There is nothing of this aloofness about the other pasture people. The younger pines do not whisper solemn riddles, but are gently friendly without mystery, and so are many of the myriad creatures that crowd the spaces boldly or dwell quietly in unsuspected seclusion. Of all the outdoor world the pasture is the most friendly place, yet it is not obtrusively so and you must dwell in it long before you know many of even your elbow neighbors by sight. If you know them very well you will be able to detect their nearness by sound, oftentimes, long before sight of them is vouchsafed you. When they do appear it is usually a sort of embodiment. They materialize as if out of thin air and disintegrate by the same route. This is not because they fear you. It is simply because it has been the habit of pasture people for untold generations. Thus it is that a lovely white moth flits often in the veriest gray of dawn just to the eastward of where I lie. It always seems as if he were a condensation out of the white mists that are born in that darkest hour when the night winds cease and that runic rhyme of the pines is lulled for a time. He seems as transparent as they and is nothing but the ghost of a moth as he passes from one head of goldenrod bloom to another. Some mornings he vanishes in the amber glow that ushers in the daylight and then I think I have merely been dreaming of lepidoptera. This morning he did not appear, either in the early gray or the amber glow, and I went out to look for him. The waning moon hung wan and white in the west, a white paper ghost of a moon that had no light left in her. All the east had the clear translucent yellow radiance of the yellow birch leaves, a cool, pale gold, and between lay dead the morning mists, chilled to white frost on all the pasture shrubs and the level reaches of brown grass. Along the hedgerow of barberry, wild cherry, raspberry, hardhack, meadow sweet, sweet fern and goldenrod that deck the ancient wall I looked for the white radiance of my moth's wings in vain, and I pictured him as dead among the frozen grasses, and mourned him thus. *****