I got tired at last and sat down.
I had been pensive when I started, I was now perplexed. No wonder, for night was coming on. Stars were glinting out in the east, a big brown owl flew close over me, with a most melancholy shriek of “tu-whit-tu-whoo-oo,” that made my blood feel cold.
I was lost!
Yes, but what had I to fear? I thought I had been lost before, lost in Afric wilds, on prairie lands, and in Greenland mists: was I going to be baffled by a Highland forest and moorland?
“Tu-whit-tu-whoo-oo!”
A sweet spirit of melancholy is very nice, but one may have too much of it.
“Tu-whit-tu-whoo-oo!”
Bother the bird. His wings too are flapping on the night air, and rustling as they say evil spirits do.
The trees grow more uncanny-looking every minute, and after going on and on for fully twenty minutes more, these ghostly ill-omened pines positively seem to advance to meet me, and wave their gnarled arms in the starlit air as I pass.