Other of the farmers’ wives shared her air of awe—of mystery—as if the air held something untellable—but, for them, not quite unfamiliar.
The fascination grew upon their faces as the silvery murmuration became a wild, sweet, wandering organ-note—a faint piping, as of elfin singing, trembling off into inaudibility over spell-bound heads—while rough hands clutched at the air, as if, could they but reach up high enough, they could bring it back again.
“Gosh! I’m bewiddied—I am,” gasped the farmer, beginning to think that, possibly, his wife had more insight than he had.
Upon his bewilderment broke a laugh—elfin in its mischief, but human.
Forth from the background of trees danced a girl—a girl arrayed as a bluebell—a mountain harebell.
She carried a rather heavy box which she set down behind the footlights—among the quivering Wild Flowers. She pressed a button. The stage—all the open-air theatre for a couple of hundred feet around—became a reverberating sea shell. Another! All the elves in Christendom were piping!
“Behold,” cried Pemrose Lorry, “the source of the elfin music; a simple arrangement of tuning forks, magnets and a battery!... There, Unie, isn’t that what you heard, last night?”
“It sounds like it,” admitted Una doubtfully, her pulses galloping, beginning to gallop, as she thought of the Lenox garden at home.
“Weird enough in the gloaming—eh?” laughed a youth who knelt by Pemrose, flourishing his hands as if he were pulling the joy-stick in his plane. “Oh! we’re proud of our fairy music, pipes of Pan—anything you like to call it—we had a great time rigging them up, after I got back with the stuff. You see the forks—there are two pairs here, one low-pitched, the other high and shrill—are not in tune, not quite of the same pitch, each pair, so that when that pair is set vibrating, the magnet between them carrying the sound, it—it makes a wave with a hump in it,” gleefully, “that hollow sea shell crooning—elfin ringing.”
“But how—how did you hit it off, clever children?” The Guardian was flatly gasping.