“The moon and starlight, how I enjoy them!” one spending a holiday on the Island offered this evening. “Island folks remark about this. But” she explained, “when one lives in a city like ours, she is inclined to forget there is a sky above the lights! Now, here in the country… well” she smiled “this is among the memories I shall take home with me: a memory of its beautiful nights.”

Gently still the moonlight falls along the fields, on the dew where the animals keep: the cow-kind resting in a dark pattern on their pasture, the ewes and lambs in the paddock, the mare and filly, just beyond. Only the wildings rove,  we fancy, a startled rabbit perhaps, and the foxes, and owls from regions of woodlands up the valley…

When with us sleep is somewhat elusive, we sometimes hear a fox bark, the sound sharp though lonely as it falls in the stillness, or an owl a-hunting, its voice across the quiet a little eerie  to hear. But there comes too, up from the broken dam by the mill below, the summer music of the stream as it drops from the nearer spillway. It is a soothing melody, a lullaby, which sooner or later bears the one on her pillow away into that strange Land of Dreams.

   – Ellen’s dairy, August 24th, 1964.

Source: Islandnewspaper.ca