r investigations--these stories, I mean?" the
doctor broke in, anxious to keep him to the main issues.

"Yes, I'm coming to that," he said slowly, "but the wood first, for this
wood out of which they grew like mushrooms has nothing in any way
peculiar about it. It is very thickly grown, and rises to a clearer part
in the centre, a sort of mound where there is a circle of large
boulders--old Druid stones, I'm told. At another place there's a small
pond. There's nothing distinctive about it that I could mention--just an
ordinary pine-wood, a very ordinary pine-wood--only the trees are a bit
twisted in the trunks, some of 'em, and very dense. Nothing more.

"And the stories? Well, none of them had anything to do with my poor
brother, or the keeper, as you might have expected; and they were all
odd--such odd things, I mean, to invent or imagine. I never could make
out how these people got such notions into their heads."

He paused a moment to relight his cigar.

"There's no regular path through it," he resumed, puffing vigorously,
"but the fields round it are constantly used, and one of the gardeners
whose cottage lies over that way declared he often saw moving lights in
it at night, and luminous shapes like globes of fire over the tops of
the trees, skimming and floating, and making a soft hissing sound--most
of 'em said that, in fact--and another man saw shapes flitting in and
out among the trees, things that were neither men nor animals, and all
faintly luminous. No one ever pretended to see human forms--always
queer, huge things they could not properly describe. Sometimes the whole
wood was lit up, and one fellow--he's still here and you shall see
him--has a most circumstantial yarn about having seen great stars lying
on the ground round the edge of the wood at regular intervals--"

"What kind of stars?" put in John Silence sharply, in a sudden way that
made me start.

"Oh, I don't know quite; ordinary stars, I think he said, only very
large, and apparently blazing as though the ground was alight. He was
too terrified to go close and examine, and he has never seen them
since."

He stooped and stirred the fire into a welcome blaze--welcome for its
blaze of light rather than for its heat. In the room there was already a
strange pervading sensation of warmth that was oppressive in its effect
and far from comforting.

"Of course," he went on, straightening up again on the mat, "this was
all commonplace enough--this