them, and I was aware at once of an atmosphere of commotion in the house. I arrived breathless and hatless, wet to the skin, my hands scratched and my boots caked with mud. 

 "We made sure you were lost, sir," I heard the old butler say, and I heard my own reply, faintly, like the voice of someone else: 

 "I thought so too." 

 A minute later I found myself in the study, with the old folk-lorist standing opposite. In his hands he held the book I had brought down for him in my bag, ready addressed. There was a curious smile on his face. 

 "It never occurred to me that you would dare to walk—to-night of all nights," he was saying. 

 I stared without a word. I was bursting with the desire to tell him something of what had happened and try to be patient with his explanations, but when I sought for words and sentences my story seemed suddenly flat and pointless, and the details of my adventure began to evaporate and melt away, and seemed hard to remember. 

 "I had an exciting walk," I stammered, still a little breathless from running. "The weather was all right when I started from the station." 

 "The weather is all right still," he said, "though you may have found some evening mist on the top of the hills. But it's not that I meant." 

 "What then?" 

 "I meant," he said, still laughing quizzically, "that you were a very brave man to walk to-night over the enchanted hills, because this is May Day eve, and on May Day eve, you know, They have power over the minds of men, and can put glamour upon the imagination——" 

 "Who—'they?' What do you mean?" 

 He put my book down on the table beside him and looked quietly for a moment into my eyes, and as he did so the memory of my adventure began to revive in detail, and I thought quickly of the shadowy man who had shown me the way first. What could it have been in the face of the old folk-lorist that made me think of this man? A dozen things ran like flashes through my excited mind, and while I attempted to seize them I heard the old man's voice continue. He seemed to be talking to himself as much as to me. 

 "The elemental beings you have always scoffed at, of course; they who operate ceaselessly behind the screen of appearances, and who fashion and mould the moods of the mind. And an 

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