As she spoke, the sun came up and his first rays touched the pointed crests above them with gold; and Paul noticed that there were thousands of tiny, slender ribbons streaming out like elastic threads from the tips of all the pines, and that these had only just begun to move. As at a word of command they trooped out to meet the sunshine, undulating like wee coloured serpents, and uttering their weird and gentle music at the same time. And Paul, as he listened, understood at last why the wind in the tree-tops is always more delicately sweet than any other kind, and why it touches so poignantly the heart of him who hears, and calls wonder from her deepest lair. ‘The young winds, you see,’ Nixie said, peering up beneath her joined hands and finding it difficult to keep her balance as she did so. ‘They sleep longer than the others. And they’re not loose either; they’re fastened on, and can only go out and come back.’ And, as he watched, he saw these young winds fly out miles into the brightening sky, making lines of flashing colour, and then tear back with a whirring rush of music to curl up again round the twigs and pine needles. ‘Though sometimes they _do_ manage to get loose, and make funny storms and hurricanes and things that no one expects at all in the sky.’ Paul was on the point of replying to this explanation when something struck against his legs, and he only just saved himself from falling by seizing Nixie and risking a flying leap with her from the log. ‘It’s that wicked Japan again,’ she laughed, clambering back on to the tree. The puppy was vigorously chasing its own tail, bumping as it did so into everything within reach. Paul stooped to catch it. At the same instant it rose up past his very nose, and floated off through the trees and was lost to view in the sky. Nixie laughed merrily. ‘It woke in the middle of its silly little dream,’ she said. ‘It was only half asleep really, and playing. It won’t come back now.’ ‘All puppies are absurd like that——’ But he did not finish his profound observation about puppies, for his voice at that moment was drowned in a new and terrible noise that seemed to come from the heart of the wood. It happened just as in a children’s fairy tale. It bore no resemblance to the roar the winds made; there was no music in it; it was crude in quality—angry; a sound from another place.