Whistness

"Who dares cumber / This universall whistnesse; where none come, / But taciturnity, and silence dumbe?"

"[O]thers fancied — the natives notably — that there was some "whistness," or witchcraft, in the business; it might be, as they thought, the work of Dick Down, the old huntsman who was eaten by the Hayne hounds, and whose ghost was known to haunt the covers round the park."