“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.