NATURE'S DREAMS 
237 
carefully over field and stream. Could a weird nightly 
visitor have careened on a broom over the distant 
pines and across the field in the moonlight, pausing 
to rest on the smooth rounding bank i A running 
stream is an impassable barrier, and there the witch 
may have paused to breathe out maledictions at the 
fate that balked her evil designs. A short distance 
away there is another hole in the smooth snow, and 
now that the eye has begun an unconscious search 
several more are discovered. Did the moon look down 
on an unhallowed orgy of the terrible sisterhood, 
arrested in their fell purpose by the mystic power of 
the moving water under the snow i There is the 
mark of their trailing garments. But the lines are 
drawn in concentric circles with mathematical 
accuracy, showing, perhaps, a cabalistic warning to 
the unfortunate wayfarer who might wander, how- 
ever innocently, over snow made baneful by their 
machinations and the exhaled wickedness of their 
sacrilegious rites. A mind in intellectual twilight, 
filled with the strange fears that linger like mists on 
the dawn of supernatural thought, could find in the 
snow-covered field the premonitions of evil and the 
signs of a vague and terrifying life, peopling earth 
and air with its fantastic and distorted forms. Stimu- 
lated by fear, it must have been easy and natural to 
account for every trifling circumstance of unusual 
aspect or momentary mystery by fancying the sur- 
