It might reasonably have been supposed that she was listening to the wind, which rose somewhat as the night advanced, and laid hold of the attention.  The wind, indeed, seemed made for the scene, as the scene seemed made for the hour.  Part of its tone was quite special; what was heard there could be heard nowhere else.  Gusts in innumerable series followed each other from the north-west, and when each one of them raced past the sound of its progress resolved into three.  Treble, tenor, and bass notes were to be found therein.  The general ricochet of the whole over pits and prominences had the gravest pitch of the chime.  Next there could be heard the baritone buzz of a holly tree.  Below these in force, above them in pitch, a dwindled voice strove hard at a husky tune, which was the peculiar local sound alluded to.  Thinner and less immediately traceable than the other two, it was far more impressive than either.  In it lay what may be called the linguistic peculiarity of the heath; and being audible nowhere on earth off a heath, it afforded a shadow of reason for the woman’s tenseness, which continued as unbroken as ever.

Throughout the blowing of these plaintive November winds that note bore a great resemblance to the ruins of human song which remain to the throat of fourscore and ten.  It was a worn whisper, dry and papery, and it brushed so distinctly across the ear that, by the accustomed, the material minutiae in which it originated could be realized as by touch.  It was the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes, and these were neither stems, leaves, fruit, blades, prickles, lichen, nor moss.

They were the mummied heath-bells of the past summer, originally tender and purple, now washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and dried to dead skins by October suns.  So low was an individual sound from these that a combination of hundreds only just emerged from silence, and the myriads of the whole declivity reached the woman’s ear but as a shrivelled and intermittent recitative.  Yet scarcely a single accent among the many afloat to-night could have such power to impress a listener with thoughts of its origin.  One inwardly saw the infinity of those combined multitudes; and perceived that each of the tiny trumpets was seized on, entered, scoured and emerged from by the wind as thoroughly as if it were as vast as a crater.

“The spirit moved them.”  A meaning of the phrase forced itself upon the attention; and an emotional listener’s fetichistic mood might have ended in one of more advanced quality.  It was not, after all, that the left-hand expanse of old blooms spoke, or the right-hand, or those of the slope in front; but it was the single person of something else speaking through each at once.

Suddenly, on the barrow, there mingled with all this wild rhetoric of night a sound which modulated so naturally into the rest that its beginning and ending were hardly to be distinguished.  The bluffs, and the bushes, and the heather-bells had broken silence; at last, so did the woman; and her articulation was but as another phrase of the same discourse as theirs.  Thrown out on the winds it became twined in with them, and with them it flew away.