first thrill of the AEolian harp in the evening wind.  Another message was passing.  I reached my hand out to the iron thread.  A confused sadness began to oppress me.  A mother’s voice weeping over her sick child pulsed along the wire.  Her husband was far away.  Her little daughter lay very ill.  “Come quick,” said the voice.  “I have little hope; but if you were only here, I should be calmer.  If she must die, it would be such a comfort to have you here!”

I drew my hand away.  I saw the whole scene too vividly.  Who this mother was I knew not; but the news of the death of a child whom I knew and loved could not have affected me more strangely and keenly than this semi-articulate sob which quivered along the iron airtrack, in the silence of the evening, from one unknown—­to another unknown.

I roused myself from my sadness, and thought I would descend the tree and stroll home.  The moon was up, and a pleasant walk before me, with enough to meditate upon in the singular discovery I had made.  I was about to get down from my crotch in the tree, and was just reaching out my dexter leg to feel if I could touch a bough below me, when a low, wild shriek ran along the wire,—­as when the wind-harp, above referred to for illustration, is blown upon by some rude, sharp northwester.  In spite of myself, I touched the vibrating cord.  The message was brief and abrupt, like a sea-captain’s command:—­“Ship Trinidad wrecked off Wildcat’s Beach,—­all hands lost,—­no insurance!”

Do you recollect, when sitting alone sometimes in your room, at midnight, in the month of November, how, after a lull in the blast, the bleak wind will all at once seem to clutch at the windows, with a demoniac howl that makes the house rock?  Do you remember the half-whistles and half-groans through the key-holes and crevices,—­the cries and shrieks that rise and fall,—­the roaring in the chimney,—­the slamming of distant doors and shutters?  Well, all this seemed to be suggested in the ringing of the iron cord.  The very leaves, green and dewy, and the delicate branches, seemed to quiver as the dreary message passed.

I thought,—­This is a little too much!  This old tree is getting to be a very lugubrious spot.  I don’t want to hear any more such messages.  I almost wish I had never touched the wire.  Strange! one reads such an announcement in a newspaper very coolly;—­why is it that I can’t take it coolly in a telegraphic despatch?  We can read a thing with indifference which we hear spoken with a shudder,—­such prisoners are we to our senses!  I have had enough of this telegraphing.  I sha’n’t close my eyes to-night, if I have any more of it.

I had now fairly got my foot on the branch below, and was slipping myself gradually down, when the wire began to ring like a horn, and in the merriest of strains.  I paused and listened.  I could fancy the joyful barking of dogs in accompaniment.  Ah, surely, this is some sportsman,—­“the hunter’s call, to faun and dryad known.”  This smacks of the bright sunshine and the green woods and the yellow fields.  I will stop and hear it.—­It was just what I expected,—­a jolly citizen telegraphing his country friend to meet him with his guns and dogs at such a place.