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 
