deep darkness of the woods--and silence and
space and shapes invisible, and voices inaudible as yet to my
city-dinned ears and staring eyes. But sight returns, and hearing,
till soon my very fingers, feeling far into the dark, begin to see and
hear.

And now I near the hill: these are my woods; this is my gravel bank;
that my meadow, my wall, my postbox, and up yonder among the trees
shines my light. They are expecting me, She, and the boys, and the
dog, and the blazing fire, the very trees up there, and the watching
stars.

How the car takes the hill--as if up were down, and wheels were wings,
and just as if the boys and the dog and the dinner and the fire were
all waiting for _it_! As they are, of course, it and me. I open up
the throttle, I jam the shrieking whistle, and rip around the bend in
the middle of the hill,--puppy yelping down to meet me. The noise we
make as the lights flash on, as the big door rolls back, and we come to
our nightly standstill inside the boy-filled barn! They drag me from
the wheel--puppy yanking at my trouser leg; they pounce upon my
bundles; they hustle me toward the house, where, in the lighted doorway
more welcome waits me--and questions, batteries of them, even puppy
joining the attack!

Who would have believed I had seen and done all this,--had any such
adventurous trip,--lived any such significant day,--catching my regular
8.35 train as I did!

But we get through the dinner and some of the talk and then the
out-loud reading before the fire; then while she is tucking the
children in bed, I go out to see that all is well about the barn.

How the night has deepened since my return! No wind stirs. The
hill-crest blazes with the light of the stars. Such an earth and sky!
I lock the barn, and crossing the field, climb the ridge to the stump.
The bare woods are dark with shadow and deep with the silence of the
night. A train rumbles somewhere in the distance, then the silence and
space reach off through the shadows, infinitely far off down the
hillside; and the stars gather in the tops of the trees.

[Illustration: The open fire]

II

THE OPEN FIRE

It is a January night.

". . . . . . . Enclosed
From Chaos and the inroad of Darkness old,"

we sit with our book before the fire. Outside in the night ghostly
shapes pass by, ghostly faces press against the window, and at the
corners of the house ghostly voices pause for parley, muttering thickly
through t