Sleep does not come quickly to a mind depressed. As I lie awake and listen, the noises of the night reverberating through the forest, with the rush of the wind in the tree tops, blend together in one vast chorus, whose music is a funeral march. The materialistic modern mind calls the universe a machine. But the old Norsemen of the forest said that it is a tree, the tree _Igdrasil_, that lured the mind of a great modern mystic. Often in the night-forest have I recalled the Norse legend of the tree _Igdrasil_, the tree of _existence_. It is watered by three streams, the past, the present and the future. The branches are human history, the leaves are the actions and the words of men; the wind sighing through it is the sobbing of men’s sorrows. But the forest is as variable in her moods as the mind of a man. Stern at times and sometimes awful, yet again she loves to soothe the mind and impart a gentle cheer. If you would know the charm of the night-forest in her most intimate and communicative mood you must wait until some time, as if in response to an inaudible summons, you waken after several hours of deep, restful sleep that is one of the secrets of the forest. Under a roof and between close walls a wakeful hour is monotonous and miserable and the habit of wakefulness is a malady that were fit penance for mortal sins. But in the open forest, especially when there is a glimmer of stars shining through the screen of dark foliage, a wakeful hour passes easily. One is never lonely in such an hour, for a mystic life pervades the night-forest, and one realizes that it is something more and greater than the definite forms which the eye sees by day. When these are dissolved in darkness one is more sensible of the underlying, mysterious life, as of a spiritual presence. Forms, whether material or creedal, sometimes conceal the reality which they represent. The noises of the night-forest, the mingled voices of innumerable crickets, tree-toads, frogs and croaking night-birds, the chatter of the stream over the stones, the rushing of the wind above the trees, with many unfamiliar sounds, each almost indistinguishable in the thrilling volume, seem but the sights of the silent day transformed into sound, and one feels that the interpretation of the sound would be also the interpretation of the forms and shapes, of colours, of shadows and broken light-beams. This illusion may be promotive of the native belief in animistic nature. For the eye does not see those animate creatures in the day, and to the child-mind it might easily seem that the myriad noises of the night issue from rock and hill and stream and tree.