h a certain stealthiness, peering on this side and
that down moony vistas and into shadow-bowers, as if half expecting, if
he might step lightly enough, to catch a glimpse of some sort of
dream-people basking there.

Nor could Miss Rood herself resist the impression the moony landscape
gave of teeming with subtle forms of life, escaping the grosser senses
of human beings, but perceptible by their finer parts. Each cosey nook
of light and shadow was yet warm from some presence that had just left
it. The landscape fairly stirred with ethereal forms of being beneath
the fertilizing moon-rays, as the earth-mould wakes into physical life
under the sun's heat. The yellow moonlight looked warm as spirits might
count warmth. The air was electric with the thrill of circumambient
existence. There was the sense of pressure, of a throng. It would have
been impossible to feel lonely. The pulsating sounds of the insect world
seemed the rhythm to which the voluptuous beauty of the night had
spontaneously set itself. The common air of day had been transmuted
into the atmosphere of revery and Dreamland. In that magic medium the
distinction between imagination and reality fast dissolved. Even Miss
Rood was conscious of a delightful excitement, a vague expectancy. Mr.
Morgan, she saw, was moved quite beyond even his exaggerated habit of
imaginative excitement. His wet, shining, wide-opened eyes and ecstatic
expression indicated complete abandonment to the illusions of the scene.

They had seated themselves, as the concentration of the brain upon
imaginative activity made the nerves of motion sluggish, upon a rude
bench formed by wedging a plank between two elms that stood close
together. They were within the shadow of the trees, but close up to
their feet rippled a lake of moonlight. The landscape shimmering before
them had been the theatre of their fifty years of life. Their history
was written in its trees and lawns and paths. The very air of the place
had acquired for them a dense, warm, sentient feeling, to which that of
all other places was thin and raw. It had become tinctured by their own
spiritual emanations, by the thoughts, looks, words and moods of which
it had so long received the impression. It had become such vitalized
air, surcharged with sense and thought, as might be taken to make souls
for men out of.

Over yonder, upon the playground, yet lingered the faint violet
fragrance of their childhood. Beneath that elm a kiss