  Have you ever heard the Little People of the Streams singing in the night? I wonder! Once you have heard their music you will never forget it! The first time I heard it was one February—shortly after I had taken the cottage—the season above all others when the brooks and falls and mountain springs are over-full of water, that hurries along at a great pace, tumbling over rocks, dropping down into green wells and grottos below, always galloping down hill till finally it reaches the ever-rushing river in the valley. By day, each brook seems merely to be chatting sociably to the banks and the long harts-tongue ferns as it passes down, and you only hear one at a time. But after dark, when most other sounds have ceased, the voices of the streams seem to grow marvellously in volume. I was lying awake one night with the windows open, listening literally to the sound of many waters, and trying to disentangle them. First I heard the spring outside my garden gate as it scrambled down from the hillside above, Soon I could distinguish a second brook, that serves a cottage a quarter of a mile further along the lane, before it winds about and enters my lower orchard. This had overflowed in the orchard, and was having quite a gay time, running skittishly out of the orchard gate and into another lane, instead of pursuing its proper course. Next I was able to detach the conversation of the small waterfall that drops about a hundred feet from an overhanging ledge of rock into a green cave under the hill, where mosses of wonderful size abound, and yellow flags stand guard at the entrance, with creeping jenny and forget-me-nots just outside. The sound always seems to increase as you listen, and soon I detected the noise of the river as it tears over successive weirs. If the tide is low it is often a roar when you stand on the river bank beside a weir; but up here on the heights the noise is softened to a purling sound, that runs like a never-ceasing ground-bass or pedal note Other and more distant murmurings floated in at the window; but one could never allocate them all, for, excepting in the hottest weather, this is in truth “a good land, a land of brooks of water, of fountains and depths that spring out of valleys and hills.” I was thinking of this, when suddenly the babbling of the water was drowned in the sound of wonderful bells that rose upon the night air. It was not from our village church; that possesses only one bell, whose sound, unfortunately, resembles nothing so much as a cracked iron shovel struck with a pair of tongs: and there is no other bell for miles around. And yet there was no mistaking it. I could distinctly hear the joyous clashing and clanging of bells in a tall steeple. It was no brazen banging; rather, some fairy music, like the carillon at Malines (which I am proud to remember I once played, though, alas! I shall never play it again). I listened in amazement; soon was added the sound of voices, like subdued distant singing in some vast cathedral, while the bells still clashed outside. Yet it was never close at hand; it always seemed to float to me from a distance. I was sure I was not asleep, for I knew where I was, and decided to get up and go to the Like a sensible person, I of course decided that I had been dreaming. Yet again and again have I heard the clanging bells, with often the sound of an organ and singing wafted through the open window. It always comes when the streams are most impetuous and when I am in that lotus-flowering land that lies between awakeness and sleep. The music is always enthrallingly happy, and my only regret is that the bells and the singers do not come a trifle nearer, so that I could catch every note and jot it all down for future reference. I related my experiences to one or two people; but this was all the information they seemed able to give me: “If I were you, I should run down to Margate for a week or so, and leave all work behind. Go to a nice bright boarding-house, where there are lots of people, and enjoy yourself; and forget about that wretched cottage. You’ve been overdoing it lately. I had another friend just like you—got a little peculiar, you know, and then—well, I won’t tell you any more; don’t want to make you nervous, of course, but—her mother Then I kept my own counsel, and decided that there were Little People living in the streams, just as I had always liked to picture them living in the flowers and under the mushrooms. And the music I heard was the Little People singing, and ringing all the harebells and foxglove bells that grow along the banks of the brooks. I concluded that no one had ever heard them but myself. But, to my surprise, one day I found that others did know about these Little People! I was reading “The Forest,” by Stewart E. White, where he describes his impressions and experiences as he lay awake at night in a tent on the banks of a Canadian river, when I came upon the following, that in many points coincides with my own sensations:— “In such circumstances you will hear what the boatmen call the voices of the rapids. Many people never hear them at all. They speak very soft and low, and distinct, beneath the steady roar and dashing, beneath even the lesser tinklings and gurglings whose quality superimposes them over the louder sounds. In the stillness of your hazy half-consciousness they speak; when you bend your attention to listen, they are gone, and only the tumults and the tinklings remain. “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 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. I dare say. Personally, I would just as soon leave it unelucidated. There are certain moods in which I do not want such things as nature, and love, and beauty, and self-sacrifice explained. It is enough for me that they are, and that I have been permitted to enjoy them. And although I know that the Little People are not necessarily wearing gauze wings and white frocks and stars in their hair, as I pictured them in my first childhood, I still like to think that even in the brooks something is singing, something rejoicing, something giving thanks for the gift of life. |
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