THE SINGING PINES 55 



surface itself came a weird twilight, filtered no 

 doubt through a mile of flying scud a mile above, 

 reflected from the wind-swept surface and show- 

 ing these distant pines lifting heads of murk 

 against the murky sky. But their antiphonal 

 shout was no pine-voiced song of the sea, it was 

 the sea itself. Again and again I listened in 

 successive lulls. I could not believe it the pines. 

 I heard so surely the rush of waves, the deep 

 boom of beating surges, all the mingled clangor 

 of the on-shore gale, that I thought through some 

 atmospheric trick I was listening to the thing 

 itself; the uproar swept over the hills a dozen 

 miles inland. Only by marching up the pond 

 shore until the pines across were south instead 

 of east of me did I prove to myself that it was 

 they and not the sea in very truth that I heard. 

 Back again in the Stygian darkness of the 

 grove it was easy to note how the pines protect 

 their own. On the beach the smothering onrush 

 of the gale beat me down, drove me before it. 

 Yet I had but to walk inland a dozen yards to 

 find a calm. The outermost trees shunted the 

 gale and half the time it did not touch even the 

 tops of those a hundred feet in. Walking out 

 into the midnight storm, I had wondered how it 



