Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic Tales Vol 2

By Algernon Blackwood

Selected from the entire body of Algernon Blackwood's work, this collection of short stories contains his finest writing. Published in a total of five volumes, Volume 2 contains eight stories including The Willows, The Wendigo, The Doll, and The Trod. Blackwood’s ability to create and sustain an atmosphere of unrelieved horror is witnessed in ‘The Willows’, a starkly terrifying tale of another dimension impinging on our own. Mysticism and cosmic experiences feature, as well as the more traditional elements of the horror story. Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic Tales reveals why Blackwood is celebrated as the twentieth century's foremost British writer of supernatural fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: House of Stratus
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780755156092

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) was an English journalist, novelist, and short story writer. Born in Shooter’s Hill, he developed an interest in Hinduism and Buddhism at a young age. After a youth spent travelling and taking odd jobs—Canadian dairy farmer, bartender, model, violin teacher—Blackwood returned to England and embarked on a career as a professional writer. Known for his connection to the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Blackwood gained a reputation as a master of occult storytelling, publishing such popular horror stories as “The Willows” and “The Wendigo.” He also wrote several novels, including Jimbo: A Fantasy (1909) and The Centaur (1911). Throughout his life, Blackwood was a passionate outdoorsman, spending much of his time skiing and mountain climbing. Recognized as a pioneering writer of ghost stories, Blackwood influenced such figures as J. R. R. Tolkien, H. P. Lovecraft, and Henry Miller.

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Copyright & Information

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic Tales

Volume 2

© Algernon Blackwood; House of Stratus 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

The right of Algernon Blackwood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

This edition published in 2017 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

Typeset by House of Stratus.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author's imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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About the Author

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) was born into a well-to-do Kentish family. His parents, converts to a Calvinistic sect, led an austere life, ill-suited to their dreamy and sensitive son. During adolescence, he became fascinated by hypnotism and the supernatural and, on leaving university, studied Hindu philosophy and occultism. Later, he was to draw on these beliefs and experiences in his writing.

Sent away to Canada at the age of twenty, his attempts at making a living were wholly unsuccessful and shortly after his return to England, he began to write. The Empty House and Other Ghost Stories, published in 1906, was followed by a series of psychic detective stories, featuring John Silence, 'physician extraordinary'. His reputation as one of the greatest exponents of supernatural fiction began to grow.

Chiefly known for his ghost stories, Blackwood wrote in many different forms within the genre. His most personal works, however, are his 'mystical' novels, for example The Centaur, where he explores man's empathy with the forces of the universe.

Blackwood also wrote children's fiction. A Prisoner in Fairyland was adapted into the play (later the musical), Starlight Express.

Later in life, Blackwood turned to writing radio plays, and in 1947 he began a new career on BBC TV telling ghost stories. He received a knighthood in 1949.

The Works of Algernon Blackwood

Published by House of Stratus

Novels:

The Bright Messenger

The Centaur

The Education of Uncle Paul

The Extra day

The Human Chord

Julius LeVallon: An Episode

The Promise of Air

Children's Fiction:

A Prisoner in Fairyland

Collections:

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic tales Volume 1

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic tales Volume 2

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic tales Volume 3

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic tales Volume 4

Ghost, Supernatural & Mystic tales Volume 5

Note: No Stories are repeated in these volumes

Introduction

(To the previous Volume of The Best Ghost Stories of Algernon Blackwood)

The body, they assure us, changes its atoms every seven years or so, being therefore totally different at twenty-eight from what it was at twenty-one, but science does not commit itself with regard to mental changes, such changes being doubtless incommensurable. At any rate, Mr Martin Secker's request for an introduction to this collection faces me with a question: Am I the man who wrote these tales some thirty years ago, or am I someone else? This considerable period of time is involved, but as I cannot step back to the platform from which I viewed the world in 1906, the question finds no answer. Neither Dunne's Serial Universe, nor Ouspensky's other-dimensional time, nor even a book like Forrest Reid's Uncle Stephen, can help, while the recent exposé of the Versailles Adventure suggests brutally that thirty or one hundred years are precisely what they say they are, no more, no less. Moreover, a polite request from an intelligent publisher being in the nature of force majeure, if not an Act of God, this Introduction, whoever writes it, must be written.

