Coming out into the darkness, and hearing this mighty rushing note high overhead, you get a queer sense of underhand activity and concealed purpose in the world, as though scenery were being swiftly changed, a new piece hurriedly staged, under cover of the blinked lights. It tends towards a feeling that is rather foreign, not to say humbling, to your desires—that of being made a spectator rather than a participant in the great earth play. Or it may have another and a stranger effect. The sound of all that strenuous motion, the deep travel-note high in the darkness, may come to you with all the urging inspiration of a summons: you may restrain only with difficulty, and much assembling of prudence, the impulse to gird up and be off southward in the track of the flying host. The old nomadic instinct is not dead in humanity, as he well knows who keeps his feet to the green places of earth, and his heart tiding with the sun. Now, too, the brown owl begins his hollow plaint in the woodlands. ‘Woo-hoo-hoo, woohoo!’ comes to you through the fast-falling dusk, the direction and intensity of the cry varying with astonishing swiftness, as you stop to listen on your homeward way. This is conceivably the ‘to-whoo’ that Shakespeare heard; and there is another note, which seems to be an answer to it, and which sounds something like ‘Ker-wick,’ and might by a stretch be allowed to stand for the ‘to-whit’ in the song. But ‘to-whit, to-whoo!’ in a single phrase, from a single throat—that seems to be a piece of owl language that has become obsolete with the centuries.