It was nearly midnight on the eve of St. Thomas's, the shortest day in the year. A desolating windwandered from the north over the hill whereon Oak had watched the yellow waggon and itsoccupant in the sunshine of a few days earlier.Norcombe Hill-not far from lonely Toller-Down-was one of the spots which suggest to apasser-by that he is in the presence of a shape approaching the indestructible as nearly as any to befound on earth. It was a featureless convexity of chalk and soil-an ordinary specimen of thosesmoothly-outlined protuberances of the globe which may remain undisturbed on some great day ofconfusion, when far grander heights and dizzy granite precipices topple down.The hill was covered on its northern side by an ancient and decaying plantation of beeches, whoseupper verge formed a line over the crest, fringing its arched curve against the sky, like a mane. Tonight these trees sheltered the southern slope from the keenest blasts, which smote the wood andfloundered through it with a sound as of grumbling, or gushed over its crowning boughs in aweakened moan. The dry leaves in the ditch simmered and boiled in the same breezes, a tongue ofair occasionally ferreting out a few, and sending them spinning across the grass. A group or two ofthe latest in date amongst the dead multitude had remained till this very mid-winter time on thetwigs which bore them and in falling rattled against the trunks with smart taps.Between this half-wooded half-naked hill, and the vague still horizon that its summit indistinctlycommanded, was a mysterious sheet of fathomless shade-the sounds from which suggested thatwhat it concealed bore some reduced resemblance to features here. The thin grasses, more or lesscoating the hill, were touched by the wind in breezes of differing powers, and almost of differingnatures-one rubbing the blades heavily, another raking them piercingly, another brushing them likea soft broom. The instinctive act of humankind was to stand and listen, and learn how the trees onthe right and the trees on the left wailed or chaunted to each other in the regular antiphonies of acathedral choir; how hedges and other shapes to leeward then caught the note, lowering it to thetenderest sob; and how the hurrying gust then plunged into the south, to be heard no more.