We used to stay out till what Ariadne called Dryad time. She thought she saw white figures hiding behind the trees in the dusk. Little pellets made of nuts and acorns and dead leaves, and so on, used to fall on us out of the thickets, and Ariadne said it was the Dryads pelting us. She thinks trees are alive, and that one of the reasons you hear ghosts in all old houses, is the wood creaking because in the night it remembers it was once a tree. I prefer to believe in ordinary solid ghosts instead of rational explanations like that. But still Ariadne's funny ideas make a walk quite interesting. Of course we never talk of such things at home, among materialists and realists like Aunt Gerty and Mother and George. George makes plenty of use of birds in his books, but he once came home from a visit to St. John's College at Cambridge, and told us that he had been kept awake all night by a beastly nightingale under his window. Now I have never heard this much-vaunted bird, but I am sure, from Matthew Arnold's poem where he calls it Eugenia, it must be a heavenly sound, quite worth while being kept awake by. Ariadne and I stay out very late till it is getting dark, hoping to hear it, in Cock Mill Wood, and then we go home and race through supper, and then go out again, on the quays and piers this time. We don't know or care what George and his friends are doing, up above us, in the smart hotel on the cliff. What I should just love would be for some of them and George to come down for a walk in the dark and perhaps meet us, and for George to say, "Who are those little wandering vagabonds flitting about like bats? Why doesn't their father or mother keep them at home in the evenings?" It would be so nice, and Arabian Nightish! At very high tides, we stay out very late, and take a shawl, and sit on a capstan and tuck it round us, and listen for a certain noise we love. It is when the water gets into a little corner in the heap of stones by the Scotch Head, and gets sucked in among them somehow, and then we hear a sort of sob that is better than any ghost. Ariadne and I put our heads under the shawl when we hear it, but not quite, so as to prevent us hearing properly. The harbour smells at low water, and the town children yell and scream, and it isn't poetical then. So Ariadne and I like to go away on the Scaur and put our fingers in anemones' mouths, and pop seaweed purses, and pretend we are lovers cut off by the tide, as they are in novels. In the afternoons when the harbour is full we sit on the mound above the Khyber Pass, and watch the water filling up the hole between the opposite cliff and the cliff ladder. It is all quite quiet then. We don't hear any town cries, for the children that make the noise are turned out of their playground, and their mothers out of their good drying-ground, and the boats begin to go out of the harbour in a long, soft, slow procession-- _And the stately ships go on_ _To their haven under the hill._