voice. It was long years ago--at Eastdean in
half-forgotten Sussex.

"Father!" I cried. "Father!"

There was no reply, and I stood there for what seemed a long time
waiting one. I called again and again in vain.

"It is weakness," I said to myself at last, and turned.

At once the voice was wailing, with some wild terror as it seemed,
at my very shoulder, with its cry of my name, and I must needs turn
once more sharply:

"Oswald, Oswald!"

My foot struck a stone as I wheeled round, and it grated on others
and seemed to stop. But as I listened for the voice I heard a
crash, and yet another, and at last a far-off rumble that was below
my very feet, and I sprang with a cry away from the sound, for I
knew that I stood on the very brink of some gulf. And then the snow
ceased for a moment and the moon shone out from the break in the
clouds, and I saw that my last footprint whence the voice had made
me turn was on the edge of an awesome rift that cleft the level
surface on the downland, clean cut as by a sword stroke, right
athwart my path. Even in clear daylight I had hardly seen that gulf
until I was on its very brink, for I could almost have leapt it,
and nought marked its edge. And in its depths I heard the crash and
thunder of prisoned waves.

I do not know that I ever felt such terror as fell on me then. It
was the terror that comes of thinking what might have been, after
the danger is past, and that is the worst of all. I sank down on
the snow with my knees trembling, and I clutched at the grass that
I might not feel that I must even yet slip into that gulf that was
so close, though there was no slope of the ground toward it. Sheer
and sudden it gaped with sharp edges, as the mouth of some monster
that waited for prey.

There on the snow I believe that I should have bided to sleep the
sleep of the frozen, for I hardly dared to move. The snow whirled
round me again, but I did not heed it, and with a great roar the
wind rose and swept up the rift with a sound as of mighty harps,
but it did not rouse me. Only my father's voice came to me again
and called me, and I rose up shaking and followed it as it came
from time to time, until I was once more on the track that I had
lost.

There it left me, but the sadness that had been in its tones was
gone when it last came. And surely that was the touch of no
snowflake that lit on my hand for a moment and was gone.

Now I grew stronger, and the fear of the unseen was