sounds of rustling branches or crackling twigs. Somebody of life approaches with stealthy tread. Gentlier, even gentlier, my steersman! Take up no pearly drop from the lake, mother of pearliness, lest falling it sound too loudly. Somewhat comes. Let it come unterrified to our ambush among the shadows by the shore.
Somewhat, something, somebody was coming, perhaps, but some other thing or body thwarted it and it came not. To glide over glassiness while uneventful moments link themselves into hours is monotonous. Night and stillness laid their soothing spell upon me. I was entranced. I lost myself out of time and space, and seemed to be floating unimpelled and purposeless, nowhere in Forever.
Somewhere in Now I suddenly found myself.
There he was! There was the moose trampling and snorting hard by, in the shallows of Ripogenus, trampling out of being the whole nadir of stars, making the world conscious of its lost silence by the death of silence in tumult.
I trembled with sudden eagerness. I seized my gun. In another instant I should have lodged the fatal pellet! when a voice whispered over my shoulder, — “I kinder guess yer’ve ben asleep an’ dreamin’, ha’n’t yer?”
So I had.
Never a moose came down to cool his clumsy snout in the water and swallow reflections of stars. Never a moose abandoned dry-browse in the bitter woods for succulent lily-pads, full in their cells and
