but
to walk inland a dozen yards to find a calm. The outermost trees
shunted the gale and half the time it did not touch even the tops
of those a hundred feet in. Walking out into the midnight storm, I
had wondered how it fared with the small folk of the forest. So
fierce was the onslaught of the wind that it seemed as if the
birds might be blown from their roosts, the squirrels shaken from
their nests. Under the shelter of the trees themselves I knew they
were as safe as I from any harm from the wind. There was not
enough of it below the tree-tops to ruffle a feather.

To lay one's ear closely and firmly against the trunk of one of
these pines was to curiously get an inkling of what was going on
far up among the branches. It is quite like listening at a
telephone receiver, the wood like the wire bringing to the ear
sound of many things going on within touch of it. Thus placed, I
was conscious that the seemingly immobile tree swayed rhythmically,
just the very slightest swaying in the world, and this I seemed to
hear. It was as if the slight readjustment of the woody fibre gave
me a faint thrumming sound, a tiny music of motion that was a
delight to the ear after the beat and bellow of the gale beyond.

Twigs rapped one upon another, making little crisp sounds. Most
surprising of all, however, was a tinkling tattoo of musical notes
as if a dryad within were tapping out woodland melodies on a
xylophone. I listened long to this. It was not exactly a
comfortable position. To hear I must press, and the tree bark was
hard and the rain ran down the trunk and into my ear. Yet the
music was exquisite, a little runic rhyme, repeated over and over
again with quaint variations but with neither beginning nor end.
It was wonderfully wild and fairylike. Who would stop for water in
his ear or a pain in the lobe of it? Midnight, the middle of the
gale, the middle of the woods; perhaps here was that very opening
into the realm of the unseen woodland folk that we all in our
inmost hearts hope for and expect some day to find.

So did he feel who pulled the boughs aside,
That we might look into the forest wide.

*****

Telling us how fair trembling Syrinx fled
Arcadian Pan, with such a fearful dread.
Poor nymph--poor Pan--how he did weep to find
Naught but a lovely sighing of the wind
Along the reedy stream; a half heard strain,
Full of sweet desolation, balmy pain.

It may have been the dryad, playing the xy