The beautiful California days, with warm sunshine tempered by the cool
winds from the bay, are not surpassed in any country under the sun.
But if the _days_ are perfect, the brilliant moonlight nights lose
nothing by comparison.
To tramp the hills and woods, or climb the rugged mountains by day, is
a joy to the nature lover. But the same trip by moonlight has an
interest and charm entirely its own, and mysteries of nature are
revealed undreamed of at noonday.
The wind, that has run riot during the day, has blown itself out by
evening, and the birds have gone to sleep with heads tucked under
their wings, or settled with soft breasts over nestlings that twitter
soft "good nights" to mother love. The dark shadows of evening steal
the daylight, and cañon and ravine lose their rugged outlines,
blending into soft, shadowy browns and purples. The moon peeps over
the hilltop, the stars come out one by one, the day is swallowed up in
night, and the moonlight waves its pale wand over the landscape.
In the deep woods it flickers through the branches, mottling the
ground with silver patches, and throwing into grand relief the trunks
of trees, like sentinels on duty. It touches the little brook as
softly as a baby's kiss, and transforms it into a sheen of gold. It
drops its yellow light upon a bed of ferns until each separate frond
stands out like a willow plume nodding up and down in the mellow
gleam. A flowering dogwood bathed in its ethereal light shimmers like
a bridal veil adorning a wood nymph. It lays its gentle touch on the
waterfall, transforming it into a torrent of molten silver, and
causing each drop to glisten like topaz under its witching light.
Overhead fleecy clouds, like white-winged argosies, sail high amid the
blue, or, finer spun, like a lady's veil, are drawn, gauzelike, across
the sky, through which the stars peep out with twinkling
brilliancy. The scent of new-mown hay laden with falling dew comes
floating up from the valley with an intoxicating sweetness, a
sweetness to which the far-famed perfume of Arabia is not to be
compared.
[Illustration: THE WITCHERY OF MOONLIGHT]
The crickets, those little black minstrels of the night, chirp under
the log upon which you are resting, and the katydids repeat over and
over again "Katy's" wonderful achievement, though just what this
amazing conquest was no one has been able to discover. The cicadas
join the chorus with their strident voices, their notes fairly
tumbling over each other in their exuberance, and in their hurry to
sing their solos. Tree toads tune up for the evening concert, a few
short notes at first, like a violinist testing the strings, then, the
pitch ascertained, the air fairly vibrates with their rhapsody.
Fireflies light their tiny lanterns and flash out their signals, like
beacon lights in the darkness, while, ringing up from the valley, the
call of the whip-poor-will echoes clear and sweet, each syllable
pronounced as distinctly as if uttered by a human voice. In a tree
overhead a screech owl emits his evening call in a clear, vibrating
tremolo, as if to warn the smaller birds that he is on watch, and
considers them his lawful prey. The night hawk wheels in his tireless
flight, graceful as a thistledown, soaring through space without a
seeming motion of the wings, emitting a whirring sound from wings and
tail feathers, and darting, now and again, with the swiftness of light
after some insect that comes under his keen vision.
If you remain quite still, you may perchance detect a cotton-tail
peeping at you from some covert. Watch him closely, and do not move a
muscle, and when his curiosity is somewhat appeased, see him thump the
ground with his hind foot, trying to scare you into revealing your
identity. If not disturbed, his fear will vanish, and he will gambol
almost at your feet.
You are fortunate indeed, if, on your nightly rambles, you find one of
the large night moths winging its silent flight over the moonlit
glade, resting for an instant on a mullein-stalk, then dancing away in
his erratic flight, like some pixy out for a lark.
O the witchery of moonlight nights, when tree, shrub, and meadow are
bathed in a sheen of silver; when lovers walk arm in arm, and in soft
whisperings build air castles for the days to come, when the
honeysuckle shall twine around their doorway, and the moonlight rest
like a benediction on their own home nest; when you sit on the porch
with day's work done, and the fireflies dance over the lawn, and the
voice of the whip-poor-will floats up from the meadow, and you dream
dreams, and weave strange fancies, under the witching spell of the
silver moonlight!
[Illustration]