eir reality which no unnatural situation can give. Even to look up
at them perched on bough and stem, as one rides by, and to guess what
exquisite and fantastic form may issue, in a few months or weeks, out of
those fleshy, often unsightly, leaves, 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,
which 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 quiet
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-fal