THE SPIRIT OF THE WOOD. 
HE wood stood stiff and stark in the cold. 
Farther up the valley the oaks were 
straining and creaking in chorus as the wind 
went romping through them. But down in the 
spruce-wood there was no wind; the curved 
hunch of the opposite hill, flung up like a 
careless knee, acted as a break-wind, so that 
you could hear the breeze racing overhead, 
but could not feel it. 
A spatter of hail drummed over the valley, 
and passed. A jay spoke suddenly in the 
depths, and, dipping away among the gray 
columns a moment later, gave one glimpse 
of pinkish-fawn and black-and-white slashed 
doublet. A woodpecker, hidden somewhere in 
the cathedral gloom, began tapping all at once 
in the silence that followed, and something— 
truly, it may have been no more than a shadow, 
a mist-wreath, or the spirit of the place—was 
standing in an open glade. 
Whether it had come there on animate legs, 
whether it had been there all the time, or had 
been evolved out of the blue haze that hung 
between the trees, were hard to say. 
It was there, anyhow, a mouse-coloured 
form on legs as slender, and as strong, as steel 