It is, none the less, a dour job, for I have not read these stories since I first wrote them; physically, mentally, spiritually I must have changed more times than I care to remember; they introduce me to someone I now know but slightly, so that it is almost like reading the work of another man. Any desire to cut, to alter, entirely to re-compose is, of course, inadmissible; tinkering is worse than useless, it is dangerous; the tales stand, therefore, as they were first set down. Far from apologising for them, however, I must admit that most of them thrilled me. I wish I had known the fellow who saw things in this way and thus expressed himself is the kind of comment my twentieth-century mind suggests, since behind the actual tale I discern hints of an adventurous philosophy. I wonder whether his queer, observant, questioning mind travelled further! But what I myself honestly think of the stories today not even Torquemada could extract from me.

It is, of course, extremely interesting to look back across the years questioningly, wonderingly, objectively, without detachment, though seeing objectively does not necessarily imply seeing truthfully. It ought to imply seeing with self eliminated, yet self obstinately intrudes, whether it be the self of today or the self of 1906. I recall, anyhow, that these tales poured from me spontaneously, as though a tap were turned on, and I have often since leaned to the suggestion that many of them derived from buried, unresolved shocks – shocks to the emotions; and by unresolved, I mean, of course, unexpressed. These shocks had come to an exceptionally ignorant youth of twenty who had drifted into the life of a newspaper reporter in New York after a disastrous cattle farm and a hotel in Canada, and the drifting had included the stress of extreme poverty and starvation. Having told some of this in Adventures Before Thirty, I must not repeat, but it holds this psychological interest for me today: that the New York experiences in a world of crime and vice had bruised and bludgeoned a sensitive nature that swallowed the horrors without being able to digest them, and that the seeds thus sown, dormant and unresolved in the subconscious, possibly emerged later – and, since the subconscious always dramatises, emerged in story form.

Others are, of course, ghost stories, so called, for the classification of ghost stories has stuck to me closer than a brother, and even when the BBC ask for a story it must be, preferably, of the creepy kind. Yet this alleged interest in ghosts I should more accurately define as an interest in the Extension of Human Faculty. To be known as the ghost man is almost a derogatory classification, and here at last I may perhaps refute it. My interest in psychic matters has always been the interest in questions of extended or expanded consciousness. If a ghost is seen, what is it interests me less than what sees it? Do we possess faculties which, under exceptional stimulus, register beyond the normal gamut of seeing, hearing, feeling? That such faculties may exist in the human being and occasionally manifest is where my interest has always lain. Such exceptional stimulus may be pathogenic (as duplicated in the Salpetrière and other mental hospitals), or due to some dynamic flash of terror or beauty which strikes a Man in the Street, but that they occur is beyond the denials today of the petty sceptic. If this is more certain to me now than it was when I wrote these tales a generation ago means merely that I have since studied more of the increasingly voluminous evidence. Thus in most of these stories there is usually an average man who, either through a flash of terror or of beauty, becomes stimulated into extra-sensory experience. A wide gap may lie between a common-place mind that became clairvoyant and clairaudient from a flash of terror in The Empty House, to the Man in the Street in The Centaur whose sense of beauty blazed into a realisation of the planetary bodies as superhuman entities, but the principle is the same: both experienced an expansion of normal consciousness. And this, I submit, travels a little further than the manufacture of the homespun ghost-story.

These early stories, though I did not know it at the time, seem to me now to have been practice-flights for more adventurous explorations, or, as Eveleigh Nash, my first publisher, phrased it, trying your hand on a larger canvas. That idea of a larger canvas scarified me at the age of thirty-six, but seeing my first book in print, I remember, scarified me even more. It is an experience that must surely intensify any hint of inferiority complex that lies hidden. I well recall my intense relief that The Empty House, my first book, enjoyed, if that be the word, a gentle, negligible press until the Spectator of that day, half to my distress, half to my delight, chose it as a verse for a special sermon, and, later, a scholarly article in the Morning Post, analysing the ghost-story as a peculiarly Anglo-Saxon form, based its remarks on this particular book and became traceable to Hilaire Belloc, to whose subsequent encouragement I owe much.

