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Nobody ever drew from it, and from the howling of the wolves, the honking of the geese, the calls of the ducks, the strange cries of the cranes as they soared with motionless wings high overhead, or rowed their way on with long slow strokes of their great wings, or danced their strange reels and cotillions in the twilight; and from the myriad voices of curlew, plover, gopher, bob-o-link, meadowlark, dick-cissel, killdeer and the rest day-sounds and night-sounds, dawn-sounds and dusk-sounds more inspiration than did the stolid Dutch boy plodding west across Iowa that spring of 1855, with his fortune in his teams of cows, in the covered wagon they drew, and the deed to his farm in a flat packet of treasures in a little iron-bound trunk among them a rain-stained letter and a worn-out woman's shoe.

Nor had I any choice then but to listen to the night-sounds of the forest; and they were various as the day-sounds, and for every day-sound, from the faintest lisping and softest trill to the deep boomings and piercing cries, there was an analogue; always with something mysterious, unreal in its tone, something proper to the night.

The rim of the early moon shouldered above the frowning death-mask of Napoleon, the huge salmon-tinted mountain on the far side of the Lecco. In the villages the day-sounds had given way to the more peaceful voices of the night.