Coming out into the darkness, and hearing this mighty rushing note high overhead, you get a queer sense of underhand activity and concealed purpose in the world, as though scenery were being swiftly changed, a new piece hurriedly staged, under cover of the blinked lights. It tends towards a feeling that is rather foreign, not to say humbling, to your desires—that of being made a spectator rather than a participant in the great earth play. Or it may have another and a stranger effect. The sound of all that strenuous motion, the deep travel-note high in the darkness, may come to you with all the urging inspiration of a summons: you may restrain only with difficulty, and much assembling of prudence, the impulse to gird up and be off southward in the track of the flying host. The old nomadic instinct is not dead in humanity, as he well knows who keeps his feet to the green places of earth, and his heart tiding with the sun.
Now, too, the brown owl begins his hollow plaint in the woodlands. ‘Woo-hoo-hoo, woohoo!’ comes to you through the fast-falling dusk, the direction and intensity of the cry varying with astonishing swiftness, as you stop to listen on your homeward way. This is conceivably the ‘to-whoo’ that Shakespeare heard; and there is another note, which seems to be an answer to it, and which sounds something like ‘Ker-wick,’ and might by a stretch be allowed to stand for the ‘to-whit’ in the song. But ‘to-whit, to-whoo!’ in a single phrase, from a single throat—that seems to be a piece of owl language that has become obsolete with the centuries.
There is a stretch of lane here, running between high grassy banks densely overshadowed by trees, which is always dark on the clearest nights of any season, but of a Cimmerian blackness on these moonless evenings in late October. As if they knew their opportunity for service, the glowworms often light up the place from end to end, so that it is possible, steering by their tiny lamps alone, to keep out of the ditch that yawns invisibly on either hand. I came through the lane this evening, and counted near upon a score of these vague blotches of greenish radiance hovering amidst the dew soaked grass, each bright enough to show the time by a watch held near. As long as I can remember, glowworms have been plentiful in this stretch of dark, overshadowed lane, and very scarce in all other quarters of the village. New colonies of glowworms seem difficult to establish, although single lights do appear in places where they have not been seen before, and in ensuing year appear again and again, generally in slowly increasing numbers. It is not wonderful that glowworms should keep to the same grassy bank season after season, because, as all countrymen know, it is only the lampless male that flies. The female, who bears the light, and on whom the persistence of the race depends, lives and dies probably within no more than the same few square yards of tangled herbage. What seems really wonderful is that single glowworms of the female sex should occur in places far removed from old resorts of their kind, seeing how feeble are their means, and how slow their rate of travel.