DRAGON'S BLOOD 225 



There are certain bird-notes that strike strange 

 chords whose vibrations are lost in a mist of dreams. 

 I remember a little runaway boy, who stood in a clo- 

 ver field in a gray twilight and heard the clanging 

 calls of wild geese shouting down from mid-sky. 

 Frightened, he ran home a vast distance — at least 

 the width of two fields. As he ran, there seemed to 

 come back to him the memory of a forgotten dream, 

 if it were a dream, in which he lay in another land, 

 on a chill hillside. Overhead in the darkness passed 

 a burst of triumphant music, and the strong singing 

 of voices not of this earth. From that day the trum- 

 pet-notes of the wild geese bring back through the 

 fog of the drifting years that same dream to him 

 who heard them first in that far-away, long-ago 

 clover field. A few years ago there was a night of 

 April storm. Until midnight the house creaked and 

 rattled and clattered under a screaming gale. Then 

 the wind died down, and a dense fog covered the 

 streets of the little town. Suddenly overhead sounded 

 the clang and clamor of a lost flock of geese that cir- 

 cled and quartered over the house back and forth 

 through the mist. That night the dream came back 

 so vividly that, even after the dreamer awoke, he 

 seemed to feel the cold dew of that hillside and hear 

 an echo of the singing voices. 



It was only a few months ago that this same 

 dreamer found himself on the shore of Delaware 

 Bay, with the three friends who had gone adventur- 

 ing with him for so many happy years. In the 

 middle of a maze of woods and swamps shrouded in 



