NATURE'S DREAMS 237 



carefully over field and stream* Could a weird nightly 

 visitor have careened on a broom over the distant 

 pines and across the field in the moonlight, pausing 

 to rest on the smooth rounding bank t A running 

 stream is an impassable barrier, and there the witch 

 may have paused to breathe out maledictions at the 

 fate that balked her evil designs, A short distance 

 away there is another hole in the smooth snow, and 

 now that the eye has begun an unconscious search 

 several more are discovered. Did the moon look down 

 on an unhallowed orgy of the terrible sisterhood, 

 arrested in their fell purpose by the mystic power of 

 the moving water under the snows' There is the 

 mark of their trailing garments. But the lines are 

 drawn in concentric circles with mathematical 

 accuracy, showing, perhaps, a cabalistic warning to 

 the unfortunate wayfarer who might wander, how- 

 ever innocently, over snow made baneful by their 

 machinations and the exhaled wickedness of their 

 sacrilegious rites. A mind in intellectual twilight, 

 filled with the strange fears that linger like mists on 

 the dawn of supernatural thought, could find in the 

 snow-covered field the premonitions of evil and the 

 signs of a vague and terrifying life, peopling earth 

 and air with its fantastic and distorted forms. Stimu- 

 lated by fear, it must have been easy and natural to 

 account for every trifling circumstance of unusual 

 aspect or momentary mystery by fancying the sur- 



