Since the morning stars sang together, absolute silence has not visited
the uneasy earth. In this Silent Isle the ears--


"Set to small measure, deaf to all the beats
Of the large music rolling o'er the world"--


become almost supernaturally alert, catching the faintest sound.
Kinglake, who heard in the Syrian desert while dozing on his camel and
for ten minutes after awakening "the innocent bells of Marlen,"
attributed the phenomenon to the heat of the sun, the perfect dryness,
the deep stillness, "having rendered the ears liable to tingle under the
passing touch of some mere memory that may have swept across my brain in
a moment of sleep." Homesick sailors, too, lost in the profound stillness
of mid-ocean, have listened with fearful wonder to the phantom chiming of
their village bells.

Apart from the tricks which memory plays upon the solitary individual,
inviting him by scents and sounds to scenes of the past, I find that the
moist unadulterated atmosphere is a most compliant medium for the
transmission of certain sorts of sound waves. The actual surface of the
sea--differing from its resonant bulk--seems to sap up, rather than
convey sounds, though on given planes above its level sounds travel
unimpeded for remarkable distances. The resonance of the atmosphere
appears at times to be dependent on the tone and quality rather than on
the abruptness and loudness of the sound. I have listened with strange
delight to the rustle of the sea on the mainland beach--two and a half
miles distant--when the air has been so idle that the sensitive
casuarinas--ever haunted by some secret woe upon which to moan and