All day he went over the fields, greeting some farmer here and there, or
worker in the field, and gaining greetings in return, and good wishes
for sport. But when evening came and he was near the frontier, fewer and
fewer greeted him as he passed, for he was manifestly travelling where
none went, whence even their thoughts held back. So he went lonely, yet
cheered by his eager thoughts, and happy in the comradeship of his
hounds; and both his thoughts and his hounds were all for the chase.
And so he came to the barrier of twilight again, where the hedges ran
down to it from the fields of men and turned strange and dim in a glow
that is not of our Earth and disappeared in the twilight. He stood with
his hounds close in against one of these hedges just where it touched
the barrier. The light just there on the hedge, if like anything of our
Earth, was like the misty dimness that flashes upon a hedge, seen only
across one field, when touched by the rainbow: in the sky the rainbow is
clear, but close across one wide field the rainbow's end scarcely shows,
yet a heavenly strangeness has touched and altered the hedge. In some
such light as that glowed the last of the hawthorns that grew in the
fields of men. And just beyond it, like a liquid opal, all full of
wandering lights, lay the barrier through which no man can see, and no
sound come but the sound of the elfin horns, and only that to the ears
of very few. The horns were blowing now, piercing that barrier of dim
light and silence with the magical resonance of their silver note, that
seemed to beat past all things intervening to come to Orion's ear, as
the sunlight beats through ether to illumine the vales of the moon.
The horns died down, and nothing whispered from Elfland; and all the
sounds thenceforth were the sounds of an earthly evening. Even these
grew few, and still no unicorns came.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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