ed to me, in my then nervous state, to sound wonderfully well the
music of doom.

It was extraordinary, too, how the withdrawal suddenly of bright
sunlight took everything out of the landscape that made for
cheerfulness; and since this particular landscape had already managed to
convey the suggestion of something sinister, the change of course was
all the more unwelcome and noticeable. For me, I know, the darkening
outlook became distinctly more alarming, and I found myself more than
once calculating how soon after sunset the full moon would get up in the
east, and whether the gathering clouds would greatly interfere with her
lighting of the little island.

With this general hush of the wind--though it still indulged in
occasional brief gusts--the river seemed to me to grow blacker, the
willows to stand more densely together. The latter, too, kept up a sort
of independent movement of their own, rustling among themselves when no
wind stirred, and shaking oddly from the roots upwards. When common
objects in this way become charged with the suggestion of horror, they
stimulate the imagination far more than things of unusual appearance;
and these bushes, crowding huddled about us, assumed for me in the
darkness a bizarre _grotesquerie_ of appearance that lent to them
somehow the aspect of purposeful and living creatures. Their very
ordinariness, I felt, masked what was malignant and hostile to us. The
forces of the region drew nearer with the coming of night. They were
focusing upon our island, and more particularly upon ourselves. For
thus, somehow, in the terms of the imagination, did my really
indescribable sensations in this extraordinary place present themselves.

I had slept a good deal in the early afternoon, and had thus recovered
somewhat from the exhaustion of a disturbed night, but this only served
apparently to render me more susceptible than before to the obsessing
spell of the haunting. I fought against it, laughing at my feelings as
absurd and childish, with very obvious physiological explanations, yet,
in spite of every effort, they gained in strength upon me so that I
dreaded the night as a child lost in a forest must dread the approach of
darkness.

The canoe we had carefully covered with a waterproof sheet during the
day, and the one remaining paddle had been securely tied by the Swede to
the base of a tree, lest the wind should rob us of that too. From five
o'clock onwards I busied myself with the st