is a strange pleasure; a spur to the fancy which is surely
wholesome, if we will but believe that all these things were
invented by A Fancy, which desires to call out in us, by
contemplating them, such small fancy as we possess; and to make us
poets, each according to his power, by showing a world in which, if
rightly looked at, all is poetry.

Another fact will soon force itself on your attention, unless you
wish to tumble down and get wet up to your knees. The soil is
furrowed everywhere by holes; by graves, some two or three feet wide
and deep, and of uncertain length and shape, often wandering about
for thirty or forty feet, and running confusedly into each other.
They are not the work of man, nor of an animal; for no earth seems
to have been thrown out of them. In the bottom of the dry graves
you sometimes see a decaying root: but most of them just now are
full of water, and of tiny fish also, who burrow in the mud and
sleep during the dry season, to come out and swim during the wet.
These graves are, some of them, plainly quite new. Some, again, are
very old; for trees of all sizes are growing in them and over them.

What makes them? A question not easily answered. But the shrewdest
foresters say that they have held the roots of trees now dead.
Either the tree has fallen and torn its roots out of the ground, or
the roots and stumps have rotted in their place, and the soil above
them has fallen in.

But they must decay very quickly, these roots, to leave their quite
fresh graves thus empty: and--now one thinks of it--how few fallen
trees, or even dead sticks, there are about. An English wood, if
left to itself, would be cumbered with fallen timber; and one has
heard of forests in North America, through which it is all but
impossible to make way, so high are piled up, among the still-
growing trees, dead logs in every stage of decay. Such a sight may
be seen in Europe, among the high Silver-fir forests of the
Pyrenees. How is it not so here? How indeed? And how comes it--if
you will look again--that there are few or no fallen leaves, and
actually no leaf-mould? In an English wood there would be a foot--
perhaps two feet--of black soil, renewed by every autumn leaf fall.
Two feet? One has heard often enough of bison-hunting in Himalayan
forests among Deodaras one hundred and fifty feet high, and scarlet
Rhododendrons thirty feet high, growing in fifteen or twenty