226 A GARDEN DIARY 



AUGUST 1 8, 1900 



STANDING, shortly after dusk yesterday 

 evening, upon the edge of the slope which 

 drops suddenly into the valley enclosing our 

 village and its church, my ear was filled with a 

 variety of sounds, all of them familiar, yet none 

 somehow quite recognisable ; all with a certain 

 strangeness about them, born no doubt of the 

 mist and of the oncoming obscurity. 



Sounds which reach our ears after nightfall 

 never seem to be quite the same sounds as in the 

 daytime, even though they may be produced by 

 exactly the same means. Commonplace in reality, 

 they are never perfectly commonplace in their 

 effect. They awaken curious echoes. They 

 bring back odd, and half-vanished thoughts. 

 They play the same rather uncanny tricks with 

 the brain as they doubtless did in the days of 

 the Patriarchs, or of the Shepherd Kings. The 

 bark of a dog half a mile away will conjure up 

 visions of hunting scenes, swift and phantasma- 

 goric as the pageant of a dream. The sharp 

 "click-clack" of a horse's hoof; the crunching 

 of a waggon-wheel ; most of all, perhaps, the 