What I may call left-handed compliments, at any rate, flew wildly across a barrage of faithful criticism, and I remember that, while accepting the blame as deserved, I cuddled the compliments, deciding therefore to try again – so that The Listener in due course appeared. And, such are the tricks of memory, I can still see the grave expression on the faces of Eveleigh Nash and his gifted reader, Maude ffoulkes, while we discussed together whether a large Ear might be printed on the cover (picture-jackets had not yet come in), and whether the title story was not perhaps of too pathogenic a character to be included, my own vote being in the decided negative despite the personal origin of that horrible tale.

It is, at any rate, true that to this persuasive suggestion of trying a larger canvas I owed a later Centaur, Julius Le Vallon, The Human Chord, The Education of Uncle Paul, and many others. Thus, I both blame and bless Eveleigh Nash for a stimulating hint which, if its results have afflicted others, provided relief to an author who found himself more overcharged with material than probably his talent was competent to express adequately.

The origin of some of these stories may be of interest to a reader here or there: this not only sounds egotistical, but is: it interests me, as I look back to revive old memories…of a journey down the Danube in a Canadian canoe, and how my friend and I camped on one of the countless lonely islands below Pressburg (Bratislava) and the willows seemed to suffocate us in spite of the gale blowing, and how a year or two later, making the same trip in a barge, we found a dead body caught by a root, its decayed mass dangling against the sandy shore of the very same island my story describes. A coincidence, of course! Of that unfurnished haunted house in a Brighton Square where I sat up to see a ghost with a woman beside me whose rather wrinkled face suddenly blanched smooth as the face of a child, frightening me far more than the ghost I never actually saw; of the Moravian School in the Black Forest (Königsfeld), where as a boy I spent two haunted years and revisited later to find a compensating Devil Worship in full swing and called Secret Worship; of the island in the Baltic where the Were-wold Legend materialised as The Camp of the Dog, yet whereof our happy party of six campers remained ignorant until they read my tale; above all, of that old French town of Ancient Sorceries, where the slinking inhabitants behaved as cats behave, sidling along the pavements with slanting gestures, twitching their sleeky ears and snakey tails, their sharp eyes glinting, all alert and concentrated upon some hidden, secret life of their own while they feigned attention to tourists like ourselves – ourselves just back from climbing in the Dolomites and finding the train so boring on its way from Basle to Boulogne that we hopped out at Laon and spent two days in this witch-ridden atmosphere. The Auberge de la Hure was the name of the Inn, and it was not Angoulème, as some fancied, nor Coutances as John Gibbons thought (I Wanted to Travel), nor elsewhere as variously attributed, but Laon, a lovely old haunted town where the Cathedral towers stand up against the sunset like cats' ears, the paws running down the dusky streets, the feline body crouched just below the hill. Yet who should guess that so much magic lay within a kilometre of its dull, desolate railway station, or that from my little bedroom window I should presently stand enthralled as I looked across the moonlit tiles and towers, jotting down on the backs of envelopes an experience that kept sleep away till dawn? Then the awful Wendigo comes shouldering up over a hill of memory, a name I remembered vividly in Hiawatha (Wendigos and giants runs the line), yet hardly thought of again till a friend, just back from Labrador, told me honest tales about mysterious evacuations of a whole family from a lonely valley because the Wendigo had come blundering in and scared them stiff; of the Haunted island, an island I lived on for an autumn month alone in the Muskoka Lakes north of Toronto, where Red Indians flit to and from when the summer visitors have left; and of a dreadful house I once lived in (New York City) where unaccountable noises, voices, slitherings at night and so forth seemed a commonplace setting for the Eavesdropping re-enactment of a gruesome murder of twenty years before…

Memories, indeed, of where each story was written are clearer to me today than the conduct and details of the plots themselves, but clearer still is the vivid recollection that in each case an emotion of a very possessive kind produced each tale. To write a ghost story I must first feel ghostly, a condition not to be artificially induced; and there was a touch of goose-flesh down my back as I watched my Wendigo in a mountain inn above Champery and heard the November night-winds crashing among the pine-forests beyond the window; shivers down the spine, too, as the horror of that Willows island crept over the imagination. I think, indeed, the majority of these tales were accompanied at birth by what may be called a delicious shudder. The true other-worldly story should issue from that core of superstition which lies in every mother's son of us, and we are still close enough to primitive days with their terror of the dark for Reason to abdicate without too violent resistance.

