It might reasonably have been supposed that she was listening to the
wind, which rose somewhat as the night advanced, and laid hold of the
attention. The wind, indeed, seemed made for the scene, as the scene
seemed made for the hour. Part of its tone was quite special; what was
heard there could be heard nowhere else. Gusts in innumerable series
followed each other from the northwest, and when each one of them raced
past the sound of its progress resolved into three. Treble, tenor, and
bass notes were to be found therein. The general ricochet of the whole
over pits and prominences had the gravest pitch of the chime. Next there
could be heard the baritone buzz of a holly tree. Below these in force,
above them in pitch, a dwindled voice strove hard at a husky tune, which
was the peculiar local sound alluded to. Thinner and less immediately
traceable than the other two, it was far more impressive than either. In
it lay what may be called the linguistic peculiarity of the heath; and
being audible nowhere on earth off a heath, it afforded a shadow of
reason for the woman's tenseness, which continued as unbroken as ever.

Throughout the blowing of these plaintive November winds that note
bore a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remain to the
throat of fourscore and ten. It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, and
it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the
material minutiae in which it originated could be realized as by touch.
It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these
were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades, prickles, lichen, nor moss.

They were the mummied heathbells of the past summer, originally tender
and purple, now washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and dried to dead
skins by October suns. So low was an individual sound from these that a
combination of hundreds only just emerged from silence, and the myriads
of the whole declivity reached the woman's ear but as a shrivelled and