not my senses. I did not see them but I felt them. I knew not what they said or sang, but had always the general sense of their thronging neighbourhood.

[19]

[20]

[1] And me also when I was enabled at a later day to perceive them. I am thankful to remember and record for my own comfort that that day came not too late for my enchantment to overtake his and proceed in company.

[1]

I enlarge upon this because I think it justifies me in adding that, observing so little, what I did observe with my bodily eyes must almost certainly have been observable. But now let the reader judge.

The first time I ever saw a creature which was really outside ordinary experience was in the late autumn of my twelfth year. My brother, next in age to me, was nine, my eldest sister eight. We three had been out walking with our mother, and were now returning at dusk to our tea through a wood which covered the top of a chalk down. I remember vividly the scene. The carpet of drenched leaves under bare branches, the thin spear-like shafts of the underwood, the grey lights between, the pale frosty sky overhead with the sickle moon low down in it. I remember, too, various sensations,[21] such as the sudden chill which affected me as the crimson globe of the sun disappeared; and again how, when we emerged from the wood, I was enheartened by the sight of the village shrouded under chimney smoke and by the one or two twinkling lights dotted here and there about the dim wolds.

[21]

In the wood it was already twilight and very damp. Perhaps I had been tired, more likely bored—as I always was when I was not being somebody else. I remember that I had found the path interminable. I had been silent, as I mostly was, while the other two had chattered and played about our mother; and when presently I stayed behind for a purpose I remember that I made no effort to catch them up. I knew the way perfectly, of course, and had no fear of the dark. Oddly enough I had no fear of that. I was far less imaginative in the night than in the day. Besides that, by the time I was ready to go after them I had much else to think of.

I must have been looking at him for some time before I made out that he was there. So you may peer into a thicket a hundred times and see nothing, and then a trick of the light 

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