It was humorously like a fellow townsman having trouble with Central so far as inflection went, but there was a quality in the tone which barred the human. You had but to listen with closed eyes to know that here spoke the primal forces of nature. You may hear that same quality in the voice of a gale at sea. I don’t mean the shrilling of the wind in the rigging, or the cry of the waters, even, but that burbling undertone of the upper air currents, growling and shouting at one another as they roar by far overhead. An Arabian might say these are the voices of Afrites, journeying through the air to the kingdom of Ethiopia. So even in the bright sun of that springlike morning these solemn voices of the winter ice seemed like echoes of messages superhuman, passing from deep to deep. At the time I laid the cause to the changes in temperature produced by the warmth of the morning sun on the thick ice. Yet the uproar began after the sun had been shining for an hour or two, and it ceased within a half-hour. That night came the south blow and a warm storm. In the whirligig of our New England winter weather the soft rain and strong south wind passed. Then the wind blew strong from the northwest and fair skies and low temperature prevailed for some days, welding the erstwhile softened ice into an elastic surface as resonant as tempered steel. Then came a still warm day in which we had the same increase of temperature under springlike skies as on that previous day. Yet the pond never uttered a word--audible to my listening human ears. Here were the conditions like those of the other message period, yet not a word was said. Even the soft haze which presaged another south blow filled the sky, so apparently nothing was wanted but the voice at the other end of the line. It was along in the evening that I heard the first call, followed rapidly by a great uproar, so that people heard it in their houses half a mile or more away. Immediately I looked up the thermometer. The temperature had not changed a degree for hours. Yet here were the primal forces telephoning back and forth to one another and fairly making the welkin ring with their hubbub. Surely wires were crossed somewhere on the ether waves, or else the tempers of the primal forces themselves were out of sorts. I seemed to hear familiar words in their roarings, admonitions to get farther away from the transmitter, requests for strangers to get off the line and other little courtesies that pass current in the telephone booth; and so for a half-hour they kept it up. It was all very ghostly and disquieting and savoring of the superhuman to listen to it in the night and wonder what it was all about. At last one or the other giant hung up the receiver with a tremendous bang, and nothing more was to be heard but the mutterings of the other, grumbling about it in notes low and tremendously deep.