Thus swept into the unity of a dominating mood, the woods sometimes gain a voice of their own. I heard it first on a stormy night when I was walking along the wood road to meet Jonathan. It was a night of wind and rain and blackness--blackness so dense that it seemed a real thing, pressing against my eyes, so complete that at the fork in the roads I had to feel with my hand for the wheel ruts in order to choose the right one. As I grew accustomed to the swish of the rain in my face and the hoarse breath of the wind about my ears I became aware of another sound--a background of tone. I thought at first it was a child calling, but no, it was not that; it was not a call, but a song; and not that either--it was more like many voices, high but not shrill, and very far away, softly intoning. It was neither sad nor joyous; it suggested dreamy, reiterant thoughts; it was not music, but the memory of music. If one listened too keenly, it was gone, like a faint star which can be glimpsed only if one looks a little away from it. As I had listened that night I began to wonder if it was all my own fancy, and when I met Jonathan I made him stop. "Wait a minute," I begged him, "and listen." "I hear it. Come on," he had said. Supper was in his thoughts. "What do you hear?" "Just what you do." "What's that?" I had persisted, as we fumbled our way along. "Voices--I don't know what you'd call it--the woods. It often sounds like that in a big rain." Jonathan's matter-of-factness had rather pleased me. "I thought it might be my imagination. I'm glad it wasn't," I said. "Perhaps it's both our imaginations," he suggested. "No. We both do lots of imagining, but it never overlaps. When it does, it shows it's so." Perhaps I was not very clear, but he seemed to understand. Since then I have heard it now and again, this singing of the rain-swept woods. Not often, for it is a capricious thing, or perhaps I ought rather to say I do not understand the manner of its uprising. Rain alone will not bring it to pass, wind alone will not, and sometimes even when they are importuned by wind and rain together the woods are silent. Perhaps, too, it is not every stretch of woods that can sing, or at all seasons. In winter they can whistle, and sigh, and creak, but I am sure that when I have heard these singing voices the trees have always had their full leafage. But however it comes about, I am glad of the times that I have heard it. And whenever I read tales of the Wild Huntsman and all his kind, there come into my mind as an interpreting background memories of wonderful black nights and storm-ridden woods swept by overtones of distant and elusive sound. We did not hear the woods sing that day. Perhaps there was not wind enough, or perhaps the woods on the "home piece" are not big enough, for it chances that I have never heard the sound there. As we came up the lane at dusk we saw the glimmer of the house lights.