Then I kept my own counsel, and decided that there were Little People living in the streams, just as I had always liked to picture them living in the flowers and under the mushrooms. And the music I heard was the Little People singing, and ringing all the harebells and foxglove bells that grow along the banks of the brooks.
I concluded that no one had ever heard them but myself. But, to my surprise, one day I found that others did know about these Little People!
I was reading “The Forest,” by Stewart E. White, where he describes his impressions and experiences as he lay awake at night in a tent on the banks of a Canadian river, when I came upon the following, that in many points coincides with my own sensations:—
“In such circumstances you will hear what the boatmen call the voices of the rapids. Many people never hear them at all. They speak very soft and low, and distinct, beneath the steady roar and dashing, beneath even the lesser tinklings and gurglings whose quality superimposes them over the louder sounds. In the stillness of your hazy half-consciousness they speak; when you bend your attention to listen, they are gone, and only the tumults and the tinklings remain.
“But in the moments of their audibility they are very distinct. Just as often an odour will awake all a vanished memory, so these voices, by the force of a large impressionism, suggest whole scenes. Far off are the cling-clang-cling of chimes and the swell-and-fall murmur of a multitude en fête, so that subtly you feel the gray old town, with its walls, the crowded market-place, the decent peasant crowd, the booths, the mellow church building with its bells, the warm, dust-moted sun. Or, in the pauses between the swish-dash-dashings of the waters, sound faint and clear voices singing intermittently, calls, distant notes of laughter, as though many canoes were working against the current; only the flotilla never gets any nearer, nor the voices louder. The boatmen call these mist people the Huntsmen, and look frightened. . . . Curiously enough, by all reports, they suggest always peacefulness—a harvest field, a street fair, a Sunday morning in a cathedral town, careless travellers—never the turmoils and struggles. Perhaps this is the great Mother’s compensation in a harsh mode of life.
“Nothing is more fantastically unreal to tell about, nothing more concretely real to experience, than this undernote of the quick water. And when you do lie awake at night, it is always making its unobtrusive appeal. Gradually its hypnotic spell works. The distant chimes ring louder and nearer as you cross the borderland of sleep. And then outside the tent some little woods noise snaps the thread. An owl hoots, a whippoorwill cries, a twig cracks beneath the cautious prowl of some night creature—at once the yellow sunlit French windows puff away—you are staring at the blurred image of the moon spraying through the texture of your tent.”
Since reading this, I have spoken of the matter to others with more courage; and although the majority do not seem to have come across them, I have discovered several people who have heard the Little People singing.
Some, indeed, have been kind enough to attempt to give me a lucid explanation of what they are pleased to call a very simple natural phenomenon, and they prattle of enharmonics and sound vibrations, of nodes and super-tones, in a very impressive manner. One tells me the whole thing is merely a psychological emotion vibrating in sympathy with the acoustical environment.
I dare say.