To-night the garden was delicious. The sky was covered with a film of cloud which diffused the light of the moon (in her first quarter) all over the heavens into a soft and radiant blue. She hung just above the greatest of that row of elms which burdens the western sky line. A high branch touched her. The big trees loomed imminent, rather terrible. The great one seemed to crouch there, huge, devilish. In two clear places among its branches there seemed the long slit eyes in the head of a bushy and shapeless demon. It must have been the immense and contrasting peace of the night that put this gruesome idea into my head. The elm-fiend was to the rest of my circumstances like that abominable anticipation of trouble which so often does its best to kill complete happiness. Low among the arms of the smaller, thinner elms to the south, lightning flickered, just above the down. The stars shone very faint, largely luminous. A sigh of breeze stirred rarely. Sounds are never absent in the
22