There has, however, been one striking change in knowledge since the generation when these tales were written – matter has been wiped out of existence. Atoms are no longer minute billiard-balls but charges of negative electricity, and these charges, according to Eddington, Jeans and Whitehead, are themselves but symbols. What these symbols stand for ultimately Science admittedly does not know. Physics remains silent. Jeans speaks of a world of shadows. Phenomena, Professor Joad reminds us, may be merely symbols of a Reality which underlies them. The Reality, for all we know to the contrary, may be of an entirely different order from the events which symbolise it. It may be even mental or spiritual. The Universe, thus, seems to be an appearance merely, our old friend Maya, or Illusion, of the Hindus. Possibly, therefore, Reason might today encounter less need for abdicating than thirty years ago, and the rapprochement between Modern Physics and so-called psychical and mystical phenomena must seem suggestive to any reflecting mind. All alike conduct their researches in a world of shadows among mere symbols of a Reality that may conceivably be mental or spiritual, but is at any rate unknown, if not unknowable.

Let me leave the stories to speak for themselves. They are printed here in the chronological sequence in which they were written between 1906 and 1950.

AB

Savile Club

1938

The Willows

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in colour as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sümpfe, meaning marshes.

In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty. These willows never attain to the dignity of trees; they have no rigid trunks; they remain humble bushes, with rounded tops and soft outline, swaying on slender stems that answer to the least pressure of the wind; supple as grasses, and so continually shifting that they somehow give the impression that the entire plain is moving and alive. For the wind sends waves rising and falling over the whole surface, waves of leaves instead of waves of water, green swells like the sea, too, until the branches turn and lift, and then silvery white as their underside turns to the sun.

Happy to slip beyond the control of the stern banks, the Danube here wanders about at will among the intricate network of channels intersecting the islands everywhere with broad avenues down which the waters pour with a shouting sound; making whirlpools, eddies, and foaming rapids; tearing at the sandy banks; carrying away masses of shore and willow-clumps; and forming new islands innumerable which shift daily in size and shape and possess at best an impermanent life, since the flood-time obliterates their very existence.

Properly speaking, this fascinating part of the river’s life begins soon after leaving Pressburg, and we, in our Canadian canoe, with gipsy tent and frying pan on board, reached it on the crest of a rising flood about mid-July. That very same morning, when the sky was reddening before sunrise, we had slipped swiftly through still-sleeping Vienna, leaving it a couple of hours later a mere patch of smoke against the blue hills of the Wienerwald on the horizon; we had breakfasted below Fischeramend under a grove of birch trees roaring in the wind; and had then swept on the tearing current past Orth, Hainburg, Petronell (the old Roman Carnuntum of Marcus Aurelius,) and so under the frowning heights of Theben on a spur of the Carpathians, where the March steals in quietly from the left and the frontier is crossed between Austria and Hungary.

Racing along at twelve kilometres an hour soon took us well into Hungary, and the muddy waters – sure sign of flood – sent us aground on many a shingle-bed, and twisted us like a cork in many a sudden belching whirlpool before the towers of Pressburg (Hungarian, Poszóny) showed against the sky; and then the canoe, leaping like a spirited horse, flew at top speed under the grey walls, negotiated safely the sunken chain of the Fliegende Brücke ferry, turned the corner sharply to the left, and plunged on yellow foam into the wilderness of islands, sandbanks, and swampland beyond – the land of the willows.

