beating surges, all the
mingled clangor of the on-shore gale, that I thought through some
atmospheric trick I was listening to the thing itself; the uproar
swept over the hills a dozen miles inland. Only by marching up the
pond shore until the pines across were south instead of east of me
did I prove to myself that it was they and not the sea in very
truth that I heard.

Back again in the Stygian darkness of the grove it was easy to
note how the pines protect their own. On the beach the smothering
onrush of the gale beat me down, drove me before it. Yet I had