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WHAT

AT strange things to watch are shadows! They have a beauty, but they have also an indistinctness, a mystery; they have a shape, but it is one which may mislead, although, on the other hand, it may suggest. I like to watch the shadows, whether those of firelight, or cast by the warm summer sun, or by the pale moon's mild beam. I like to watch them; and sometimes to lean back in my chair (as I have before hinted) in the Study, tired with a day's work, just at the hour when the veil falling upon earth is silver-grey, not blue

black; to lean back and muse, with no other company than that of the fitful, dancing shadows upon the ceiling and the walls. It is curious to notice how far they reveal, how far conceal, the real objects which more or less clearly, distortedly, grotesquely, they represent strange coincidences and strange discrepancies are alike betrayed when, after a puzzled study, the substance is at last compared with the shadow. There are shadows simpler, less weird, yet often as misleading, to be found on those days when the hot sun, looking into my study, has frightened away

all the fitful firelight crew until the lengthening evenings again herald Winter's approach, shadows that you cannot have in the town, where all such things are cut out square and clear and formal; but shadows that are pleasant to think of in cities, as you tread the baking pavement, and hug the narrow retreating line of shade.

You

Yes, the summer sunlight shadows are delicious to watch, for instance, upon the green and daisied lawn. Moving with a gentle swaying motion, in the soft, cool airs that are not wanting to the really pleasant summer's day; moving in cadence, in balanced harmony with the motion of the branches above, apple boughs, crowded with flushed blossoms; sycamore, with jagged leaves; bending laburnum, with trailing yellow fringe; or white-balled guelder-rose, or tasselled Weymouth pine. cannot guess at what may be the originals which the indistinct, yet not blurred, shadows faintly indicate; you do not greatly care to know much about it. It is enough that the season is Summer, and that you are sitting on the rustic seat in the tranquil, sweet-breathed garden. It is enough that, smoothly mown and kept, so as not to break the shadows, the grass is laid like a vivid velvet carpet all about you, picked out with stars of silver, lush-golden green in the sunlight, and traced at the corners and edges with a pattern of cool grey. This broader mass, amid the jagged, naked branch shadows, may represent a living gathering of pointed foliage and blossom-bunches; this flitting shade may stand for the blackcap which is singing overhead; much may be suggested either to baffle or to direct thought; but you rest content in the contemplation of the shadows themselves, of their graceful motion, their sway and

play; and you care not to speculate upon, or to wonder about, the substance which they attend.

And while I am on the subject, I must say one word about the silver light and lucid grey which alternate upon the ground when the white Moon has risen, and all the landscape is tinted merely, instead of being coloured. Oh, I like to stand at the open door, before I close up the house with bolts and bars, and behold the still shadows in a calm night sleeping under the earnest Moon! Broad masses, lying solemn and mysterious on the grass and over the walks, cast from those Scotch firs, through whose fringe-foliage, as through lashes, gleam the bright eyes of the stars; long veins of shade, slanting from the pollard-ash trees, and making a wide lace-work of the pearly white; faint, yet clear, and supernaturally weird and grave. Sometimes pictured on the snow, and then clear and transparent upon the dazzling sheet, beyond the power of any word-painting to depict. Or again, if I should walk out along the lane, until I come to the avenue, how almost awful the stillness of the sleeping bars of light and shadow there! The watching trees above, so silent, holding their breath; the ticking crack of the pine-cones just marking, and so increasing the stillness; and under them such lurking depths, and indistinct recesses; and such grave, bare, silver sheets of cold light; there is something chilling, unearthly about it all: I feel glad to get me back, and trace the familiar patterns on the lawn about my house. One thing I note in these still shadows of the night, that they seem more clearly to shape out and indicate the realities of which they are the attendants, than do their relations of the noisy, bustling, busy, coloured, garish day.

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