Ever and again a delicate sweet singing came from the moonshine-folk. Peterkin listened, but could hear no words he knew. Perhaps there were no words at all, or mayhap he himself knew too few. But the singing was strangely familiar. Sometimes when mother sang, surely he had heard it: as far back, farther back, than memory could take him, he had heard some echo of it. Cradle-sweet it was, that dim snatch of a fugitive strain. And, too, had he not heard something of it in the wind, when that went whispering through the grass and in and out of the wild-rose thicket, or when it lifted and waved a great wing and fanned the trees into vast swaying flames of green? Yes, even in the fire he had heard it. When the orange and red flames flickered among the coals, or caught the sap in the pine-logs and grew into yellow and blue with hearts of purple, he had heard a faint far-off music. Peterkin gave a little gasp when a sudden wave of shadow, trailed across the poplar by a long slow-travelling cloud, swept from bough to bough. It was as though all the singing, laughing, dancing folk had been drowned. He stared through the darkness, but there was nothing to be seen. He shivered. It was lonely out there. Again he heard a sound as of a remote singing. As before, he could not hear what the words were. But, once more, it was not all unfamiliar. It was sadder than anything that dimly he remembered, save the long mournful crooning of a Gaelic cradle-song, sadder than any flame-whisper in a waning fire, or than any cadence of the wind in the grass, or among the thickets of wild rose. III Next night Peterkin lay awake a long time, hoping to see the moonshine-folk again. He had spoken of them, but was told that there were no little people in the poplar. At first this was the more strange to him, for had he not seen them? Then, after he had scrupulously examined the branches from beneath as well as at a distance, he comforted himself with the thought that, while there might be no little people actually living in the poplar, they came into the tree on the flood of the moonshine. But that night there was no moon-flood. A south wind had arisen at sundown, and had shepherded from beyond the hills a medley of strayed clouds: these, intricately interwoven, now spread from horizon to horizon, obliterating the stars and obscuring even the radiance of the new-risen moon. If there were no moonlight, and therefore no little yellow and green lives with bright shining eyes, there was a strange exquisite whispering that grew into music sweeter than any which Peterkin had ever heard. He rose and crept stealthily from his bed to the door. It was ajar, and he looked, half-fearfully, half-wonderingly, into the open passage. How long and dark it was, and haunted by unfamiliar shadows: but, clasping the skirts of his nightgown close to him, he ran swiftly to the balustrade at the far end.