him, "I bet a button that if I fling a pebble on to that bush it will
stay on it," meaning that the bush was so matted the pebble would not
be able to go through it. So he took up "a pebble of cow-dung, and as
soon as it hit the bush there came out of it the most beautiful music
that ever was heard." They ran away, and when they had gone about two
hundred yards they looked back and saw a woman dressed in white,
walking round and round the bush. "First it had the form of a woman,
and then of a man, and it was going round the bush."


II

I often entangle myself in argument more complicated than even those
paths of Inchy as to what is the true nature of apparitions, but at
other times I say as Socrates said when they told him a learned opinion
about a nymph of the Illissus, "The common opinion is enough for me." I
believe when I am in the mood that all nature is full of people whom we
cannot see, and that some of these are ugly or grotesque, and some
wicked or foolish, but very many beautiful beyond any one we have ever
seen, and that these are not far away when we are walking in pleasant
and quiet places. Even when I was a boy I could never walk in a wood
without feeling that at any moment I might find before me somebody or
something I had long looked for without knowing what I looked for. And
now I will at times explore every little nook of some poor coppice with
almost anxious footsteps, so deep a hold has this imagination upon me.
You too meet with a like imagination, doubtless, somewhere, wherever
your ruling stars will have it, Saturn driving you to the woods, or the
Moon, it may be, to the edges of the sea. I will not of a certainty
believe that there is nothing in the sunset, where our forefathers
imagined the dead following their shepherd the sun, or nothing but some