But The
Autumn Had Scarce Advanced Beyond The Outworks; It Was Still Almost
Summer In The Heart Of The Wood; And As Soon As I Had Scrambled
Through The Hedge, I Found Myself In A Dim Green Forest Atmosphere
Under Eaves Of Virgin Foliage.
In places where the wood had itself
for a background and the trees were massed together thickly, the
colour became intensified and almost gem-like:
A perfect fire
green, that seemed none the less green for a few specks of autumn
gold. None of the trees were of any considerable age or stature;
but they grew well together, I have said; and as the road turned
and wound among them, they fell into pleasant groupings and broke
the light up pleasantly. Sometimes there would be a colonnade of
slim, straight tree-stems with the light running down them as down
the shafts of pillars, that looked as if it ought to lead to
something, and led only to a corner of sombre and intricate jungle.
Sometimes a spray of delicate foliage would be thrown out flat, the
light lying flatly along the top of it, so that against a dark
background it seemed almost luminous. There was a great bush over
the thicket (for, indeed, it was more of a thicket than a wood);
and the vague rumours that went among the tree-tops, and the
occasional rustling of big birds or hares among the undergrowth,
had in them a note of almost treacherous stealthiness, that put the
imagination on its guard and made me walk warily on the russet
carpeting of last year's leaves. The spirit of the place seemed to
be all attention; the wood listened as I went, and held its breath
to number my footfalls. One could not help feeling that there
ought to be some reason for this stillness; whether, as the bright
old legend goes, Pan lay somewhere near in siesta, or whether,
perhaps, the heaven was meditating rain, and the first drops would
soon come pattering through the leaves. It was not unpleasant, in
such an humour, to catch sight, ever and anon, of large spaces of
the open plain. This happened only where the path lay much upon
the slope, and there was a flaw in the solid leafy thatch of the
wood at some distance below the level at which I chanced myself to
be walking; then, indeed, little scraps of foreshortened distance,
miniature fields, and Lilliputian houses and hedgerow trees would
appear for a moment in the aperture, and grow larger and smaller,
and change and melt one into another, as I continued to go forward,
and so shift my point of view.
For ten minutes, perhaps, I had heard from somewhere before me in
the wood a strange, continuous noise, as of clucking, cooing, and
gobbling, now and again interrupted by a harsh scream. As I
advanced towards this noise, it began to grow lighter about me, and
I caught sight, through the trees, of sundry gables and enclosure
walls, and something like the tops of a rickyard.
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