The change came suddenly, as when a series of bioscope pictures snaps down on the streets of a town and shifts without warning into the scenery of lake and forest. We entered the land of desolation on wings, and in less than half an hour there was neither boat nor fishing hut nor red roof, nor any single sign of human habitation and civilisation within sight. The sense of remoteness from the world of human kind, the utter isolation, the fascination of this singular world of willows, winds, and waters, instantly laid its spell upon us both, so that we allowed laughingly to one another that we ought by rights to have held some special kind of passport to admit us, and that we had, somewhat audaciously, come without asking leave into a separate little kingdom of wonder and magic – a kingdom that was reserved for the use of others who had a right to it, with everywhere unwritten warnings to trespassers for those who had the imagination to discover them.

Though still early in the afternoon, the ceaseless buffetings of a most tempestuous wind made us feel weary, and we at once began casting about for a suitable camping ground for the night. But the bewildering character of the islands made landing difficult; the swirling flood carried us in-shore and then swept us out again; the willow branches tore our hands as we seized them to stop the canoe, and we pulled many a yard of sandy bank into the water before at length we shot with a great sideways blow from the wind into a backwater and managed to beach the bows in a cloud of spray. Then we lay panting and laughing after our exertions on hot yellow sand, sheltered from the wind, and in the full blaze of a scorching sun, a cloudless blue sky above, and an immense army of dancing, shouting willow bushes, closing in from all sides, shining with spray and clapping their thousand little hands as though to applaud the success of our efforts.

What a river! I said to my companion, thinking of all the way we had travelled from the source in the Black Forest, and how he had often been obliged to wade and push in the upper shallows at the beginning of June.

Won’t stand much nonsense now, will it? he said, pulling the canoe a little farther into safety up the sand, and then composing himself for a nap.

I lay by his side, happy and peaceful in the bath of the elements – water, wind, sand, and the great fire of the sun – thinking of the long journey that lay behind us, and of the great stretch before us to the Black Sea, and how lucky I was to have such a delightful and charming travelling companion as my friend, the Swede.

We had made many similar journeys together, but the Danube, more than any other river I knew, impressed us from the very beginning with its aliveness. From its tiny bubbling entry into the world among the pinewood gardens of Donaueschingen, until this moment when it began to play the great river-game of losing itself among the deserted swamps, unobserved, unrestrained, it had seemed to us like following the growth of some living creature. Sleepy at first, but later developing violent desires as it became conscious of its deep soul, it rolled, like some huge fluid being, through all the countries we had passed, holding our little craft on its mighty shoulders, playing roughly with us sometimes, yet always friendly and well-meaning, till at length we had come inevitably to regard it as a Great Personage.

How, indeed, could it be otherwise, since it told us so much of its secret life? At night we heard it singing to the moon as we lay in our tent, uttering that odd sibilant note peculiar to itself and said to be caused by the rapid tearing of the pebbles along its bed, so great is its hurrying speed. We knew, too, the voice of its gurgling whirlpools, suddenly bubbling up on a surface previously quite calm; the roar of its shallows and swift rapids; its constant steady thundering below all mere surface sounds; and that ceaseless tearing of its icy waters at the banks. How it stood up and shouted when the rains fell flat upon its face! And how its laughter roared out when the wind blew upstream and tried to stop its growing speed! We knew all its sounds and voices, its tumblings and foamings, its unnecessary splashing against the bridges; that self-conscious chatter when there were hills to look on; the affected dignity of its speech when it passed through the little towns, far too important to laugh; and all these faint, sweet whisperings when the sun caught it fairly in some slow curve and poured down upon it till the steam rose.

It was full of tricks, too, in its early life before the great world knew it. There were places in the upper reaches among the Swabian forests, when yet the first whispers of its destiny had not reached it, where it elected to disappear through holes in the ground, to appear again on the other side of the porous limestone hills and start a new river with another name; leaving, too, so little water in its own bed that we had to climb out and wade and push the canoe through miles of shallows.

And a chief pleasure, in those early days of its irresponsible youth, was to lie low, like Brer Fox, just before the little turbulent tributaries came to join it from the Alps, and to refuse to acknowledge them when in, but to run for miles side by side, the dividing line well marked, the very levels different, the Danube utterly declining to recognise the newcomer. Below Passau, however, it gave up this particular trick, for there the Inn comes in with a thundering power impossible to ignore, and so pushes and incommodes the parent river that there is hardly room for them in the long twisting gorge that follows, and the Danube is shoved this way and that against the cliffs, and forced to hurry itself with great waves and much dashing to and fro in order to get through in time. And during the fight our canoe slipped down from its shoulder to its breast, and had the time of its life among the struggling waves. But the Inn taught the old river a lesson, and after Passau it no longer pretended to ignore new arrivals.

