So haunted at moonlight with bat and owl and ghostly moth, 1902

Elizabeth Shippen Green (1871 – 1954) was an American illustrator whose work appeared in Harper’s Magazine and Saturday Evening Post. Her illustration of a young dryad (or wood nymph) balanced in treetop branches appeared in the 1902 publication of An Old Country House, by Richard Le Galliene. It shows the side of nature that few venture into - the mysterious and undisturbed nighttime:

“You can never know till you build your own nest high up in the boughs how much goes on within a seemingly idle tree during a summer day: all the hard work and the pretty play, the tragedies and comedies, the war that is waged and the love that is made, from morning till moonlight; so mirthful at morning with bands of singing birds, so haunted at moonlight with bat and owl and ghostly moth; and maybe, if you blow out your lamp and keep very still, somewhere about midnight the dryad who lives in a dainty cupboard down below will open her hidden door and steal up to peer in through the windows at the moonlit shelves.”