226 A GARDEN DIARY 
AucusTt 18, 1900 
TANDING, 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 