This was many days back, of course, and since then we had come to know other aspects of the great creature, and across the Bavarian wheat plain of Straubing she wandered so slowly under the blazing June sun that we could well imagine only the surface inches were water, while below there moved, concealed as by a silken mantle, a whole army of Undines, passing silently and unseen down to the sea, and very leisurely too, lest they be discovered.

Much, too, we forgave her because of her friendliness to the birds and animals that haunted the shores. Cormorants lined the banks in lonely places in rows like short black palings; grey crows crowded the shingle-beds; storks stood fishing in the vistas of shallower water that opened up between the islands, and hawks, swans, and marsh birds of all sorts filled the air with glinting wings and singing, petulant cries. It was impossible to feel annoyed with the river’s vagaries after seeing a deer leap with a splash into the water at sunrise and swim past the bows of the canoe; and often we saw fawns peering at us from the underbrush, or looked straight into the brown eyes of a stag as we charged full tilt round a corner and entered another reach of the river. Foxes, too, everywhere haunted the banks, tripping daintily among the driftwood and disappearing so suddenly that it was impossible to see how they managed it.

But now, after leaving Pressburg, everything changed a little, and the Danube became more serious. It ceased trifling. It was half-way to the Black Sea, within scenting distance almost of other, stranger countries where no tricks would be permitted or understood. It became suddenly grown-up, and claimed our respect and even our awe. It broke out into three arms, for one thing, that only met again a hundred kilometres farther down, and for a canoe there were no indications which one was intended to be followed.

If you take a side channel, said the Hungarian officer we met in the Pressburg shop while buying provisions, you may find yourselves, when the flood subsides, forty miles from anywhere, high and dry, and you may easily starve. There are no people, no farms, no fishermen. I warn you not to continue. The river, too, is still rising, and this wind will increase.

The rising river did not alarm us in the least, but the matter of being left high and dry by a sudden subsidence of the waters might be serious, and we had consequently laid in an extra stock of provisions. For the rest, the officer’s prophecy held true, and the wind, blowing down a perfectly clear sky, increased steadily till it reached the dignity of a westerly gale.

It was earlier than usual when we camped, for the sun was a good hour or two from the horizon, and leaving my friend still asleep on the hot sand, I wandered about in desultory examination of our hotel. The island, I found, was less than an acre in extent, a mere sandy bank standing some two or three feet above the level of the river. The far end, pointing into the sunset, was covered with flying spray which the tremendous wind drove off the crests of the broken waves. It was triangular in shape, with the apex up stream.

I stood there for several minutes, watching the impetuous crimson flood bearing down with a shouting roar, dashing in waves against the bank as though to sweep it bodily away, and then swirling by in two foaming streams on either side. The ground seemed to shake with the shock and rush, while the furious movement of the willow bushes as the wind poured over them increased the curious illusion that the island itself actually moved. Above, for a mile or two, I could see the great river descending upon me: it was like looking up the slope of a sliding hill, white with foam, and leaping up everywhere to show itself to the sun.

The rest of the island was too thickly grown with willows to make walking pleasant, but I made the tour, nevertheless. From the lower end the light, of course, changed, and the river looked dark and angry. Only the backs of the flying waves were visible, streaked with foam, and pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows, which closed about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves. They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there together in such overpowering numbers.

Altogether it was an impressive scene, with its utter loneliness, its bizarre suggestion; and as I gazed, long and curiously, a singular emotion began to stir somewhere in the depths of me. Midway in my delight of the wild beauty, there crept, unbidden and unexplained, a curious feeling of disquietude, almost of alarm.

A rising river, perhaps, always suggests something of the ominous: many of the little islands I saw before me would probably have been swept away by the morning; this resistless, thundering flood of water touched the sense of awe. Yet I was aware that my uneasiness lay deeper far than the emotions of awe and wonder. It was not that I felt. Nor had